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Why did you pick your profile pic?
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i chose this portrait of Ira Aldridge as Othello, hes the first black actor to play othello on a large stage (before it was done by white men in blackface/ brownface) i think hes cool, he was an abolitionist, and its a nice picture. this was my second choice also Ira Adridge![](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/0ce39914-fb3d-45ec-bf2b-ccc80a077208.png)
and my third also a depiction of Ira aldridge as Othello, but i figured it would be too cringe to have a statue as a profile pic
i love that corsalet in the second choice
agreed
Oh, God. This reminds me that I'm technically a white guy that played Othello, we covered it in high school English and got characters to read the lines of as we went through. The whole class was white and we drew characters from a hat. I ended out being the lead in everything, got to be Shylock in Merchant of Venice, John Proctor in The Crucible and Berenger in La Rhinoceros (that was fun cause I did a quebecois accent for it). AP English didn't make the best casting choices.
wild! did you have fun? i was mercutio in romeo and juliet and i loved it.
I think I could have had more fun with Othello if I wasn't acting the lines while also reading it for the first time, it became a class joke that everyone knew Iago was being a manipulative little prick cause he wasn't too subtle and that every character had just assumed someone else would deal with it. Merchant of Venice was a pretty good time, gotta be real, the play kinda sucks and we were pretty much all on team 'shylock did nothing wrong'. The Crucible was a great time, the kids playing the women accused of witchery did Wicked Witch of the West voices.l, we also did the weighing more.than a duck sketch from Holy Grail mid trial, the teacher had never seen Monty python and thought we were just really good at improv. I could do way better on any of em now cause I can speak early modern English and do the accent correctly for a shakespearian times or puritan of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, which is more or less the same. La Rhinoceros was weird cause half of the class was French immersion and could read the original where the rest of the class had only the translation but it's an absurdist comedy and we had a good time. This was like level 2 AP English, so the work was pretty high level for high school but also anyone who wanted to tske a class 2 degrees harder than standard wanted to be there and didn't really need evaluation, so things were pretty loosy goosy. We'd have classes outside and talked about trolls for a class. It was a generally really fun time.
that sounds fun, sadly we only did romeo and juliet and hamlet, i mean those are some of my faves but i wish we did even more! we also did the dollhouse and 12 angry men. i skipped two English classes and we had a lot more fun in the advanced classes. god i really love theater.
The normal English classes did Romeo and Juliet and a Midsommar's Night Dream (I know what I did). I haven't read or seen either. In tenth grade where there weren't AP classes and the teacher just let me not show up after I was 2 months ahead on the work, we did Julius Caesar, that would have been really fun to act out but that wasn't happening in our standard English class, we didn't even get through reading the play, which was fine cause we watched the Charleton Heston movie instead. Hamlet would have been a really good time too. It turns out you won't get much out of Shakespeare if you're with 25 other people who are loudly determined not to.
darn children, i could never teach high school.
I have immense respect for those that do. Got my grade 11/12 French/geography teacher on board with Marxism. He was pissed cause we were French immersion and he was genuinely French and passionate about it, unlike pretty much every teacher before us and was rightfully pretty pissed off and decided he was gonna crash course us to being fluent. He also would have been retired had he not bought a house that thennhad a sewage treatment plant moved in across the street a year after. So he moved and still had to teach. One time the announcement speaker fell down almost hitting him and he calmly walked over to the office phone and said 'hello, your PA speaker fell off the wall. I was up front teaching. Yes, it barely missed me. I felt it's wind at my back, pushing me forward...like my fury.' and hung up. He also asked in French if he had to be christ on the cross super loud when he found out how much we sucked at French and how much our education had totally failed us. He scared the shit out of everyone and I loved the dude, for social studies he just printed off like 1000 questions and borrowed out the schools classroom worth of laptops that never got borrowed said 'you're gonna be looking shit up online anyway in the future, so I may as well take a modern approach, here's a sourcing guide, here's every single piece of class work for the semester I'll be grading my other classes, just come talk to me if you have questions, I'm not gonna do lectures or whatever'. Dude was awesome. Anyway, our final geography essay was to write one on the nature of competition, I hadn't read jack shit for theory and had a real crude understanding of Marxism, doing research for this essay changed that and he took me aside later and told me my essay changed how HE thought about the subject he assigned and I made him able to understand Marxist theory after years of studying geography and not getting on board. Biggest feather in my cap ever. He was also an opera singer and would sing opera while we tried to work. Norman LeBlanc, you fucking ruled. Oh he also taught us about the French revolution and stuff cause he was baffled we didn't learn French history along with the language. That dude ruled
god i love teachers like that, im grateful ive had many good and patient teachers in my life. I had an oprea singer teacher too! he sang at the end of the year, and yeah that dude sound extremely fucking cool, really went above and beyond! also extremely based of you! that must have been a killer essay!
Oh shoot, I had no idea! I figured it was Othello, but I had no idea there was so much history around this actor.
yeah he lived a super interesting life and i find it so tragic that he died just before he was about to return to America post civil war. also hes super handsome.