South Korea

I heard on NPR the other day that a theatre company in South Korea is doing a musical that is based on fictionalized actual events in a North Korean prison camp. Now, while my immediate reaction is "Couldn't they have come up with a medium that would effectively communicate the genre more readily than a musical? Maybe a horror movie? An episode of Law and Order perhaps?", I developed a sort of fascination with the idea.

The show is, apparently, being met with favorable reviews, although the South Korean government doesn't like it because it is their stance as a government to try to ruffle as few feathers as possible, especially when those feathers have nuclear capabilities like their neighbors to the north.

The biggest part of the story that hit me, however, was the fact that the writer/producer had put up one of his kidneys for collateral for a loan in order to put on the show. He has until April to pay it off, otherwise he loses his kidney. Now as, perhaps, short-sighted or genius (Where can I sign up to give body parts as insurance that I'll pay people back?) as this may seem to us in the west, I can hardly imagine believing in my own creation enough to essentially give up everything, even my life. This is very counter-intuitive to the popular notion of making money and having a good safe life.

This idea of giving everything up for one's dreams appears to be re-occuring for me lately. I recently watched Million Dollar Baby for the first time over the weekend, and it made me want to box, both literally (because who doesn't like being the best and strongest?) and figuratively. The main character wanted to be a boxer despite the fact that the odds were stacked against her in that she was too old and she hadn't ever been trained. I valued seeing anyone do this, even a fictional character, because it made me believe that I could do it. It is little wonder that Hillary Swank won best actress for that movie; if everyone else left that movie feeling like they could do anything that they set their minds to, than I think that her character is one of the great characters in all of fiction.

Superlatives aside, my dad always (oops, that's kind of another superlative) told me that I could do whatever I set my mind to. I always believed him, but I'm starting to believe him. We'll see what becomes of this.

In lighter news, I recently signed up for a stat-tracking service so that I could see where my visitors were coming from, and one of my visitors got here by googling "strawberry surfrider recipe".

I don't blame them for looking that up; it's a delicious beverage. I only hope my meager offerings of talk about my Jamba Juice diet was helpful.

Oh, and if anybody wants to read about that musical that I mentioned above, the link is here.