My group in class is putting on an interpretive dance routine to raise awareness for AIDS, and we needed ideas for costumes. It sounds good, but it's for a Catholic school, and we wanted to sneak in a sly homage to the homosexual community because they've suffered especially from the stigma of AIDS and HIV. But we've been debating that this also might be misinterpreted as equating the homosexual community with AIDS. We want to show our support, but we don't want to make the wrong move even out of good faith. We're incorporating a bit of mime to convey emotion at times as well. Sort of combining mime and dance. Which I guess interpretive dance kind of has that similar vibe? We've got one guy in our group who can convey emotion well. He can even cry on command. We were thinking of having him convey Emotion, and sort of, like, how do I explain? He'll represent the human side of things, and people, while the rest of us represent kind of the battle inside the body. Oh, but we do have one tall guy who represents external conflict. So like, he's Wall, and Emotion is flung toward him, but repelled, to sort of symbolize the emotional toll that stigma invokes. The guy playing Emotion goes down on his knees and starts crying, and I mean tears streaming. Like, he is scary good at it. Actually we have a violinist performing the lead music for our piece, and she's been practicing with very ecclectic and experimental sound. And it's all set to the beat of a heartbeat, she says. The violin music is supposed to represent the alien landscape of the human body, yet it like, how can I explain. Like, it combines attempts at organic sound and it SOUNDS alien, right? Because we're used to music just sounding like music. And then when Emotion does his bit, she does this really frenetic thing with the notes going up that makes your hair stand on end, and it sounds like he's going to explode with raw emotion because Wall keeps blocking him from Hope. And she came up with these three notes for when the body dies, and like, it's just three long notes but it's so scary in how eerily calm and sad it is. The death is the end of our routine. That's not, like...too gruesome, is it? It's like, a lethal threat. So we felt like, that was natural. People are dying, so we need to be aware. Um, well, I'm hoping they're gonna applaud. After the lights go down, the house lights go on and we bow, and one of us has prepared a message with a number to call for assistance and information on AIDS. Then the next act has to go on. Hopefully we can trim enough time and still convey our message.

I think the next group's act is a comedy routine about Vegas.