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Hissie's SNEEZE page - Best Posts of Fall Semester 2017

Best Posts of Fall Semester 2017

Dear Friends,

If you are reading this you've arrived upon my SNEEZE page.

What's a SNEEZE page?  Here I've devised an easy and effective way for you to enter deep into my blog.  For your convenience, I've created a series of links for my favorite posts.  

Take a look around and CLICK on the one you like best.

                                                             Con mucho carino,

                                                                                         Hissie                                                         

Janis Joplin - Queen of Psychodelic SoulSoundtrack of My BookshelvesAngelina: Compassion and DefianceThree Things You Probably Didn't Know about MeDolores Huerta - Soldadera of the Farmworkers MovementThe Death of Marilyn Monroe

Tragic Butterfly

Today I share a song from my favorite opera!  Actually it’s the only opera I know.  The song is called “Love Duet.” The opera is Puccinni’s Madama Butterfly. The story is brutal.  You’ll hear it in the song and see it in the video - a beautiful but naive Japanese teenager throws her life away for the love of a cynical American sailor.

In English 201, we read  M. Butterfly,  a crazy theatre piece based on a true-to-life love affair between a French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer. The action takes place during the sixties which I like because we learn about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War.   We talk about cultural conflict both a personal and political levels. The protagonist of the play is a man named Rene Gallimard who is obsessed with the Asian Mystique: “I have a vision.  Of the Orient,” he says. “That, deep with its almond eyes there are still women.  Women willing to sacrifice themselves for the love of a man.  Even a man whose love is completely without worth.” 

The story goes like this: working as a French diplomat, Rene carries on a torrid love affair with a beautiful Chinese Opera singer only to find the women of his dreams is indeed a man.  How can that possibly happen?  They were friends, lovers and confidants – intimate the whole way – for TWENTY years!  Rene only learns of the deception much later when he is accused of treason by his own government.  In the courtroom, not the bedroom, he finds out that his Song (that’s her name) is an agent of the Chinese government.   Blinded by love, he’s been used – he’s passed on sensitive political information.    He’s thrown his life down a deep dark hole that he will never crawl out of.

Throughout  M. Butterfly Rene obsesses with the the story Madama Butterfly.  More than anything he’s always dreamt for a life of passion. Well, he got what he wished for….

Although the story is often difficult to follow, I’m happy to have read it for opening my eyes to an entire new world.  I’ve never read much before about Asian culture.  Mr. Lewenstein helped us see the parallels between the opera and the play.  Both end in horrible tragedy.  In class we our discussed Orientalism, Imperialism, Feminity and the Male Ego.  “Do you know why women’s roles in the Peking Opera are always played by men?” This is a line from the play.   I didn’t know, but I do now.  China was and probably still is an oppressive state.  The story teaches us an important lesson about gender equality:  Women should never allow themselves to become passive or submissive.

Their voices need to be heard. 

Irony in His Blood - Alanis Morisette in M. Butterfly

In English 201, we read about opera legend Maria Callas.  Many say she was the perfect singer to interpret the tragedy of the Madame Butterfly.  Here, I select Alanis Morisette to voice the irony. 

And Isn't it "Ironic..." Don't You Think?

The voice of Maria Callas may be perfect for Madama Butterfly. Here, the lyrics from Alanis Morisette's "Ironic" fit nicely to the text of M. Butterfly: “And isn’t it ironic…” Many people have criticized Alanis’ interpretation of irony in the song. Irony is the use of words to express the opposite of what is expected. They say her lines are weird or funny, but they are not ironic. For example, “like rain on your wedding day.” Stuff happens. The weather on you wedding day may be unfortunate, but it’s not ironic. Still, I like the song. You can’t say that the lyrics won’t make you think about possibility and expectation. What goes through the mind of a ninety-eight year old man who wins the lottery? How can he expect to spend his money? He’ll probably have a heart attack trying to figure it out. In M. Butterfly, Rene must have felt the same way for his relationship with Song. He had waited his whole life for her, and when he finally found her in his arms, he didn't know what to do with her. For Rene, Song gave him everything that he had ever wished for, and it killed him. That’s both funny and cruel.

Alanis Morissette Lyrics – “Ironic”	David Hwang Text – M. ButterflIy
It's the good advice that you just didn't take Who would've thought, it figures...	This is the ultimate cruelty, isn’t it? That I can talk and talk and to anyone listening, it’s only air — too rich a diet to be swallowed by a mundane world.Why can’t anyone understand? That in China, I once loved, and was loved by, the Perfect Woman. ( Act Two – Scene 11 )
It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife It's meeting the man of my dreams	The love of a Butterfly can withstand many things — unfaithfulness, loss, even abandonment. But how can it face theone sin that implies all others? The devastating knowledge that,underneath it all,the object of her love was nothing more,nothing less than … a man. (Act Three – Scene Three)
He won the lottery and died the next day It’s a black fly in your Chardonnay	My mistakes were simple and absolute — the man I loved was a cad, a bounder. He deserved nothing but a kick in the behind and instead I gave him … all my love … ( Act Three – Scene Three)

“Over the Rainbow” : A Plea to Escape a Dreary Life

In Mr. Lewenstein's English 009 class, we read the memoir Girl, Interrupted.  It's about a young woman trying to navigate her way through her mental illness. When her parents commit her to a mental hospital, she has to look inside herself to find out who she really is.  I liked the book.  After finished it, Mr. Lewenstein asked us to contribute a song to our Girl, Interrupted Soundtrack.  We were supposed to connect our music with our reading.  I thought a lot about it and this is what I came up with:

When I read Girl, Interrupted, I hear Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” in the film The Wizard of Oz. Here, Judy played Dorothy, a young girl yearning to escape her surroundings in Kansas. In the memoir Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen finds herself trapped in a parallel universe (see chapter one.) Both girls are depressed and frustrated teenagers. They’ll do anything to end their misery. Here is what is the most cool part of this selection: The real-life Judy Garland is basically Susanna Kaysen.

From a very early age, she was pressured and pushed and manipulated into doing things she didn’t want to do. Judy’s life became a pattern full of drugs, heartbreak and self-destruction. When she sings “Over the Rainbow,” she is basically foreshadowing both the story of her life, and the tragedy of Susanna Kaysen.  In both works – The Wizard of Oz; and Girl, Interrupted – the song could represent the road to freedom. Both girls need to find a way out of their depression. To do so, they have to learn once more to believe in themselves. 


I know Dorothy sang the song  before the tornado hit the farm.  It was early on in the movie.  She believes she’s all alone in her world and dreams of a better place.

That’s why I believe “Over the Rainbow” should appear early in Girl, Interrupted.  You should hear the song in the cab on the way to McLean– maybe it could be Judy singing on the radio – as Susanna sits silent in the backseat with her eyes closed. At this moment, Susanna doesn’t know what to believe or who to trust.  Her parents have turned her over to a psychiatrist.  He’s diagnosed her with Borderline Personality Disorder.  Now she finds herself on the way to a strange, new universe.  I’m not sure if Dorothy was crying when she sang this song. Or, if Susanna was tearing up in the backseat.  But clearly, it’s a sad, sad moment for both girls.  It deserves a sad, sad song. 

Judy Garland’s  “Over the Rainbow”	Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted
Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high There's a land that I've heard of once in a lullaby.	“Take her to McLean,” he said, “and don’t let her out till you get there.” I let my head fall back against the seat and shut my eyes   (“The Taxi”  9).
Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue And the dreams that you dare to dream, Really do come true.	“In our parallel world, things happened that had not yet happened in the world we’d come from” (“Politics” 28)
Somewhere over the rainbow, blue birds fly Birds fly over the rainbow Why then, oh why can't I?	“In a strange way we were free.   We’d reach the end of the line.  We had nothing more to lose” (“Bare Bones”  94).

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is sad and depressed.  She’s trapped in a an adult world where she has no say.   In the movie, Dorothy sings the song in the middle of a bland and gray landscape.  There is no color.  No movement.  There is nothing there that would remotely resemble happiness for a young girl.  It’s a little bit crazy that the movie star singing this particular song is also fragile and depressed.   At the time, Judy must have felt she had no control over her life.  Her mother pushed her beyond her limits.  The studio made her every decision.  She was seventeen  and worked like sixteen hours hours per day.   No high school.  No friends.   Every time Judy sang this song, she said she cried. She couldn’t help herself.  

Girl, Interrupted MVP - The Vermeer

Life Interrupted

My MVP just may have come to me before I even opened the book.  It’s all in the title – Girl, Interrupted.  We all can sense how Susanna’s life was “interrupted” by her illness.  I mean, she was a energetic and talented young woman.  She must have been pretty.  The boys liked her, and so did the men.  For a teenager in her position, it must have been the saddest and loneliest taxi ride to McLean Hospital.   She was giving up the best years of her life, and she knew she wasn’t going to get them back.

But that “Girl, Interrupted” is not the most valuable part.  For me, it was the trip to the Frick Museum with her English teacher  to see the Vermeer paintings.  Of course, that scene made me nervous.  It made her nervous.  We both knew that something sick was about to happen. There she was, waiting for her English teacher to stop and kiss her.  It wasn’t if he was going to do it; it was when he was going to do it.  In anticipation,   she found herself escaping down a corridor when she  stops suddenly in front of “Girl, Interrupted At Her Music” by the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer.   The painting was of a young girl turning her face away from her music teacher.

It seemed to me that this was an important – if not mystical -  moment in Susanna’s life. As she stood there it was like the girl in the painting was speaking directly to her. “I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled,” says Susanna.  “She was warning me of something – she looked up to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn a breath in order to say to me, ‘Don’t!’ (166).  Oh man, I wanted to say the same thing, but how is an inexperienced 17-year-old to know of the implications?

Susanna must have regarded this experience so meaningful  that she returned to the scene 16 years later and wrote about it again:  It’s the second time around when Susanna shows real understanding for the way the world works.   She detects the sadness in the young girl’s eyes.  The music teacher is right on top of her, telling her something like, “This is the way it has to be…”  Susanna knows what the music student feels inside.  For Susanna, it wasn’t a momentary interruption; it would be a lifetime of sadness.

How many of us can recall those life-changing, self-discovery moments?  Could we write about them like Susanna did?  What she saw in the young girl’s eyes, that’s my MVP.   

M. Butterfly - Quote Sandwich - "My name is Rene Gallimard - also known as Madame Butterfly."

Irony in His Blood
We first get a sense for who Rene is when he reveals his love for the opera Madama Butterfly. The first line he speaks in the first scene of the play is "Butterfly, Butterfly..." He's serving time for treason in a prison on the outskirts of Paris. He once lived the international life of a French Diplomat; now he's confined to live out his life in a tiny dark prison cell. He has nothing to live for. Everything he has ever had has been taken away from. 

The only thing that keeps him going is this fantasy he has for Madama Butterfly. It dampers his reality.
 The story gives him hope. He shares it with his fellow prisoners: "My name is Rene Gallimard - also known as Madame Butterfly." 
Rene became hooked on the romance of the opera Madame Butterfly. It's about a young Japanese geisha girl who devotes her life to an American sailor. She just about lives for him. In fact, even when he disappears for three years without a word, she continues to love him. When Cho-Cho-san - that's the girl's name - finds out that her American sailor has married a white woman, she can't control herself. She kills herself with her uncle's knife.
 Rene thinks the opera story is so beautiful. From witnessing Cho-Cho-san's passion, Rene becomes obssessed with the Asian woman. He wants to experience the same feeling of having a woman submit to him the way Cho-Cho-san submitted to her American Sailor. That's the "irony in his blood": At the end of the play, we learn that Rene has lost his woman. She was a man. Now he's dressed in make-up and a wig - like a woman. After he tells his audience his real name, Rene Gaillamard, but now he reveals he is "Madama Butterfly." This is right before he drives a knife into his body. Clearly, Rene longed for the life he saw in Madama Butterfly, but I bet it just wasn't this one.

Definition of Diva - Maria Callas

        The Black Geishas

This summer we read M. Butterfly with Mr. Lewenstein.  Maria Callas captured our attention.  Her name isn't mentioned in the play, nor does she appear in the movie.  It's her voice that makes us want to write.  She's one of the most famous opera singers of all time. For Maria, nothing short of the best was acceptable.  She was a perfectionist.  She was a "diva."

A diva is a woman who demands all or nothing.

It’s either her way, or no way at all.  It’s not that she is selfish or mean spirited; it means she is talented and knows exactly what she wants.  She may be a perfectionist that strives for the impossible.  That may be good for her, but it can be absolute hell on earth for everyone she works with. Divas are most often associated with opera singers, but today the term often is used for top-of-the-line performers.  (D)emanding.  (I)ntense.  (V)ivacious.  (A)ttitude.  Think J-Lo.  Beyonce.  They fought their way to the top.  And now they are looking down at the rest of us.

In the movie “Callas Forever,” Maria Callas is so committed to excellence that she is ready to kill for it.  She’s fierce.  She’s determined, but she has no voice.  Once known as the best opera singer this world has ever known, she has been asked to lip-synch scenes in a movie to her  own voice.  The sound is already perfect.   It’s her voice that had been recorded nearly twenty years before.   Here is the problem:  she lives in a world of the past, and she has no way to cope with the world of the present.  She abuses all of her friends.  She terrorizes all of her co-workers.  She will never understand why they will never be able to match her passion or talent.   In the end, she destroys the project.

In “Callas Forever,” everyone loves Maria, but that’s not good enough for a diva.  Nothing ever will be.     

Frida Lets It All Hang Out - On the Dance Floor and in Her Art

In Mr Lewenstein's class, we developed film history research papers.  I chose to write mine about the famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.  Below is an excerpt from my paper.  I compared what I saw in Salma Hayek's movie with what I found in my research:

Frida will always be known as a fierce individual who wasn’t afraid to express her sexuality.  When Frida married Diego, she had no idea what world she was entering into.  She must have felt like Alice dropping down the rabbit hole.  For Frida, Diego’s bohemian art world was this strange, weird place she probably considered like some freethinking Wonderland, filled with crazy people and peculiar creatures.  It’s probably right here where Frida discovered the full extent of her sexuality.  While her husband openly cheated on her, she began to be seen cavorting with more and more women.  According to her close friend,  Frida loved to go out and have a good time with the women.  They liked to drink and dance with each other at popular Mexico City cantinas.  On these nights,  Frida was known to drink “like a mariachi.”  This means, I suppose, anything goes.  Frida hid her bisexuality from no one.

The cantina scene captures Frida’s free-wheeling, free-stepping nature. Here Frida dances the sensual tango with a visiting female Italian photographer right in front of her husband.  The two women are all over the dance floor.  Their hands are all over each other.  The song is called “La Alcoba Azul – The Blue Bedroom.”  As Frida and her partner are dancing, you hear a singer in the background belt out these lyrics: “Vuelve a mí  Ámame sin luz En nuestra alcoba azul Donde no hubo sol para nosotros.” Come back to me.  Love me in the dark… At the end of the dance, the women embrace to share a French kiss to the applause of the crowd.  Even Diego looks on with love and admiration.

The astute eye may see elements of her bisexuality in her self-portraits.   For Frida, her self-portraits helped her explore her own identity.  “I paint myself because I am so often alone,” she once said, “and because I am the subject I know best.”   She was  probably all alone when she painted Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair.  In fact, it’s known that she was separated from Diego during this time.  Her creation of this work follows her heart-crushing discovery that her husband was sleeping with her sister.  During this period, she had left the couple’s home in Coyacan and moved into her own apartment in the center of Mexico City.  In Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Frida appears in an over-sized, darkly-colored man’s suit.  She has cut off all her hair.  We can see it strewn all over the floor.  The scissors are still in her hand.   Across the top of the painting, she writes the lyrics to a popular Mexican song of the Forties:  “Mira que si te quise, fue por el pelo…”   In English, the words come out “See, if I loved you, it was for your hair; now that you’re bald, I don’t love you anymore.”  Here Frida seems to be putting aside her feminine attributes.  Al that is left are her earrings.  

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair shows up in the film.  There’s the portrait right in her room, and there is Frida cutting her hair off in front of the mirror.  She’s been drinking all night.  She’s alone.  It’s like life imitating art.  Her worlds are fusing together.  Playing in the background is “La Paloma Negra”  sung by a famous Mexican lesbian.  The lyrics tell Frida she should be out enjoying herself.  At times, Frida probably didn’t know which way to turn.  

Tortilla Soundtrack: "Coyote" by Joni Mitchell

After reading The Tortilla Curtain, Mr. Lewenstein asked us select a song to represent our reading.  He calls it our Tortilla Soundtrack.  We all looked into our musical archives.  I found this one  - "Coyote" - by Joni Mitchell.  Below I matched up lyrics with passages from the novel.

Joni Mitchell was once known as the Queen of the Canyon. She developed and refined much of her songwriting genius in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon in the Sixties. Who knows? That might not be too far away from The Tortilla Curtain’s Blanco Arroyo. Midway through the novel, I can hear Joni singing the perfect song in the background where America finds herself alone in the woods. In the shadows, America goes face to face with a wild coyote and doesn't budge. “There’s no comprehending…Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes…And the lips you can get..” sings Joni. “And feel so alone.” Joni knows something about surviving harsh realities. So does America. So I love the scene where America is sitting there all by herself in the shadows of the woods. It must be both frustrating and frightening . She’s tired and hungry and hurt, and she hears something but she doesn’t know what. It’s kind of like a dream, but it’s real – she’s staring face to face with a coyote. And instead of screaming or panicking, “she looked at that coyote so long and so hard that she began to hallucinate, to imagine herself inside those eyes looking out…”

Tortilla MVP - Hotel California

In English 1A, Mr. Lewenstein asked us to vote for our Tortilla MVP.  This means we get to choose the most valuable part.  We write about the part of the book we connected with most.  For me it was the mention of the Eagles song "Hotel California."   A beautiful song about broken dreams.  It's perfect. You can almost hear it in the background of the entire novel.  

Eagles Guitarist Don Felder has said he came up with the idea for the song “Hotel California” on late

night drive along an L.A. freeway: “You can just see this glow on the horizon of lights and the images that start running through your head of Hollywood and all the dreams that you have."  Most of my classmates will know this song.  So will  their parents.  Most immigrants come to America in search of opportunity or freedom represented in the lyrics.  The Hotel California becomes a symbol of an escape and/or a better life… but things are not always as they seem. The student narratives I read often refer to the constant struggle of immigrant life: the toil in the fields,  the financial woes,  the family separations.  Many newcomers find life in California to be an illusion.   

In our reading of T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, I mean, you can almost hear it in the background.  Soon-to-be first-time father Candido crosses the border with his teen-age wife in pursuit of the American Dream.  He’s promised her a better life.  Not a rich one, but a comfortable one where some day they will have a house with chickens in the yard.

I bring up the part of the novel  when Candido’s wife America was in the rich white guy’s car listening to “Hotel California”.  Right here, this song is so significant because it was written to reflect the excess of luxury in this country. Something for everybody, right: Any time of the year..You can find it here.. Everybody, I suppose, unless you are a Mexican immigrant. In this scene, America gets sucked into the dream of Hotel California. She’s sitting up front in a Cadillac sedan and can’t believe her good fortune. On the first day she looks for work, she was going to be earning more money than she has ever before.  This is the passage that stands out: “If someone had told her when she was a girl at school she wouldn’t have believed them – it would have been a fairy tale like the one about the chambermaid and the glass slipper” (Boyle 97).  I think her mindset here might explain a lot about the novel. We as Americans often have no idea of the thoughts immigrants may have. It’s so easy to complain about them when we see them waiting on a street corner, but it’s difficult to imagine their dreams and desperation.

I mean, America is basically working for minimum wage, and she feels that she has hit the lottery on her first day of work. Sadly, she got something more than she bargained for out of the deal. Yes, she got paid, but she also felt a strange man’s hand on her thigh. Here she learns a hard lesson about the American Dream. It’s not for everybody.

Janis and Taylor: Freedom Through Their Music

As passionate as Janis and Taylor are for their music, it’s no surprise that their lyrics often express their heartbreak for relationships lost.  I mean they are both free spirits. It’s hard to imagine either of them slowing down. How hard that must be to maintain a normal relationship? Their lovers must always feel secondary to their music.  

Janis most famous song – “Me and Bobby McGee” - was actually written by her lover at the time, Kris Kristofferson. It’s a song about discovering the world on your own terms.  There is a line the song about independence that goes like this: “Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose. Nothin', don't mean nothin' hon' if it ain't free.”  What brought Janis and Kris together was what drove them apart.   They both wanted to be free, but they would never feel that way in a long-term relationship.

In the same way, Taylor’s best songs are the most painful.  As much as she dreams of enchanted love, she sings of crushing despair.  In “White Horse,” her lyrics probably approach Janis’s “Me and Bobby McGee” in the way they express the hope to be with a person, and then there is that moment when you know it’s never going to happen.  She sings, “Holding on The days drag on..Stupid girl…I should have known.. I should have known.” Man, all she wanted was the truth. 

When I listen to these songs, I think of one sad disappointment after another.  One’s driving off into the distance.  One dreams of riding off on a white horse.  Whatever are looking for, they’re never going to find it.  The only place to feel free and honest is in their music.

The Outsiders: Janis and Taylor, Defiant to the End

As young girls, both Janis and Taylor found themselves socially on the outside looking in, but that’s probably what pushed them both to songwriting.   They didn’t really fit into their high-school crowd.  They weren’t really followers.  They were free-spirits.  They were dreamers. 

Janis grew up in an affluent family in Port Arthur, Texas, but she ran away at age 17 because she felt like such an outcast.    While her high-school classmates were listening to Top 40 coming out of the AM radio, Janis was crazy for black blues legends like Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thorton, and Leadbelly.   In 1963, she landed in the psychedelic, drug-energized San Francisco music scene where she established her own unique sound as white blues queen and rock ‘n’roll mama. Janis  once said, "Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday....They are so subtle, they can milk you with two notes. They can go no farther than from A to B, and they can make you feel like they told you the whole universe.”  

While Janis sought inspiration from the blues, Taylor’s songs often come straight out of her personal experience.  She writes about her her feelings, her dreams, and her heartbreaks.  Beginning  in middle school and continuing through high-school, Taylor didn’t have many friends or people to talk to.  She felt like an outsider looking in.  But all that misery and rejection pushed her towards songwriting.   She spilled her guts on paper.  Writing songs was like keeping a diary.  According to Taylor, she tries to write songs that people her age could relate to.  When she writes,  Taylor says she writes in real time.   She strives to be personal and honest..  In her songs, she shares the sadness and letdowns of her own relationships because she wants to let her fans know they are not alone: “Nobody ever lets me in/ I can still see you, this ain’t the best view/  On the outside looking in.” (from a song she wrote when she was twelve: “The Outside.”) 

 I read that both Janis and Taylor were often teased and bullied in high school. It’s like whatever makes you different at that age makes you somehow uncool.  At a certain point, they must have thought there was no chance to be part of the crowd.  I can only imagine their insecurities.  

Fortunately for them, music became their own form of therapy.  They may have not had anyone to talk to, but they were only a guitar away from saying something special.   Their music tells us it’s okay to stand apart. 

The Runaways: Janis and Taylor

In English 61, I'm writing my sixties research paper on Janis Joplin.  You can consider her a rock 'n' roll pioneer.  She was one of the first women performers to take center stage in the decade of the sixties.  You can say she paved the way for women rockers to follow - one of them, of course, being Taylor Swift.  Here, I compare their musical beginnings.

As soon as they possibly could, both Janis and Taylor left home to pursue their musical dreams on the big stage.  Janis ran away from home and fled to San Francisco.  Taylor took her family with her south to Nashville, Tennessee to become a star. In 1965, Janis found home in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.  This area was known as a mecca for young hippies.  Young people  dressed in bright colors, beads and feathers were coming in from all over the world, and they listened to loud, crazy psychedelic rock.  Janis jammed with the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish and the Jefferson Airplane.  Her rough and  raucous voice pushed the music to the edge.  “They loved to see her get crazy,” said Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish. “It was part of her image: the wild woman, the blues mama” (Angel 42).  At 14 years of age, Taylor had the talent to earn a songwriting contract with Sony/ATV Records. She was the youngest songwriter they had ever  hired. For Taylor, it was the double life:  during the day, she attended high school like any normal teenager, but at night she was writing songs with professionals two and three times her age. She was right there in the middle of it, that same place – Nashville, Tennessee – that had skyrocketed the careers of music’s biggest stars: Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, and Dolly Parton. Taylor was especially inspired by the young women that had come through town like Lee Ann Rimes and Shania Twain. Most of all, Taylor explained she loved these stars for  “We don’t care what you think” quirkiness (Spencer 16). While most teens spend their high school years finding themselves, both Janis and Taylor were clearly driven by their music.  As soon as they reached a certain age, there would be no waiting and hoping like the rest of us do.  The time for them to move was “now.”

                                    Works Cited 

Angel, Ann.  Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing. New York: Amulet Books,  2010. Print. 

Spencer, Liv.  Taylor Swift: Everyday is a Fairytale.  Ontario: EECW Press, 2010. Print.