Summary: Ruby Bridges was the first African American child who attended a white school in the segregated South during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis on 14 November, 1960. She is also the subject of a 1964 painting, The Problem We All Live With, by Norman Rockwell. In this video, she talks with President Barack Obama at the Norman Rockwell Museum in front of the iconic picture. Along with the story about the Norman Rockwell Painting, this story can be used to talk about being different, being excluded and belonging, civil rights, history. But you can also use this on a very personal level to talk about the real person in the painting who went to first grade as a little girl.
6 years old in 1960, 66 years old in 2020, Childhood memories of school, Desegregation and civil rights, Discrimination and prejudice, Subject of iconic painting, Meeting the President
West Side Story was an acclaimed and popular Broadway musical about an ill-fated and impossible love between Tony and Maria. This story is about a recording of the Broadway score in 1984, 25 years later. Bernstein records the songs with a new generation of performing artists, renown singers who learned to act in the opera rather than Broadway actors who learned to sing in the theater. It's a remarkable documentary that captures the dynamic between the maestro and these superstars.
Perhaps because Bernstein is conducting his own piece as an old man, music that he composed many years earlier as a much younger man, you can talk about aging in this context. What does it mean to return to a work from your youth?