contains a serious ammount of stream of conciousness type writing

Wow…it’s all over…we just had our final performance of The Laramie Project.

Here I am, sitting at my computer thinking about it all. Four months of preperation have led to this, and now it’s done. We’ve had four performances, and the last one is done. I can’t believe that we did  this play. This has made such a strong impact on me and I’m sure it’s made an impact on the cast and crew as well as all the people who came.

I am so thankful that I was able to close my senior year with this play. It means so much to me that, yes, a group of kids from Davis High School performed a play that has had controversy over it and, being in a conservative part of California, I’m proud to be able to say that ‘Yes. I was part of The Laramie Project. Yes. I’m proud of it and yes this play has made an impact on me.’

I mean, it’s weird that one play has made such an impact on me, you know? I just think that this has shown me so much that I was missing. I knew hate was wrong and everything, but I never realized that hate is such a foul thing, and being intolerant and discriminatory is not ok. It doesn’t matter if it’s joking around, it’s not ok. It doesn’t matter if your gay, bi, black, white, asian, male, female. It doesn’t matter. We are all human beings, and no one deserves to be discriminated against and no one deserves to be hated against.

I just can’t imagine…what if it happened to a friend of mine? Or to me? I think about it and like….What if I get a call tomorrow and find out my friend was found violently beaten and left for dead? How do I react? I….It doesn’t seem like it would happen….but it could…it’s happened to other people…it happened to Matthew….

I don’t know…this play…it’s so important to me now and I’m so proud that I can tell anyone in the future that ‘I was in The Laramie Project.’ They may not know what it is, but I would be more than willing to tell them.

Going a bit back to this being my last play at high school….I don’t know…It’s so…unreal to me that…I’m done…It hasn’t fully hit yet…I’m practically done with my high school drama career…and I think about it. I’ve been involved in drama for two years. Two years. and drama has had such an impact on my life that…yeah…It’s just like, where do I go on now? I’m filled with so many different emotions…happy, sad, excited, worried….I dunno…I think that this will all fully hit the night of the Bobby Awards…

So…I guess I should now say that…this play wasn’t just for me…this was for the people that came to watch this play…this was for the people who know what it’s like to be told ‘you’re not good enough’ or those people who are teased and made fun of, for those people who are bullied because they’re ‘different.’ This was for the people who know someone that goes through discrimination all the time. This was for the people who have lost someone because people are intolerant and don’t agree with the ‘lifestyle’ that these people live. This was for the people of Laramie, Wyoming. This was for Marge Murry, the mother of Reggie Fluty (who was the officer that had cut Matthew Shepard from the fence he was tied to), who passed away a few weeks ago. This was for the Shepard family who has lost a member of their family and will never have him back. This was for Matthew Shepard who taught me that hate and intolerance is not something that we should have.

And in the distance, I could see the sparkling lights of Laramie, Wyoming.