Arsenic and Old Lace

On Saturday I went to Morton High School’s fall play Arsenic and Old Lace. I went because my brother was in it, but also because I was in theater all through high school and had promised friends that were in it that I would go see it.

Arsenic and Old Lace is a comedy about the Brewster Family. Mortimer Brewster and his brothers, Jonathan and Teddy, were raised by their aunts, Abby and Martha, and the play begins when Mortimer proposes to his girlfriend, who is Abby and Martha’s neighbor and a pastor’s daughter, Elaine Harper. Shortly after, while looking for a book, Mortimer discovers a body in the window seat. His aunts confess to poisoning him and tell Mortimer that he is there until Teddy can bury him in the cellar.

You see, Teddy thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States. To him, the cellar is Panama and he is digging the Panama canal.

Abby then tells Mortimer that it started with an old, homeless man looking for a room to sleep and dying in their living room five minutes later. Teddy then buried him in the cellar after being told that he was a yellow fever victim.

While Mortimer tries to process everything, his aunts confess to poisoning ten other men, who were also buried in the cellar by Teddy due to “yellow fever.” So when Mortimer has to leave to write a review for a play, he tells his aunts not to let anyone else into the house. They promise, only to find that Jonathan, who had left home years ago and hasn’t been heard from, has come home. He brings with him Dr. Helga Einstein, who has done plastic surgery on Jonathan many times and is the reason for his disfiguration at the time, and Mr. Spenalzo, who Jonathan killed.

Later in the night, Jonathan and Helga decide to stay the night after Teddy brings Helga into the cellar, thinking that she is a general. Helga finds the hole that has been made for Mr. Hoskins, the man Abby and Martha poisoned but is still in the window seat, and tells Jonathan that they should put Mr. Spenalzo in the hole.

So after everyone is in bed, Teddy takes Mr. Hoskins down to the cellar and shortly after Jonathan and Helga bring Mr. Spenalzo into the house through the window. When Elaine Harper knocks at the door, Helga puts the body in the window seat and hides when Elaine comes in. Jonathan then sneaks around to the front door and follows Elaine in, who came to see Abby and Martha thinking that someone was trying to break into the house. She actually saw Jonathan and Helga, but she didn’t know that. So Jonathan thinks she’s lying and gags her and makes Helga take her to the cellar. The noise wakes Martha and Abby up, who are dress all in black and had planned on having a funeral for Mr. Hoskins in the cellar.

Mortimer then comes home from the play just as Elaine comes running from the cellar. Mortimer sends her home after realizing who Jonathan is and tells him to leave. After hearing that Martha and Abby said they could stay, Mortimer makes Jonathan and Helga sleep in the living room, but changes his mind when Helga says she’ll sleep on the window seat. Mortimer still thinks that Mr. Hoskins is still in the seat and learns minutes later, after looking in the seat, that someone else is in there. He gets mad at his aunts for letting someone into the house and shows Abby Mr. Spenalzo, who she refuses to bury in the basement because he’s a foreigner. When they try to show him to Martha, Jonathan yells, “NO!” and Mortimer becomes very happy. He tries to use the dead body to get Jonathan out of the house, saying that he’ll call the cops. But Jonathan threatens to tell the cops about the other body they found in the basement, so Jonathan and Helga stay.

Martha and Abby then later tell Jonathan and Helga about the twelve bodies in the cellar and we learn that Jonathan has also killed twelve men. Jonathan then plans to kill Mortimer, who is tied up by Helga and Jonathan and almost drinks the wine Abby and Martha use to poison their victims. They are then interrupted by Teddy, who blows his bugle, and then by Officer O’Hara, who comes looking for Mortimer to talk about the play she’s writing.

O’Hara spends many hours talking about the plot and is joined later by Officer Brophy and Officer Klein, who were called because Teddy blew his bugle again. They find Jonathan asleep on the couch and when he wakes up, he thinks he was turned in by Mortimer so he tells them about the thirteen bodies in the cellar. They don’t believe him and tell him he’s insane.

In the end, Teddy is put into a home for the insane and Martha and Abby go with him, leaving the house to Mortimer. We also find out that Jonathan had escaped from a prison in Indiana and was wanted. But Martha and Abby are not happy to have poisoned the same number of people that Jonathan had killed, so they poison the old man who came from the home Teddy was going to.

The Stupidest Rules

In The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams, the main character, Kyra, and her family live in a compound. They are polygamists. In the compound, they have many “rules” which they talk about throughout the book.
1. “The unwhole won’t meet God. They do not qualify for the kingdom.” Kyra talked about Sister Janie Abbott who had two baby boys, one who did an hour after birth and the other who lived awhile. He was unwhole (meaning those who have disabilities) and they “did away with him.”
-God loves all. It says so in the bible. Prophet Childs is full of crap.
2. “If I were a boy, I’d get to do more stuff, like the boys do here.” Like choose who to marry.
- Women obey the men. That’s how it is there. When men and women are married, it’s mostly and arranged marriage. Except now I just think that the men choose who they want because they are selfish. The boys get nothing. The old men who work for the Prophet are the ones who have lots of wives, which is apparently important to get into heaven.
3. “’Bring the demon’s world here. Burn it all.’ And everyone did. They brought picture books and teen books. Magazines and newspapers. Novels and even the Reader’s Digest. ‘Bring word from the Infidel. And I will bring you truth. I will lead you to Heaven.”
-I don’t want someone telling me what I can and cannot read. I talked about that last week. Nowhere in the bible does it say that the Bible is the only thing you can read. Kyra talks about how her younger sister wanted to keep a Dr.Seuss book, but wasn’t allowed, because “the devil is in the books.” Really? Because I just thought the books were to help kids read and for their enjoyment?
4. “Don’t speak, Sister Sarah, unless I’ve spoken to you first.”
-And again, women have no rights in the compound.
5. “Discipline is God’s way to raising righteous children. It’s a way you can move up in leadership.”
-What happened here was Kyra’s Uncle, who she’s supposed to marry, comes to their house because the youngest, a baby, was very noisy when he was over to dinner and he did not appreciate it. Kyra’s mother is forced to hold her under water three times and they almost lose her.
6. Sister Ellen has to marry Brother Mathias, who was at least seventy years old. She fell in love with someone else, Bill Trophy. He was sent away and she was killed.
-Where do I even begin? Well, for one, sleeping with another man when you are married is wrong, but killing someone does not make God any more happy.
7. “Once, two years after Prophet Childs took over and close us into our community, people started peering in. ‘They are Satan. When you see them, with their all-seeing eyes, with those cameras, you run. They are Satan, here to try and steal you from us. To take babies from their mothers’ breasts. To teach you the ways of the world. To lead you all to hell.’”
-Oh, so I’m going to lead them to hell? I do not follow the ways of the world, which include drugs and alcohol and sex. I follow the bible, just like they apparently do. Except I’m not trying to play God, like Prophet Childs’ is.
8. Brother Alex Delango lost everything because he dared to contradict Prophet Childs. “They took his children and wives and give them to two other of the brethren. They made him leave, along with brother Olsen and Brother Adamson. The three of them were run off, all of them losing their families because they crossed the Prophet.”
-Wow. That’s intense. And that is what Kyra’s father is warning her about. If she doesn’t marry her uncle, her father will lose everything!

Should Harry Potter be banned from schools?

Did you know that more than 50 books are challenged to get banned from school libraries? Books like Goosebumps by R.L. Stine, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle are on many banned books lists. Since 2006, one of the most commonly challenged books is the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. According to MSNBC, mother Laura Mallory of Georgia said that the books were “an ‘evil’ attempt to indoctrinate children in the Wicca religion.” When she took it to the Board of Education, Victoria Sweeny said, “If schools were to remove all books containing reference to witches, they would have to ban Macbeth and Cinderella.”
Many Christians have stood with Mallory, quoting from the Bible Deuteronomy 18:9-12:

"There shall not be found among you anyone who... practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord…”

Since 2006, Harry Potter has been put on many banned books lists, but fans of the books continue to fight against it.
I bring this up because I am writing a paper about “Should Harry Potter be banned from schools?”. It really got to me last year when, in my Novels class, we looked at the most commonly banned books and most of the books we were reading were on that list. We also noticed Harry Potter and spent a lot of time discussing it.
As a fan of Harry Potter, obviously I do not think the books should be banned. I am a Christian and I follow the Bible. But the books are fiction, make-believe stories and some religious scholars are now arguing that the books actually follow the plot of the Gospel and use Christian imagery. There are tons of people from my church that are fans of Harry Potter, and one thing we talked about in youth groups was that most of the time the adults that are for banning a certain book are parents of younger children. They don’t want their child to be influence by the books, when, in reality, books like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby won’t be read by students until Jr. High or High School.