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Description:

Our Town is your town, Shmoopers.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:08

Our Town, a la Shmoop. These days, most of us take our first steps

00:15

here . . . . . . or here.

00:18

The 1% making "the big bucks" might be lucky enough to have their mail delivered here . . .

00:23

. . . while people making no bucks, unfortunately, end up sleeping here.

00:31

But not too long ago, most Americans used to hang out here.

00:35

They lived in places where everybody knew everybody else; where people were all up in

00:40

everyone's business and life moved a whoooole lot slower.

00:45

In Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winning play, Our Town, the author lets us in on what

00:51

life was like in 1913 in small town USA. We can agree that a bunch of things have changed

00:59

in the last hundred years, but here's the million-dollar question: Are we really all

01:05

that different from the folks Mr. Wilder wrote about?

01:09

Quick Review: Grover's Corners isn't what you would call

01:15

an exciting place to live. It's one of those places where you're born, get married, grow

01:21

old and finally, well, you know . . . The Webbs and the Gibbs are neighbors, and

01:28

their kids, Emily and George, kind of like each other.

01:32

When they finally fall in love - like we all knew they would - they do what they're supposed

01:38

to do. They get married. . .

01:41

And just when you think everyone is going to end up "Happily Ever After'. . .

01:45

. . . Emily drops dead! Okay. Review's over. Let's get back to our

01:56

original question. Are we really all that different from the citizens of Our Town?

02:01

Well, some would say that even though our stuff looks different . . .

02:05

. . . people are exactly the same. Others might argue that all that cool stuff

02:10

has done more than make our lives easier -- it's changed human beings forever.

02:17

But maybe the answer is somewhere in between. Families may look a lot different than the

02:23

Webbs and the Gibbs. . . . . . and technology and the civil rights

02:27

movement have shaken up more than just a few things.

02:30

But the values America was built on . . . . . . haven't exactly disappeared.

02:36

We like to put a ring on it . . . . . . and love to root for the underdog.

02:41

We work hard . . . . . . and share what we have with our neighbors.

02:45

The real world is a lot more complicated these days...

02:51

. . . sometimes we wonder if our great-grandparents didn't have the right idea all along.

02:57

Maybe the simple life was where it's at. So, are we different from Emily and George?

03:04

Shmoop Amongst Yourselves

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