Reflection #6

When I think back to my childhood, one particular memory involving imagination and creativity sticks out among the rest. That memory would be when my grandfather passed away. I was unable to cope with the idea that my grandfather would no longer be around, so I used my imagination to pretend that he was still around, teaching me how to play piano and the cello, how to throw a knuckleball and how to knock the wind out of another person without doing permanent damage. Although I was painfully aware of the fact that he wasn’t there to teach me more, I was able to replay everything that he did teach me over and over until I was finally old enough to accept the fact that hanging on to him that strongly wasn’t health. I needed to move on.

In more recent times, imagination and creativity has been exceedingly helpful in order to fix problems. For example, over the summer I had the opportunity to be the set manager for a 114 person cast of Hairspray. During the run of the show, my job was to make sure everything technical ran smoothly, including set changes, costume changes, actors being in place, etc. and to fix anything that broke during the show. On one such night, we had a heavy rainfall during the day before a show, due to that rainfall, our toilet for the jail scene cracked. The crack was small enough that, unless you happened to be looking at the exact place at the perfect angle, it would be missed. Unfortunately, during the first act of the show, the rolling platform it was on was bumped, causing the crack to grow into a full blown split, causing a large chunk of the toilet to fall off and shatter. With little time and even fewer resources, I had to jerry rig a way to cover the gaping hole in the back of the toilet. I found some tin foil and laid it over the hole, then, I use spray paint to blend the tin foil into the rest of the toilet. It didn’t look pretty up close, but from the audience’s perspective, it looked close enough to the real thing to not raise any extra questions.

One superhero in particular who uses his creative abilities often, is Iron Man aka Tony Stark, one time in particular is the Extremis storyline. In this storyline, a super solider gets loose and begins terrorizing the United States, Iron Man is dispatched to fight him, but the super solider quickly gets rid of him due to a lapse between the time commands need in order to transfer from Stark’s brain to his suit. In order to solve this problem, Stark takes the Extremis serum himself and uses it to not only link his brain to all technology, but also repair his heart so he doesn’t require the arch reactor in his chest at all times.