How to utilize the Wildcat Recreation Center video (BAD!)

Eliciting Anecdotes

Lending a helping hand

 A little girl sits fearfully watching the other kids zoom around on mini-motorcycles over hills on the muddy track. Tears stream down her face as she feels the butterflies build up inside her wanting her to take a ride, but her fear stops her from trying anything new.

Noticing the little girl struggle to work up the courage to join in on the activity, Manuel Moreno worked with her all day, giving her positive reinforcement until she was up and about revving her engine along with the others.

Being a counselor at a summer camp is more than just a job, it is about being there for kids, helping them learn new things and showing them that people care, he said.

Taking a step backward to take a step forward

Jeff Pelrade stood in his room emptied of furniture and blank walls, but with feelings of accomplished washed across his face. He was standing in his own room, in his own house and with his own roommates. For the first time, he was on his own ready to move in.

He never thought he would grow up and graduate from college, but he was accepted into a four-year university where he would receive a bachelor’s degree to hang on the fridge at home.

When he was pulled from his classes right before school was supposed to start, his dream was ripped out from under him and his life moved a step backward. He never wanted to stop growing as a person and didn’t let that stop him from coming back in the new year.

 Baseball runs through the blood

The smell of dirt beneath his cleats and the sun glaring down on his face, Chip Brennand kept his eye on the baseball preparing his bat for the loud crack that signaled for the sprint to first base.

The day he started playing ball when he was six years old, was the day he knew he wanted to be a major league baseball player. He played for 13 years and now that he is older his dreams have changed him to a new path, but he still remains a huge fan and will never forget the day the San Francisco Giants won the World Series.

The excitement filled the room as everyone was standing on their tip toes to see the outcome of the last inning and he knew no matter where life would take him, he would always love baseball.

Leads and Voices

1. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. …” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

• The narrator is speaking in the first person talking about his experience driving to Las Vegas while tripping out on drugs.
• The envisioned audience would be to people who are open taking drugs and who would be interested about people’s different experiences on them.
• The book most likely is starting in the late 60’s early 70’s when a lot of people were open to experimenting with all different types of drugs.
• The tone is skittish and nerve-racking. I noticed as I was reading I began speeding up almost like the car would have sped up to 100 miles per hour.
• The author’s voice is portrayed through the experience. In order to be able describe a hallucination, the author had some influences and perspective with drugs.
• The voice of the narrator is the character telling of his experience in Las Vegas. It is hard to tell with this lead because it is told in the first person, so it could possibly be the author.

 2. He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning silver at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine – he could see out, but you couldn’t see it. We were sitting in the living room of his Victorian house. It was a mansion, really, with fifteen-foot ceilings and large, well-proportions rooms. A graceful spiral stairway rose from the center hall toward a domed skylight. There was a ballroom on the second floor. It was Mercer House, one of the last of Savannah’s great houses still in private hands.

• The narrator appears to be using the first person. Even though they don’t use the “I”. The author uses “We” which puts them in the story and not on the outside.
• The envisioned audience is readers who like mysteries because the man introduced is left at a cliffhanger and the reader is wondering what he has done with house.
• Since the house being described is a Victorian, the time is probably around the mid-1800’s.
• The tone of this lead is dark and mysterious.
• The authors voice is elegant and smooth. They emerge when describing the delicate inner-workings of the house.
• The voice of the narrator seems somewhat scared and fearful of the unknown because they don’t know what is going to happen to the house, while the author is more gentle.

3. On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription – this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe. I’d finished my writing for the day and offered to pick it up for her. She said thanks, but she wanted to get a piece of fish at the supermarket next door anyway; two birds with one stone and all that. She blew a kiss at me off the palm of her hand and went out. The next time I saw her, she was on TV. That’s how you identify the dead here in Derry – no walking down a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the walls and long fluorescent bars overhead, no naked body rolling out of a chilly drawer on casters; you just go into an office marked “private” and look at a TV screen and say yep or nope.

• The narrator is speaking in the first person telling his personal story of how he lost his wife.
• The audience is readers who feel sympathetic and relate to small town ways.
• The time of this story started in 1994 because it is stated, but it was probably written shortly after in the present time.
• The tone is sad and weary.
• The narrator and the authors voice a more difficult to distinguish because it is written in first person. Both build up to a tragedy that they feel could have been prevented, their voice is morose.

4. Tall sails scraped the deep purple night as rockets burst, flared, and flourished red, white, and blue over the stoic Statue of Liberty. The whole world was watching, it seemed; the whole world was there. Ships from fifty-five nations had poured sailors into Manhattan to join the throngs, counted in the millions, who watched the greatest pyrotechnic extravaganza ever mounted, all for America’s 200th birthday party. Deep into the morning, bars all over the city were crammed with sailors. New York City had hosted the greatest party ever known, everybody agreed later. The guests had come from all over the world.

This was the part the epidemiologists would later note, when they stayed up late at night and the conversation drifted toward where it had started and when. They would remember that glorious night in New York Harbor, all those sailors, and recall: From all over the world they came to New York.

• The narrator is speaking in the third person omniscient because they are describing a scene to the reader as an outsider.
• The audience is readers who are patriotic Americans and people interested in history of the United States.
• The time of this would be a couple of years prior to now because the celebration is of Americas 200^th birthday.
• The tone is nostalgic and proud.
• The authors voice shows through describing the scene because you can hear that he is happy and proud to be celebrating the fourth of July with what seemed to be the whole world.
• The narrator gives us the picture and sets the scene for us, while the authors voice is shown through the tone he or she sets.

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