The Torah of Rochelle Zell
Chesed in the Musical Mean Girls Amitai Vales, RZJHS 2021
Art by Marc Luban, RZJHS 2020 No one wants to be hit by a bus. Well, that’s exactly what happens in the movie Mean Girls. A girl comes to a new high school and creates a huge mess out of things resulting with a girl getting hit by a bus. My point is not entirely about the bus, but the fact that the way you treat others has a huge impact on people and their future.
rience better by treating people with respect.
Well, in Cady’s desperation, she finds herself hurting the feelings of others, and ultimately hurting someone physically as a girl ends up getting hit by a bus. However, in Cady’s realization of her wrongdoing, she sings a song at the end of the Broadway musical called ‘I See Stars’, which acknowledges what she has learned through her mistakes. Over the course of the song, she helps others understand how they can make their high school expe-
None of what she saw was true because she was constantly being blinded by a false image of how people were supposed to be. Now, she explains that not even the brightest diamond could outshine any of them, conveying the idea that everyone holds a unique element about them that cannot be outshined by anything else. Later, Cady sings that “The darker the night, The brighter you shine.” See Vales, next page
One of the main metaphors utilized in the song compares people to ‘stars’, highlighting the brightness and uniqueness within every single human being. The song begins as Cady says how everyone is “Cheap, fake, Easy to break” but follows that by stating how “Now I’m In the movie and in the musical Mean Girls, Cady Her- awake, I’ll tell you what I see, Plastic don’t shine, Glitter on attends a new high school and has trouble fitting in. don’t shine, Rhinestones don’t shine the way you do.” This situation is probably easy for most of us to imagine, Cady starts by acknowledging how she used to see herso it is also probably easy to imagine, that in people’s self and others as imperfect and breakable, but counters desperation to fit in with kids at school, they find them- that by saying how she is now awake, suggesting that she was not seeing clearly before. selves doing things they wouldn’t normally do.
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