Enlarge Courtesy of Dana Farrington

The cast and crew of Titanic, as pictured in my 2001-2002 yearbook. I'm standing in the third row back on the right side, in front of the "captain."

Courtesy of Dana Farrington

The cast and crew of Titanic, as pictured in my 2001-2002 yearbook. I'm standing in the third row back on the right side, in front of the "captain."

I died on the Titanic — in the musical, that is. Titanic opened on Broadway in 1997 and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

My small California middle school performed the show in grand fashion. Goodness knows why it hadn't been done before at the school, but the curtains rose on our stage in February 2002.

Thanks to the local community theater, my friends and I were in many musicals growing up. I was an orphan twice — in Oliver and Annie — a dancing yellow brick in The Wiz, the baroness in The Sound of Music and a less-than-ladylike secretary in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

But this was my first drowning victim.

The musical was "horrible," according to my parents. Not for lack of talent, of course. Rather, it was sort of depressing watching a bunch of children re-enact this horrific event.

We had a hydraulic stage that literally rose on one side to simulate the sinking ship while dramatic music played in the background. In many a rehearsal, we practiced rolling down it (to our deaths).

The real kicker was the end of the show, in which all of us who died sang a haunting song from our watery grave. We were not the lucky ones.

I remember my eighth-grade self really trying to get into the part. We were not playing fictional characters, arms spread over the bow. This musical was based on the lives of real people. We were acting out their personal lives, hopes and dreams. And their tragic deaths. It was, well, creepy.

On the bright side, my mom notes, I got to wear a fabulous period-style hat.

In a school newsletter in May 2002, one student conveyed how it felt to be ending such a masterpiece.

"Usually when a play is over, I say goodbye to my friends. In this play, I said goodbye to everyone, as we became so close in our sailing on the Titanic."

Dana Farrington is a producer and weekend editor for NPR.org.

Enlarge Laurence Cendrowicz/The Weinstein Company

Michelle Williams stars in My Week With Marilyn.

Laurence Cendrowicz/The Weinstein Company

Michelle Williams stars in My Week With Marilyn.

As we head into the heaviest-duty part of Oscar bait season, we're going to look at some of the performances that are getting a lot of attention this year. We begin with Michelle Williams in the Marilyn Monroe tale My Week With Marilyn.

Michelle Williams' performance in My Week With Marilyn is both the best part of the film and the biggest challenge to the narrative that it unwisely tries to grab onto in its closing minutes.

The problem starts with Colin Clark, who parlayed a brief week he spent with Monroe while she was filming The Prince And The Showgirl with Laurence Olivier into a book. Clark was employed as the third assistant director — basically a gofer and an assistant to Olivier — and wound up wrangling and befriending Monroe for a period of about nine days, during which, the film would have you believe, he was able to know the real Marilyn Monroe, to see into her soul, and to fall a bit in love with her, only to have his heart broken.

In the film, Clark is presented as a young man who is painfully decent and kind beyond his years, on whom Monroe quickly comes to rely almost entirely. He is vulnerable and naive, and unprepared for the inevitable letdown of seeing this shining star for a brief moment. But of course, the up side is that he has this brief connection with her, this moment of grace, person-to-person, and while it can't last, it becomes a magical memory tinged with the pain of the youthful love affair (even though there's not much to it beyond a single chaste kiss — and Monroe was, after all, married to playwright Arthur Miller at the time). As Judi Dench, playing an older actress on the film who wisely understands both Clark and Monroe, puts it, "First love is such sweet despair."

What makes the movie mesmerizing is that Williams' performance as an often drugged, always insecure, fundamentally lost Marilyn Monroe makes it absolutely clear that there is no relationship at all. There is no give and take, no moment of grace, no bittersweet young love affair to be sighed over in years to come — for her, there is nothing. This Marilyn Monroe is a bottomless pit of need and fear and a severe drug problem, and this Colin Clark is a young man drunk on celebrity and fantasy, whether he convinces himself that spending nine days with her makes them really truly friends or not.