Laura's Missed Chance in The Glass Menagerie"The Glass Menagerie" is a play about intense human emotions; frustration, desperation, sadness, anger, shyness and remorse. Perhaps the most intense scene in the play is when a gentleman caller, Jim O'Connor, finally arrives. Their entire future hangs in the balance during this scene. Laura actually manages to break out of her shyness with someone besides her family, and really starts to feel good about herself. If Jim had not been engaged to someone else, the outcome of the play might have been different. If he had been free to love her, he could have continued to call upon her, bringing her out of her shell and boosting her self-esteem. They may have gotten married in the end, giving Laura a husband who loved her, making Amanda happy, and freeing Tom to go off and live his own life. Laura is very nervous when Jim knocks on the door. Amanda begs her to open it. Aside from the fact that his words differ somewhat from the text of the play, he does not try to block Jim and Tom by lyrically shouting, "I'm coming! Just a second." Laura's meeting with Jim at the door is just as I imagined it while reading the play, her demeanor casual and friendly, and her shyness painfully evident. After entering the house Tom goes out onto the terrace, but does not light his cigarette before leaving as the play prescribes, and also continues reading the newspaper once he is on the terrace, something the play says nothing about. Another difference that was immediately noticeable in the film was the absence of the images that appear every couple of pages throughout the show. I think the absence of these images slightly weakens the aura of unreality. The presence of images represents dreams and imagination, which we know are invented, fantasy. The absence of dream imagery helps us forget what Tom says at the beginning of the show: "the show is memory. Being a memory show, it's dimly lit, it's sentimental, it's not realistic." Jim in the film does not lean over the railing looking like a traveler while saying, "I'm going to change," as he is supposed to do in the play, nor does he wave his hand at the film theater as he talks about it..