ABSTRACT
Most audiences can relate to stories of first love. Adolescents who fall in love are sure that if it goes wrong they will die of the pain. It is a universal experience that can be sweet, painful, embarrassing, innocent, impassioned, misunderstood, awkward, scary, and life-changing. It is one of the events that mark the shift from childhood to adulthood. There may have been teen love stories before the sixteenth century, but let's start with Romeo and Juliet, a perennial favorite that has been remade dozens of times and has been performed on stages around the world every year for the last 400. This chapter focuses on baby love stories where both people are young. Whether boy/girl, two boys, two girls, or two neutral gender kids, they both need to be young. Love is love at any age. While it may be amplified out of all proportion in adolescents, it's no less sweet and touching at 12 than at 82.
