BFA = Best Fun in Abilene

I graduated from Abilene Christian University on May 10th with a BFA in Theatre: Acting and Directing. Here I am with my family on graduation day!

Exactly one week later I presented my senior Capstone project: The Shakespeare Celebration: A Scene Festival.

I spent the greater part of the school year directing some 30 elementary school students in scenes from Shakespeare's plays and, on 17 May 2008 we presented them at the Alliance for Women and Children in Abilene. It was a great success and I loved working with them! Here are some photos from the performance day:

The Alliance for Women and Children then asked me to come and do some Shakespeare workshops with their middle school girls summer camps. I had a wonderful time sharing the story of As You Like It with the campers, but especially enjoyed talking about "growing up" issues they face and connecting some characters as well as lessons from "As You Like It" to the girls' own lives.

I chose to focus on "As You Like It" this summer because the Abilene Shakespeare Festival was also performing it this summer (my students got to come a see the opening night performance). I was in the production, which marked my fourth summer with the ASF. I was THRILLED to get to work with the director, actors and designers again!

Here I am, in a corset line, with all the women in the production and with actor who played Orlando, my love interest, in the show:

My best friend, Emily, and I got to play best friends in the show, which was fantastic. After four years in the ACU Theatre department, we'd never gotten to act together, so it was a real treat. It was especially good because she is leaving in September to nanny for her sister and brother-in-law in Bangladesh for a year. We were able to use the show as a kind of "last hurrah" before we part. We've grown very close over the years and it's impossible to describe, here, the mixture of excitement for our futures and sense of loss and sorrow as we're living apart.

The photo at the top is of Emily and me in our "As You Like It" costumes and this one is of us on my graduation day.

After "As You Like It" closed, I got a job baby-sitting in July, and started looking around Abilene for a more long-term position. For the past three years I've worked as the Study Abroad student worker in the Center for International and Intercultural Education at ACU, but as I'm not a student anymore, my job there was scheduled to end in August and I needed another source of income. That's when the opportunities to travel with the Opera (and my former teacher, Mary!) and teach in Rwanda happened to drop in my lap. It seems everything has been orchestrated. I received the offer to tour Europe on 20 July, quit my job, said goodbye to as many people as I could get a hold of in Abilene, packed up my house and drove to Denver by 02 August. Needless to say, it's been a few of crazy weeks.

The rest of the summer was mostly spent at my church in Abilene, New Life Church of Christ. I've developed incredible friendships with many different people at New Life, and I will miss them all -- and my lovely flatmates who have put up with me for the past two to three years -- as I head to Europe. Here are some photos of me with my New Life friends.

This was when I went through the bathroom window (just like the Beatles' lyric, "She came in through the bathroom window"!) at my friends' house.

I leave Denver on Wednesday morning and I've already checked out Internet Cafes near our first hotel in Germany, so the next post should be coming soon! Stay tuned!