Jeepers. It just dawned on me that, 30 years ago, I graduated from Western Kentucky University, worked my first summer at the Williamstown Theater Festival and then started as a PR assistant at Hartford Stage in Hartford, Connecticut, which had just opened A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Mark Lamos and which featured a very young and often shirtless Bradley Whitford. And I was a size 8.
It was an extraordinary year. I loved my senior year of college and I loved my first post-university jobs. I felt like the luckiest girl alive.
What a year it was (links go to photos):
- I wrung in the new year outside of London with my best friend from WKU, Carmen, and my new best friend from the UK, Louise.
- In the Spring, I was part of the first massive protest that my university had seen in more than a decade – students protested the WKU President, Kern Alexander, install faculty editors at the WKU student newspaper, the College Heights Herald, and the WKU yearbook, the Talisman.
- In May, I graduated, stuck around town for a month with friends, then closed my bank account in Bowling Green and moved away, not knowing that Domino’s Pizza hadn’t cashed my last check I wrote to them and they swore out a bench warrant for my arrest and my former flatmate, still in town for the summer theater, had to take care of it.
- I drove from Kentucky to New England and back to Kentucky twice, having never seen much of the USA at all until then.
- Over the summer, I helped a fledgling little show called Entertainment Tonight get interviews at Williamstown, which they featured on TV for a full week.
- Sigourney Weaver said my name and Tony Goldwyn rocked his baby while doing a press interview in my office.
- I met Christopher Reeve and he hated me and two years later, he STILL hated me.
- Nikos Psacharopoulos would hang up on me if he called and I said my boss wasn’t in the office.
- Jon Polito and I discussed both being Capricorns.
- I worked with possibly the most talented, dedicated, fun staff I ever have in my life – at Hartford Stage (though the staff at the UN my first two years run a very, very close second)
Good times!
Many of the people I knew in that year, and met in that year, are my still friends to this day.
30 years ago? Sometimes it seems like a million, sometimes it seems like yesterday.
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