The Airport Plays

On Sunday, March 7^th, Drama Collective presented The Airport Plays.  Drama Collective is the student drama group on campus, and every spring, we ask five playwrights to each write a short one-act over FWT.  We always require different things of our playwrights.  One year, they had to include rainboots and a bathtub. (The Rain Plays.)  The next year, each playwright used a famous piece of art as inspiration. (The Art Plays.)  And this year, we decided that each play would take place in a different section of an airport, and aptly named the event, The Airport Plays.

The plays took place in security check, the terminal, the airplane bathroom, on the airplane itself, and in baggage claim.  So on one Sunday, five playwrights, five directors, five stage managers, three costume designers, two set designers, sixteen actors, and two producers worked from 8 in the morning until 7 that night to put on show.  The night of student-created drama was a success.  We had a long day, a full house, a lot of fun, and a great show.

Watch excerpts of each Airport Play below!

Sudden Spring

A lot can change in a week:

February 27th, 2010

March 9, 2010

And no one is enjoying the change more than the students who brought the couch onto the main lawn today:

Just like "Friends"!

Top Five Things

As I prepare for my flight back to New York, I inevitably find myself compiling numerous mental lists: lists of things I did and didn’t do during this trip abroad, lists of things I have and haven’t packed, a list of what I will miss most about Italy, and a list of what I’m most looking forward to about coming home tomorrow.  As a farewell to FWT blogging, and in the nature of The Top Five _______ I’d Want On A Desert Island, I thought I’d go ahead and actualize those latter two lists:

Top Five Things I Am Going to Miss About Italy

1.) My boss, Alessandra.  Though I had a student-professor sort of relationship with her before I came to Florence this winter, I hadn’t spent as much time with her as I have now, and I am so grateful to have gotten to know her better.  She is brilliant and beautiful and one of the kindest people I have ever met – an amazing photographer and an excellent boss.

2.) Mila, the fatter of the two cats I was living with.  I’m not a cat person at all, but by constantly hiding between my sheets and in my closet, and by acting as sentry outside of my bedroom door at all other times, I became particularly fond of this overweight Italian kitty.

3.) Coffee.  It just tastes better here, and I love having espresso or cappuccino be a part of my daily diet, as opposed to a dessert-time luxury.

4.) The Odeon, forever one of my favorite things about Florence.

5.) Il Mercato Centrale, and shopping in Florence in general.  The prospect of returning to American supermarkets and the mall is, honestly, not very appealing.

Top Five Things I Am Looking Forward to About America

1.) Obviously, seeing my family, my boyfriend, and my friends.  I realize this number is kind of a cop-out.

2.) Spending some quality time with my big fat yellow lab, Hallie.  She is very wise and a very good listener, and she is quite crafty when it comes to finding food that she is not supposed to eat and devouring it in a timely manner.  We are very good friends.

3.) Coffee.  While it tastes better in Italy, it comes in very small cups that just aren’t any fun to hold.  This is one of those things that you never know you’ll miss until it’s gone, but I can’t wait to get back to New York/Vermont and hold a big mug full of American coffee in my hands.

4.) All of the gross/often tacky things about America that I never expect to miss very much but always do after a prolonged separation from home.  This includes but is not limited to: hamburgers, bad chinese food, various TV shows, outrageously large movie theaters, whatever is currently being overplayed on all American radio stations, and the ability to listen to these stations while driving.  Also, in another category, I rather miss snow, but I know that feeling will only last for a day or so.

5.) Bennington (awwww).  But seriously.  At the end of every term, I can’t wait to be out of Vermont – I feel overworked and stressed and tired of eating in the dining hall and seeing the same people every day.  And a few weeks before term starts back up again, I inevitably start getting really excited to begin my new classes, to be back in that dining hall, and especially to see everyone again.  The general mood around campus after FWT makes it seem like no one has seen each other in a decade, as opposed to the few months it’s actually been – you can’t avoid seeing people run up to each other making embarrassing squeals of delight, and you’re doomed to be hugged numerous times, whether you like it or not.  The entire atmosphere is comically exciting and reassuring, and I can’t wait to go back to it next week.

The View from Home; Goodbye Boston

The final page count for my time as a Kneerim & Wiliams editorial intern: 2,798 pages in 6 weeks. While in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that many pages, I really like having a concrete method of gauging where and how I end FWT.  Looking at that number, I feel accomplished.

I’m at my home in CT, watching the first day of the Winter Olympics.  I watched Apollo Anton Ohno win another Olympic medal.  I watched the U.S. steal the gold from fold-medalist Canadian mogul skier, Jenn Hines.  Watching these amazing feats and achievements got me thinking once more about what I’ve accomplished over FWT, besides a seemingly-impressive “pages read” count.

I now understand the business side of publishing.  I can use phrases like “net sales” and “earn out” and “author advance” comfortably in a sentence. (Net sales – total book sales; Earn out – to sell enough copies of a book so that the publishing house earns back the amount paid in the Author Advance – the initial payment for an anticipated manuscript.)  For example, on the author earns out her advance, the publisher takes a smaller percentage of the net sales.  I also know more about e-rights than I thought there was to know, as I’ve mentioned before.

I’m more attuned to the pulses of both the current fiction scene and respected literary magazines.  More importantly, I understand how important familiarity with both these spheres are.  To shine in a field, you must know what is happening around you, what is popular or revolutionary, so next time, you can find it first.  I met five incredibly intelligent, talented, and kind people.  While they all taught me about the world of publishing, they taught me more about how I want to live and who I’d like to become.

FWT asks us to reflect.  While the constant evaluation of “what I learned” can seem maudlin or redundant at first, this reflection is just as important as the experience itself.  This kind of evaluation is what has helped me to have better and better FWTs.  Soon, this reflective outlook becomes second nature and insight follows close behind..

Il Mercato Centrale

One of the great things about FWT is how it often (though not always) forces you to cook for yourself.  For many students, this means either learning how to cook or else sticking to the easy stuff – eggs, pasta, things like that.  Being in Florence, I’m pretty lucky when it comes to food, as this place is known for its amazing cuisine.  And even though I’m on a budget and can’t afford to go out much, just shopping for food is tremendously fun here.

Just two blocks from where I’m living, there’s a huge central market (Il Mercato Centrale), an enormous indoor space, open all day Monday-Saturday, selling every type of fresh produce you can imagine.  Fruits and vegetables, meats and cheeses, bread (baked daily), Italian chocolates, grains, dried fruits – I get lost in this place on a weekly basis.  The best – though often disturbing – part, though, is how raw everything is, how unprocessed.  You can often see entire animals hanging up in the meat department – pork that still looks like pigs, lamb that still looks like sheep, full hooves or legs, and fully intact poultry.  My sister is a vegetarian, and she did not enjoy this section when she came to Florence two years ago, but even the grain or cheese sections can blow you away – stacks and stacks of full wheels of cheese, basket after basket of every type of grain or fruit or vegetable.  Italy, and Florence especially, is known for its shopping, but the appeal of the Florentine shopping experience clearly isn’t limited to bags, shoes, and leather jackets.

Under the Tuscan Sun

When I told people I was going to Italy for FWT, I could immediately tell the sorts of associations that were going through their heads: warmth, sunflowers, handsome men on vespas, and something resembling the lifestyle of Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun.  Needless to say, this is not what Italy is really like – at any time of year, but especially in January and February.  However, last night I got about as close to this image as I’m ever going to: I had coffee with a nice Italian boy.

He did not ride a vespa, and he did not have olive skin and big dark eyes, but he was very friendly and very charming.  He teaches a photo class at the studio, and after his class was over, he came up to the library where I’d been working.  We got to talking about Calvino, whom I’m taking a class on this coming term, and we ended up going to a coffee shop around the corner.  We talked a lot about the American students in the city and the Italians’ reception of them, about what countries we’d been to and what our experiences were there.  He admitted to me, hesitatingly, that though “it’s such a cliche,” he really wants to go to America someday, that “New York must be the nicest place in the world.”  Upon reflection, it makes complete sense that wanting to go to America would be a cliche for Italians – as he described it, they all grew up watching American movies and listening to American music and constantly hearing about American politics.  But it just hadn’t occurred to me before in quite this way: that the whole Under the Tuscan Sun thing works in reverse, too, that while Americans are smiling about handsome Italian men and sunflowers, the Italians are dreaming of big lights and tall buildings and movie sets.  And that one might feel a little foolish, in either country, for voicing these cliches.

Anyway, I was very happy to have met him, and to have had the opportunity to have that conversation with an actual Italian, and especially an Italian who’s close to my age (as opposed to most of the people I’m working with, the people I see the most, who are all significantly older).  Of course, when living abroad, a girl’s got to be careful about who she goes out with – a friend of mine was actually proposed to while volunteering in Peru last FWT.  But, apart from the fact that I lay awake for half the night cursing caffeine, a little cappuccino never hurt anybody.

Beginning of the End

Yesterday was the first day of my last week of work.  I am returning to campus a week early, with the rest of the House Chairs, for spring training.  As usual for me, the end of FWT has a bittersweet tang to it.  On the one hand, it’s wonderful to know that I will be back at Bennington soon, close to friends, and in new classes.  On the other, I will be leaving a job I love and a group of people I really enjoying working with.  Katherine and Caroline took me out to an early goodbye lunch today.  It was wonderful to be surrounded by and engaged in smart, thoughtful conversation.  I admire them more now than I did after that first lunch, six weeks ago.

We — being Katherine, Caroline, Hilary (a fellow intern), and I — also spent about an hour and fifteen minutes just throwing around book ideas.  It was our brainstorming meeting.  These book ideas were not our own, but rather inspired by articles or feature stories we’ve each been reading over the past few weeks.  Of all the websites that I was checking out, Guernica has been my favorite. Both the fiction selections and feature stories are top notch.  This meeting, in addition to the lunch conversation, was just really inspiring and added to my attachment to the agency.  I would return to Kneerim & Williams as an intern in a heartbeat.

Jill Kneerim, on of the founding partners of the agency, already offered to put me in touch with some of the New York branch agents to help me find a job for next FWT.  I was talking about perhaps working at an online literary magazine — I’ve recently become very interested in literary publication and the role of the editor. I hope to take some e-mail addresses and phone numbers home with me.  I respect my co-workers so much, and hope to keep these relationships open.  Connections are one of the most important benefits of FWT.

LA: The Traffic City

I spent this weekend away from work…exploring Los Angeles with another Bennington student, Marisa Prefer 10‘. Marisa is spending FWT in Los Angeles, working for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions as well as setting up an online jewelry website, but we both took time away from our jobs to explore LA.

Friday

11 AM: Breakfast at Aroma, a quaint little brunch spot in Studio City.

12:15: Quick Trip to the Getty, where we found out parking was going to cost 15$. As poor college students, we decided to skip a trip inside and instead opted for a look at the architecture on the outside.

2-4: Spent the hours between 2 and 4 SITTING IN TRAFFIC because everyone in LA works the most unpredictable time schedules i.e traffic at 2 in the afternoon on a Friday. ABSURD.

4: However, made it to Korea Town just in time for a trip visit to OOGA BOOGA, trendy bookstore/obscure apparel hidden above a Korean Bakery. Absolutely perfect.

7: Museum of Jurassic Technology. This place is too cool for words.

Saturday

We heard about this artwalk in an up and coming neighborhood called Echo Park, and decided to check it out. We got lost a few times, but finally made it to the walk, which included cafes, music shops, and clothing stores set in between houses. The weather forecast a 95% chance of rain, but it stayed clear all afternoon, giving us a chance to get cartooned (for free) drink tea, and listen to music while exploring. And later that night, we had the most amazing dinner at Elf, described as “so cool it doesn’t even have a sign telling you where it is…”

Sunday

THE DAY OF MARKETS

Studio City Farmers Market (where I was able to nab some potato samosas, kale, strawberries, asparagus, fresh juice, and snap peas. No Winter here.

AND

The Melrose Trading Post flea Market—–full of trendy shoes and rusty antiques.

AND

The Superbowl—which is not really a market–and NOT something you need to be in LA for, but everything does happen earlier here—so it’s sort of like I saw the Superbowl three hours before all you EastCoasters out there. OH Geez, I love the West Coast.

Studio Savior (Maybe a Little?)

This starts week four, my last week, at Studio Marangoni in Florence.  My job here has been defined as “do whatever they need me to do, whenever they need me to do it,” which means I’ve been doing all sorts of odd jobs for them here and there – largely in promotional writing and Italian-English translation for the studio’s website.  As it is my last week, though, my supervisor Alessandra and I just sat down to have a How Are Things Going talk, and to pin down some more specific tasks for me for the week.  And it’s looking like this week is going to be the busiest yet.

As I’ve written in earlier posts, I got this job through my contacts at this photo studio, where I took a class when I studied abroad in Florence through NYU two years ago.  Studio Marangoni is still responsible for the photo classes that NYU in Florence offers, but in recent years (and in the past semester, especially), numbers have been dropping and the studio has had to cancel several classes for lack of enrollment.  Knowing how amazing a facility this is, and what brilliant professors and artists work here, it’s clear that the problem is not the studio itself but the courses they’re offering.  Thus, in an effort to bring enrollment numbers up, they’re designing new courses to specifically appeal to the NYU kids – and this is where I come in.

Alessandra has proposed that I spend my last week here designing the basis for three or four new courses from some general ideas that she and the director of the studio have come up with.  My job is, specifically, to come up with catchy course titles and course descriptions that will appeal to the average study abroad student.  These ideas will go to Mr. Marangoni, who will then take them to the director of the NYU program in New York and make his proposal.  The fate of the studio is in my hands!  Not really.  But this does feel like a fairly significant (and fun!) responsibility, and not something that I’m wholly unprepared for.  Now that I attend a school where designing your education is the whole shtick, playing the “if I could design any course in this subject that I wanted, what would it be like?” game feels pretty close to home.  And, as someone who eventually wants to develop her own college courses as a living, this isn’t too far a throw from my ultimate career goals.

FWT Dispatch #3

View the first FWT Dispatches post here, and the second here.

Dispatch from Baltimore, MD
Correspondent: Megan Diehl, Class of 2011
Job: Hampton National Historic Site, Mount Clare Museum House
Concentration: Psychology and History

This field work term hasn’t been at all what I expected. In the past, I worked at a chocolate shop and a bakery, where I was constantly running around on my feet. I always had someone to talk to, even if it was just to complain about the newest crazy thing a customer had done. This year, it’s been a lot of sitting at a desk, typing mostly by myself. Big change. Before I actually started working at Hampton, a 220 year old estate, my conversations with my boss led me to believe that I’d have some sort of project to work on, but I quickly learned that this wasn’t the case. I spent my first few days going on mansion tours, having tons of information thrown at me, and wondering what I was supposed to do with all of it. I asked for a project, and things got much better after that. I’m currently helping redesign an exhibit about the site that has been sitting unattended at a local library for about 30 years. Hopefully we’ll actually install it before I have to head back to Bennington.

I’ve pretty much been given free reign at Mount Clare to explore my love of food history, and generate what I learn into something the museum can use. I’m almost finished with a food pamphlet that highlights the differences between colonial and modern foodways in Maryland, including period recipes that I found after many hours of searching. I LOVE Google books. The tour guides are going to use what I’ve found to help visitors understand a few of the “whys” of a southern colonial plantation, because my theory is that most people can relate to food regardless of time period. I just have one more page to write, and then my 30 page document is off to the printers. Exciting!

Dispatch from Melbourne, Australia
Correspondent: Madison Best
Job: Intern at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Gallery
Concentration: Visual Arts, Photography

For my FWT, I’m interning at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Gallery in

The Piano Man of Melbourne

Melbourne, Australia. One of my favorite things to do on my lunch break is walk down the streets of the city and admire the people on the street. I have come across two people thus far that I will probably never forget. The first is a man that recreates classical paintings with chalk. He had recreated Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring perfectly down to every tiny shadow, highlight, and fold. It was truly beautiful. It was enlightening to compare and contrast this man’s chalk drawings on the sidewalk in the city of Melbourne to the pieces up in the gallery. He clearly spent a lot of time getting every detail perfect and was using such a difficult medium. As a child, I was always excited if I could just get my name in chalk to look seemingly normal.
My other favorite person I’ve seen on the street is a man that plays happy-go-lucky music on an old piano while smoking a cigarette. He had a huge stack of notebooks next to him that were filled with music. He usually ignores everyone around him and concentrates on the music, but he’ll happily take requests as long as you pick one from the list of songs posted on the side of his piano.