Obviously, the  big topic of conversation right now is where everyone will be headed after graduation. Some are moving cross-country for jobs or family or school. A lot are uncertain what the future holds. For me, I am moving north to work at a camp for the summer. Then, I’ll be headed right back home to Hollins for another two years as a student!

Once I’ve completed my B.A. in English/creative writing, I’m going to return to Hollins for a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, with a concentration in Visual & Performing Arts. Basically, I’m going to be taking as many theatre classes as I possibly can.

As I indicated in my last blog, theatre has become a big part of my life this semester. I’ve also decided that I want for it to be a big part of my life in the future, as well. Ideally, I would love to be a teacher or director at a children’s theatre. I’m also now considering pursuing a career as a public relations rep for a theatre or theatre company.

I’m really excited to be staying at Hollins for another two years and to be able to continue my involvement with the Hollins Theatre Department! I’ve found a path that I’m really happy with right now, and I’m so eager for fall to arrive so I can get started with grad classes!

I will write more soon, as finals begin and graduation preparations get into full swing.

Love, Em

I was really involved with theatre in high school, both acting and teching. However, in getting through all the requirements for my major, minor and leadership certificate, I haven’t been particular involved in theatre in college. Until this year.

Last semester, I took a Theatre Stagecrafts course and, as a part of the class, I volunteered to work run crew for the fall production of Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and I fell in love with theatre all over again!

The crew for "Dead Man's Cell Phone"

This semester, I’ve been able to squeeze in two theatre shows! The spring musical Violet opened Wednesday night (and runs till Sunday) and is absolutely fantastic. They were a short of crew, so the stage manager Kat asked if I would help out. I’m so glad that I did, because it’s been a blast! I’m a spotlight operator, which is a totally new experience for me. I’m learning a lot, and I’m also getting to know the other young women in the theatre department a lot better. They are wonderful people!

Next month, my friend Heidi is directing her senior thesis project, a play entitled The Smell of the Kill. It’s the first senior thesis to be presented on the Hollins Theatre mainstage. (Most theses are performed on a smaller studio theatre stage.) It’s a great show and is having a big impact on the theatre department as a whole. The entire production is student-led… director, production manager, technical director, costumes, props… you name, it there’s a student in charge of it.

Along with another student, I’m working on publicity for the show. I’m busy drafting press releases, coordinating PR photos, and updating the production website. You should definitely check out our website:

SMELLTHEKILL.WORDPRESS.COM

You can learn all about the show (which you should attend if you are in the Roanoke area – it’s free to everyone), the Hollins theatre students, and the Hollins theatre department.

Publicity photo for "The Smell of the Kill"

Well, I’d better find my flashlight and spot cues and be ready for tonight’s performance of Violet. The cast party is directly after the show, so it should be a great night!

Founder’s Day
Thursday of this past week was Founder’s Day, which is a big tradition for seniors. It celebrates the birthday of our founder, Charles Lewis Cocke. All the seniors wear our robes, most of which are decorated like crazy, and walk up to the old HU cemetery (where C.L.C. is buried) and place a wreath on his gravestone. This year’s walk to the cemetery was especially entertaining because all the winter snow had just melted and the path was pure mud! Regardless of how gross our shoes were, it was nice to have all the seniors together doing something that we know generations of women have done before us. During senior year, we all get pretty busy. While we walked, I got to catch up with some friends who I haven’t talked to recently.

100th Night
Earlier this month (February), the senior class had another big tradition, called 100th Night, which is a celebration that takes place exactly 100 nights before graduation. Our senior class secretary created a slideshow of dozens and dozens of photos from the past three and a half years we have spent at Hollins, and everyone brought snack foods to share. We also brought our decorated bottles of cider/champagne from our junior Ring Night baskets. (I’ll explain more about that in a minute…) It was a fun time, hanging out with the seniors and being reminded of all the fun times from the last few years. There were definitely photos in that slideshow that we’d all forgotten ever existed

Ring Night
Ring Night would definitely have to be my favorite tradition… And because of that, I’m pretty sure my description of it is going to be uber-long, and include a ton of photos and hopefully video. So it’s going to be a separate blog entry: Ring Night 2009

Tinker Day
Tinker Day and Ring Night are probably our two wackiest traditions, and thus two of the best! On Tinker Day, everyone is woken early in the morning by seniors running up and down the dormitory halls banging pots and pans. Then, President Gray officially cancels classes for the day and the dining hall serves hundreds of Krispy Kreme donuts for breakfast! And the best part has even begun yet…

After breakfast, every runs back to their dorms to find the wildest, most ridiculous costumes to wear. (The Goodwill store down the street is invaluable in the weeks leading up to Tinker Day!) Once everyone is “appropriately dressed,” we all meet on Front Quad and then head off towards Tinker Mountain, the mountain behind faculty row. I can’t imagine what the people who live near Hollins must think, seeing us in our random colors and layers, trekking to the base of Tinker Mountain and then hiking to the top!

Once we reach the top of the mountain, we eat a picnic lunch of fried chicken and chocolate cake, and each class performs a skit. The new professors also perform a skit… this year, three new male professors re-enacted Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.”  Then we hike back down to campus, arrive to our dorms mid-afternoon, and take a nap! lol

Hollinsblogger Kylie also wrote about Tinker Day, and you can read her perspective here: Kylie’s Blog

First Step
The very first tradition of every year is First Step. Hollins has a big beautiful front lawn known as “Front Quad.” Per tradition, only seniors (and those invited by seniors) are allowed to step on the grass of Front Quad. Until senior year, students have to use the sidewalks that cut across the Quad. So, on First Step day, the entire senior class (with our First Step bottles from Ring Night in-hand) take one unified step onto the grass. And then we go insane, running on the grass, dancing on the grass, soaking each other with sparkling cider… It’s sticky and crazy to participate in, and quite hilarious to observe!

Well, I went about it in completely the reverse order, but I think I hit most of the big traditions on campus. Of course, there are many many smaller traditions, but you’ll have to come to Hollins to find out about those!

[For a little bit more info on our wide range of traditions, check out the Hollins University homepage.]

As I said, Ring Night is about craziness. The juniors are broken down into groups of 4-9 young ladies that stick together throughout the Ring Night and do activities together. Each evening of Ring Night, they perform skits in the dining hall, they also dress up and sing silly songs during the day, and sometimes they go on scavenger hunts in Roanoke. (It may sound really embarrassing, but none of it is done alone. It’s actually really fun to get dressed up and act silly when your close friends are right there with you, and if anyone feels too embarrassed, they can stop at any point.)

Seniors get involved by adopting Junior Sisters to take care of during Ring Night. But the juniors are not allowed to know who their Senior Sisters are until after Ring Night. So sophomores and first-years get the important job of being helpers and running messages back and forth between the juniors and their Secret Senior Sisters.

This year, I had three full Junior Sisters and two honorary Junior Sisters. (Honorary means that the junior already had two full sisters to take care of her, and I just contributed little bits during the activities.) The Senior Sisters are responsible for deciding what skit themes each junior group will perform, and for suggesting what costumes, songs, etc, the juniors use during the day.

As Senior Sisters, we all work really hard to make sure that our Junior Sisters will enjoy themselves and that the Ring Night assignments mean something to them. For example, our group (both seniors and juniors) are pretty dorky (and proud of it), so we seniors gave our Junior Sisters the skit assignments of “Superheroes” (for their Thursday night skit) and “Harry Potter” (for Friday night). From there, their creativity ran wild and we ended up with live-action versions of “Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny” and “The Mysterious Ticking Noise.”

Saturday night is the BIG night of Ring Night. For that night’s skit, Senior Sisters not only decide the theme for the skit, we also decide exactly which characters each Junior Sister would play. Our group chose Disney’s The Lion King. To tell our sisters what characters they were to play, we made individualized posters for each of them. (In the photos, the Junior Sisters are blindfolded so they wouldn’t find out who their Senior Sisters were… shhh, remember it was still a secret at that point!) My sisters played Scar, Nala, and the Hyenas (yes, all three hyenas at once).

Throughout the weekend my Junior Sisters also dressed up as various movie and television show characters…

…like Sam Carter and Ronon Dex from Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis…

…and Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer from Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog!

One of the great things about Ring Night is that Junior Sisters can be assured that their Senior Sisters are their friends and only want them to have fun. Each assignment is carefully picked for the junior it’s given to. And at the end of the weekend, the juniors get rewarded with their Ring Night baskets, full of special gifts and crafts chosen/made by their Senior Sisters. (The Junior Sisters receive their baskets after Saturday night’s skit, which is also when the identities of the Secret Senior Sisters are revealed.)

My three full sisters’ baskets…

(Actually, that last one was a toy dump truck, not a basket, lol)

Some of the most important items in the Ring Night baskets (aside from the large amount of candy and soda) are the BOTTLES. Each Ring Night basket contains four large bottles. Depending on the age of the Junior Sister, these bottles are either champagne or sparkling cider. BUT, these are not to be drunk just for fun!! Each bottle is designated for a specific senior year tradition: First Step, Ring Night, 100th Night, and Graduation. These bottles are decorated and personalized for the junior. At those four events during senior year, the juniors (who will be seniors by then) are allowed to open and drink one of their decorated bottles. Until then, they make great dorm room decorations!!

Hollinsblogger Katy wrote about her Ring Night experience as a junior in a different group. Flip over to her blog if you want to read that: Katy’s Blog

Right now, Hollins ladies are in the midst of our January short term, so students are scattered across the country on four-week internships or enjoying hands-on, focused studies on-campus. As a senior, I’m spending J-term working on my English honors thesis and my application to grad school in North Carolina. I don’t think I’m ever appreciated January quite as much as I do this year. It’s wonderful to have several weeks to concentrate on these tasks, rather than having to balance them with regular courses and homework.

So, my life at the moment:

• THESIS – I’m writing a two-hour pilot for an original television show idea. I have an awesome advisor in the English department who is allowing me to write a story that also includes my interest in theatre. The story is very character-driven, which I love, and lets me pull a lot on my own life experiences. The characters are really fun to work with. Most of them began with a seed of someone that I know in reality, but as the story has developed, each character has taken their own life in their hands and become someone new. My main female protagonist has been renamed three times already.
• GRAD SCHOOL – I’ve decided to only apply to one graduate school for the fall, for a lot of reasons. If I don’t get accepted, I’ll work for a year or two and apply to more grad schools at that point. So, I’m currently working on my application for University of North Carolina–Greensboro’s Theatre for Youth MFA program. On the one hand, it’s really exciting to start planning towards the future…but on the other hand, it breaks my heart to think about leaving my roommates and Hollins friends. (One of my junior roommates has begun referring to “graduation” as the G-word and has forbid me from talking about it, lol.) If I do relocate to North Carolina, I’ll absolutely be running back to Hollins for monthly visits…at minimum.
• WORK – January is a great time to catch up on work-study hours, because I can do office work between 9:00 and 5:00 and be rather flexible with my writing schedule. I also have a weekly babysitting gig where I take care of a beautiful little two-year-old girl. Seeing her is definitely a highlight of my week.
• FRIENDS – J-term can be quiet and slow-paced sometimes….IF you don’t have friends like mine! Between movie nights, spontaneous Kroger runs, sugar-high games of Truth/Dare, and 4:00 a.m. conversations about personalities, trust and relationships, we’ve managed to keep this month pretty exciting so far. (This is what I’m going to miss so much after I graduate.) I’m incredibly blessed with the friends I’ve found here at Hollins.

And now, it’s 12:30 a.m. and I should really put aside this computer and get some sleep. I hope everyone is having a wonderful start to 2010 and that you’ll check back to my blog from time-to-time. In my next entry, I plan to recap some of the fun times from fall semester!

Yours truly, Em