I’m 23 and have had the great privilege of working in non-profit arts administration at The Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park, San Diego. Though love it dearly I did, and to me, Balboa Park is heaven on earth, I was always reading up on the AFS website, wishing I could be there for the screenings and festivals, to see films and learn about things I’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere, and to see what friends I would make in an environment that was as crazy about film as I was. I had to get to Texas, so here I am! 

I suspect all of us cinephiles have similar childhood stories, ones that involve running around the house declaring things like, “After all, tomorrow… is another day!” (Cue end title music), prancing around the living room and keeping step with the Sharks and the Jets, or dressing up like Princess Leia when it wasn’t Halloween (there is photographic evidence). 

I was bewitched by the moving picture, intoxicated by the stories and the sound and the movement. It was an art form that combined all of my favorite things – people, action, words exclaimed, whispered, mumbled, music, history, art, poetry, nature, places you’ve never heard of, people you’ll never meet, situations you may never experience, inextricably mixed with those incorrigibly mysterious human emotions. What fun! What inexhaustible delight! 

It’s the closest thing you can do to walk a mile in another person’s shoes…next to actually walking a mile in another person’s shoes. Movies foster compassion. I think Robert Browning had it down good when he wrote, “Art was given for that; [for] us to help each other so, lending our minds out.” 

So I’m really excited to be here! I come with my dorky sense of humor, my complete, unabashed love for Virginia Woolf, English literature, and the exquisite musical compositions of the modest Mr. Thomas Newman, my dream of adapting a short story describing the experience of being pregnant in the second person, and a daunting but irresistible desire to somehow facilitate the adaptation of Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. As a note on character, my love for RUSHMORE is so much that, if I were an army general at war, I would send it across a battlefield to negotiate peace. Whose heart wouldn’t be undone by its humor? 

Long live non-profit arts administration!