I want to take just a little while to write about my summer before I leave tomorrow at 4am. So, although this should be a lot longer, I don’t have that much time so a few minutes will have to do.
This summer has been such an incredible and eye opening experience. Here is a list of my summer jobs. Office Cleaner, Waiter, Farm Hand, Pretend Astronaut, Intern, Extra, Trade Show Worker, Capri Sun Pusher, Stand-up Comedian, and maybe others that I can’t remember.
I want to thank Basil Kelley for giving me the farm hand job this summer even though I may not have been the most experienced person for the job. His flexibility let me do a lot of great new things. Working for him I mucked stalls, and weeded and watered a lot.
Izzy’s sucks because they stopped giving me hours a month ago. Enough said.
My internship at Artist’s Reparatory Theatre in Portland was an incredible experience. I worked with them for 2 weeks on their children’s theatre Camp called “Spotlight” 10 children worked with 10 playwrights and 10 actors to create a 2 person show that was performed by the child and their assigned actor. Each play was tailored to the child acting in it. It was incredible to see so much interesting material come to life with the raw creativity of the children filtered through the amazing talent of the playwrights and actors. I met incredible actors and found out that it is possible to make a living in Portland being a theatre artist.
I was able to be in two commercials this summer, which blows my mind. The first one I was in was very hush hush so I don’t know much about it other thanthe fact that it is for the video game Rock Band in some way. The lovely Jenny Tate and I both auditioned and though I didn’t get in but Jenny did in the initial decisions, I was called up to come in when the shoot time had changed.
My second extra experience was as a featured extra in a commercial for Portland Community College to be shown in the Portland area. I got to work with two great individuals who seem to know a lot about the acting scene in the Portland area. Talking to them was incredible. Both of these commercials should be showing soon. The Rock Band commercial is national and I will be in a crowd listening to the band Bang Camero, and the PCC commercial is local to Portland but should show a shot of me working on homework with a voice over talking about being the first one in your family to go to college.
To start off my summer I did some work in Promotional Events which I didn’t even know existed until this summer. The world of Promotional Events is made up of a bunch of companies that staff certain events and festivals throughout the year as well as Guerilla marketing campaigns. The first one I did was for the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum and a team of people including me dressed up in Astronaut suits and walked around Portland handing out freeze dried ice cream and stickers. It turns out that some people do promotional events for a living, while others just do it as a job on the side. I had a lot of fun and so I did another one.
I worked for Capri Sun down at the Rose Festival in Portland where they had a large area full of activities for their demographic which is the 8 to 12 year olds. There was a half pipe there where some very talented action sports athletes performed. My job during most of the promotion was to ride a Capri Sun long board around Portland and hand out free Capri Sun. I wasn’t very good on the skateboard to begin with but after the week was over I got pretty awesome on it. One of the tour managers who was traveling with the tour which was criscrossing the US turned out to be a dancer and actor. Once he was finished touring with Capri Sun, he was going to move to New York to try and make it on Broadway. He said something really interesting to me, that promotional jobs were the new waiting tables for actors. I think that is a fair assessment because of the sporadic nature of both professions. I learned a lot and will defiantly try to do more in the future.
One last thing I wanted to talk about were the incredible trips I had with friends this summer. Artshare with Jacki was fun and invigorating. I went on a fated adventure hiking with David Wolf and although we had to turn back halfway I would do it again. The rafting trips with David Cohn and Mike Heppner were awesome and crazy. Mike is fighting a forest fire right now so keep him in your hearts while he is out there. Meghan and I had an incredible hiking trip and although it was extremely planned out, we had an incredible and exciting time, especially with large shadows walking past your tent. Also I want to thank those people I had an incredible time with at the beach, and on 4th of July in Tacoma. So basically, this summer has been great and I couldn’t have wished for a better one.
Feel free to ask me more questions about it if you like, but right now I have a 6am flight I have to get to in the morning so I will update this some time, but it might have to wait until after I get through London, Marseilles, Paris, Fribourg, and Geneva. But I will defiantly update in Dublin. I wish you all happy travels back to school or where ever you are going as I embark on my adventure. Thank you everybody. Good night.
