This week I'm highlighting a former student, Jess Honovich. Jess studied Educational Theatre at NYU, got her bachelors degree, then entered the work force for two years. I had Jess in a number of classes at NYU, and then last year she acted in my site-specific project at Red Bank Battlefield. Her Irish indentured servant was a highlight for audiences, and she was a pleasure to work with on that project.

My blog was quieter than usual this week because I was in Dublin, Ireland, completing the work on the premiere of Jenny Macdonald's one-woman show Enthroned at the First Fortnight Festival.

I've known about Aretha Franklin for a long time. How could I not? How could anyone not know about Aretha Franklin???

When I was a kid, our local library had a large number of Peanuts books, collections of comic strips that appeared in syndication and were then collected and anthologized in these books. I loved reading those books because I learned more about the characters, their pasts, and why they behaved in the comic strip I would see each week in the Sunday newspaper.

It's that moment in the semester when I'm faced with all the data from the work of my students at NYU, and it's time to somehow assign each of them a grade. The process of wading through their essays, my own notes on student presentations and performances, and peer assessments of other students' work can feel incredibly daunting, especially when faced with the holiday season and the deadlines that swirl around because of that.