L:  Why did I decide to come to Hollins?  It was interesting when you were talking about graduating early because I graduated a year early from high school.  I really didn’t like high school.  As I said once I had these big things happen in my life I sort of felt different and I grew up…too quickly probably.  But I really wanted to leave high school.  And so I approached the principal and the board of education and proposed that I take two years of classes in one year.  And they were very luke-warm about it, really didn’t want that to happen.  But, made a bunch of conditions: that I had to maintain a certain GPA, I had to not fail any classes.  I had to have a perfect attendance record and all these things.  And that my mother had to basically testify to the board of education that I was mature enough to graduate early and to and that I had the intention to go to college.  So we did all those things and they let me graduate a year early.  So I graduated when I was 16 from high school and went to Hollins because my mother’s end of the agreement with me was that she would support me in leaving high school early if I would go to a women’s college close to home for the first two years.  So I looked at all of those women’s colleges in Virginia and also really liked Creative Writing and English.  and um, and liked the physical place of Hollins and what I saw about the Creative Writing Department. And I think I did early admission there and so I got in soon and so that’s why I picked it. 

 Anyway, West Virginia was also a culturally bizarre place. And um, I was really ready to be done with it.  I played sports and stuff in high school which was good, but I don’t know, it was very cliquey, not very challenging academically where I was and I was, I was bored. 

 And there was a big cultural divide between the very wealthy people and the very poor people, which I think is still true.  In West Virginia and across the country, but and my family wasn’t either.  I mean we were fine.  We were upper middle class probably or middle class.  My father was a dentist and my mother was a dental hygienist.  I didn’t like that cultural divide either, and had, started to have sensibilities about fairness and equity.  And it was a very racist place to grow up. (laughs).  Um, and I just, as I said, partly because of my father and brother’s mental illness I didn’t feel quite the same as the people there and was looking for some more interesting people and interesting challenges. 

  Growing up in West Virginia and going to school in rural Virginia, going to London (while at Hollins) opened my eyes to people in the world who thought like I did, and leftist newspapers, and radical political theatres.  And it was wonderful, and a big city.

   It was fabulous.  And you know I was 19 and all of a sudden felt like there’s a whole world of people out here who think just like I do. (laughs)  And it was a relief.  I was interested in theatre.  I got interested in theater there and theater as a mechanism for social change.  And so I got excited about doing that and when I came back to Hollins, I did, there wasn’t a minor, I don’t know if they have minors now, but that wasn’t available to me, so I did a concentration, just a minor concentration.  I added that on to the English degree, and directed a play for my senior project. 

I continue to love theatre, but I’ve decided since that it isn’t a very accessible medium for social change work.  I love the artistry in it, but the masses can’t afford to see it for the most part.

  I took the (acting) classes because I had to, to get the minor, or the concentration, but I didn’t like the acting part.  But the thing I loved about it, was, it seems to me and I tell people all the time now that it’s affected my work life, because in theater, every, every piece is so critical.  You know the sound manager’s job is as important as the lead actor.  And the props people, if anybody drops the ball the whole thing falls apart.  And so it’s become very much a parallel for me about work and the world.  And, and how we need to work together, honoring everybody’s contribution.  So, I tell people that was my most relevant training for my job now, which is a lot of cross-cultural facilitation and honoring different people’s traditions and way of being and way of communicating, and the theater, my study of theatre I think has helped me more than anything else (laughs).

 So the London abroad program was tremendously influential because as I said, just the exposure to liberal thinking in the world was a relief to me. I started a Hollins Peace Coalition.  When I was in college the issue was arms control and disarmament because Ronald Reagan was the president, and we were in the middle of an arms race.  And um, in fact maybe that was Henry Nash.  I took a class on arms control and disarmament and we read The Fate of the Earth and some other books about the arms race, and I was very motivated to try and do something about it.  So, I started this Hollins Peace Coalition, which didn’t really go anywhere there weren’t—the other thing you have to know about the time I was in school, was not a time in our history where activism was really at the fore, I think.  It was a conservative time, Ronald Reagan was president, and many people supported US dominance and the arms race, and especially among the affluent people at Hollins…

 And so my buddies sort of um, you know, tolerated my ranting, but weren’t very interested in getting involved (laughs).  And I think thought, “Oh Lori just aspires to be a Hippie or alternative, or something."  I remember once, I and I think I probably talked about this in the talk, I decided um, that we would fold a thousand cranes, do you know that story?  About the little girl in Japan?  And so I started the Peace Coalition and decided we would fold a thousand cranes and hang them all over campus on Hiroshima day.  And I think I folded 999 of them.  But I remember running around the dorms getting people who were watching soap operas and to try to fold cranes while they were watching TV. (laughs)  I got a little bit of help that way, but...

 So there were a few of us who met, you know, at regular intervals, and tried to think about, did letter writing campaigns, and tried to motivate people to get involved, and did the crane thing.  And wrote poetry about peace and there was a local Roanoke poetry group that we started to get involved with as the Peace Coalition and writing about peace, so that was the thing I was most involved in and as I said it didn’t, I’m sure it fizzled after I left, and, it didn’t, we had a hard time rallying people.

 The women’s university question, I think, again I didn’t really realize this until recently, but I think it did have the impact on me of, um. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t do something.  You know, I think there’s something about being in an educational environment where you’re not with more competitive men that you just don’t ever question whether this avenue or this path is available to you.  I just always felt that I could do whatever I wanted to do. Like the idea to direct the play, that hadn’t ever been done.  It was an all-student production, all student-run production and I think at a big university that would have been a lot harder to pull off.  And so how that translates into life, is that it affirms initiative.  And I know about myself in the workplace that I feel very much like I can decide what I want to do and make it happen.