Education Blog

Tonight I went to a special midnight showing of the last play of the semester at WCU, That’s What We Love About You, Hardy Boys!

Directed by Anthony Giordano (who played “Nathan Detroit” in Guys and Dolls and the title character in The Nerd), the play is a musical comedy spoof of the classic Hardy Boys series by Franklin W. Dixon. According to the program, Charles Ellis worked as an assistant director. Ellis, Sean Nelson and Ben Chafetz helped Giordano write the script. My apologies to that group if I have not given enough credit to a certain individual.

I enjoyed reading the books as a youngster, and so I appreciated the humor and fun in the play tonight. Not only is Giordano an excellent actor, the play demonstrates his skill in directing great comedy. He and the other writers have an ear for what their generation likes to see and hear. The audience sang along with almost all of the music performed tonight, from the theme songs to Scooby Doo, Inspector Gadget, and even music from the bar scene in Star Wars. Writing and directing a full length play is a monumental task. That Giordano and his team, “The Part Time Models,” saw it to fruition with such success is a great accomplishment. I do not remember another theater student reaching such a goal while I was an undergraduate here.

Hopefully, Anthony’s talent and hard work here at Western will springboard him into the show business career he wants. I encourage you to check out his website at http://www.anthonybgiordano.com/.

Again, the cast was a joy for me to watch. Many were the same actors from Guys and Dolls, and their performances made me think they had just as much fun with this production.

Nathaniel Mason and Ben Chafetz played “Frank Hardy” and “Joe Hardy.” Giordano writes Mason’s “Frank” as the competent, handsome lead while Chafetz plays the slower, less socially skilled “Joe” who follows in Frank’s footsteps. The two worked well together and got a lot of laughs. Frank Hardy’s nightmare scene was surprisingly surreal and disturbing to me– perhaps in part because the hour neared 1 a.m. as it was performed.

Christy Waymouth and Bethany Rowe both lit up the stage in Guys and Dolls, and they did so again tonight with their singing and dancing. When I wrote about Guys and Dolls, I had never recognized Bethany on campus. But then I saw her for the first time a week ago on the University Center Lawn as the actors staged a promotion for the play. She has a lovely smile, and the unique confused look she kept giving to the audience tonight cracked me up.

Sarah Lipham, who directed Stop Kiss last semester, portrayed “Mrs. Hardy.” Sarah is an attractive blonde, and this role let her show some of her great talent as she bounced back and forth from the typical conservative “apple pie” mom of the 1950s to a sultry and ravenous woman who craves the affections of her husband.

Dayna Damron plays “Hannah.” She also acted as “Mimi” in Guys and Dolls and had a large role in Lucky Stiff. Dayna is one of the most beautiful women on this campus. Her looks are somewhere between “Snow White” and a porcelain doll come to life. She is also a mesmerizing dancer. Dayna has the “Marilyn Monroe effect,” at least on me. She grabs my complete attention when she comes on stage. I hope she will go far with her acting.

“Oscar,” a sort of nerdy character, is played by Sean Nelson. I do not know Sean personally, but he has always been friendly when I say “hi” to him on campus. He seems to be a really nice guy, and he impressed me with his athleticism tonight, staging a couple of great falls. His role grows in importance as the play progresses, and he has a great flourish near the end. I also enjoyed watching his portrayal of a drunkard in Guys and Dolls.

Abby Gonzalez and Mark Hudson, two of my favorite actors from past productions, did not disappoint tonight. Abby plays a bubbly, cheerful “Iola Morton,” Hudson a comically abused husband. Hudson spent most of his time on stage in roller skates, reminding me of his great performance with a wheel chair in Lucky Stiff.

A new actress, Kaley McCormack, played the role of “Lucy Drew” quite well. She was cute with her thick glasses and the way she ran around stage. Perhaps she has been in other productions, but this is the first time I really noticed her. Both my date and I laughed a lot with her performance and the other characters’ reaction to her.

The two actors who carried the show tonight were Greg Kennedy as “Mr. Hardy” and Peter Savage as “Mr. Johnson.” They play opposing political candidates. Savage, a professor at WCU, does a John or Ted Kennedy impersonation while using the thumb pointing mannerism made popular by Bill Clinton. He is the “villain” of the play, and it was hilarious to watch him spontaneously react to the chorus of boos he received from the audience. “I did not have sexual relations with that bear” was my favorite line of the night.

As for Greg Kennedy, I start laughing almost as soon as he starts talking. This play was great for his over the top style of comedy. His facial expressions and booming voice worked so well for his role. You have to see him and watch him. He was wonderful as well in Lucky Stiff and Guys and Dolls.

The other actors were great, from the gay store owner played by Tim Stoeckel to the Bear, I believe played by Charles Ellis.

Let me end with Tivis Womack, who portrays the “Big Nose Girl with Bangs and Short Socks.” I loved her in Guys and Dolls. Almost immediately after that production ended, she dyed her hair a sort of orange red. After watching her performance tonight, now I know why. It made me laugh to see her carry an airplane across the stage again, just as she did in Guys and Dolls. Like I said before, she is a sweet girl with one of the best personalities I have ever come across. I was glad to see her do well in this production, possibly the last one I will see at Western.

I plan to go see the play again, and I encourage you to take it in. It will show Friday and Saturday night at 7:30 pm, with a 3:00 show time for Sunday. One final word of advice, though. This is not a show for children or young audiences. The humor is racy and full of adult innuendo– college students pushing the limits. I enjoyed the play and appreciate the hard work of everyone involved. Thank you again for a great evening.

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And so it has arrived.

Last night around 12:30 am, I finished typing my last assignment for this semester. I proofread the paper, and then emailed it to my professor. My academic work at Western Carolina University is done.

I am profoundly sad right now. I did not want this day to come. Western Carolina University is one of the best places on earth, and this year has been the best year of my life. It went by way too fast. Yesterday was August 17, 2007, and I was just arriving on campus.

After I finished my assignment last night, I walked around the library like I usually do when I need a break or just when I want to see who else is here. I saw many people I know and spoke to almost all of them. The emotion almost overwhelmed me, as funny as that may sound. But I realized it was an isolated moment of time in my life, one of the happiest, and it was soon to be gone.

Have you ever seen the movie, Groundhog Day? It stars Bill Murray as a TV weatherman who gets trapped living the same day over and over again. He can’t escape the pattern, even when he commits suicide multiple times. He wakes up at the same time in the same place on the same day. In some ways the movie depicts this as a terrible trap.

But I think Bill Murray’s character was a very lucky man. If I had to pick one day out of my life to repeat, it would be yesterday, May 6, 2008, in Cullowhee, NC. Let’s do that day over and over for eternity. The weather is warm, sunny and spectacular, and many flowers are still in bloom. There are thousands of books to read in the library. Many of the students and professors know me, so I wouldn’t be a complete stranger walking up to them for a conversation…. Man, the fun I would have. It would be heaven.

Right now, I am still a young man. I feel like I am 23, only smarter now than when I really was that age. I can still run and jump and move like I was 23. Most people believe me if I tell them I am 23. Both my parents are still alive, in reasonably good health, and their minds are sharp. I would spend a lot May 6ths driving the six hours to Lumberton to visit them. I would also spend days visiting my brother and his wife in Wilkesboro. They have a son who has just learned to walk and is actually running around the house now.

Atlanta is close enough to spend some great nights on May 6, 2008. Maybe I could even hop a flight that day for Las Vegas. If the rules of the movie held true, I would have until I go to sleep before time resets. But most days I would spend right here in Cullowhee, studying, playing sports, socializing with different people. You can keep the streets of gold, the harps and singing and the wings. My heaven would be right here.

The point of this fantasy is to show that I fully understand how good life is for me right now, and I also fully understand how temporary it all is. My parents are not getting any younger, nor am I. And now I have to leave the cocoon of WCU and head back out into the real world.

The real world is harder, believe me.

A Bachelor’s degree from Western opened the way for me for some great jobs in years past. I came back to this place to sort of hit the reset button on my life, and once again the University has served its purpose. Thanks to the work I did here as a graduate student and the recommendations of professors, I will head to law school in the fall to prepare for hopefully a new and enjoyable career.

I want to thank the school and everyone here for this past year. The life experiences are something that has added another dimension to my character.

This is my last blog as a student at WCU. That is hard for me to say… that I am ending my days as a student at WCU. The window of my youth is beginning to close… I know something now of why NFL football players often break down when they announce their retirement. It’s tough to leave a setting you enjoy so much.

I’ll cease my rambling. Words can not express the emotions I feel right now, anyway. I plan to continue blogging from law school. I look forward to that new chapter in my life. I will meet more people and have more great experiences. But for as long as I can remember anything, I will remember this year at Western Carolina University. I love this place, and I wish my best to all of you.

Nathan Marshburn

Last night around 12:30 am, I sat in the computer lab of Hunter Library typing a paper. Students occupied almost all of the computers, as the semester is coming to a close and the library is now open 24 hours.

Suddenly my computer screen and all the lights in the room went dark.

“Whoa!” I said loudly.

There was a pause of about three or four seconds as we all sat in pitch black before I heard a guy say, “Aw man, that is not cool! That is so not cool!”

I also heard people mutter a few expletives. After about 20 seconds, emergency generators kicked in and the fire alarm went off. The generators provided only minimal lighting.

We all stood up and began packing our things to leave the library. A friend of mine from the Netherlands who sat beside me asked a question. I misunderstood his English.

“You want to borrow $360!” I exclaimed.

“No,” he said. “$3.60″

“Oh. Sure.” But I correctly guessed that it was to buy a pack of cigarettes from Bob’s Minimart, and I reminded him that Bob’s closed at 11 pm, and that the power was probably off there as well.

He and I joined the mass exodus from the library. Power was indeed out all over campus.

I had never seen WCU like this. It was difficult to make out the sidewalks. The stoplights were out, and various generators over campus made loud noises as they dimly lit stairwells and halls in some of the buildings. I walked with my friend back to his dormitory at Albright-Benton, then headed up the hill to my room at Madison.

I encountered no one as I climbed the steps and graded sidewalks. The lack of light and humans made for lonely, eerie, and exhilarating emotions all at the same time. It was quiet except for a wind blowing through the trees and the sound of my footsteps. The stars were out along with a few clouds.

When I got to the parking lot of Madison, I stopped. The Big Dipper was right over the roof of my dorm, and it pointed to the North Star. I realized that this would probably be the only time in my life that I could see the stars from campus and also the buildings and objects I know so well covered in almost complete darkness, so I stayed outside for a few minutes to enjoy it. A meteor shot across the constellation over Madison.

The only thing that would make this better, I thought, would be a girl to enjoy it with me. But I shrugged. Sometimes girls make things worse.

Then I heard a police siren in the distance, and I was reminded that I probably looked like a suspicious character, just standing in the middle of a dark parking lot in my black leather coat.

So I headed inside, took a shower in the dark and went to bed. When I awoke this morning, the power was back on.

Until Next Time,

Nathan Marshburn

This is a duplicate of a blog I wrote for WCU’s Pre-Law Club.

Hello all,

My name is Nathan Marshburn. I am a graduate student at Western Carolina University, and I also received a B.A. in History from WCU.
Dr. Todd Collins, faculty advisor to the Pre-Law Club at Western, has been an enormous help to me as I prepare for law school. He also provided some questions for me to think about for this blog, the answers to which I hope will prove useful to my fellow students considering law school. The questions are as follows:

1)What do I know now about the process of getting into law school that I would have liked to have known when getting started?

Well, if I had done some research I would have discovered that having a Master’s degree does not mean much when applying to law school. The two most important factors are your LSAT score and your undergraduate GPA. After I learned this information at a LSAC forum in Atlanta, I went ahead and applied to several schools and received multiple acceptance letters. I plan to leave the M.A. program at WCU and go ahead and enroll in law school for the fall 2008.

I certainly do not feel like I wasted a year here, though. When I came back, I was undecided between law school and pursuing a Ph.D. in history. My experiences both inside and outside the classroom in Cullowhee this year have made me a more prepared person for the practice of law. I established some great relationships with professors who wrote vital letters of recommendation to law schools. And I was happy this year, a year that went by faster than any in my life.

Also, I probably would have taken the LSAT a little earlier than I did. I took it twice, in December 2007 and February 2008. I scored higher on the February test, but a couple of schools that rejected me closed the application process before the February test and only used my December score for evaluation. If I had taken the September 2007 and December 2007 tests with the same subsequent results, I might have been admitted to these two schools.

2) What should I have done earlier in my college career that would have helped me get into law school?

I can not stress enough the importance of good grades. Like I said, undergraduate GPA and the LSAT score are the two heavy hitters, and a good performance in both of these areas will get you accepted more places than a great personal statement or letters of recommendation. When I was 19, I goofed off for a couple of semesters. This put a dent in my GPA that as an immature sophomore I did not realize would be so influential. I am happy and fortunate to receive many acceptance letters, but who knows what results might have occurred (say, with merit scholarships) if I had given my all to academics for all four years of college. It is okay and even important to have a good time in college and learn the art of socializing, but never let it interfere with your academic work.

3) Was there one or a few pieces of advice that someone (lawyer, professor, family, etc.) gave me that really helped?

Dr. Collins has given me some great advice on where I should go now that I’ve been admitted to schools and have some choices. As far as the application process, though, one of my best friends, Heather Loveless (who went to WCU with me as an undergraduate) proofread my five page personal statement for a law school and made some suggestions for changes that I now view as very important in where I got accepted. While no two personal statements I wrote for law schools were the same, I used elements of this five page statement that Heather edited for all of them. After you write a personal statement, get someone you trust, has good common sense, and can read and write good English to proofread it. They will catch things you never would have realized needed to be changed.

4) What was most surprising about the process?

Honestly, not much has surprised me about the process. I did a lot of research in applying to schools, and had a fair idea of where I might be accepted or rejected based on my LSAT and GPA. An unfortunate surprise is the amount of debt law school students graduate with. I believe $90,000 is the average, and it is not uncommon for students to finish with well over six figure debt. Right now, $90,000 in debt means a monthly payment of about $1100 for the next 10 years. Going to law school can be like mortgaging a house, and this has weighed heavily on me in my decision about where to attend school. It is an enormous risk to accrue debt like that for three years with the hope you will get a high paying job when you graduate. A lot of things have to go right- a lot of things I do not necessarily have any control over.

I’d better pick an area of law that I like, because I can’t quit once I’ve signed master promissory notes for that much money! But WCU has given me a great opportunity not available to many people. As Dr. Collins has reminded me, though the process can be stressful, I am very fortunate to have options like this.

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In 2004, I spent a month in Miami. During that time I drove all over the city and interviewed many people as part of my job. One of the things that remains in my mind from that experience was a certain sign on billboards and the sides of buses all over the city. It was an advertisement for a television show on ABC called Karen Sisco. The show was about a fictional, beautiful, female US Marshal in Miami. Carla Gugino played the lead.

Gugino has one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen. Her image, ten times larger than life on the billboard, burned into my brain– permanently, I guess, as I can recall it quite easily and distinctly. The show had a short run and was cancelled. But whenever I saw her face on television again, I remembered it. She also starred in a CBS show a year later called Threshold, about an alien spaceship that crashes into the Atlantic Ocean. That show also had a short run before getting the axe.

The last thing I remember seeing Gugino in was a small guest role in HBO’s series Entourage. She was as beautiful as ever, and I’m really surprised that she never broke through to become a huge star like Sharon Stone. I mean, I would pay money to watch her in a movie.

So you might understand my surprise when today in the library I rounded a corner and there stood a woman looking very much like Carla Gugino.

It stopped me in my tracks. She was standing near the circulation desk, talking to another woman. Both were dressed in all black business suits, but the one who did not look like Gugino wore a WCU name tag that said “Patti, VIP Services.”

I had to stop and stare for a moment. This woman looked so much like her. She was a little shorter than I imagined Gugino being, and I could see the outline of her cheek bones more so than the real Gugino, but I have heard that television makes you look bigger and heavier than you really are.

Before they could notice me staring at them, spontaneity inspired me to walk up to the two women.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Carla Gugino?” I asked.

The woman turned and smiled, pleased. But it was Patti of VIP Services who answered. “That’s because she is Carla Gugino.”

I’m really not sure what I said next. Maybe it was “Wow!” or “Holy Smoke!” I do remember asking, “So what are you doing here at Western Carolina University?”

“I’m interested in a position in the Theater Department,” she said, “and I’ve come to see what living in a little town near Asheville might be like.”

“Oh really,” I said. “You’re going to be a professor here?”

Patti broke in. “The school wants to bring her in as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Acting.”

“Okay, Okay,” I said, nodding rapidly and beginning to stammer a bit. It was sinking in that I was standing in front of Carla Gugino, and she was looking straight at me. Her eyes were huge, an impossible shade of brown not found elsewhere in nature. They reflected light in a way I’d never noticed eyes to do before.

I lost my bearings.

“The school would be great… the school, Double-you-see-you would do good to have you… Miss Gugino.”

Patti sensed one of her duties and tried to pull Carla Gugino away from me. “We’ve got to get to the Ramsey Center and to lunch, ” Patti said to her– not to me.

“It was nice meeting you,” Carla Gugino said in a quick, cheerful tone. I’m sure she’d done this a thousand times with dumbstruck guys like me.

“Yeah,” I gurgled out.

They started to walk away toward the entrance of the library.

Images and thoughts shot through my mind: “Carpe Diem.” “You only live once.” “Don’t be a porch puppy.” “What’s the worst that could happen?” “It’s Carla Gugino.” “The woman from the billboard.” “The woman from Miami.” “MOVE!”

I almost ran to them, consciously and deliberately taking two giant breaths in the hopes my words would come out plainly.

“Miss Gugino?”

Both women stopped and looked at me.

“I’m going to law school next year. Even if you become a professor here, this is probably the only time in my life I will see you. I think you are beautiful. I saw you on a billboard in Miami. Would you like to have dinner with me?”

It was Patti’s reaction that I noticed first. Her jaw didn’t exactly drop, but she frowned in disbelief and something akin to horror. It was not the first time I’d seen such a look after asking a girl out, so I stood there bravely and waited for Carla Gugino’s reaction.

She smiled and did not seem to be surprised. “What is your name?” she asked me.

“Nathan Marshburn.”

“How old are you?”

I told her.

“You know some good places to eat here?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” I said. “There’s.. there’s 553 in Sylva. That’s nice. They have good wine.”

“Well, I think I’m free tomorrow tonight. There are no plans or activities on the agenda for me, are there Patti?”

Patti, bewildered, said “No. Not if you’d like to have dinner with… Nathan.”

“Okay, then, Nathan. It looks like we have a date.”

Patti reluctantly gave me Carla Gugino’s phone number, which I wrote down with a trembling hand, along with the time to pick her up. My mind was such Swiss cheese at this point that the conversation and details became a little blurry.

I remember Carla Gugino smiling at me and then walking way. Her walk was an actress’s walk across a stage. Absolutely stunning. Absolutely beautiful.

So tomorrow night, I have a dinner date with Carla Gugino at 553 Restaurant in Sylva. I have no idea how to act, but I couldn’t resist telling the world about it in a blog. Maybe I’m not blowing it. We’ll see what happens.

Oh, and by the way, though the date on the blog says March 31, it is actually now past midnight on April 1. This is my April Fool’s Day blog.

Until Next Time,

Nathan Marshburn