Featured Q-STAGE Artist: Simone Bernadette Williams & Holo Lue Choy

 

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Q-STAGE Core Artists Simone Bernadette Williams & Holo Lue Choy have created a dynamic and powerful show together, titled e. Click here for more info and tickets! (Photo Credit: Blythe M. Davis)

Can you tell us about where the idea(s) for your Q-STAGE show came from?

We really wanted to create a narrative about our lives. We are both mixed race, queer, trans and struggle with eating disorders, and we don’t get to hear stories revolving around all of those identities and their intersections often enough. We wanted to make something that was so authentically us.

Why do you feel it is important to share this story/the story(ies) of your performance with the community?

e is really important for audiences to see because it is unlike anything else. We’ve never made a piece like this, we’ve never seen a piece like this. At this point, the most targeted body in America is that of the black trans woman, and so for two black, trans femme people to come up and communicate about our lives, while we are alive, is revolutionary.


What aspects of your queer identity do you hope to express through your Q-STAGE piece?

The main focus we’re working with is the intersectionality of our trans identities and our racial identities, and the way those co-actively affect the way we navigate the world. We want other queer and trans folx of color to see themselves, for once.

Talk about your background as an artist. What sort of artistic experience are you bringing to this production? Have you been involved with 20% Theatre in the past and, if so, in what ways?

Simone: I work primarily as a spoken word artist, and dabble in acting, directing, playwriting, visual art, curation, singing, songwriting, fashion design and knitting. This is my first time working with 20% as an artist, but I have attended many shows.

Holo: My training started in a conservatory dance and theatre context. Outside of this training, I’ve been heavily interested in incorporating sonic design (both live and recorded) and visual art in the form of video, lighting design, and use of architecture/space to create interdisciplinary performance works. This is my first time working with 20%, after having seen The Naked I, and last years Q-STAGE.


What social issues are important to you and how do they inform the art you create?

The more appropriate question would be if there were issues unimportant to us. Every piece we create, whether together or individually, is in response to the oppressive systems of hetero-normative, cis-normative, white supremacist, neo-liberal, capitalist, patriarchy. In e, we address all of these, and talk about how they affect us as artists.


What other artists or performances have inspired you over the years?

Simone: I am a huge fan of the work that youth in our community make. Any poet who goes through TruArtSpeaks inspires me, especially executive director Tish Jones. Pillsbury House, Penumbra and Million Artist Movement are three organizations that continue to center the voices of people of color, which is important to me when looking at work.

Holo: Huge influences on my early artistic training were Kenna Camara-Cottman, Angharad Davies and the two years I spent apprenticing with Ananya Dance Theatre. More recently my work has been based in the performance art idiom, using movement as the basis. A lot of what I’m currently working with is inspired by the Judson Dance Theatre, and my experiences performing for Rosy Simas and Laurie Van Wieren.


Are you working on any other projects or are there others you hope to work on?

Simone: I just wrapped directing a piece written by myself and three other youth called BATTLE FATIGUE through blank slate theatre company, which shines a spotlight on the school-to-prison pipeline’s intersections with blackness and mental illness. Mostly, however, I am gearing up to head to UW Madison as a member of the 11th cohort in the First Wave program next fall!

Holo: Currently e is my main focus as a creator, though performatively I’m preparing for a lot of new works. I’ll be performing in Aniccha Arts’ 3600 Cuts in June, and Fire Drill’s Bill: The Musikill in July, both at the Southern Theatre. Additionally, I’ll be performing in Rosy Simas’ Skin(s) when it tours to Illinois next Winter.

What is your favorite pre or post-rehearsal snack or meal?

Simone: Ice cream. Hands down.

Holo: Fried rice seems to be a daily post-rehearsal staple.

What is your favorite hangout spot and why?

Simone: I really love hanging out at the Midtown Global Market and walking the greenway. I can get some delicious food, celebrate diversity & enjoy a beautiful walking path.

Holo: Any spot in nature is ideal. I most frequently find myself walking through the Lake Harriet Bird Sanctuary, though Cedar Lake forest is also amazing for wandering.


When you’re not deep in Q-STAGE rehearsal and development, how do you spend your time? What are some of your hobbies or passions in life?

Simone: I spend most of my time making or watching art. I love hanging out with my friends, going out dancing, knitting and reading books.

Holo: Most of my time seems to be consumed in making art. When not working on a show, I’m usually walking around nature, seeing work, or listening to music.

 

Featured Q-STAGE Artist: Sami Pfeffer

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As one of our 2017 Q-STAGE Artists, can you tell us about where the idea(s) for your show came from?

My piece is about the ways in which trauma and abuse, a well as others’ reactions to and judgements of those experiences, haunt survivors. The piece is also about theatrical hauntings. Who possesses whom: the audience or the actors? The play features two performers, a paranormal investigation, and lots of flashlights.

I’ve been obsessed with abuse and trauma for as long as I’ve been actively healing from my own. Which is to say I’m interested in empathy. I want to understand how empathy can be withheld because I can’t even withhold empathy from the folks who’ve been abusive to me. But they can certainly withhold it from me.

I’m also interested in the structures in our lives that teach us about empathy. Like theater. I find theater odd. We can sit six feet from an actor and believe that they’re dying in Medieval Europe, but we won’t believe their lived experiences of rape or racism. What conventions make the former reasonable and the latter suspect?

My more recent performances have happened in the context of tourism- I spent a winter working as a ghost tour guide which is a job that requires dexterous empathy because the people who embark on ghost tours can be susceptible to great amounts of cruelty for their beliefs. Personally, I’m undecided on spiritual matters, but I had to quit that job because I felt like those fucking clerics of old who sold relics by the dozen to already impoverished believers.

I intended to write a different play about that experience. This play was supposed to be more surreal, performance art instead of theater. But the spirits want what they want. And who am I to withhold empathy, especially from myself?

Have you been collaborating with any other artists to create this show? Who are they are how are they contributing?

Yes! I’ve collaborated with the actors, Suzi and Beckett Love, and the co-director, Kai Greiner. I had about ⅗’s of the script finished by the first rehearsal, so we spent a few weeks devising the last ⅖’s of the play.

The piece is much stronger because of the collaboration. This is by far the most personal play I’ve ever written and at a certain point, for me, I needed it to become other. I needed the play to no longer be about me but to be about a character so that I could finish the story because otherwise, it’d go on for as long as I’m alive.

Why do you feel it is important to share this story/the story(ies) of your performance with the community?

I hope that this story does three things: 1. Encourages folks who’ve experienced emotional abuse to believe themselves and take those abuses seriously. 2. Encourages folks who’ve perpetrated emotional abuse to believe that their behaviors can be damaging even when we don’t have very strong cultural definitions of what emotional/psychological abuse looks like. 3. Encourages community members in general to recognize that we are all capable of committing abusive acts (which are really similar to oppressive behaviors, just on different scale and with different amounts of power and privilege) and that we are all culpable because abuse is not an individual failure alone but also a communal one.

What aspects of your queer identity do you hope to express through your Q-STAGE piece?

The biggest aspect of my queer identity that I hope to express through my Q STAGE piece is that of self-work. My queerness is less grounded in my desires, my genders, my body even, and more in how I commit myself to being in the world. For me, queerness is about finding ways to radically identify with others and dismantle the systemic barriers that our collective bodies face. As a white, educated, owning-class, size-privileged person I define some of my queerness in how I hold myself accountable to the power I inherently receive. And use, to be honest. I have yet to find a way to have power and not use power so I try to be aware of who I’m aligning myself with and who I’m aligning myself against.

Another aspect of my queer identity that I hope is expressed through my Q STAGE piece is one of survival. Like so many queer folks, I’m gaslighted every day. Our realities are ridiculed, ignored, challenged, denied, and made murky by this world. We are more likely to suffer depression and anxiety and all those medical pathologies made up to narrate our valid responses to an invalidating country.

We struggle not only to have our bodies recognized, but to have our minds declared cognizant enough to engage in the act of recognition, to recognize ourselves as ourselves. We struggle both to feel and for the right to feel. And we struggle to recall and maintain our histories because even within our own stories, some of us use our confluences of privilege and pain to overwhelm and drown out other queer voices.

In short: sometimes we gaslight each other. On a national level, gaslighting is a strategy employed by generally privileged queers in order to gain access to systemic power by performing sanctioned acts of erasure of other queer truths and identities considered more “disruptive” to dominant society. We see this in white-cis-washed films like “Stonewall” and the Gay Marriage movements which helped endear straight Americans to certain queer bodies because of perceived sameness, but did nothing to advocate for the validity of difference.

On an intimate level, gaslighting is a strategy employed by often similarly positioned queers in order to gain psychological power by performing acts of erasure towards their partners’ truths, especially those considered disruptive to the gaslighter’s dominant sense of self. I understand the urge here- having a queer self is already hard. We are continuously experiencing threats to not just our selves but to our right to have selves in the first place, and thus any request to engage in self-examination can be perceived as yet another ontological threat.

Plus, this level of self-examination requires us to also acknowledge the traumas that we collectively and individually carry within our queer bodies, and to engage with those traumas in order to avoid perpetuating them. In other words: we are asked to heal.

Talk about your background as an artist. What sort of artistic experience are you bringing to this production? Have you been involved with 20% Theatre in the past and, if so, in what ways?

As an artist, I’m late-blooming, less a flower than an ivy, creeping up on even me. I spent six years fallow and asleep. I dropped strong roots though and found little veins of truth to stick my tubers in. And now that I’ve got a stalk and stem, I’m pulling those truths up through my body, up into my unfurling leaves.

20% Theatre is one of the first companies I’ve branched into. I directed two pieces for The Naked I: Self-Defined.

What social issues are important to you and how do they inform the art you create?

I feel like I answered this above in the section about queerness which for me is inextricable from fighting against the white supremacist cis-het patriarchy of capitalism.

What other artists or performances have inspired you over the years?

Recently: Faye Driscoll, Shá Cage, Michael Sakamoto, Rennie Harris, Eric F. Avery, Vie Boheme, Pedro Lander

Are you working on any other projects or are there others you hope to work on?

I am working on other projects! In addition to my Q STAGE piece, I’m also creating my second installation for Northern Spark and working on a series of short films about self-empathy. As a person both dysphoric and dissociative, I struggle to spend time in my body, and my films document the revulsion and joy of my self-embrace.

What is your favorite pre or post-rehearsal snack or meal?

My favorite pre AND post-rehearsal snack is grapefruit, steak, and La Croix.

What is your favorite hangout spot and why?

My favorite hangout spot is a secret little beach on the MPLS side of the Mississippi River because 1. I love the river, 2. I love being alone.

When you’re not deep in Q-STAGE rehearsal and development, how do you spend your time? What are some of your hobbies or passions in life?

When not deep in Q STAGE, I spend my time facilitating youth programs and events at Intermedia Arts, and in the few hours I have not doing either of those things, I take my dog on long runs, I walk through the alleys looking for cool trash, and I try to find moments to sit still and just be me.

Leah's Train: Actor Jessica Smith

Travel through three generations of adventure, grief and love. Co-presented by 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities and the Sabes Jewish Community Center, we are pleased to bring you Leah’s Train by Karen Hartman March 7-22, 2015 (all performances at theJCC).  Before and during the run of this show, we will be giving you a chance to learn a little bit more about the artists involved in our production. In this first interview, meet actor Jessica Smith.

Actor: Jessica Smith
Actor: Jessica Smith


Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? How/when/why did you get into theatre?

I was a late bloomer when it came to theatre.  Before I got the theatre bug, I had been doing competitive martial arts for years before taking time away to focus on college.  My first play was A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the part of Helena when I was 18.  After that, it was all about theatre and the arts and creating.  I fell in love with the world that allows people to play the world’s best game of pretend with people who are so passionate, so out there, and are willing to play right along with you.

Is this your first show with 20% Theatre Twin Cities? Tell us briefly about your past experience with the company?

This is my first show performing for 20% Theatre, though I had the privilege to be the company’s fight coordinator for their production of If We Were Birds earlier this year.

Tell us what originally drew you to the Leah’s Train script. What interested you in auditioning for this show?

When I read this script, I fell in love.  It was so different than what I expected.  There’s the sense of mysticism and connection that I loved about it right away as well as these awesome raw characters.  It was actually the opportunity to work for this company again that convinced me to audition for this play and I’m so glad I did!  Once I had read the script, I was that much more excited about the possibility of being involved.

Tell us a little bit about the character you play?

Ruth desperately wants to matter.  She has this incredible ancestor (her grandmother) who has been put on a pedestal by her mother and herself her entire life.  She feels as though she is never going to measure up to her grandmother’s achievements and so she has tried to disconnect from her family while trying to matter in her career field.  She relies on her boyfriend and her patients to have a place in the world, but things are about to happen that will force her to view family in a different perspective.

This experience has probably been quite different than doing fight choreography for If We Were Birds? How has it been different to be on the other side, now acting for 20%?

It’s been interesting-both absolutely wonderful and a little scary.  When I’m fight directing, I’m in charge of what’s going on and I’m the one providing direction.  It’s a switch to be in the position of the one being directed.  At the same time, though, the process has reminded me why I love acting so much.  The letting go, the moment you decide to throw everything into a scene and just let loose.  It’s magical.

What else do you do in the world, outside of theatre and/or working on this production?

For the bills, I bartend, I’ve got a great group of regulars where I work, and hearing their stories and discussing life with them is always interesting, to say the least.  Otherwise, for free time, I love dancing, being in the outdoors when it’s warm never gets old for me, and if there’s a place with live music-I’m there, and if there’s good beer there, bonus points!

What is your favorite type of transportation?

I miss riding around on the moped I used to own.  So much fun!

Leah's Train: Director Chava Curland

Travel through three generations of adventure, grief and love. Co-presented by 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities and the Sabes Jewish Community Center, we are pleased to bring you Leah’s Train by Karen Hartman March 7-22, 2015 (all performances at the JCC).  Before and during the run of this show, we will be giving you a chance to learn a little bit more about the artists involved in our production. In this first interview, meet director Chava Curland.

Director: Chava Curland
Director: Chava Curland

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? How/when/why did you get into theatre?

My dad took me to see shows at a very young age.  We had regular tickets to CTC and when I was 10, he started taking me to see shows at the Guthrie.  I was enchanted with this make-believe world where anyone could be someone. And when a friend of mine convinced me to take acting classes in middle school, I was hooked.  While I was a teen actor at The Children’s Theater Company– though it is weird for me to think of myself as an actor for them as I only did 2 shows, small parts there–I remember thinking during a  particularly arduous technical rehearsal that the decisions the director was making, the questions he was grappling with with the designers were ones that I had ideas for, ones that I had my own answers to.  I thought, I can do this. So, I changed from an fine arts to a theater major going into Ithaca College and said “I’m a director’.  Big headed to say the least—I am highly embarrassed by what I must have been like as a know-it-all freshman in college.

Since then, my road in theater has taken me many different directions—as an actor, a mask maker and puppeteer, a dancer/movement theater artist, playwright, world traveler–but I always come back to directing and to the power of the rehearsal process. Directing is not just telling people where to move like chess pieces in space–it is excavating a story, like an archaeologist, digging deep into the dirt of the lives of the characters–its forging relationships within this micro community of a production–crew, cast, company, audience–we are a little microcosm–and it is also to be a visual artist, the painter who sees the whole canvas of the evening but must decide which strokes need to be made to reach the final image. Thats why I stay in it–to be an explorer, a painter, and part of a community all at the same time.

Have you worked with 20% Theatre Twin Cities in the past? How and in what capacity?

I last worked with 20% as an actor in Changes in Time.  I played Court.

How has this directing experience been different than working for 20% as an actor?

I get to see the full picture.  I can follow the little tendrils of my thoughts on a scene, experiment with different points of view and different arcs to the play–and certainly a lot more responsibility to the play and actors in that sense. Otherwise, I would say working with the company and the people in it isn’t that different as a director. Everyone has been so wonderful and supportive—though that was the same as an actor, too 🙂

Tell us what originally drew you to the Leah’s Train script. Why did you want to direct it?

Its deceptively simple.  You look at the words on the page and think–hmm, this seems pretty straight forward.  But when you look at the motivations behind the words and the disconnect between what people say and do, there is a whole deeper level of tension and intention that is going on.  It’s a play full of rich emotion and specific history, yet takes place in the neutral impersonal space of a train.  I saw a prime opportunity to work on a powerful, reality driven story but within a more abstract onstage world.

I also feel strong personal connection to sense of ancestry and healing of generations past in the play.  My father’s side of the family is Polish Jew and they fled during WWII to Russia, then Siberia, then Uzbekistan, and at the end of the war to Berlin before finally getting passage to NY in 1951. While Leah’s train predates WWI, the haunting echos of the past the follow Ruth on her journey I feel in my own life.

Did you have a specific vision for what the cast would look and feel like during the audition process?

I didn’t have a specific vision for the cast, but rather a sense of how they needed to function together—Hannah and Ruth needed to be powerful players together, Ben needed to have chemistry with Ruth and Hannah, Leah needed sense and Sammy sass. But beyond that, I tried not to have any preconceptions of how they would look or talk.  I wanted to be surprised, discover what could work or not based on what was coming out of the actors mouths.

Do you have any hopes about what the audience will walk away from this production knowing, feeling, thinking, etc.?

I hope they come out of this thinking about their own family and the journey that had to happen for each person to end up where they are right this moment.  Ruth says “family is made, not born”, but I think that’s false.  We can’t runaway where we come from–we can only accept it, make peace with it, and build our own lives from there.

What else do you do in the world, outside of theatre and/or working on this production?

Theater and Non Profit Admin–I work as a Company Associate for Girl Friday Productions and Communications and Outreach Coordinator for the Germanic-American Institute.  I also have fun training my dog, Ruby-Rue the Corgi-Aussie, playing very nerdy board games, salsa dancing, making masks/art creations, practicing yoga/acrobatics—and exercising (which means using the steam room) at the JCC.

What is your favorite thing about the Twin Cities?

The lakes, rivers and the bike trails—especially around late April/May when everyone is waking up from hibernation and spring fever is catching on.  I love seeing all the people, dogs and life bustling around on the Greenway and the Grand Rounds.

What is your favorite type of transportation?

Anything that lets me feel the breeze.

If you have one, tell us a little bit about your most memorable train ride?

While I don’t have a specific train ride in mind, I’d say the times when I commuted between NYC and The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in CT.  I was living in NYC, with a real nice off-Broadway literary internship, but me being the crazy-always-need-to-be-busy person I am, decided that I also wanted to Apprentice under the Droznin Russian Movement teacher at the O’Neill’s National Theater Institute.  I would leave Queens at 2:30am and take a 3-4 hour train ride (including subway and connections) up along the dark coast.  I’d see the bright city fade away to old, abandoned looking towns, then trees shoot past my window until I could see some brief silver glints of the ocean.  I would arrive in New London in the bluish- predawn light, and just as I would pull into the O’Neil grounds, the sky would go pink and a round orange sun would pop up over the horizon.

Then, I would beat up my body for 6 hours of intense acrobatic work, ride back that night and go to work the next day.  It was grueling, but those train rides, which brought a sense of peace, freedom, and possibility, were the thing that often got me through the week in the Big City.

 

Leah's Train: Actor Laura Mason

Travel through three generations of adventure, grief and love. Co-presented by 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities and the Sabes Jewish Community Center, we are pleased to bring you Leah’s Train by Karen Hartman March 7-22, 2015 (all performances at theJCC).  Before and during the run of this show, we will be giving you a chance to learn a little bit more about the artists involved in our production. In this first interview, meet actor Laura Mason.

Actor: Laura Mason
Actor: Laura Mason


Laura, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? How/when/why did you get into theatre?

I did my first community theatre show when I was seven. I don’t remember if I asked my parents if I could do it or if I was too dramatic and they decided that I needed an outlet. I just remember that it felt really natural – I did all kinds of skits and stuff in my church as a kid, so I loved being on a real stage! I did a couple shows in the community in middle school before I switched schools to a high school that had a drama program….and now I’m majoring in it!

Is this your first show with 20% Theatre Twin Cities? If not, what may we have seen you perform in in the past?

I was in If We Were Birds last September. I was in the Chorus of bird-women.

Tell us what originally drew you to the Leah’s Train script. What interested you in auditioning for this show/company?

I found out about the show because Claire asked me to consider auditioning for it. I actually wasn’t able to read the script before the audition, but I liked the premise of the story and I trust Claire! Once I did read the script though, I was very impressed with Hartman’s style and the force of the characters.

Tell us a little bit about the character you play?

I play Leah, who is a twelve-year-old Jewish girl looking for her brother and nephew. She is matriarchal force to be reckoned with in her later years, but even as a girl, she is described as “brave” and “legendary” and a “child Moses.”

How has this experience been different than the one for If We Were Birds?

There are so many things that are different that I will start with one of the only familiarities I see. Both plays contain major themes of family dynamics, specifically of how mothers relate to their children. Birds concluded that mothers have a lot more power of possession over their children than Leah’s Train, which deals more with the power of succession – the expectations of the matriarch. Hartman’s mothers set very high standards for their children and manipulate them emotionally, rather than physically as seen in BirdsNot to spoil the ending of If We Were Birds, but the children in Leah’s Train end up a lot better after the treatment from their mothers.

What else do you do in the world, outside of theatre and/or working on this production?

I am a full time student at the University of Minnesota and work at Juice So Good, which is a cafe that provides healthy options to the corporate skyway crowd. I have a lot on my plate as a double-major (Theatre Arts AND Communications) but I enjoy my classes so much, it’s almost not even fair.

Are you still studying at the University of Minnesota?  Do you have any big plans for after graduation?

I’m a Junior! Woohooo! At this point, everything is still kind of in the ether, but I’m looking at internships in Marketing or Media Production/Broadcasting and continuing to make art in Minneapolis. It would be awesome to eventually continue my education in physical theatre by studying Commedia dell’Arte and at some point I want to be a part of a legit feature length film…whatever that means.

What is your favorite type of transportation?

I like Streetcars / Light Rails / Strassenbahns. They seem really efficient to me, and they usually don’t smell as bad as underground transit, and they’re not as bumpy as buses. It’s a very satisfying form of independence to be able to rely on a streetcar to get around a city.

If you have one, tell us a little bit about your most memorable train ride?

I used to live in Vienna, Austria and the trains over there are a much more legit system than what we’ve got going on over here. The train ride that stands out to me the most was when my family took an overnight train to Venice. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but a member of my family snored the whole night so we were all cranky and had remember to love each other just as much in tiny, metal compartments as we do when we’re not invading each other’s space.

 

Leah's Train: Meet Actor Kevin Fanshaw

Travel through three generations of adventure, grief and love. Co-presented by 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities and the Sabes Jewish Community Center, we are pleased to bring you Leah’s Train by Karen Hartman March 7-22, 2015 (all performances at the JCC).  Before and during the run of this show, we will be giving you a chance to learn a little bit more about the artists involved in our production. In this first interview, meet actor Kevin Fanshaw.

 

Actor: Kevin Fanshaw
Actor: Kevin Fanshaw

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? How/when/why did you get into theatre?

I am 24 years old and was born and raised near Madison, WI.  I got into theatre part way through high school as a result of relentless peer pressure from my band and choir friends.  Particularly those falling into the ‘attractive-female’ category.  It is true that you can become an addict after trying something only once, and I’m hooked.  I could go on about what I’ve come to find beautiful about theatre, but what captured me from the start was the people.  Splendid, wacky, thoughtful, explosive, ridiculous people.

Is this your first show with 20% Theatre Twin Cities?

Yes

Tell us what originally drew you to the Leah’s Train script. What interested you in auditioning for this show/company?

I was initially drawn into the script by the character Ben.  I was coming off a show where half of the 10 characters I played were senior citizens, so accessing someone so immensely similar to myself was a welcome relief. I was not familiar with the history of 20% Theatre until I received a callback and did some research.  I was all the more excited about possibly working with the company after learning how devoted they were to promoting the work of women, and trans* individuals.  Last year I was living in Chicago and working for the Human Rights Campaign and I am always thrilled when two of my passions cross paths.


Tell us a little bit about the character you play?

Ben’s having a tough time. He’s just beginning to get over the loss of his mother, and coming to understand he can’t fully do that while he’s with his current girlfriend. As he emerges from mourning he’s unsure of his place in the world, who he is, and who he wants to become. The time has come, however, to find out.


What else do you do in the world, outside of theatre and/or working on this production?

I wait tables to pay the bills, and I enjoy getting paid for being kind and hospitable.  In my free time I cycle through a slew of hobbies: playing music, painting, creative writing, etc.  I also have a great desire to travel and am already looking forward to the next adventure.

What is your favorite thing about the Twin Cities?

I love all the local food and (especially) beer!

What is your favorite type of transportation?

Generally speaking, biking is the greatest way from A to B.  However, if I ever get another chance to ride on the rooftop of a bus through the Himalayan foothills… that kind of takes the cake.