Emily's Epiphanies

     In 2018, TikTok merged with Musical.ly and became a huge sensation worldwide. It also became a massive hit amongst my friend groups. I was never really interested in it. I never had Musical.ly either, so another app for sharing short videos along to audio didn’t really excite me.      I feel like I am a little detached from the rest of my generation when it comes to social media. I prefer Facebook to other social media platforms since I find it easiest to navigate and all of my family members are on there. I also have trouble getting excited about trying new social media platforms that come out. It took me years to join Snapchat and, once I did, I really only used it to play around with filters. I felt (and still feel) similarly about TikTok. Almost all of my friends downloaded TikTok the moment they heard about it and started spending a lot of time on the app. I was wary – did I really need another form of social media at the time? Would I even use it, or would it just take up sp

     Rehearsals for the ONU Holiday Spectacular began last Tuesday – the day after set strike for Beauty and the Beast! I am so grateful to have been cast in this production as the Angel, a Toy Soldier, a Santa Baby, and a Female Singer/Dancer. It feels absolutely fantastic to be doing what I love again. I really missed singing, dancing, and acting while I was stage managing for Beauty and the Beast. I know I have had my classes during the day where I got to work on different dance and acting skills, but I really missed getting to perform in a production. Every day I feel so happy and lucky to be doing what I’m doing in this show.      Our first two days of rehearsal were focused on learned all of the music for the show. The third day of rehearsal, we worked on music for an hour, then transitioned into dance rehearsal for the rest of the night. For every rehearsal since then, we have been learning and cleaning dances. It is crazy to me that we have only been rehearsing for one week and

     I use YouTube almost daily, but I often forget that it is a form of social media because I am never the one posting. I use YouTube to look up songs that I want to work on in my voice lessons, to practice singing a song with accompaniment, to listen to Lo-fi music when I need some noise while I study, to laugh at funny videos when I am bored/need entertainment, and to get inspiration for my own work. YouTube is an integral part of my day and helps me to feel more productive, especially when it comes to my work as a musician.      More recently, since I began posting videos to send in for college pre-screen auditions, I have learned how to upload my own content onto YouTube. I have posted videos of myself dancing, acting, and singing. Most of them are on private, then the links were sent to each college that needed to have access to the videos. However, there are a few that are public, since I applied to a singing competition that required the privacy settings to be on “public”.   

     This past weekend was the closing weekend of Beauty and the Beast. We started on Wednesday with a brush-up rehearsal to reacquaint ourselves with the show, since we had not practiced it in almost two weeks. The run on Wednesday night was not perfect, but we all expected to be a little rusty on our first night back. Then, Thursday evening was our first performance of the weekend. I feel like all of the shows went really well this weekend, each one better than the last. There were a few hiccups and a few missed sound cues – but other than that, I was very proud of the work from the cast and crew on each show.      On Friday afternoon, my parents came into town. My mom and dad took off of work on Friday and spent the day driving from Baltimore, Maryland to Ada, Ohio (8 hours!). My parents arrived in the afternoon on Friday and spent some time with me before my call time that evening for the Friday night performance. They were able to see the shows on Friday night and Saturday afterno

     My first experience with LinkedIn was in 9 th grade – when I kept getting email invites to join and connect with an old dance teacher. Back then, my mom told me not to worry about it and I haven’t thought about LinkedIn since – until this class! I didn’t even really know what LinkedIn was, other than I thought it was a place to connect with people professionally. I didn’t know there were marketing aspects to it or that it was considered a form of social media.      By reading Chapter 9 in “Essentials for Social Media Marketing”, I learned that you can make posts with text, a call-to-action link, images, videos and, polls. There are also LinkedIn Stories, which are very similar to the Stories embedded in Facebook and Instagram. LinkedIn even has a livestreaming component on their site. As I continued to read the chapter, LinkedIn reminded me more and more of other social media sites that I use regularly (Facebook and Instagram).      Something interesting that I read in this chapt

     My roommate invited me to her house in Cincinnati for fall break this year, since I live 8 hours away and she’s only a 2-hour drive. We have had this planned since last spring, so I was very excited when the weekend was finally here. We left campus on Friday night after we were finished with classes so that we could start with a tour of Cincinnati bright and early on Saturday morning. We have done a lot these past few days and will be headed back to ONU tomorrow afternoon.      On Saturday, we started with a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. Then we drove to the Spring Grove Cemetery/Arboretum. We walked around for about an hour and a half, looking at the grave markers and the plant life. It was beautiful there, especially all the huge trees and the massive crypt. All of the architecture and the details that went into each of the markers was incredible. After we left Spring Grove, we drove over the Kentucky border and had lunch in Newport. It was my first time being in

     I do not have Pinterest, but I am not really sure why. I think my main reason for not adding it was because I didn’t think I could handle another social media site. However, I use multiple sites already and Pinterest seems like a site that I would enjoy.      In my Voice & Movement class yesterday, my group was looking up inspiration images on Pinterest for our group movement piece that we are creating ourselves. When I told them that I didn’t have Pinterest, they all seemed surprised. I’ve never really thought about why I didn’t have Pinterest until yesterday in class.      According to Chapter 8 in “Essentials of Social Media Marketing”, you can pin images and videos to different boards, which are clusters of related ideas. You can share your boards with other people and save boards from others, too. There are a lot of times where I take artistic inspiration from images – both in my professional field of theatre and elsewhere. This is one of the big reasons why I would like

This weekend was the opening for Beauty and the Beast! The show had a few hiccups on the technical side during Saturday’s evening performance, but Sunday was smooth sailing. As many of you know, this is my first time stage managing. This show is massive – 30 cast members, 20 crew members, projections, large moving set pieces, lights, sound effects, and a whole bunch of props. I oversee all of these elements and make sure they happen and move at the correct times by calling on a headset from up in the booth. Considering all of this, I was very proud of myself for the work I did this weekend. I am also so proud of the acting company and the crew for making this weekend happen and working with me to make the show come alive. I was live tweeting the performance through pre-show preparations, intermission, and closed with a post-show tweet. I am so glad I chose to tweet on Sunday, because everything went so smoothly and looked amazing. We had nineteen little girls dressed as Belle in the au