On November 13th, I was sitting on my comfortable couch, a bowl of chips on one side and my snoring dog on the other. On November 13th, Benjamin Cazenoves was in a dark hall, the sounds of guitar strums, drumming, and gunshots forming a most unwelcome cacophony.

Benjamin and I were across an ocean from one another, and yet I felt an overwhelming need to swim for however long it would take, to help him – along with every Parisian unjustly clawed at by calamity.

On November 13th, Paris suffered attacks, the force of gunfire and bombings splitting the city’s s into pieces. Bataclan Theater, La Belle Equipe bar, the terrace of the Casa Nostra pizzeria in Rue de la Fontaine au Roi, and a restaurant in Boulevard Voltaire are a few targets in the November 13th attacks. 128 are reported dead, but that number only seems to be making a steady and somber upward trend.

This isn’t humanity.

This is hunger.

Once primates, we have evolved from our animalistic ways. We want food? We don’t run to a tree, picking it, and spilling juice all over ourselves, letting the sticky substance trail down our chins and remain in between our fingers for hours to come. We want sex? We don’t trail a weaker looking mate, pressing our power upon them and leaving them for dead when we’re finished. We want power? We don’t run into stadiums, armed with AK- 47s , shooting at every innocent face we see, screaming gleefully, eyes gleaming.

At least that’s what I thought.

I was wrong, of course.

As a species we’ve begun to regress. We have slowly begun to peel off the coating of culture and progress our ancestors have spilled blood to create. We have climbed out of the squishy dermis of civilization, into the open arms of cruelty and chaos.

I understand this emotional appeal barely stands in contrast with the dark night and spilled blood, but this is my letter to humanity.

This is my letter – my plea – for a resolution. An end that does not result in the ending of lives. A resolution that can serve as a beginning for children who’ve never seen the sadistic sneer of an unremorseful murderer, for children who’ve never had smoke stuck in their lungs, dragging down their bodies in a heaving wreck, for children who have never felt lamentation and oil coursing through their veins.

This is only a letter yearning for change, and November 13th is only a date on a burned and cracking calendar, but they both have voices that will remain unrestful, howling for resolution. Now.

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The same pertains to life. Right? Once you’ve failed a test or gone on vacation there’s no way to reverse time and go back to a time where you didn’t see a giant red “F” on your paper, or you didn’t have jellyfish stings covering your legs. What’s done is done.
So the beginning of every story is the most pure and untouched part. The shell of the story has not been cracked open yet.

My omelet begins on a rainy night almost three years ago. I had recently strung unusually powerful Christmas lights and they illuminated my entire room as I drew with a jumbo sharpie on a piece of copier paper. I was designing a phone case. Eventually the copier paper would be scanned, and I’d scale it down and retouch so that the design could fit cleanly on an iPhone case (for an iPhone 4 at the time).

People at school had been saying that they wished they could have a phone case with one of my drawings on it. With a grin, I’d nod and proclaim that it was my new mission to create original phone cases, sell them, and by doing so – to start a small art-driven business.

Oh boy, had I bitten off more than I could chew. The production expenses were far surmounting the revenue, and when I say surmounting, I mean by 150%, at least at first. I had asked the kids at my school how much money they’d be willing (or able) to spend on my case and their verdict was $20, at most.

It was the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, and the idea of running a small art shop, using something I created by hand (to some degree) was something I couldn’t get out of my head. Designing and selling original phone cases seemed to fit all too well.

At first.

With each sold phone case the scale tipped closer to broke-ness. I thought I’d be able to raise the prices later in the game to cover initial losses. But the reality was proving me wrong. I didn’t have a financial base to keep me afloat long enough. All award money I saved from winning a few competitions and now spent on manufacturing, was running dry and selling the phone cases began to feel more and more like I was wading through molasses. It wasn’t getting easier to say the least.

Eventually it was time to call it quits. There I sat, in the center of my room, shrink wrapped phone cases dramatically strung on the floor around me, accounting for the fact that after six months I’d only been able to sell forty of them, and didn’t even break even.

I’m not a quitter, I just didn’t know how to do what I’d wanted to do. I knew that with a couple more years of experience and experiments I’d be able to figure out how to run a business.

All I needed was time to learn.

And here I was, learning.

I’ve learned that to begin the art shop that I so strongly desired, I’d need to actually figure out costs and investments. Run balances. This is something I’d have to dedicate a sizable fraction of my effort to, not skim over and hope for the best as I had with most other monumental decisions in my life. Not only time and creativity would need to be invested, but real money. It wasn’t going to be an easy feat. I was a sophomore who produced expensive hand made cases with no selling strategy to back me up. Not the ideal business plan. Especially after lost all money I had.

As the Splattered Egg Law states, once an egg has been cracked open, there’s no way you can go and scoop up the remains, piecing the thing back together again. We’ve all learned this, one way or another. I’d learned that through my failed phone case business.
But the more eggs in the omelet, the more flavor it obtains. I learned it the hard way, but I learned.

These phone cases were just the beginning.

Fast forward two years and, again, you can see me sitting on that same floor I once sat surrounded by bubble wrap and plastic phone covers – but now, I’m coordinating the team and contributors, editing stories and preparing interviews – placing the puzzle pieces of my online network together. EX LOCUM is my business. Its currency is support.

EX LOCUM is my sunny side up.

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I wish I could say that while painting, I could feel the souls of Van Gogh and Magritte coursing through my veins, powering my paintbrush, but unfortunately I’m thinking of food most of the time. And riddles. Food and riddles. So once, while I sat at the dining table (eating) and thought (of riddles), a pure idea came in like an arrow, hitting my brain and infecting me with a rush to get up and run over to my canvas to paint. I wanted so badly to figure out a way to create a collection of paintings that I’d be proud of for years to come. (Also – between us – the walls of my house were looking pretty bleak and some colorful paintings would surely spice things up.)

So, glad to have been hit by inspiration, I hustled over to my room, sandwich in hand, and laid out on the floor the woolen orange blanket that I so often sat on while painting. It was covered with streaks of green, yellow and red paint. I smiled and began to size up my idea on the canvas. The graphite traveled over the ridges of canvas and sketched an outline before I even had time to take control and overthink.

My idea was to create the sins. Yup. All seven of them. Each on a canvas the size of a seven year old child. I wanted to paint them using the artistic “voice” that I’d found over the summer at the Cooper Union Summer Program.

It was so invigorating to finally be able to pick up a brush and know exactly what to do with it. My collection began. The end of August was made up of late nights, dying in the absence of cool air (my AC decided to not work) and painting until my wrist creaked like an old door. September followed suit, slowly becoming colder and colder with each passing day. And as the days grew colder, I would slip on more and more sweaters to accidentally leave streaks of paint on. Finally, at the beginning of October, the pieces began to come to a slow and steady stop. I had painted Lust, a woman wearing a lace bra and sucking on a lollipop. Gluttony, a round man with an even rounder sandwich in his hands. Envy, a slightly hunchbacked woman with a sneer plastered to her face.

Sloth, a woman leaning against the side of the canvas, half-asleep.

Pride, a former king, stripped of everything. Greed, a miserly brood with a couple dollars clenched in his fist. And lastly, Wrath, an old man who’d lived through many fights and feuds, ready to make that number grow. It was a beast of a project, but when I’d finished, the happiness I felt far surpassed that of when I ate a sandwich. For sure.

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The night before we left for BADA, we all called one another and gushed about how excited we were to be doing this together. There were five lucky us from the same school going to England that summer to study Shakespeare. Five of us, who screamed in happy unison, when we got emails notifying us of acceptance to the Midsummer Conservatory Program run by British American Drama Academy in Oxford. This was the first time any of us would be out of the country without our families, and while the thought was exhilarating, it was just as terrifying.

Finally, the departure day came. We all met at the airport. I lugged my suitcase behind – feeling every crack it rolled over – and cursed myself for packing so much. But when I quickly looked over at my friends’ bags, it seemed that among them I had the lightest load! Surprising. We sat at the airport, it was 6:00 pm, but the sky was already beginning to darken. We listened to music and danced, laughing. I felt genuine bubbles of happiness filling up my heart.

world travelers!

A photo posted by •A•N•A• (@anakrutchinsky) on Jul 25, 2014 at 7:44pm PDT

Eventually, we boarded the plane and piled on our stuff. After almost ten hours of shaky movie-watching and bumpy attempts to sleep, we landed in Heathrow Airport!

Of course, we weren’t quite at our destination yet. A shiny bus took us from Heathrow to Oxford, and a small man who resembled a house elf greeted us and insisted on taking ALL of our bags to our rooms for us. I’m not kidding, this guy was basically Dobby. He had round eyes and a really kind demeanor.

We finally entered Wadham college, an architectural beauty. Brown bricks staring down at us.

My best friend and I got to be roommates and found out that our room – while it was spacious and magnificent – was four flights of creaky, spider-ridden stairs up. (Let’s not forget that we had to drag our obviously overpacked suitcases up, too At last, we both plopped in armchairs opposite one another, relieved that we’d made it! We were 16, we’d flown halfway across the globe without the cushion of our parents’ nearby presence, and we were still in one piece. My bare feet dug into the blue carpet – getting used to the ground that would be ours for the upcoming weeks. Suddenly, I felt a tickling on my toe and saw a green insect the size of my thumb absentmindedly crawling up my leg. I shrieked and kicked it off. Yup, we’d made it in one piece, but with insects that big, how long would we last?

Little did I know that in a couple of days these bugs wouldn’t faze me. I’d be sprawled on the grass singing songs with my fellow actors, and I’d open my bag to get a water bottle, only to be greeted by three oversized moths. Nobody would flinch and we’d all continue on with our day.

Little did I know that the room we had so proudly taken residence in, would be a burning hell for the first three days because I was an idiot who would accidentally short-circuit all outlets – after hours on a Friday – severing any chance for a breeze provided by an electric fan.

Little did I know that when we went to our first meeting as a group to get acquainted with our instructors, we’d learn not only the ways of Shakespeare, but how to be better people.

Little did I know that when we were given the chance to go to the Globe theater to watch The Royal Shakespeare Company perform Antony and Cleopatra, it would be raining buckets, none of us would have any real form of cover, and none of us would mind.

Little did I know that I would grow to have a second home, or that I’d get the chance to make a fool of myself using the words of the Bard, or that I’d tell anti-jokes while standing on a table to an entire audience of faculty, parents and guests in the final performance, or that the people I met at the academy would stay with me so tangibly that I’d miss BADA every day.

These are the moments that make one a good actor. The chance to get to live, and understand, and experience, and feel… This is why I do it!

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Yes, it disgusts me to use instagram “likes” as a measuring tool, but in all honesty, for the Generation Z, social media DID become an all-in-one “meter-of-value”. The number of followers you have on every network, the number of likes and comments you get, is what the majority of my generation is checking to find people to look up to, and we need to just accept it and work with it.

Surely, it feels good to feel beautiful and appreciated for your natural (or filtered :)) beauty once in a while. But, at that moment, I felt the urge to focus on revealing the beauty that lays beneath the skin level, the beauty of a vulnerable artistic soul. People become so much more beautiful when they let their walls down and open up about their creative endeavours!

So I decided to build a website to showcase young artists’ through their passions and aspirations! To give them an opportunity to feel connected, supported, loved and recognized for what they love to do most. Whether it be writing or singing or acting or hip hop.

Everyone deserves a chance to walk up to the podium, look out into the darkness and tell the world about their art. EX LOCUM is here to support young artists, to give the spotlight to those who deserve it, but haven’t gotten enough of it yet. I’m not an attention-seeker (at least, I hope I’m not), I’m not here to get famous, or make anyone else famous. I simply believe that everyone deserves to get acknowledged for what they love to create, and hopefully find others that love it, too, and bond over that. I want to help creative young people to believe in themselves and grow appreciation for others who choose to go through the soul-wrenching struggle of “making art”. That’s the general outline

I’ve been contemplating this idea for a while, until one day, I shared it with a friend of mine. Without missing a bit, he told me that I should do it as video interviews. It would help the audience to actually SEE the artists not just read about them, and – in this industry – I suppose, that’s what people are going for. This was the moment when all pieces fell into their rightful places. So thanks to my friend’s advice, I now work primarily with video when it comes to young artists’ interviews.

Doing the interviews has been an amazing experience so far! Getting to see people’s eyes light up as they talk about what they love is a unique pleasure. Moreover, it’s incredibly energizing and inspiring! Seeing the support they get and sometimes the connections that are made, fills me with joy. On EX LOCUM, the interviewees get a few minutes on camera to just be themselves, and let others see them in a most genuine way. I feel like people my age are constantly putting up walls, trying to protect and hide the things they love because they are unsure or embarrassed and don’t know what people would think about them. I want to celebrate people’s passions, not hide them.

Naturally, the very first interview for EX LOCUM was with the boy who helped me to define the idea. He’s a rapper and goes by the name “Imperial Chambers”. The interview went wonderfully! It was filled with confusion, a million takes, and many technical difficulties and yet, it was still wonderful! We both had a passion for art, and we were doing something about it! Imperial Chambers has his own rap group – Rhetorical Intentions – and they do concerts every couple of months. We talked about that, too. He was charismatic, intriguing, and made my job (as interviewer) easy. At the end, I realized that this is going to be good, and I should’ve started it a lot earlier.

The teaser trailer below shows how it all began —

Now, it’s been almost three months since the launch of EXLOCUM.com, the team has grown, and I’ve already had the opportunity to interview over thirty young NYC artists. Some of them I met through friends, some of them I’d known for a majority of my life, and some of them reached out to me. EX LOCUM is probably one of the best things I’ve ever had the chance to do, and I hope it helps people.

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“Little Lady, I told you to leave that glass alone.” I grinned mischievously, and followed the group away from the aqua tank containing a lower view of the Gharial crocodile. The tour guide began to lead us up to a metal staircase. Every stride I took caused the step to heave and wheeze. I almost wanted to apologize, the tour guide must’ve seen my expression, “Oh, sweetie, don’t worry, the steps are completely secure, just watch your step, we wouldn’t want you hurting yourself.” I nodded at her politely. I was used to women like her. With their tight buns and overly pressed khaki shorts. Women who wanted to be powerful and fabricated a demeanor that would exude this. It never worked, the moment they let their guards down their insecurities tumbled out.

We arrived at the upper level. “Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the Gharial crocodile. This species is critically endangered, and he doesn’t have many brothers and sisters left. We moved him all the way from India. Little buddy has had a long travel. Now this crocodile is a primarily fish eating species and…” I stopped listening and let my eyes wander over to the beast. It had an unusually long nose and dark skin. It had beady little eyes that seemed to challenge anybody walking by. Wanting a closer look, I calmly walked over to the rail. The crocodile was only a couple feet away now, all that separated us was a tiny stream that fed into a larger body of water. I slowly came closer and closer until suddenly “Little lady I told you to sto-” Esparanza grabbed my shoulder and I spun too quickly, my body buckled over the metal, and I fell forward landing on my forearms and head. Before I could comprehend what was happening, I was face to face with the crocodile. It breathed deeply. Really i never expected a crocodile to have the ability to take in oxygen and have it go so deeply into their stomach. I heard every breath it took. “Stay still, we are getting help.” I didn’t really care. If it killed me, maybe my mother would look up from her yoghurt to check my obituary picture, maybe my father would stay in the house long enough to look over my room and check on my mother. I was ready to die and I hadn’t even lived yet. The crocodile began to walk away, and I suddenly felt a tugging urgency, somehow, deep in the cavities of my stomach I knew something wasn’t quite right. That’s when I heard the snap. A boulder that had been positioned as decoration in the crocodile home had slipped and landed square on my foot. Everybody screamed and clutched one another. I simply blinked up at them and tried to understand. I did not know what had just happened. I felt no different, I simply felt wrong. As if every molecule of my being had switched places. It was when the medics came and lifted the boulder off my foot that I felt the pain. They told me that the bone had been completely crushed and that my foot would need to be removed. I didn’t care. All I remember thinking was how I would never be able to climb Pico de Orizaba. That was what truly crushed my insides into powder. My dreams had been for nothing, I’d never be able to manifest them.

I now dream about what would’ve happened if nobody had been there, and I had been laying in the containment with the beast. What would’ve happened if the boulder had stayed on my foot and I simply remained there, laying in the damp pebbles and grass, the sound of the tiny stream whistling in my ears. The vines of earth slowly pulling me closer to the center of the earth and the loudest sound in the world would be the Gharial crocodiles breathing.

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But back to the beginning. I confidently nodded and said that it would be my pleasure, a few moments later we were dismissed and it began to dawn on me how onerous this task could be. As I walked down the hallway trying to mentally sketch out a few blueprints of an idea, my phone buzzed and I saw a stream of texts describing how the rap group wanted their cover designed. Words like “purple”, “baby”, and “New York City” were being thrown about like dice in a dark alley. I had my work cut out for me.

The first couple attempts were flawed to say the least, they looked naive and incomplete. As the days passed and my oasis of ideas evaporated, my family told me they’d planned a trip to Canada. Perhaps this was a good thing, I’d sent in the ideas I’d had to my rapper friends but there hadn’t been any true enthusiasm. It was humiliating, I wanted so badly to know exactly what to do to make them happy while being happy with the results myself, but it wasn’t working out as easily as I’d hoped. So often does the road look simple and smooth, yet the moment your foot touches the rough land you regret ever taking that first step. Yes, I do sound cheesy, but this was a time for self-reflection and a lot of melancholy was rising to the top. While my parents and I sat on the tiny – yet remarkably sturdy – airplane to Winnipeg, Manitoba, I sketched more ideas on one of those pull out tables. The rap group I was designing a cover for was quite set on the idea of having their baby pictures be a part of it, they also wanted me to incorporate a skyline to let people know that they were New York babies. So, I sat in my plaid and ridiculously comfortable airplane seat, grinning down at an illustration of two babies reclining in front of a skyline. The stewardesses eyed me cautiously.

Once we landed, I texted a picture of my idea to my rapper “clients” and after a few minor edits they were happy, and I was happy, and we were all happy.

Listen to the full album on bandcamp:

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Yesterday we finished filming the pilot of a new web series “Falling From Grace”.

It all began in February. A friend of mine, who I’d worked with in Dog Sees God before, asked me if I wanted to play a part in a web series he was putting together. HELL YES! In his words, the web series would tell a story of “6 teenagers dealing with traumatic fallout after a party.” He sent me the script and a short description of the character he wanted me portraying. He envisioned Tallulah, (my character), as a “bombshell” who was extremely awkward around guys she was interested in. Hmm, bombshell? Extremely awkward around guys? More like awkward in general! I can certainly do that. Exciting mix

EVERYBODY GET READY!!! SOMETHING SWELL IS COMING!!!

A photo posted by •A•N•A• (@anakrutchinsky) on Apr 6, 2015 at 10:44am PDT

The first couple months were dedicated to planning. We did a couple of read throughs, discussed the characters, drank coffee and chewed ice. And got a little off subject frequently…All seemed to be going great!

Well, not entirely. You see, the original cast was quite different from the final group of people on the shooting days. We went through a couple of re-casts, and roughly three rotations for a female lead, only because of eternal schedule conflicts. At the last minute, a great friend of mine volunteered to help out with the pilot, and she got the lead! Funny story actually, she knew I was in the web series so when she found out she was casted, she texted me right away and started asking questions. Questions like, who am I playing? Honesty, do you know what character I’m supposed to be? And, I’m serious I don’t know who I’ve been cast as? I guess in the commotion of it all, she somehow had been never given any details Laughing, I told her that she would be playing the title role, and also sent her a copy of my script. Even if our director was a bit too accommodating at first, when the time came to put his foot down and take authority, he lay down a schedule, and we all made time for all days he needed us.

On the final day of shooting, we were filming a house party scene, with everyone in the cast, plus a few extras present. We all live in New York City. So we all are used to tiny apartments. Well, our director’s apartment wasn’t an exception. We all huddled inside and “partied”. There were prop beer bottles everywhere filled with apple juice, and prop “cups of vodka” that were, in fact, water In short, we really did have a good time!

The very last scene was taking place on the steps outside. In the scene, my character had a panic attack and my friend “Ethan” was supposed to help me “calm down”. According to the script, he was supposed to kiss me and I was supposed jolt out of my hyperventilating state. Well, stage kisses aren’t a big deal, and neither was this one, until…. a couple of the extras – who happened to be very close friends of ours – began to rate the kisses on a scale of 1 to 10. It was hard to “act natural” after finding what they were laughing about

But at last, the final scene was finished. The night felt glorious! We all crowded on the sidewalk, our director standing at the top of the steps, screamed “That’s a wrap!”, and we all cheered!

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I checked in with my cast (who all lived in different boroughs) and heard back from two out of the three that they would be at my house, ready to shoot, shortly. As more time passed, and I didn’t hear back from my third and final cast member, terror clung to my heart and the doubts began to sneak up on me. My parents were kind and understanding, they told me not to worry.

It was at that moment that I heard the little “ping” of a facebook message, quickly grabbing my phone I saw a message saying quite literally the exact opposite of what I had been hoping, that the final cast member couldn’t make it because all the trains around him weren’t running properly.

I began to genuinely panic, so I ran to my computer trying to figure out a way to get him to my house. As I skidded into my room I slipped on the freshly washed floor and landed on my elbow. It was then that I genuinely felt like melting into the ground for the very first time in my life. I landed on my elbow, fracturing (as I found out much later) the cubital joint and bruising my back and butt. It wasn’t the most graceful moment in life – that was for sure. My parents came running to find out – what I presume- the sound of a penguin trying to fly – and failing – was. They did the parental duty of trying to pull me up and stabilize me. It didn’t quite work. I just continued to lay on the floor – like an embarrassed penguin – and begged the universe to let me melt into the wood.

Right then we all heard the doorbell, it was the first of the cast showing up. I crawled over to the door and welcomed her in, she looked at me and then hugged me, telling me that the shoot was going to be fine and that there was nothing to worry about. I was confused at first but then realized that my face was drenched with pain, shock, and stress tears. That was when I really began to cry. How professional, right? After settling down, bandaging the elbow and welcoming the second in the cast, we all began to realize that the final member simply wasn’t going to make it, which seemed like a nightmare at first, but then I was able to call in a last minute favor and had a good friend come in and take over the part.

My friend read the part of “The Angel”, which fit him perfectly, because who comes in at 10 am on a summer Saturday after being woken up by the call and steps in to read and film a short? An Angel. We ran upstairs to the room I had “booked”. (Kind of a lenient use of the word “booked” considering it was a public lounge and I had ripped a paper out of my notebook and scrawled “Do not disturb, filming in progress” on it, and then proceeded to tape it to the door.)

Finally, we began to set up. The cast was all decked out in their costumes – even the Angel – and they were moving around the room, inspecting their set. I set up my tripod in the corner but asked them all to run their lines and blocking, considering we had JUST added a new cast member. They began to work, and I stepped back and let them do their thing. It was AWESOME.

In that one second, I didn’t feel hopeless or nervous or out of my league in any way. The cast was here, the room was ours, and we were about to begin shooting. As we ran over the blocking, we went over a scene that would take place in the hallway outside the room. Here’s the funny part, as we walked out of the door one of my friends broke character and asked “do you still have the keycard to let us back in?” Realization flooded into everyone’s faces, and we all simultaneously rushed back to catch the door before it crashed closed. We were just a second too late and we all sighed, knowing that we had just locked ourselves out – or rather I had locked everyone out.

Oops. I ran to a man that I saw down the hallway and begged him to let us use his key to let us back into the room that held most of our belongings and the place that we needed to film the most scenes in. He was kind enough to help us get back in, but slightly dubious – probably because he was wondering what four teenagers were trying to use a lounge for, and why one of them was dressed in an all black suit, another was barefoot, the third was just as confused as he was, and the girl begging him for the key was wearing an athletic bandage over her elbow and carrying a camera in the other hand. We were a slightly disorienting group. Nevertheless, once we got back into the room, we were back in business and more productive than ever. The filming ran smoothly, until everyone got too hungry to focus and we ordered Thai food. A definite highlight. After the food we were even more productive than before and were able to finish filming everything at exactly 3:30. Not bad, I must say. A day that had begun as a nightmare ended wonderfully. We went back to my apartment, sang, danced to mariachi music and finished our leftover Thai food. All in all, a truly awesome, productive, and rollercoaster of a day. I was grateful for every second of it.

More info at:

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Alright! So it finally happened. The day we’ve all been waiting for, well, you – the reader – probably couldn’t care less, but the Cooper Union Summer Drawing Intensive Art Exhibit occured yesterday!

Yes, all of us at Cooper Union were very very very excited about it! We had worked hard for four weeks and now it was time to step back and enjoy the handiwork. We were promised great lighting, a wonderful space, entertainment, and FREE FOOD. The first three happened, and they happened marvelously. The lighting, space and entertainment were glorious. The place we hung our art was a gigantic uniquely shaped white room with pillars and a round elevator in the center of the room.

Fun fact: The round elevator at Cooper is the oldest elevator in the world. Nope. I am kidding. I just googled it and it’s simply not true. That’s a little embarrassing. The first day we were told that by our TA. So naturally, all of us students told everyone we could that “we ride the oldest elevator in the world, every day!”. Oops.

So, as I was saying, the space was marvelous, but the food. The food. The food we’d all been so excited for the last couple weeks. The cookies and fruit were in our dreams. And no, I’m not saying “our” to divert attention off of myself, I mean we literally sat in class drawing and talking about the awesome food that we would eat at the exhibition. But alas, the day came and the food platters were put out. We all ran over to them, roughly two minutes after they’d been set and EVERYTHING ON THEM HAD BEEN EATEN. I’m talking about giant silver platters filled with food, BEING COMPLETELY BARE. Only a few crumbs were left on them. It could’ve almost been comical if it hadn’t felt like our hearts had been ripped out of our bodies.

Moving on, so our art was up and we finally had the chance to look at eachothers pieces, instead of quickly sneaking glances at our classmates easels while they weren’t looking. The day was eye-opening, in every sense. Eye-opening because we all got the chance to look at each other’s work, And, eye-opening because humanity is cruel when it comes to giant silver platters filled with cookies and fruit

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