The Sheriff will have its WORLD PREMIERE at the 32nd Atlanta Film Festival in April. Screening times and venues have yet to be published. When Jeff gets that information, it will be posted. A big round of applause to everyone who worked on and supported the film. This year, the festival had more than 1600 entries from 66 countries. The Sheriff will screen in the Full of Life Documentary Short Category. As for short documentaries, only a total of 9 films will be screened.

Highlights from the 2007 Atlanta Film Festival:
The Last Days of Left Eye (directed by Oscar nominee Lauren Lazin) opened the festival with a red carpet premiere and national press event launch for VH1. The festival closed with Fay Grim, directed by Sundance Award Winner and Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm nominee, Hal Hartley.

Top films to screen at the 2007 festival were La Vie En Rose (Oscar winner for Best Actress - Marion Cotillard), Away from Her (starring Oscar winner and 2008 nominee for Best Actress - Julie Christie), Crazy Love (Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominee), and The Great World of Sound, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival, and was directed by fellow NC School of the Arts alumni, Craig Zobel (2008 Independent Spirit Award nominee).
More info:
http://www.atlantafilmfestival.com/2008shorts.htm

Twenty-Seven Stories is a Runner-Up at the Student Films Across America Film Festival for the Documentary Category.
Only 3 documentary films in total, have been chosen to screen at the festival.
This awards selection was done as a preliminary action, before the festival begins.
A schedule of locations/venues/screening times will be posted soon.

About the festival:
A touring film festival showcasing the best short films at colleges, universities, and high schools, between March 15 and April 15. The film is not required to have been produced by a film school or college. The only rule is that each film must have been made by a student, during the time of production, and at least 50% of the crew, must have been either in high school or college at the time of production.
More info:
http://www.studentfilmsacrossamerica.com/films.php

Jeff is starting an uncensored INTERVIEW SERIES with people of all backgrounds, ages, races, and professions. The purpose is to present contemporary thinking, interests,
and remain informed, with modern humanity. All interviews will be conducted through e-mail and questions will not always be the same. Until further website organization, all INTERVIEWS will be posted on this page.

Below is the INAUGURAL INTERVIEW with Raquel, matriarch of the Thursday Night Social Club (a cross-cultural collegiate collective), old ally of Jeff, and renaissance woman. She has much to say, so read on. Thanks again to Raquel for sharing her time and energy.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::10 QUESTIONS WITH RAQUEL::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Date: February 24, 2008 1:45:56 AM EST

1.) Elaborate on your background (ethnicity, where you grew up,
childhood).

I was born in 1980 in a suburb of Philadelphia and have lived in the same house my whole life. I am an only child, which is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. My mother came to the U.S. from Cuba with her family after Castro took power. My father came to the U.S. from Spain via Cuba because Franco’s government would have forced him to enlist in the army and die in Africa of some horrible tropical disease. So my whole life was steeped in speaking Spanish at home, reeking of garlic, and having dark family pasts looming over everything. There was always a sense of not quite fitting in because I was so different from most of the Irish/Italian kids at my school who great-grandparents were the last to immigrate. My already awkward childhood was made still more awkward by the fact that my parents spoke with accents and my house smelled like Cuban spices.

I lived a sort of dual life: I spoke English and treaded water at school by day; by night, I came home and spoke Spanish and ate a lot of rice. I desperately wanted to be Americanized. I spoke English at home every chance I got, even when my dad shouted and pounded on the table. I told my mother my favorite meal was spaghetti.

I didn’t really start to embrace my heritage until I got to college and it was okay to be different. Now I find myself identifying even more with my background. I am trying to hold on. I miss eating rice most days of the week, even though I hated it as a kid, and sometimes I keep my mom on the phone longer than necessary just to hear another person speaking Spanish. I put garlic in everything.

2.) Elaborate on your education and what career you’re working toward
right now.

I was an incredibly dorky child. I was socially awkward and “weird” and as a result, I ended up being very smart and getting ridiculously good grades because I had nothing else to do. I spent almost all of my free time reading. It provided the most glorious form of escapism… I could be anyone anywhere. From a very early age I decided that I wanted to be a writer. Writers were my heroes. I begged my parents for new books and read every chance I got. My father would give me these packets of small memo books and I would fill them with these bizarre stick-figure-like renderings of people and then I would flip the pages and narrate the plot to my father.

My father was probably the strongest influence and biggest impediment to my current career path. He was the one who bought me the books and listened to my stories and read to me every night before bed. He was the one with whom I wrote my first short story, written on an oversized pale-green piece of accountant’s paper with a mechanical pencil in perfect penmanship. I was about 7 or 8 and I dictated the action to him and he wrote it down. He helped me brainstorm ideas and figure out the plot for said story, which involved Daffy Duck and Donald Duck building an amusement park.

But as I grew older and continued to pursue my interest in books and writing, it troubled my father. It confused him. He didn’t understand why I was following such an impractical career path. He yelled at me for spending all my time reading. He was an accountant; I have no head for numbers. I think he was discouraged when he saw me taking these low-paying jobs doing freelance editing and working at a writers’ center. He came to the U.S. for opportunities and I don’t think he understood why I was taking this path into an impoverished young adulthood. He has only recently started understanding that I can make a career out of anything I want to.

When I got accepted into the graduate program with a fellowship, I think that really validated for him that, hey, it’s okay that my daughter is doing this. He and I have only recently begun to make a fragile peace after many years of a tumultuous existence together. I think he’s mellowing out in his old age. He cracks a lot more jokes than he used to.

Now I’m in the Emerson College Master of Arts in Publishing and Writing program here in Boston. It’s one of the few programs of its kind in the country, and I loved both words and Boston, so I came. I decided that I didn’t necessarily want to be a writer, or rather that I wanted to work with words in a different capacity—not give up my own writing, but do it for myself, on my own time, while working with the words of others as a career. It’s something I’m good at. I’ll be done the program this summer, and I can honestly say that all it has done is confuse me more than straighten me out. I came into the program after 5 years of very varied career experience: running a nonprofit, freelancing, editing for corporations, editing GRE test questions for ETS. By that time I’d narrowed down that publishing was what I wanted. I thought I knew what I wanted. But I got here and so many new ideas and avenues all just surrounded me at once that I honestly have no idea what I want to do at this point. I want to work with people who express their ideas through the written word. I want to make these words more accessible to all people. That is just about all I currently know.

3.) How important is sex in your life?

From my father and books to sex. What a transition, or lack thereof. I would say that sex is simultaneously very important to and noticeably absent from my life right now. My boyfriend lives 300 miles away in Philadelphia and we only see each other every month or two. We talk often, but I find that even if you tell each other everything, it’s still hard to fully be part of another person’s life when they’re so far away. You miss out on the little mundane details, but those are the most important. It’s sort of funny and sad a little, in a sweet way, when we do reunite, because there is always this initial period where we are sort of shy and awkward around each other, even though we’ve known each other over 5 years and have dated over 3. We’re like, I haven’t seen you in a while. Who are you? So the sex is clearly far more limited in quantity than a 27-year-old woman would like. But I am either getting old or zen; I’ve come to accept that quality is preferable to quantity. And honestly, at times the most passionate thing you can do is just sit there together and be quiet and enjoy the fact that another human being is okay with you intruding on their personal space in an extreme way.

But yes… I like sex and I want to finish graduate school so I can actually make pancakes with my boyfriend and watch the Weather Channel together every day instead of just for 4 days every 60 days. I am obsessed with the Weather Channel, I can’t leave the house without watching it, and my boyfriend is okay with that, and that’s why I love him.

4.) Pick one.
What artistic expression such as book, painting, song, sculpture, movie
has affected you most?
Why?

Hmm. It will probably sound cliche and stupid, but I think it was the book The Catcher in the Rye. I read it when I was 14 and it was the first book that made me angry, genuinely angry, at humanity for its stupidity and its foibles. I reread that book constantly. It made me realize it was okay to not just blindly go along with everyone else, that it was okay to think other people were ridiculous, and it made me want to do something about it. I was listening to a lot of Nirvana then too, which was like the musical equivalent of Holden Caulfield’s descent into near-madness. I don’t know that I’d necessarily read or listen to either of those today, but during those formative years they were both really important to me, so I’d certainly never get rid of my copies of them either. Grunge was really big back then, so it was cool to be angry. But it was good for me to learn what it meant to not hold back, because I was raised in a household of restraint, and to just let go and get angry, even just through another person’s words or music, was a very freeing thing to experience.

5.) After what experience in your life, did you feel like you became an
adult?

Honestly, a lot of times I still don’t feel like an adult. Half a century ago I’d be 10 years married with two kids at this age. Now I feel like we’re taking longer to become fully self aware of ourselves, or maybe we’re just actually more focused on the importance of self-awareness in this day and age. I wish I could say I had a defining moment in my life that was the turning point that made me realize, this is the end of my childhood, this is me being an adult, but I just don’t have one. I think I tend to instead have more of these tiny moments of realization that I’m not just some nutty, confused kid anymore. I see that my parents are getting older, sometimes they forget things and they complain about aches and pains and I try not to let myself think at length about the fact that one day they will die and I won’t have them there anymore. Those moments, more than anything, probably, make me feel like an adult. Or I’ll do something like worry about my credit rating or examine my face for developing wrinkles and I’ll feel old and boring. But most of the time it’s hard for me to feel like an adult because I’m back in school. I carry a backpack, I have homework, I worry about grades, I go out drinking to gossip with/about my classmates. It’s hard to feel like an adult when you’re submerged in academic culture.

6.) How important is spirituality in your life?

I wish it were more important in my life right now, but the truth is, it’s just not. I was raised Catholic but don’t really associate myself with the religion anymore. I sort of don’t like organized religions generally because they have all these human-created sets of rules that lead their followers to kill each other in the name of God. I can’t believe that God would want people to kill each other so I can’t believe in a God created by organized religion. I believe that there’s something out there, more of a force than a ruling Godly figure. I take comfort in that belief. But I am honestly too busy to really think about it. I’ve meditated a few times and found that to be the only way I can truly quiet myself and clear my mind. I find a lot of the teaching in Buddhism to be incredibly interesting and I feel like I need to learn about it further because I think there’s a lot of wisdom and common sense to it. I like that Buddhism isn’t a religion and doesn’t really lay out these rules and rather encourages you to use these tools to figure things out on your own. I am hoping to delve more into this kind of stuff once I have my life back—aka, once I am done school and not devoting every spare minute to homework.

7.) Do you want to have children in the future?
Why or why not?

I honestly have never really imagined myself in the role of a mother. I have always felt sort of weird and awkward around babies and children. When I was growing up as an only child, I got dragged by my parents to a lot of functions where there were no other kids around, so I just became comfortable around adults. I was a pretty serious and mature kid, mostly because I was a loner (due to other kids ostracizing me—I’m glad for it now, in retrospect, because it formed me into the person I am today, but at the time it sucked). So I think that started me just not being interested in being responsible for another little person’s life.

I enjoy playing the role of a nurturer and I feel like I’m a pretty loving person, but I just don’t know that children are right for me. I don’t know that I’d make a good mom because I don’t think I want to devote my life to raising children. I have a lot of other things I want to do with my life, and I feel like I won’t be able to do some or many of them if I have the responsibility of caring for children. I’d rather pursue a fulfilling career and my writing and my relationships than also squeeze in being a mom. A lot of people think it seems self-indulgent and selfish to not want children for this reason, but I think it’s more selfish to kid yourself into thinking you can have it all.

I just want my friends and cousins to have lots of babies so I can just be the crazy auntie. Crazy aunts are the best.

8.) As a country, the United States of America is 232 years old.
What social/cultural/political changes do you foresee within the next
100 years?

Socially, I think people will continue along this trend of being constantly plugged in, constantly having information flowing. People will meet in person a few times and then transfer their relationships completely online. We will carry our entire lives on little hand-held devices, even more so than we do now. Maybe paper will disappear, but I hope not.

Culturally, I think America will become less relevant as other superpowers rise. China, I think, will become a cultural giant, and I feel like Japan will start influencing our culture more as well. The Japanese are light years ahead of us in terms of technology, so I feel like maybe in the future we’ll start to catch up. As it is, other countries are starting to take less and less cues from American culture, and honestly, we’re such a young country that it’s sort of like, how can you replace centuries of culture in other countries with this high-fructose, processed and preservative-laden reality show culture we’ve got? Oh that’s another thing: I think our culture and society will increasingly get so obsessed with voyeurism that nothing will be private anymore. YouTube-ism to the nth degree.

Politically, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Things need to change, but I don’t know if things will ever stop being broken in some way, shape, or form. We’re still running our elections on an antiquated electoral college system that is completely irrelevant in modern times. Politicians are more focused on personality and charisma than their job descriptions of policy-making and representing the people. People need to take Jesus out of politics because that’s violating freedom of religion—which also means you’re free to NOT participate in religion. Things need a major overhaul. Something’s gotta give.

I guess politically I’ve recently come around to the idea of anarchy as the ideal system of living. Not in the smash-stuff, punk rock teenagers kind of way, but anarchy in its purest sense, in which each person is truly her own keeper. You live on your land, you sustain yourself, you trade with other people or seek their services. You don’t pay taxes, you don’t expect the government to interfere with your life or do things for or to you. The problem is that the general populace, especially in America, is too stupid for anarchy to work. They need and even like having a system of rules in place telling them what to do. Anarchy is very much a DIY, self-starter, time-manager kind of system. It’s not impossible. It worked in Spain before the civil war for a few years before the communists came in and fucked everything up and everyone started killing everyone else. So in summary: I’m ideal enough to want anarchy but pragmatic enough to know it’ll never work. I try to do a little something anarchistic every day. I jaywalk or I use the printer at work for personal purposes or I infringe copyright by making a photocopy or burned CD for “nonpersonal” use (read: to give to another). Just little insignificant ways of breaking the rules to remind me that I’m my own person.

9.) What is something that no one else knows about you?

My middle name. A girl’s gotta have at least one secret. (Okay, okay, my family knows it, but I don’t tell it to anyone else.)

10.) If you had to write your own obituary, what would you want to be
known/remembered for?

Perfect grammar and spelling. Perhaps it sounds silly, but in a world that is constantly connected and where information is constantly flowing, people are forgetting how to express themselves coherently and I worry that everything will become a huge mess. A communication breakdown, as Led Zeppelin so eloquently put it. The day will come when humanity no longer knows a semi-colon from their own asses, and I hope that I am long gone from this earth when that happens.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::END::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Episode #4 is now up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux4NuwwH3Po

We are going on a short hiatus to enlist new Vaudeville members.
So, there will NOT be a new episode until further notice.

If you would like to contribute to a future Episode, contact me.
We’re looking humans with special talents, such as juggling, dance, song, weight lifting, gymnists, acrobats,
and all those unique abilities that go unused for years.

I have additional updates coming, so stay tuned.