At the beginning, Kiernan Norman, a sophomore from Connecticut and the first in her family to go to college, seems like a nice, polite, well-mannered person—normal as can be. Shy perhaps, but first impressions, I soon learned, can be deceiving. Holding her hand aloft to her chin, her nails laying close to her teeth—a habit I notice repeatedly through the whole interview process—she allows me to begin my questioning. When I ask my first question, the response that emerges catches me by surprise. Talking so fast that her word-per-second speed could possibly break several records, Kiernan Norman is unafraid to respond to any question I throw at her, answering each with the utmost attention to detail. Indeed, in the span of our twenty-minute interview, I feel that Kiernan, open and honest, has divulged her life story to me—or as much as she could squeeze in during our short time together at any rate.
As we converse, Kiernan’s many interests pop up in conversation, one-by-one, naturally as if we were just having a casual chat between friends. She is eager to discuss each topic we land on and is generally a very easy person to talk to. After all, this is the girl who was once given the task of escorting seasoned Broadway veteran and Tony Award winning actress Alice Ripley backstage, and succeeded in not acting like a tense, star struck wreck—mostly because she wasn’t. “I really wasn’t nervous. She was really nice,” she says offhandedly to me, who, if given the chance to meet Alice Ripley, would be reduced to a babbling moron within the first ten seconds.
Yet, from being aware her love of the theater from reading her in-class blog, one might never guess that Kiernan’s devotion to the stage is actually a more recent development in her life. Among her siblings, with her stepbrother “into theater” and her brother “into drugs,” Kiernan was initially defined as being “into sports” within their immediate group of friends. Though she was a sports person in high school, showing a natural talent and becoming the only freshmen on her varsity field hockey and lacrosse teams, Kiernan says she had always had an interest in theatre, with her grandfather giving her her first taste of it with the musical Hair—a rock musical about the early 1960s hippie movement. Despite her curiosity, at first, she shied away from joining her high school’s theatre group “because [she] didn’t want [her] stepbrother to think [she] was moving in on his territory.”
Everything changed in her senior year. After deciding once and for all that she didn’t like the pressure she felt in sports, Kiernan decided to finally give theatre a shot, auditioning and landing an ensemble role in her high school’s production of South Pacific. From then on, she was hooked, participating and writing one act plays, and just enjoying the whole theatre scene both off-stage and on-stage.
The interest, which sparked in high school, has been able to kindle into full-fledged devotion as Kiernan tells me she has had the pleasure of interning for the newly developing musical I Got Fired: A Semi-Autobiographical Sort-of-True Revenge Musical, which premiered at the New York Musical Theatre Festival this September. With her eyes lit up, Kiernan says that she is essentially “obsessed with [her] internship,” and though her typical weekend currently consists of carrying props to and fro in the back of a truck like a “trafficked sex slave,” she loves every minute of it.
In addition to her experience as a theatre intern, Kiernan animatedly discusses a few more of her favorite life experiences, from right now in her time in New York City, “feeling like an adult” and her stint as an exchange student in Egypt which fed into her wish to travel. The more we talk, I also discover her fervent interest in Vietnam War memoirs, history, Native American culture, and foreign languages, noting that she has studied Arabic and a bit of an African dialect, which requires her to rhythmically click her tongue—a feat she energetically obliges to demonstrating in an impromptu, but nonetheless, impressive presentation.
Following our interview, it is clear to me that Kiernan is a person with large aspirations, many talents and interests, and a real propensity for hands-on activity and interaction with people. With the many escapades she has experienced in her young life, Kiernan firmly declares that a person “can’t be scared to move on.” As the tattoo engraved upon her right wrist reads, “movement is a blessing” and indeed, Kiernan Norman truly embodies the spirit of that adage.
This is really good, Arielle. I feel like you had real insight into Kiernan and got as much as you possibly could out of the interview. For your next one, probably don't take us along on your journey, of what you thought then discovered, etc. But for this it worked. Oh, and remember, you don't need to summarize at the end.
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