About Me

I am equal parts behaviorist, saloon piano, and Oxford comma. That is, I’m consumed with the motivations and emotions of human beings, determined to be heard over a crowd, and a disciple of the basic principles that make all creative things possible.

Here’s a brief look at the weird road that brought me here.

 

Child actors, amirite?

 
 

At 5 years old, I landed the widely coveted role of “girl” in a regional Chuck E. Cheese TV spot simply because I was too young to realize I should be self-conscious in front of strangers. I parlayed this success into a storied community theatre legacy that lives on to this day (at my mom’s house).

 

Boston: Where winter mocks you until you die.

 

I followed my musical theatre dreams all the way to the East Coast to attend the Boston Conservatory where I studied characters and voice and learned how to give and get within a conversation. There was singing, there was dancing, there was acting. There was also the painstaking breaking down of scenes — a process aimed at mapping the physical and emotional makeup of people other than ourselves.

We also had tap dance finals. Oh, and I finally figured out why scarves exist.

 

Timing.

 

I moved to New York City on May 14th, 2001 to change the world through the magic of theatre.

Things went…great.

Broadway and the city itself were forever changed that year. And even though my dad offered to drive out from California to bring me home, I stayed. For another fifteen years.

I worked at the iconic Stonewall, singing songs and slinging drinks. And served all the regulars at the legendary Cedar Tavern, where a guy named Norm nursed a whiskey neat at the bar every day, and F. Murray Abraham would show up often to tell stories and hold court.

And, just before my plunge into the ad world, I somehow found myself auditing piles of construction invoices for the Las Vegas theatre they built specifically for Phantom of the Opera. It was the job I was born to leave.

Getting creative.

 

I landed at Digitas on a two-week temp assignment that ended up changing the trajectory of my life. The job was to support a handful of creative execs, which, admittedly, is a role that would have probably been better filled by a person more type A than I. But it meant that I was spending my days communicating with a group of creative leaders via written word (thank you, AIM).

I was just professional enough to pass as an assistant, but in order to keep from feeing like a sellout and hating my life, I wrote to them like I would write to my friends. Trying to make them laugh. Trying to make myself laugh. Competing against no one to make sure mine were the messages they looked at first.

One morning, out of nowhere, two of the creative directors on my team landed at my cubicle. They did not have questions about expense reports. They did not want me to get them better seats on their flights to Korea. They wanted to know if I had any interest in being a copywriter.

Within a week, I was writing for some of the biggest brands in the world. I cut my teeth on Samsung, AMEX, LG, and Diageo, and began to realize that my word obsession might have an actual useful outlet. This is where I learned the basics and started to figure out how to bend and shape messages to meet specific ends. I had the very best mentors there. They would want me to say that.

 

Welcome back, daughter.

 

After 15 years in New York, I had a few options:

  • I could delay having a family in order to save up for an apartment that had a doorman and maaaaybe a community roof deck.

  • I could move to a suburb where the commute was worse, but my odds of having a patch of grass were substantially higher.

  • Or, I could drag my Irish brick of a husband 3,000 miles farther from his homeland so we could live down the street from where I went to high school and have my parents close enough to drop by unannounced.

We went with door number 3.

 

Write here…

 

Returning to California has allowed me to generate more creative in more directions than I ever could have possibly imagined. It’s been feverish, it’s been a grind, and it’s been so much f*cking fun to solve the communication puzzles of startups, known entities, deeply techy tech companies, wine brands, snack brands, and anyone else with something to say.