Senior Page: Virginia Bradford '19

 Virginia Bradford has been an INK editor for three years. She has a lot of hobbies, including editing, but also some of the following things.

Photography
This is my AP Studio Art concentration, which is a science fiction fashion photography series. I based it on 60's B-movies and used three models, Megan Bainbridge '19, Lela Lee '21, and Amelia Bradford '23 (my sister). I started it in January 2019 and finished it in April 2019.

 Poetry
A poem I wrote last year, in 2018, about an event that happened in 2015.

"England"
Caught up in a love affair with England,
She sees me for the second time right here,
As strangers, I see which aspects of hers
Have heightened, in the absence of myself.
Her voice is but a whisper, and I blink
She seems almost always nervous, I think.
How strange to me, that we once shared green tea
On a table, by the mall carousel.
Three years have passed, since last we thought we knew
Our lives would be "eternal", "unusual",
With him and England, she kept me a space,
Nurtured it like a garden, but slowly
Abandoned it, for England, she would say
Could build gardens and castles all day.

Digital Art
Various drawings I've done, and my Scholastic photo thrown in. From 2018 and 2019.

Stop-Motion, Video Editing, and Theater
A variation of movie-related projects. I did some paper animation for a NHD project on Igor Stravinsky, made a music video and another video, all from 2018. There is also a bit of my Hannah Dustin play this year and a little bit from when I was in A Winter's Tale. I haven't made a movie before.

Short Fiction
A short story I wrote in March 2019.

Somehow I was able to catch a glimpse of him when he first arrived-- it was a regular night at the theater, and he arrived with the new troupe. I was doing my regular cleaning and straightening-out, sweeping backstage the dust into neat lines. Over the past few years of service, not entirely out of a need of money but also a private passion for the goings-on of that stage, I had earned some amount of respect, or at least a kind of resignation from the actors toward my existence.
It was a strange existence for myself, being a constant presence as well as an invisible one, leaving me to become a connoisseur of secrets. At the side of a room, looking down at the floor, or folding a costume dress that Mr. Jordan thought was too rough for his skin, I would hear an un-hushed conversation saying that so-and-so was deeply in love with so-and-so. And so-and-so loved another so-and-so, I knew, from another conversation.

I had one good friend who I would sometimes tell things, one of the ensemble dancers, gone to another show. Today, an afternoon in late summer, the newly-casted ensemble arrived for their first day dancing on the stage I had just cleaned. They were unremarkable men and women, for the most part, seeming nice enough although I didn't speak to any. And there was Will Figaro...
The man seemed to know he was a star, but he was really very young. Younger than mostly everyone in the cast, and he knew just what to say and when to say it, speaking immediately, taking out his hand, and saying he was Will, he was Will, he was Will Figaro. I was never subject to his introduction, which he reserved only for the people he admired most. There was one woman who had been the lead for years, who had taken to wrapping her hair up in a turban and wore long earrings, she was Titania and Ophelia and it had been this way for twenty years. There was the playwright upstairs, and there was the stage manager, and there were the three boys who climbed the rope to draw the curtains every night. Will Figaro held out his hand and said his name.
He liked to draw attention to himself, making sure to laugh loudly and stand close enough to Miss Turban and Mr. Jordan and Smith. He had a crowd of girls around himself, four of the ensemble girls with long blonde hair tied up as an old habit from ballet school. They would say how Will Figaro was wonderful and tall and charming. He spoke to me one time, when I found his notebook missing while I was cleaning, and he thanked me for returning it. I began to wonder if I was paranoid, since he seemed perfectly nice and charming.
Will Figaro did not have much to do in the show that week, only dance with his troupe of ballerinas, and laugh with the stage manager. He moved his arms back and forth, seeming conscious of the comical way it appeared, and a smile sprouted on his face when Mr. Jordan caught his eye and began to laugh, saying he was quite the clown.
I went home that day and came back to the theater early the next morning, and Will Figaro was there already, standing in the middle of a group of actors, who asked about his life before he got here, Will standing tall and gesticulating and I stood nearby, wondering about whatever could be inside the mind of this man. He was supposed to be in college, but took a train with the dance troupe instead, stopping here and there. He had some good friends in school, but he had an argument before he left, and was glad to leave them behind, since they were so unpleasant.
All of you are not so unpleasant, he seemed to be saying. Miss Turban had been looking for a protege for a few years now, and she found something of herself in Will Figaro. He took to wearing long earrings in his ears, like hers, and laughing like she did. He and Mr. Jordan and the rope boys went out drinking at night, yelling and singing in the street.
I myself had a short dalliance with one of the ensemble dancers, one of the ballet school students, but which I tended to keep quiet among my fellow workers. I had nobody to confide in anyway, and nobody to tell the thoughts that kept me up sometimes, some kind of misplaced jealousy. The dancer girls smelled like perfume, but Emily brought her cousin to a late-night rehearsal one day and her college friends sat with me backstage as I watched, organizing, and talking to me as I did so.
Unusual, I thought, to be talked to, and to be a presence in the conversation. The girls were young and discussed their classes and their friends, but they wanted to know what I thought. One day close to the next month's show, as the college girls liked to see the rope boys backstage, they saw Will Figaro as he came dancing onstage, wearing the costume I had washed and folded for him earlier that November day.
Will Figaro, said Emily's cousin. I know him. Don't tell Sandy.
I did not press her for details, of course, because that was not in my character. I would wait, if I cared to, until she elaborated on her own. There was that part of myself, violently curious of this outside connection to the mysterious new star's past life. He had made himself a darling, from a series of incidents that I could see from ten feet away. Will Figaro spoke to me three times, in the company of Miss Turban. The ballet girls still followed him around, but he left a conscious space for the stage manager and the playwright and the rope boys. And they occupied that space.
A few nights before the show opened, I was knitting on the old green sofa backstage, another turban for Titania, with Julie and Emily, who had decided she liked one of the rope boys better, but who told me in confidence-- in secret, private confidence-- that Will Figaro was a fraud. Will Figaro did not lose his friends through any fault of their own, but he had pushed Sandy against the wall and made her do something awful, and after the girls heard, he was shunned among their friends, and took the next train out of town, never to be seen again.
His mannerisms and his personality, they were an act, she said. Every move was premeditated, and every bit of himself that other people saw was put-on. Every word out of his mouth was a piece of the game he played to be loved. Or paid attention to, rather, since in his mind that was love.
I paid him close attention during the show, as he spoke his lines and tilted his head and gestured broadly, all the others grinning at him. Will Figaro was a star, and he reveled in his glory as he stood at the head of the stage, the audience erupting in cheers and applause. The curtains closed, and I watched as the rope boys and Smith lifted him in the air like a king, shouting as they climbed the stairs, Will Figaro stretching his arms toward the sky.
Emily and the other girls all went back to school after the show, but Will Figaro stayed. This would mean that I had no confidante again, leaving me to sweep the stage and the hallway and the stairs, fold the costumes, wonder about the truth. There seemed to be little reason for me to feel anything but chilly toward the theater's new leading man, considering what I knew and kept tucked inside my head.
I kept myself busy now, thinking of what Miss Turban would say when her darling Will forgot to pretend for a minute, when she knew what so-and-so had done with so-and-so. Perhaps she would not care at all.