Thursdays with Bridget

Week of 2/7

On Thursdays I'll be working with Bridget Lee-Calfas, of the marketing department. My first day with her was great. She's really friendly, and she does lots of different sorts of writing. It'll be good to have practice with journalistic and business writing as well as the creative that I do on Mondays and Wednesdays. She introduced me to everyone in her office, and told everyone about my "strong journalistic background". My resume definitely left a positive impression. We sat down and discussed the sort of work she'd have for me. Bridget writes a good number of the press releases for Krannert performances (with 400+ performances a year no one person could write them all). She's in charge of PRs for "A Midsummer Night's Dream", the summer Studio productions, and Mark Morris Dance Group, along with a number of others. She told me I could pick a show to work on. My mother and I go to see Mark Morris almost every year, so I thought it'd be interesting to write about MMDG. Bridget sent me examples of previous press releases, and showed me where I could find information about the group on Krannert's webpage. Press releases are written and distributed to news sources to let them know what's going on and hopefully pique enough interest for them to write a story. It's important to give unbiased, but interesting information. Bridget wanted to highlight not only the group's single weekend performance, but the total two weeks they spend in Champaign-Urbana working with Dance at Illinois, theatre and opera majors, the Cunningham Children's home, and patients with Parkinson's. My press release is almost complete and I'll be showing it to Bridget in two days.