Laura leads lights through all challenges

Serena Bettis • November 11, 2015

Laura Van Lieu and Greenley Slater show their strong friendship. Photo Credit: Serena Bettis

“Tech is love, tech is life,” says Avree Linne, one of the many members working behind the scenes on the fall play, Our Town. Our Town is showing in the PAC November 12-14, and students in the theatre department have stayed until late in the night for the past week and a half in preparation for it. Fossil students will see and know the actors on stage, but most of the details the students do not notice is the work put in by the lights, sound, set, costume and makeup crews. Linne is on the sound crew, but one of the people she looks up to the most is Laura Van Lieu.

Van Lieu, a sophomore, started with the Drama department her freshman year, and is now the lead of the lights crew. “Laura is my queen of theatre,” Greenely Slater states. As a freshman, she controlled a spotlight during Harvey, and ran the light board for Honk. To get the position of lead, Van Lieu went through an interview process with the directors of the show. By taking on this responsibility, she has really stepped up and shown people what she can do. Most of the tech crewmembers last year were seniors, and many this year have roles in the play, so underclassmen have many leadership positions.

Emma Williams, Abby Meyer, Emily Hevelone, Betsy Pruznick, and Nic Rhodes posing for their crew photo. Photo Credit: Serena Bettis

Her main job this year is to teach the rest of her crew, which consists of Max Fink, Emily Hevelone, Abby Meyer, Betsy Pruznick, and Nic Rhodes, how to control the lights for the play. The jobs consist of moving the spotlights to follow the actors, controlling the lights on the actual stage, and changing the colors of the lights. Betsy Pruznick is new to the theatre department this year, and she says, “Laura has taught me a lot about how to hang lights, use the light board, and change gels.” She can also tell that Laura really loves what she does.

Laura Van Lieu, the lead of the lights crew. Photo Credit: Serena Bettis

The lights crew this year is bigger than a typical crew for a smaller scale play is, and Van Lieu’s role during the play is damage control. “My job is to basically fix anything that goes wrong as fast as possible without anyone in the audience noticing,” Van Lieu says. Everyone on her crew works hard to get things right, and the members of tech crew would love to see support for all of their work on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. Tickets for Our Town are $8 for students, $10 for adults, and the play starts at 7 p.m. each night.

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About the Contributor

Serena Bettis, Editor-in-Chief

Serena Bettis, senior, is entering into her third year on the Etched in Stone staff as this year’s Editor-in-Chief. A four year journalism student, she has high hopes for Etched in Stone this school year, and wants to be able to guide the staff in achieving their goals as much as possible. While Bettis has become a much more outspoken person than she was when she started at Fossil Ridge High School, she still finds discomfort speaking in front of large groups of people (“large” being defined anywhere from 6 to 30), but is more than ready to grow in that aspect of leadership over the course of the year. Most of her journalistic goals for the year are not personal, but rather involve the entire program. She aims to further improve upon the look of the Etched in Stone website, which she spent countless hours on her junior year, enough for it to win awards before she graduates.

Aside from Etched in Stone, Bettis takes part in the school marching, jazz, and concert bands as a flute player, volunteers with Key Club, and is the Historian for the National Honor Society. She has also held a part-time job at TCBY for over a year, and now knows more than she needs to about the sugar content in frozen yogurt. In her spare time, which is often hard to come by, Bettis can be found reading for fun, lamenting about how none of the new Young Adult romance novels she used to love so much are good anymore, working on making the perfect French macaron, or binge watching her recent addiction, Game of Thrones. Music is a large part of her life, and her favorite genre is difficult to describe because she listens to many different bands. Some of her favorites include twenty one pilots, All Time Low, and Halsey, more alternative bands such as Issues and SWMRS, pop artists including Carly Rae Jepsen (“she’s so much more than “Call Me Maybe””), and Little Mix, and various songs by Spanish singers.

She is more than ready for graduation, and aspires to be attending college in Chicago by this time next year. Bettis knows that she wants to double major in journalism and foreign languages, with a potential minor in music, though she is undecided on what specific occupation she wants after college. Her best advice to someone who does not know what they are interested in is to simply join different activities and see what happens from there. “Eventually, sometime during sophomore year, journalism became the only class I wanted to go to, and even now I love it more than I used to love band, so that’s when it hit me that this was what I wanted to be involved in for most of my life,” she said. Another somewhat undecided goal of hers is to join the Peace Corps either during or after college, and she hopes that an experience in a different country with complete strangers might help her figure out what exactly she wants to do with her life.