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ALUMNI PROFILES
We are always amazed at the work our alumni are doing in their professional lives and communities. In this section, alumni share their stories about life after graduating from FRA.
ASHNA DADLANI '16
University of Wisconsin-Madison '20, Client Services Team Associate, AlphaSights, New York City
I first came to Franklin Road Academy when I was four years old, and I was presented with so many great opportunities that helped shape me into the person I am today. My time at FRA was so rewarding, and I am thankful to all of the faculty and students who helped me grow and succeed. Since graduating in 2016, I have been at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I am about to finish my senior year. I am double majoring in International Studies — Global Security and Political Science with a minor in European Studies, topics I love because they open up so many opportunities for me and allow me to learn about current events taking place all over the world.
I realized my love of learning about these subjects during my time at FRA because of the wide range of classes that were offered. One class in particular, AP European History, was one of my favorite classes because it made me curious about learning more about the world. In college, I have been able to further my studies stateside as well as abroad. During the spring semester of my junior year, I traveled to Barcelona, Spain, where I tried a lot of new foods, practiced and refined my Spanish-speaking skills, and took part in many Spanish cultural events. I also took classes that are not offered in the U.S. — like a class dedicated to the urban planning of Barcelona — studying the
works of Antoni Gaudi, and visiting his architectural masterpieces. I was also able to study the Catalonian culture while watching the separationist movement take place right in front of me. Studying abroad also allowed me to travel around Europe and Morocco — experiences that were life-changing, and I am so grateful to have had this amazing opportunity.
The activities and clubs I partake in at UW-Madison were largely influenced by the opportunities given to me at FRA . For instance, because I was a student ambassador at FRA , I had the confidence and experience to apply for a tour guide position, which has been one of the most rewarding experiences at UW-Madison. I was able to easily transition from meeting prospective families and giving them tours of FRA to doing the same thing for prospective students in college. While my university’s campus is much larger, I would not have been comfortable doing this job if I hadn’t been exposed to it in high school. Another club I am still passionate about is Best Buddies. I was fortunate enough to be part of the group that brought in and integrated the Best Buddies chapter at FRA , and I wanted to continue this through college. At FRA , I served as the vice president for two years and helped organize fun and interactive events for all members of Best Buddies at school. This chapter was promotional, which allowed our students to connect with all the buddies across Middle Tennessee and spread the mission and values tied to this wonderful organization. Since Best Buddies was such a big part of my life at FRA , I wanted to continue working with them after I graduated. Thankfully, my university also had a Best Buddies chapter, so I was able to join and continue being a member. In my freshman year, I switched from a leadership role and became a peer buddy, which was something I had always wanted to do. Going to college, especially one far from home, was difficult at first, but having the consistency of Best Buddies helped me feel more at home in my new city.
Another great experience I was able to attain in college because of my experiences at FRA was becoming the membership vice president for my sorority on campus. FRA allowed me to become a leader at school, and I was able to use these skills in my organizations in college. This role required me to organize and run
spring recruitment while balancing my job and my classes. I was prepared to face all of these obstacles and be a strong leader because I learned how to balance schoolwork, sports, and being involved and leading multiple clubs while at FRA . Many of my college friends were not exposed to this and struggled early on while I was more prepared. Being prepared made my transition a lot easier, and I have FRA to thank for that.
Last summer, I was blessed to get an opportunity to work for Kohl’s Corporate, and all of the skills I learned in high school and college helped me prepare for this opportunity. I was a marketing intern for 10 weeks, and I was able to learn about how a Fortune 500 company functions and work with multiple marketing teams to create plans for the future. The best part about the internship was doing real work for the business and making a huge impact. The highlight of this experience was definitely working with six other interns to research, develop, and execute a new experience for the customers on the website. We were given full autonomy over this project, and we worked together for eight weeks to create a new function. We had to create it ourselves, back up our reasoning with research, and test it out to see if it was a project the customers would actually enjoy and if it would bring more revenue for the company. This was rewarding because now when people go onto the Kohl’s website, they will be able to see a feature I helped create.
All of these experiences allowed me to grow and eventually get a full-time job after graduating college. I am excited to work for a company called AlphaSights in New York City as an Associate for the Client Services Team. FRA and the UW-Madison gave me so many chances to prove myself and helped me develop skills that allowed me to achieve all of the goals I set. This is such an incredible experience, and I am excited to finish college strong and enter the workforce right away. I am excited to move to a brand new city and continue growing, but I will always remember who helped me get to where I am.
The friendships and connections I made at FRA are the ones I hold close to my heart. I was a student at FRA for 12 years, and through this school, I met some of my best friends and was mentored by some of the best faculty members. Some of my classmates I am still in contact with include Haylee Ferguson, Josh Schwaner, Drake Mitchell, Olivia Green, and Rob Funk, just to name a few. It is rewarding to have these lifelong friendships, especially those who I have been able to turn to during harder times. Whenever I come back home, I always try and make an effort to see my friends or visit the FRA campus. Going back to campus is always so fun and exciting. There are always new additions that make this place even more special, but it is always nice to see all the faculty who helped shape my life. My favorite spot on campus is definitely the bench outside the Seabury Family Conference Center. This bench is special because it is dedicated to my sister, a former student at FRA . This dedication meant a lot to my family and proves that FRA is a huge family.
The 12 years I spent at FRA were some of the best years of my life. It is such a great experience being able to learn and grow at the same school, and I know that none of my achievements would have been possible without this place. I was able to find my best friends, discover my passions, and grow into a strong woman who has the tools to be successful in the future. FRA gave me the foundation and knowledge to prosper, and I am forever thankful to this school and everyone in it.
BALLARD C. BOYD '00
Segment Director and Field Producer, CBS' The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
I grew up loving movies and stories. When I was in third grade, I even tried writing my own novel, but I didn’t really have that much of a grasp on storytelling yet. Soon I was re-enacting and videotaping sketches and routines from SNL and David Letterman at sleepovers with friends.
I joined FRA in seventh grade and was there through high school. I made my first “official” short film for my sophomore English class (instead of writing a paper on The Catcher in the Rye). It was terrible, but I had to start somewhere. I was active in the arts: I played trumpet in the band, sang in chorus, and acted in almost all the plays and musicals. I spent a fair amount of my afternoons and weekends making videos with friends. I made videos for multiple English classes and even a physics class. My early film projects were edited by hooking two VCRs together, playing one and hitting record and pause on the other to stitch the footage together.
During my time at FRA , I was lucky that so many teachers were open to my experimenting with videos for my projects. I’m still grateful for that. In my senior year, enough students had taken an interest in filmmaking that the school let us design our own screenwriting course for one of our class writing requirements! That same year, a short film I made on the side was selected as a finalist in the National Children’s
Film Festival and aired on HBO Family as part of a program of student made movies called 30 by 30: Kid Flicks.
After graduating from FRA , I attended Emerson College in Boston, where I graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Production. I wrote and directed films during college, but making the leap to move to Los Angeles or New York was super intimidating. Plus, even with training, I had no idea how I would get a job.
Emerson taught me the basic building blocks of movie making, but my craft still needed to be honed to be up to par with those being paid to do it. So I moved back to Franklin, Tennessee, and scooped ice cream at the Ben & Jerry’s on Main Street for almost a year. At the end of 2004, I got the opportunity to move to Boulder, Colorado, to work for a non-profit in their video production department. I leapt at the chance.
The non-profit video work wasn’t that challenging, but the silver lining of Boulder is that I started doing comedy on the side with a friend from college named Dave Burdick, who was a comedian, comedy writer, and journalist. Dave convinced the program council at the University of Colorado at Boulder to pay us to put on a new original comedy variety show every six weeks, featuring stand-up, sketches, sometimes a musical act, and original videos, which I was directing. Over the next couple of years, our show, “Secret Circus,” added a third Emerson comedian to our team, and I began to perform in the live sketches. Soon we had built a following.
After living in Colorado for three years, I knew I still wanted to make movies and that would necessitate making the jump to LA or NYC. I visited friends in both cities before eventually deciding that I felt relatively at home in NYC. I made the move to Harlem at the top of 2008 without a plan for a job.
Moving to New York was terrifying; I had friends but no job. It was up to me to make something happen. Even though friends welcomed me and helped me move in, the first night I had no air conditioning, my lofted bed took up pretty much the entirety of my 8’ x 12’ room, and it was so hot that I had to resort to sleeping on the floor beneath my bed with a fan just to sleep through the night. Luckily, the terror and worry I had made a terrible mistake only lasted four days.
It took me about a year and a half to figure out how to consistently pay my bills, and I did a lot of odd jobs, including catering, data entry, hosting trivia-based scavenger hunts, and making yoga videos for people on Craigslist. But despite this, I continued to use almost all of my free time to make videos.
My friend and roommate at the time, Dave, introduced me to a comedy troupe at Pace University started by one of his best friends from middle school. The group was just starting to make a name for itself in the early days of YouTube with weekly sketches online. I offered to direct their videos (which meant I would shoot and edit their videos for free), and they agreed. It ended up being one of the best situations I could’ve imagined. Within that first year and a half, we made about 40 videos in all manner of styles (music videos, commercial parodies, character pieces, list videos, etc.), and I now realize, that early time just making a TON of videos with a team of comedy writers and performers was a tremendously formative time for me because it got me in regular practice honing my craft.
As someone who loved all kinds of movies and directors, such a big part of my time with this troupe was attempting to lampoon or rip-off other people’s styles, in order to best sell parodies. And making a new video every week got me less protective about my work. If I messed up something and it wasn’t perfect, instead of beating myself up, I’d just say “What can I do differently next time because we’re shooting again on Saturday.” Iterating over and over and getting regular feedback from audiences radically transformed my skills. Slowly, I even began to develop techniques and tricks to make our productions look like they cost more money than they took to make.
The whole time I was continuing to dive further into the comedy scene, going to improv and stand-up shows, meeting other comedians, actors, writers, and performers and starting to build a network of other like-minded friends. When we did work that we were proud of, we’d share it with each other. Then, friends of friends started to ask if I would help them with some of their videos. I was more than happy to do it, knowing it could help build my portfolio. Through these projects, I got the opportunity to direct, first, a series of short commercials for Mountain Dew to accompany a web series; and second, a series of sponsored sketches with Captain Morgan for a sports blog leading up to the Super Bowl. I did both for incredibly little money, going so far as to actually shoot all of the Mountain Dew commercials (with the bottles moving like puppets) in front of tiny sets built in my dining room, and recruiting my roommate to voice some of the characters with me. I barely broke even, but it turned out that making comedy on the internet translated well to commercials.
Over the next few years, I developed relationships with several ad agencies to take on writing as well as directing spots for companies like Wild Turkey, DICK’s Sporting Goods, 3M, Bounce, Longhorn Steakhouse, and Ace Bandages.
In the middle of that, I helped a friend who worked at Google make a comedy sketch with some of his department colleagues for a company contest. I didn’t expect much to come of it, and the worst case scenario was that I could include Google as a company that I had “worked with.” The video didn’t win the contest, but it did end up getting passed around Google, and within a couple of weeks, it had been viewed by 30 percent of the entire company staff worldwide! It even got me an interview and led to me working for Google for two years, writing and directing commercials in-house for Google products.
While commercial work was paying the bills, I used a portion of that income to subsidize other creative projects that I might not otherwise have been able to raise money for: a web series featuring Jim Belushi, a few comedy sketches that aired on Comedy Central & Logo, and a handful of music videos, both comedic and not. A surprising/not surprising fact: there isn’t a lot of money out there for music videos since everyone started streaming music, but they can still be fun ways to visually experiment if you can make them cheaply! In 2014, my music video “Runaway” for the Middle Tennessee-based band Self made it on Rolling Stone’s “Top 20 Most Awesome Music Videos of 2014” list as number 10 for the year.
Then in 2015, I had brunch with a couple of friends, one of whom was a production assistant at The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Stephen Colbert had ended that show a few months earlier to take over The Late Show from David Letterman, and the new show was just starting to gear up and hire folks.
As I said, I was a huge Letterman fan in middle school, and he was a big part of my early comedy influences. In college, I had become a huge fan of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert while watching them just about every night with friends in our dorm.
I had met this particular friend at an Emerson College alumni mixer a few years before. The morning of our brunch, she shared she was moving over with Colbert’s new show on CBS and let me know the staff was looking to hire a “digital producer” and encouraged me to apply. The job wasn’t clearly defined, but I felt I didn’t have anything to lose by applying! I sent over a smattering of different samples of my work. The interview went well, and I was hired as one of three digital producers on their digital and social media team for the new show.
I started at The Late Show in July 2015, two months
before the show premiered in September. Immediately I got to direct Stephen in promos for the internet because he was just itching to get back in front of a camera leading up to the show’s launch. For the first two seasons of the show, I worked as a digital producer, shooting, directing, and editing over 140 videos (being promoted all over the internet) just in the first six months of the show. Even though these videos were initially supposed to only be used as promotional material for the web, our sketches started to catch the eye of Stephen and our head writers, who begin updrafting some of them onto the TV show itself.
Over the first two seasons of the show, more and more “digital” videos started being put on air, to the extent that by the end of season two, I had almost 50 segments that had aired on TV. So in season three, I moved to the field department, where I now direct full time for broadcast.
The field department covers all of the comedy pieces that don’t happen in front of a live studio audience, including traditional “field pieces” that are unscripted comedy bits filmed on-location (like “Stephen Visits NASA” or any Daily Show segment with a correspondent). These are almost like comedy documentaries. You go into the field with a plan, structure, and some jokes, and then improvise based on what arises, and the piece is largely constructed and “written” in the edit. Additionally, we produce the “scripted pieces” that include written sketches done with celebrities, commercial and movie parodies, and music videos (like most of SNL’s “Digital Shorts”).
Because we’re an hour-long nightly comedy talk show on five days a week, we always have a need for field pieces. Sometimes we have a good amount of lead time
to produce, shoot, and edit a segment, so we could take several days or a week to put together an elaborate and involved segment. Other times we’re responding to something that just happened that day in the news, and for those situations, we sometimes have to shoot a full commercial parody in a matter of hours, then tape it in front of a live audience that afternoon at 5:30 p.m. in order to air it at 11:35 p.m. that night.
We’re now in our fifth season and currently the #1 rated late night show in America. I’ve directed almost 100 segments for the show, and in 2018, I joined the Director’s Guild of America. I’ve gotten to direct pieces not only with Stephen, but with Samuel L. Jackson, Jeff Goldblum, Emma Thompson, Tony Shalhoub, Bryan Cranston, Keegan Michael-Key, Bob Odenkirk, Whoopi Goldberg, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and a whole mess of others.
I still mostly shoot and edit my own sketches, so how I work is incredibly reminiscent of what I used to do in the afternoons in high school: grab a camera and make funny videos with friends. Now, I just have more people to help, scripts from some of the funniest writers in the industry, and access to famous people to work with. But even now, with all these resources, the speed at which we work still necessitates that I use the tricks I’ve learned over the years to make our sketches look like they had more time and resources than they do. The fact that they air on CBS is still bonkers to me!
Almost all of the opportunities I’ve gotten have been built through connections with people and relationships that I’ve developed over the years combined with the dedication to continually make more and more work, not just to get better at my craft, but because it’s essential and always exciting to do — whether it’s crafting an elaborate one-of-a-kind paper pop-up book for a commercial for Google, or directing a sketch about time travel in someone’s basement in Colorado.
My time in Colorado also led me to meet my wife Kelsey, who is an educator and writer. We live in Queens in New York City about a 45-minute commute from my office in Manhattan.
Even now, a little bit of our free time is reserved for personal projects because we’re always looking to stretch ourselves or scratch our creative itch a little bit more. In addition to her day job as a movement specialist at a nursery school in Manhattan and a private practice in educational kinesiology, Kelsey teaches several online workshops throughout the year and is working on a new book. As for me, the last couple years I have been writing a script for a feature film to direct. I attached a producer to the film this past July, and we just began pitching the project to production companies with hopes to go into production this spring in New York.
Going from watching David Letterman as a kid to standing in the wings of that same theatre and watching Stephen and a live audience reacting to things that I directed, is still surreal and very, very cool.
MORE THAN OUR STORY – WE ARE INFINITE, SPIRITS. BE KIND. DO YOUR BEST.
DANE CARDER '81
Artist & Owner, Dane Carder Studio, 438 Houston St. #262 danecarder.com
My path has not necessarily been an easy one. Life is unpredictable. Luckily through all peaks and valleys, storms, and surprises, there is a solid rock upon which we can stand... faith.
In the middle of my high school experience at Franklin Road Academy, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. This traumatic event obliterated
all faith and belief within me, and I roamed recklessly through the rest of high school using humor and rebellion as a means of surviving. Since graduating 30 years ago, I have experienced many dark days, and I have basked in the radiance of recovery. My story is as regular and dramatic as the four seasons – life, death, and rebirth. This, I believe, is the essence of the human condition, and I am grateful to have embraced the entire spectrum.
After graduating from FRA , I was a bit of a wanderer, but I landed back in Nashville, where I enrolled at Watkins College of Art to take a graphic design class and Nashville Tech, where I followed my interest in photography – a craft I still use today. I also started painting again as well as writing a lot of bad, sad poetry. This was the beginning of my steady lifelong pursuit of authentic expression through the arts.
I remember the exact moment in the fall of 1994, in the midst of working on a painting, when I realized that I was destined to be a painter…an artist. There was magic happening on the canvas in front of me; beauty was being born out of nothing. And, in retrospect, I now see that it was actually being born out of everything. All of the sadness and all of the joy, the hurt and anger, and the love, it was all available to me as I painted. The numbness of my sadness and depression from my father’s traumatic death was tempered with this practice, so I leaned into it as often as possible – and I still do.
Poetry and painting were always my companions as I navigated through the darkest times. While attending MTSU in the summer 1996, I studied in Italy for six weeks. Witnessing the pinnacle of artistic achievement in the works of Michelangelo and many other Renaissance masters, a grand inspiration buzzed inside of me. In 1999, I left college for the final time, deciding to help my brother build his house, which I eventually painted. This led to me starting a painting business that I operated for 12 years.
In May 2000, several events led to my commitment to healing the deep wounds in order to lead a fuller life. I suffered what I was sure an aneurysm or something similar and was struck down by the worst pain I had ever felt. Early tests from doctors weren’t clear, but after several days of suffering, it was determined that I had contracted Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Physically and emotionally spent, I decided to seek help in therapy. During this time, I reflected on my dad’s struggles, and I didn’t want to follow his difficult path. The apparent option was to live under the influence of a higher power; it was time to surrender. All of the blessings that have come since then are certainly of divine nature.
I rented my first art studio and began to get more serious about pursuing a career as an artist. As I ran my interior painting business, I always allowed for studio time, and I discovered that, if I was away too long from the Muse, grumpiness would find me! It became somewhat of an obsession. Having surrendered my tired, destructive vices, I latched on to a habit that served a greater purpose. My desire was (and is) to create beautiful objects that add something positive and of value to the world. From early on in my quest to be an artist, I feared that my financial security would be elusive. The “starving artist” scenario seemed too common to be a myth, and my dream of being a husband and father seemed unlikely without a steady income. I
remained determined to find a way to make both dreams a reality.
For about a year, I shared a studio with a more seasoned painter, who served as a mentor as I stumbled into my art career. His willingness to converse on a diverse range of topics helped fill the void that my departure from college had created. Experience in the art world cannot be taught in school, and I found this hands-on approach to fit my learning style. I began showing work in restaurants, as I didn’t yet feel ready for art galleries. Patience and faith allowed me to progress at a natural pace, and before too long, I found my way to showing paintings at Cumberland Gallery, one of Nashville’s premier galleries.
Meanwhile, between 2003 and 2007, I fell easily in love with a friend of my younger sister, we married, and had two daughters. This experience put all of life into perspective, and it provided another essential education. The greatest life challenges and the most beautiful rewards seemed to both spring like geysers from this new family.
Having a spouse and children, for me, is like going to graduate school on how to be a fully realized, healthy human being. This, I believe, is the purpose of our journey here on Earth. I am so grateful for my teachers, Danielle, Violet, and Tweel, and for the opportunity to learn and grow in a loving environment.
I have had the great fortune of selling enough paintings over the years to keep me consistently invested in pursuing this passion. Though money has never been the goal, nor has it equated to much of a “salary,” I have slowly adapted my mindset to understand what “enough” means. In dissecting depression to understand and heal it, I came face to face with shattered self esteem and insecurity (an epidemic of sorts). Even after success in exhibiting art in galleries and museums, and being featured in publications such as Nashville Arts Magazine and Garden & Gun, I still often felt neglected and rejected. This sort of feeling has been a test for me… am I going to quit, or am I going to persist?
Around 2008, I sought to be of service to the local art scene through exhibiting other artists in my studio/ gallery, threesquared. This project offered an alternative space for art shows that was more DIY, and less highbrow contemporary gallery. I found great joy in being of service to artists and the community in creating an environment where art was shared and conversations and relationships blossomed. With the help of a co-curator, I carried on threesquared for about five years.
In 2013, when I had emotionally come to the end of my interior painting career, a simple one line email to a Memphis art gallery owner altered my path for four years. I parlayed my studio/gallery experience into a gallery director job and opened David Lusk Gallery Nashville in the winter of 2014. That experience delivered a cycle of highs and lows, as I soared by sharing so much beautiful art with visitors but sank as I found the commercial aspect of the gallery business disheartening. Nashville has long struggled to be an “art collecting” town, and this reality hit hard as I worked tirelessly over three years to gain traction in sales for the gallery. As grateful as I was to have had the opportunity to be the director of the gallery, I remain more grateful that I was “let go” from that job. I had hit “mid-life” at that time, and I suddenly found myself with a wide open road before me — an open door to intentional reflection and dreaming. Fortunately, this involved digging up some of the deepest roots of my depression, and coming to an understanding that “I am enough,” regardless of all external factors. I no longer needed to prop up my esteem with “success” in the art world or professional and financial realm, and I could finally be at peace with being who I am, as I am.
For about 13 years, much of my artwork has referenced Civil War photographs, as I have sought to communicate the depth and glory of what it means to be human. My story of loss, grief, and recovery related with that of the Civil War — unimaginable tragedy and rehabilitation experienced at a personal and a national level. Carl Rogers said, “What is most personal is most universal.” With my paintings, I am unwrapping the construct of “us vs. them” and seeking to illustrate that there really is no such people as “them.” Like the dynamic of the Civil War, our disagreements and fighting and warring are “brother against brother.” My paintings are meant to be lessons/expressions in love.
Constantly, our choice is either to fight (our ego separating from others) or to love (accepting that we are, in essence, the same). When I began the series, I envisioned a 30-year arc of paintings, where the images began as direct reproductions of the photographs, and slowly deconstructed into complete abstraction. At this point, I feel that I am halfway through this monumental work. Along the way, I have fabricated artistic projects for myself to expand the scope of my output.
In 2011, I set out to take one photographic portrait every day for a year… documenting one random encounter each day with someone who crossed my path. Those can be found at www.us365portraits.blogspot.com. For poetry’s sake, I wrote one poem every day for the year in 2005. In 2019, I wrote one blog post every day, expounding on some bit of minutiae (linked through my website). I am fascinated and inspired by creative habits such as these, or any such endeavor that works to elevate/expand the life experience. My studio practice is consistent, and I am often working toward an exhibit or producing a thematic series. In the last two years, I have returned to making purely abstract paintings alongside the historic images. I recently had a show at Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, and in March I was included in an exhibit at Tew Gallery in Atlanta. I work out of Dane Carder Studio in Houston Station, and the studio is open to the public for visits by appointment or drop-in (call first).
JIM’S STEAK & SPAGHETTI / FACEBOOK
Currently, another project I am focused on is Jim’s Spaghetti Sauce. Opened in 1938 by my grandfather, Jim’s Steak & Spaghetti House in Huntington, West Virginia, is a classic American diner with an excellent spaghetti sauce. Just last year, it received a prestigious America’s Classic Award from the James Beard Foundation. My mom (Jimmie), who worked in the FRA cafeteria for nine years, my brother Shawn (’84), and I have teamed up to produce and sell the “small batch” sauce in Nashville. It is sold frozen, direct to consumer, and is a classic Italian Bolognese. I feel tremendous gratitude and joy in being of service in helping families solve the problem, “what’s for dinner?”
Visit www.jimsspaghettisauce.com for more details.
When I am not engaged in art or spaghetti sauce, I can often be found on the soccer sideline, watching my daughters play. My family is certainly the source of my greatest joy. My wife, Danielle, is a pediatric occupational therapist, and she runs Pediatric Therapies in Cool Springs. Her patience, love, compassion, and generosity have helped countless families navigate raising children with special needs. I’m a nature lover, a regular visitor to Radnor Lake, and if hiking isn’t fast enough, I turn to running. I have completed 12 half marathons, and just last year, at 46, ran a personal best 1:40:08. I remain committed to “recovery,” and that has lent itself to always seeking ways to refine and expand the experience of being human, striving to obtain the most consistent connection with God/love.
Through years of depression, and the various twists and turns of the journey, I kept a faith that knew that all would be well. A couple of my best friends from FRA have been beside me all along. Those relationships operated like life jackets when I barely kept my head above water. Now, we regularly celebrate together as we share life events of all sorts. Coach Tucker’s influence on my life cannot be minimized. As a coach and teacher, not only did he instruct me on the football field and in the art room, but he showed me by example how to be a “good man.” I am blessed to have had his presence in my life. I am grateful for my 13 years at FRA , as I learned the value of friendship, truth, integrity, and faith, tools that will surely sustain anyone through anything.
