The audition in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, went well. The role of Sister Mary Leo was hers. “Be sure to practice your point,” director Randy Mugleston ’91 told her. With the help of Utah State University’s theatre arts department, Mugleston had just opened the family friendly Playmill Theatre. Nunsense was the second of three musicals to be performed during the premiere summer season.

Dozens of USU students had auditioned, and Sister Leo was one of the lead roles. Sarah Swenson had been studying dance since elementary school but she had never danced in toe shoes. It was finals week at USU, the academic triathlon of the year, and rehearsals in Jackson would begin in four weeks. Sarah bought a pair of toe shoes, found a tutor and committed to her crash course. “I soon had bloody feet.”

She started out in broadcast journalism. It was a more practical major than theatre arts. But her acting resume, and preference for musicals, couldn’t be swept aside. She decided to major in both. If she’s lucky and makes an impression, perhaps she can get a job as an intern behind the scenes, and work her way up to news anchor. And who knows where the Playmill and USU experiences might lead when she returns for her sophomore year and performs regularly on campus. Repertory companies and summer theatre festivals abound in cities with major TV stations.

Sarah had many opportunities when she graduated from Logan High School. She was the valedictorian and musical comedy star. But it never occurred to her to go anywhere else but USU. Her maternal grandparents are graduates, and her father, the vice principal of Logan High School, earned all three of his degrees from the university. At football and basketball games and gymnastics meets her lyrical voice blended with the cheers of the Swenson family fan club, and the shaded walkways on campus provided physical and scenic relief during hot half-marathon training runs with her dad.

“The campus is more than concrete and buildings. It has big trees and gardens,” she says.

Sarah describes her freshman year as “the big awakening.” “In high school you’re with the same people you’ve always gone to school with. You’re in your own little world. I went from being everything in high school — student body president, involved in every club, top dog in my graduating class, and suddenly I was surrounded by people who were all these things and much more. Everybody had their own story. You could be whatever you wanted to be. You didn’t have to fit into a certain mold. People accepted you for who you are.”

A lecture in Michael Lyon’s political science class underscored the difference. He was talking about the modern voting behavior of Americans — the downward trend and rising disengagement. “I realized this is not just some textbook,” Sarah recalls. “This is pertinent to me. This is my country, my government he’s talking about and I am a citizen. In high school you just take the test and get it over with. You don’t think about these things.”

The babble of a dozen different languages can be heard on brisk walks between classes, and the travel bug has bit as hard as the acting bug she caught in high school. She wants to ascend the Great Wall of China and imagine 2,300 years of empirical ambition, scuba dive in Australia’s Barrier Reef, tour Europe and see Michelangelo’s Pieta at the Vatican.

Maybe, just maybe, if she gets a really big break, “I’ll become the next Oprah.”  
 —Jane Koerner ’07Att