Kent State University

Alice Ripley is an American actor, singer, songwriter, and mixed media artist known for her various roles on Broadway in musicals, including the... Pulitzer Prize winning Next to Normal and Side Show. She has also written and produced albums with her band, RIPLEY. RIPLEY's new single and video, "Beautiful Eyes", has just been released. Ripley attended DePauw University, majoring in Vocal Performance. She then transferred to Kent State University and received a BFA in Musical Theatre. While at DePauw University and Kent State University, Ripley performed in numerous stage productions. Her first paid acting job was summer stock at the Red Barn Theatre in Frankfort, IN. Following college, she was active in community theatre in San Diego, CA, and subsequently received her Actor's Equity card at the La Jolla Playhouse through a production of Silent Edward, a musical written by Des McAnuff, who was Artistic Director of the La Jolla Playhouse at the time and who would later direct Ripley in her Broadway debut, The Who's Tommy.
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Michael John Douglas , better known by the stage name Michael Keaton, is an American actor known for his early comedic roles, most notably his... performance as the title character of Tim Burton's Beetlejuice . Keaton is also famous for his dramatic portrayal of Bruce Wayne/Batman in Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns . He has since appeared in various other films, including Pixar's Cars and Toy Story 3 . Keaton, the youngest of seven children, was born in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, and lived in Robinson Township, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. His father, George A. Douglas, worked as a civil engineer and surveyor, and his mother, Leona Elizabeth , a homemaker, came from a Scots-Irish community in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. Keaton was raised in a large Catholic family and attended Montour High School in Pennsylvania. He studied speech for two years at Kent State before dropping out and moving to Pittsburgh. An unsuccessful attempt at comedy led Keaton to working as a TV cameraman at public television station WQED in Pittsburgh.
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David Sedaris is a Grammy Award-nominated American humorist, comedian, bestselling author, and radio contributor. Sedaris has been described as 'the... rock star of writers'. He was first publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "SantaLand Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. His next five subsequent essay collections, Naked , Holidays on Ice , Me Talk Pretty One Day , Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim , and When You Are Engulfed in Flames , have become New York Times Best Sellers. In 2010, he released another collection of stories Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary. As of 2008, his books have collectively sold seven million copies. Much of Sedaris's humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and often concerns his family life, his middle class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, Greek heritage, various jobs, education, drug use, and his life in France, and most recently in London and the South Downs.
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Stephen Reeder Donaldson is an American fantasy, science fiction and mystery novelist, most famous for The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, his... ten-novel fantasy series. His work is characterized by psychological complexity, conceptual abstractness, moral bleakness, and the use of an arcane vocabulary, and has attracted critical praise for its "imagination, vivid characterizations, and fast pace." He earned his bachelor's degree from The College of Wooster and a Master's degree from Kent State University. He currently resides in New Mexico. In the United Kingdom he is usually called "Stephen Donaldson" . Donaldson was attending Kent State University as a graduate student at the time of the Kent State massacre on May 4, 1970. Though he was not on campus at the time of the shootings, his apartment was one and a half blocks away, and he was forced to live under martial law for three days afterwards. Donaldson does not like to discuss the incident, as he finds the memories disturbing. Donaldson is a fan of opera, and has said that he "love[s] that direct expression of passionate emotion in beautiful sound".
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