college Archives - StoryHook

DeWayne Taylor

By Asha Timperley

If DeWayne Taylor has it his way, he’ll be the next Ryan Seacrest.

Sure, maybe that’s asking a lot, but DeWayne is pretty convinced he can get there. He’s an optimist and a go-getter. He’s not one to back down from a challenge, and seems to approach nearly every situation with a smile.

That’s just who DeWayne is, but how he became that way… well, that’s a story.

DeWayne grew up in St. Louis, where he was surrounded by a family of entrepreneurs and small business owners. He saw his mom, aunts and uncles work hard at jobs they were passionate about and they encouraged him to find his own passion in life.

At an early age, DeWayne discovered his love of being in front of a crowd. He felt at ease around large groups of people and found ways to connect with others even when he was an outsider.

During high school, his mom’s job uprooted his family from St. Louis and moved them to Lincoln. It was a big transition, but one that he says helped his story come to life.

He jumped into all kinds of activities in high school to get involved and make new friends. Lincoln felt so much safer than St. Louis, and DeWayne said he loved how he could walk to school and be outside whenever he wanted without having to worry about his safety. It was freeing, and just what he needed to be himself.

DeWayne quickly found that speech became a fun extracurricular that sparked his passion. He loved working with others, presenting on a topic that interested him and performing in front of the judges. He didn’t just like it, he was good at it too. He competed locally and nationally with his high school team and was recruited to join the speech team at UNL.

But speech wasn’t the only passion of DeWayne’s in high school, there was also beatboxing.

Toward the end of his freshman year, DeWayne got bored during track and started transferring the rhythms running through his head to his mouth. A few of his friends started to notice what he was doing and really liked it, but DeWayne just brushed it off.

In his spare time he watched videos on how to beatbox and practiced in front of a small group of his friends. It wasn’t his main focus, just a side hobby that a few people knew about.

During his senior year a few of his friends made a deal with DeWayne, they said if he was crowned prom king he’d have to beatbox at the prom. DeWayne just laughed about the challenge because he thought there was no way he’d be prom king, but as luck would have it, he was crowned king and then handed the microphone.

DeWayne was super nervous. He was on the spot and started to question himself. What if they thought he was weird, what if they thought his beatboxing was dumb?

But the reaction he got was the opposite of everything he feared – they loved his beatboxing and couldn’t believe he’d been keeping his talent hidden.

Before long, DeWayne was performing at birthday parties, elementary schools and even dive bars. His typical event lineup included him talking about the origins of beatboxing, its multicultural history and then performing.

When he attended UNL he performed at Big Red Welcome to kick off the school year and has been performing around Lincoln ever since. He’s hosted events and performed for various companies including Ted X, RedBull, Blue Cross Blue Shield, The College World Series and Verizon Wireless. Each experience taught him something new about himself and the career path he was on. He started to see that being in front of a crowd was his way to connect with others, get people excited and be a part of the community. It connected his speech skills and beatboxing into a dream that just felt right.

It’s hard to describe, he said, but he just feels like himself when it’s his job to excite a crowd of people. It’s a challenge, but one that he loves and something that brings out a side of him that he’s proud to show off.

But it’s also a dream that a lot of people often make light of. ‘Being a TV, radio or event host? That’s not a career!’ they often say.

It’s definitely been a challenge. Juggling his college classes and his paying gigs sometimes means that he has to skip classes to perform. It’s money he needs to pay for school and experience that’s important for his future, but it also means it’ll take him longer than the average student to complete school.

This past spring DeWayne lived in LA for a few months while he participated in a hosting school. It was a big risk to take a semester off and an even bigger risk to put himself out there in front of industry professionals. He was challenged and pushed to understand his strengths and weaknesses, preparing him for whatever is next in his story.

DeWayne likes to challenge himself. To do more, dream bigger, learn more and try as hard as he can to make himself better. He doesn’t see his story as something extraordinary, he actually said he feels like a pretty boring guy. But he has drive and direction and he’s anxious to see where his story will take him next.

“I see my life and I know where I want to go,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what happens – it does, but it doesn’t – I know where I’m going and I’ll get there.”

August 16, 2017

Love6

Becky Boesen

By Asha Timperley

Becky Boesen was teased as a kid.

It wasn’t because she had braces or glasses – she was teased because of her vocabulary.

At the age of 7, Becky described jelly sandals as “superficial” and used all sorts of big words that her peers either didn’t understand or had never heard.

When Becky thinks back to this fact, it makes her laugh, even though at the time all she wanted to do was fit in. But that’s the beauty of her story, she said, and in many ways she’s still that goofy 7-year-old with a big vocabulary and even bigger dreams.

Becky grew up in a western Nebraska home where they watched the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet on family movie night and argued about politics for the fun of it. Her parents were big on letting Becky draw her own conclusions and defend her opinions. This kind of environment made Becky’s creatively-geared mind explode with possibilities, but it also set her apart from the other kids.

When she wasn’t in school, she was either writing or working at the restaurant that her mom managed. As a 9-year-old, Becky said she learned a lot about human nature while she dipped onion rings and cleared tables.

She’d listen to couples fight, friends catch up and families wrangle their kids.

“That part of the country isn’t necessarily diverse, but the stories are,” she said. “It was like I was watching a movie or a play, and soon I started to think about the people I encountered as characters.”

In junior high and high school, Becky’s family moved from Nebraska to the Ozarks and then back to Nebraska. As her parents dug into their respective jobs, Becky was left with a lot of alone time. She found that writing became the way she tried to understand her new home, school and life.

She would write anything from poems and lyrics to fictional stories to help express herself. It was a way she could get out her teenage angst without having to edit or explain herself to others.

It was during high school that Becky realized her love of language, writing and stories were pointing her toward theatre. She had a teacher who noticed her talents and encouraged her to pursue acting in college, but the thought of making a hobby into a career seemed silly and a little scary.

Becky always figured she’d be a lawyer or politician, so the thought of something so different was overwhelming. Plus, she wasn’t sure how her parents would take the news. While they had never discouraged her creativity, majoring in theatre didn’t fit their idea of a viable career path.

As graduation got closer, the conversations about college grew more intense and involved a lot of door slamming and tears on Becky’s part. The conversation finally ended with her parents giving their blessing for her to pursue theatre and she decided to attend UNL.

During her first semester, Becky quickly found her “tribe.” She loved the fact that there were other word nerds and theatre geeks out there, and she suddenly didn’t feel so alone. The next four years of her life were full of learning and exploration. She got hooked on play writing and always seemed to be working on a new project or trying to figure out how to get her latest work produced.

But no sooner had she jumped in to her degree that her time at UNL came to an end. Becky quickly realized that post-college life didn’t feel as safe as she expected, and she began questioning her work. The pressure of making the ‘right’ decisions led her back to a small town in Nebraska where she stopped writing and eventually settled down and started a family.

She had a good life and was thankful for her family, but things felt off. Becky struggled with depression and after a few years she realized she needed to move back to Lincoln and pursue her passions.

Since returning to Lincoln, Becky’s story has been a roller coaster of jobs, emotions, relationships and goals. She’s experienced loss up close, she’s come to understand the value of family and to appreciate her community.

At the age of 35, Becky said she finally understood how to connect her purpose and passion in a way that was meaningful. She began to write and produce plays with themes related to poverty, family and loss. She began to see her writing as more than just her way to breathe, but as a way to say something, give back and create dialogue in the community.

These days, Becky vacillates between writing, producing and working out the logistics for her business, being the executive director for the Flatwater Shakespeare Company and cultivating relationships with other creatives. She works a lot of long hours and usually doesn’t sleep more than 5 hours a night – mostly because her brain is buzzing with new ideas.

And yet, this chaotic schedule doesn’t seem to bother Becky. It’s what makes her feel alive, what gives life to the rest of her world and what really saved her life. Theatre was her cure for loneliness, and it’s become a way that she can reach back into her community and understand her own story.

The theatre is her safe place. Not because it’s where she feels comfortable, but because it’s where she feels most vulnerable. It’s where she can express her truest self, the part of her self she had a hard time tapping into, but the person she knows she is made to be and the story she is meant to live out.

July 11, 2017

Love7