Jason Winston George, SCT '96

They had us in class from eight in the morning to five in the evening, rehearsals from six to ten, and then on Saturdays rehearsals from ten to six, and Sunday you slept all day.

Donna Snow put us through the most rigorous vocal warm up program; it opened up the voice. You know, I think honestly my voice was like an octave higher before I came to graduate school and she dropped it down to the basement, gave me the ability to control it.

Pasen Burt was teaching stage combat at the time and we would… so we’d be sweating there. Kathy Garinella, teaching dance. And so, literally, like 70 percent of my day was spent sweating. A show called Home, it was written by Sam Martin Williams, and I got to be the lead of that show; it was an all-black cast and it was me, and mostly undergraduates, who were spectacular. Literally, at the point when they throw him in jail and are stripping him of everything he’s ever had, everything his family has managed to build, we literally strip me… and so there’s literally a moment… we’re in the black box theater, so a couple of hundred folks and I’m about seven or nine feet from the first row… and I’m naked. And the funny part of it was, that show that I mentioned, Home, really was a turning point for me in my career and what I believed I was capable of as an actor.

First semester of my last year, my third year with the MFA program, I did a contest at a mall, at King of Prussia Mall. Aaron Spelling was looking for someone to be on his new daytime soap opera. And so, when I went out and auditioned, my partner dropped a line and I just… I was so prepared for anything at that point because of what I’ve been doing at Temple that I was in my mind bulletproof, and it paid off because I actually got the job.

I’m still tight with Brian McCarthy, who was my roommate while I was at Temple and we’re actually working on some projects together that we’re trying to get produced, a documentary as well as a couple of film projects. Brian is definitely my brother from another mother, so we ended up becoming roommates; we lived on 17 th and South for the last two years of the program. My now wife, then girlfriend, would come out and live during the summers. When I moved out, Sarah Watland moved in, who was an undergrad at Temple and she is now Brian’s wife. They’re aunt and uncle to our kids and you know, there’s still a lot of love and fond memories of Philadelphia and Temple just because so much of the family that we’ve created in Los Angeles started up in Philadelphia at Temple.