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Our studios were on 125th St. in a building that was rumored to have housed the Manhattan project. In my first semester, I TA'd for a woman teacher who had recruited me for the program. I've forgotten her name because she left mid-semester to cook for a middle-eastern tour of whirling dervishes (her Turkish-artist husband was also a Sufi), and travel with them. I took over teaching her figure modeling class---something I had never done-I had to wing it. In the two years I was in the program, in addition to the full class load, I worked for Alice Adams and Ursula von Rydingsvard, waitressed at the Cupping Room in Soho and at Rolling Stone Magazine ( I also bartended there, another skill I had not prior knowledge of), worked ( as a part time job) to organize a conference on new interactive technologies with Buckminster Fuller, and people from the MIT Media Lab, TA'd for William Tucker, and got certified for public school teaching at the Columbia School of Education, doing my student teaching at a junior high school in East Harlem. I was asked to build both reading and art skills by bringing the students to exhibitions all over New York, and creating educational experiences around what we saw. I also brought them to my studio, which they loved more than anything else, and we madly built sculptures together, long before insurance regulations would have prevented me from teaching kids how to use power tools in such an informal setting! I emulated the sculptors working across the borders of architecture and public space including Mary Miss, Siah Armajani, Alice Aycock, and Jackie Ferrara. Years later, a lot of my art practice takes place in public spaces-from parks, to train stations, to libraries. And I still have the rigorous voice of Bill Tucker in my head when I do critiques, and when I make my work.