Post by Matthew Carl Derry on Jul 8, 2012 13:12:46 GMT -5
[/font][/color][/b]-- MATTHEW CARL DERRY
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-- FULL NAME: Matthew Carl Derry
-- NICKNAMES: The first three fingers, curled over the thumb of the right hand, held in the front of the body and given a slight shake. A very basic ASL name sign.
-- AGE: Twenty-Four
-- BIRTH PLACE: Seattle, Washington
-- ORIENTATION: Heterosexual, but has experimented with homosexuality in his youth as a way to try to be different from his family, which can be stifling.
-- OCCUPATION: Struggling actor, working on the stage whenever possible and doing some directing when necessary to fill in the gaps. Willing to do almost anything to support himself.
-- PLAYED BY: Ryan Lane-- PERSONALITY
-- HARD WORKING: Whatever a person might think about actors, Matt is incredibly hard working, and he does his best at whatever he does. Most of the time he throws himself into his work with a great deal of passion and drive. He's motivated and dedicated and it's not uncommon to find him wandering around town with a script in his hand while he works on memorizing the entire thing, not just his own parts. If you were to look at the same script, you'll see that it's highlighted, underlined, and worn out where he's been working with it and determining his lines, his cues, and everything else that he needs to know to be successful.
-- PASSIONATELY MOTIVATED: The life that Matthew has chosen for himself isn't an easy one, and he knows it. He will always have a handicap in the acting world due to his deafness, but he tries to hold up actors like Marlee Matlin and remind himself that there is just as much opportunity for him to be successful as any Hearing actor. But nothing gets his blood pumping like acting on the stage, and he's not willing to sell himself short because of what the world considers to be his disability. He works hard because he is passionate.
-- CONFUSED: Matthew spent most of his early years coming to terms with his deafness and developing an understanding that it didn't have to mean that he had a handicap. Being Deaf isn't the end of the world, but the way that you react to it can make you a totally different person than the person you intended for yourself to be. He still struggles with what it means to be part of the Deaf community, and with his desire to be more like Hearing people. Since he's never had speech therapy, this would be impossible. Still, even at twenty-four, he's coming to grips with what it means to be Deaf, and he still hasn't quite made it that far.
-- LOVES: Acting, Computers, Horses, His Family, Drum Beats, Hats, Pleasure Riding, Blogging, Script Writing, Being Deaf
-- HATES: Computer Programmers, Pretentious People, Rude Hearing People, Dry Weather, Hot Weather, Snobby Behavior, Being Stared At, The Dark, Being Deaf
-- HISTORY
[/font][/color][/b][/center]Matt has the best family ever, as far as he's concerned. Sure, his father pushed him much too hard, and yes, his parents refused to allow him to attend speech therapy classes when he asked to take them, but he knows deep down that they only had his best interests at heart. He's happy, for the most part, with the way that his life has gone so far.
With two brothers and two sisters, Matthew is the middle sibling in a rather large family. He loves them all to death, though! Carmen is the oldest, and she's now twenty-seven years old with her own web-design business. She's very successful at what she does and she fits in just fine since hearing isn't really a requirement of her job (as she's deaf too). Morgan is the second child, at twenty-five years old, and he's Matt's Irish twin. He has his own handicaps as he's a hearing person growing up in a Deaf world. At the moment, Morgan is in a graduate program at Gallaudet studying history. He felt like he couldn't cut it in the Hearing world, so he stuck with what he knew, attending the University for the Deaf in Washington, DC (the same school from which Matthew graduated). Kasey is twenty, and Matt's Hearing younger sister. She's the only one of his siblings who absolutely escaped the Deaf community as soon as she could, attending a mainstream college, though learning to communicate well in English is an ongoing process and she sometimes struggles. The final sibling is Greg, who is seventeen and also Deaf. He'll be entering Gallaudet in the fall, having graduated home school six months ago.
Matt himself is a graduate of Gallaudet, where he studied computer programming (one of the reasons he hates programmers) and theatrical performance. He ultimately graduated with a masters degree in drama and a bachelors degree in computer programming. The latter was a backup plan that he's starting to think he's going to need to take, since he's not finding enough acting work to make ends meet. His parents are already helping to support him and his horse, and he's worried about making things get any worse than they already are. There's some tension with them, since they want him to have a more "normal" job, but he insists on showing them what Deaf kids from the city can really do.
-- SAMPLE
[/font][/color][/b][/center]Some trips were longer than others. That was one thing that Sonya had learned in the past five years of taking care of herself. She had come to wandering from one place to another, always finding somewhere to camp out. Some nights she slept in doorways, and others on park benches, but mostly she stuck to the woodlands and the wetlands, avoiding the city streets since there were so many dangers there. The woods made sense to her, and were places where she could find solace and food, without having to worry about stealing. Since she didn't give two titties about whether or not it was legal for her to hunt or trap during this season or that, she'd been quite successful. They teach us that women are not to learn to hunt or to trap, but I have learned. I have taught myself to build the bows and to make the snares, but I am best with a sling. I can bring down my prey, and make shelter and live in it comfortably. I do not need a man, and I certainly do not need white men. Oh, yes. The journey had been a long one, from home and Mama and her death at the end of the coldest December in thirty years. Sonya had counted moons since then. There had been seventy one. She would go on counting until the day that she died, a way of paying tribute to her ancestors, the ones who had given her the blonde hair and the strange eyes that were so foreign to their people.
Her parentage had been questioned, of course. Over, and over and over again. But the medicine men had been called in and had confirmed that they could see into her spirit, that she was a very unusual girl with unusual talents. That she was special, and that she would one day grow up to possess great medicine of her own. She wasn't sure about that and she never had been, but she had managed to survive these last seventy-one moons with all of her teeth, all of her hair, and with a good deal of meat on her bones. It was more than simply managing to catch enough food to eat, too. Indeed, her success as a hunter had less to do with her survival than her use of herbs and knowledge of the plants of the forests where she had lived.
The forests were good for everything, but the cities had their purpose too. If it was not for the city then I would not know of Cael, and his whereabouts. I would not know that my mother's first husband is on this island, or that he may be able to help me. I would not know that he might lead me to understand my mother and her death, my ancestry and the strangeness of my appearance. I would not be able to complete my training. Her mother had once made it very clear that it was only her step-father, the man her mother had once been married to, who could help her. Sonya was unsure of what it was she sought to get from him, but she knew that there was something. Some secret that he held, knowledge of her mother, of her father. And she had a brother as well. That much she knew. Mother abandoned him. But not me. I am special. I have her blood. He does not. The precise meaning of this was something Sonya didn't fully understand, but she would come to, in time.
And he will train me. Mother said that he was a great fighter, and that he and his brother train the boys of their family to fight. That it is their imperative. It is mine now too. I must learn. I must learn the things my mother and father wanted me to know. He will teach me. Or I will take from him what I want at the end of a knife or arrow. And she had gotten onto the island with her bow and a knife as well (though the knife was well hidden and she had no arrows). A spear and arrows could be made easily enough. She would make her demands, and her step-father would fall into line because she carried his blood too. Her father had been a Piper by his own blood and his own right, a third cousin down the line from her step father, Cael. She was related, however distantly, and she planned on demanding her birth right: the right of a warrior.
As Sonya walked down the street, carefully remembering the directions that the woman at the dock had given her, she thought about how lucky it was that she had gotten onto the island. She had heard of some incident through the newspapers, a bust in North Dakota near where she had once lived with her father and her mother. Her father was still there, training some of their boys to fight the way that she imagined that Cael did the boys of his part of the clan as well. The paper had pointed to some small group of Pipers living on an Island in the North Atlantic. A few questions later and one reluctant phone call had revealed that it was the Pipers she was seeking, and she had found herself rather unexpectedly landing on their shores.
Now the sixteen year-old let herself in through the front door of the house the number of which she had been given. It had been a long and exhausting walk and she was tired. The house was busy, and she knew that it was likely she would simply be lost in the crowd, so Sonya slipped in through the front door and wandered into the large living room, where she put her knapsack down on the ground, then lay on the settee, one hand still wrapped around the strap of her bag to make sure that nobody could take from her what was rightfully hers: those pitiful few belongings that had gone with her for seventy-one moons since the death of her mother.
-- OOC
[/font][/color][/b][/center]-- NAME OR ALIAS: Devin
-- AGE: Thirty... Something.
-- RP EXPERIENCE: Fifteen Years
-- THREE WORDS THAT DESCRIBE YOU: creative. sensitive. plotty.
-- HOW YOU FOUND US: Ad on Adrenalin Rush, which I did not join.
-- RULEPHRASE: paddy
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