It's a well-established fact that many kidsActing alumni go on to incredible and inspired careers; you're likely to find them all over the world doing fascinating and truly innovative things - and not just in theatre and film. While many of them are indeed thriving onstage, backstage, and on both sides of the camera, plenty of other former students lead exciting and dynamic lives as professors, political analysts, prosecuting attorneys; the list goes on- you name it, they're pretty much doing it. In the case of Cory Blaiss, PhD, who starred in (and co-wrote) several kidsActing musicals and comedies during the late  80s and early 90s, she's now a leading lady in the laboratory! Dr. Blaiss works at the Ernest Gallo Clinic & Research Center in San Francisco as a member of a major neuroscience research team that studies the brain, specifically in relation to associational memory. Needless to say, when we discovered this news at kidsActing HQ, we were mightily impressed. So we began developing a hypothesis about Cory and the path which led her from limelight to lab-coat: her two fields might actually have more in common than a first analysis by the untrained eye would suggest...So in an effort to test that hypothesis, we did a little research ourselves, catching up with Cory to learn more about her life journey and her scientific process. After all these years, Cory remains charming and down-to-earth; just like when she was a teenager, she exudes warmth and intelligence with her sparkling wit, easy laugh, and a friendly, articulate speaking voice that bespeaks an engaged and engaging mind. From her perspective, the connection between her time as an actress and her time as a scientist is very strong and multi-layered. "kidsActing was a great place to learn," she says, "because there was a really solid community there when I was a kid. Everyone was very collaborative, and we had to work together - that's a skill I have to use all the time in my work now. I remember the teachers and kids that ended up doing these classes with me. Everyone was amazing; it was such a lovely environment, such a great place to learn something new and to try something silly and different and unexpected, something that you would be stepping out of your comfort zone to try." She continues: "In fact, acting training relates directly to about one-third of my job, which entails communicating effectively, through writing or through oral presentations. Honestly, that communication is just as important as the actual research - I need to be able to engage people so that they're interested, and to explain really technical and boring things in such a way that they don't go to sleep. A background in acting has been extraordinarily helpful for that." 
When she was in high school at Westlake in the 1990s, Cory's acting skills, especially her impeccable comic abilities, led to a three-year internship at Austin's legendary Esther's Follies, a life-changing gig that was precipitated by a comedy improvisation class taught at kidsActing by Esther's performer Cindy Wood. That experience, with its break-neck pace and need for quick-response skills, was "definitely helpful; thinking on my feet like that has been fantastic training for communicating research. One key element in my field involves scientists trying to poke holes in other people's research; it's one of the only ways you can know if the findings are good enough to believe - so the work has to stand up to a lot of critical questioning. In preparing for my research, there's always a question period- sometimes friendly, sometimes not-so-friendly; being able to field those queries and to react with humor has been tremendously useful." Her time as writer with a select group of kidsActing students known as "Team Caffeine" (who, among other things, wrote the first draft of the script for the original summer musical Bugs in 1992) was also a key formative experience for Cory: "I have really good memories of that because of all the other kids in the group. In the first place, it was challenging - writing was something I got to learn and get better at; and it was a great, supportive, and collaborative environment with a lot of creative, eccentric people that I got to know well and become close friends with. I learned a lot, and I felt like I was contributing to something meaningful, working with that group of kids." She even sees "Team Caffeine" as one of the strongest links to her life doing neuroscience research now: "With that writing group, there were opportunities as a kid to be able to be somewhat independent, to really engage our creativity - even as kids, we could contribute something, and I think that established a precedent for me: that experience was a nice start to what I do now, where you really have to be self-motivated; you have to be proactive and decide to step out, to contribute something and to think creatively." Cory first started merging performance and science during her undergraduate years as a Gallatin Scholar at NYU. "Gallatin was a great fit for me because it let me do both science and arts. They didn't box you into any specific discipline; you could do science and art at the same time, and I was encouraged to find the overlap, and to think about how they were related and connected... I did an independent study with a filmmaker who wanted to do something connected to the brain, so we basically picked an area of neuroscience and made a short documentary about phantom limbs. For my senior thesis honors project, I had to do an oral defense colloquium, so I picked memory as my topic; I used a wide spectrum of books to try and connect different ideas, including stuff by Stanislavski and his acting training system, which employs emotional sense memory. It was neat to ask: 'Why, biologically, is this an effective technique for acting?' ...I even found some connections in neuroscience about why that might be the case." Cory's work in neuroscience since then has been notable, and has led to a variety of significant research projects in laboratories across the country, much (but not all) of it connected to memory; she even worked in a lab with scientists whose research inspired the central "memory-wiping" conceit in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. At the Gallo Center, she's currently applying some of her previous research studying genetic mutations in mice (in connection with autism) to a study of brain regions involved with certain types of associational memory. Many of her own fondest "associational memories" are from her youth at kidsActing. Cory starred in several musicals in her day, including playing Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls and Marty Maraschino in Grease. But her very first performance, and perhaps her favorite, was in the summer show How to Eat Like a Child and Survive Adolescence at the age of eight. "I have really good memories of that - I was so little, it was my first actual full-on play, and I remember being backstage and Dede giving us honey and lemon for our throats. It was exciting; I felt so 'adult' - I can remember thinking, 'I must really be a singer!' I also remember the set being built with an actual slide and swing-set on it - but it was a set design, so it was somehow very official and fun at the same time. And then, wow, I got to use the actual swing on that set - I really enjoyed being able to swing during my song.
It was fabulous!" |
