Kirsten Vangsness
About.com has an interview with Kirsten Vangsness, and I thought it’d be a good time to look at it because last week’s episode was all about Garcia.
Q: Before you became an actress, you had several interesting jobs (substitute teacher, grant writer), did any of these positions help prepare you for a career in acting?
Kirsten: “I used to be a substitute teacher for quite some time, I was in a group home, and then sometimes I was a teacher for long periods of time. If they didn’t have a teacher for a really rough class, I would be the teacher who would come in and teach them. Someone once told me there are two kinds of teachers: The kind who can get the kids to do anything they want by sheer intimidation and then there’s the kind that can get them to do anything they want because you don’t know what that person is going to do. I was that second kind. I’d walk in the kids would be like, ‘She just came in and she’s wearing shoes with kitty cats on them, purple-striped nylons and a Sex Pistol t-shirt.’ I just pulled out an apple, a grapefruit, a pan, 12 books out of my purse, 14 kinds of lip-gloss and they didn’t know what to make of me. There’s an element of almost being like right before school when you’re going to see these kids, you’re setting yourself up to be eaten alive and chewed up and spit out. There was that element, that quickening, meeting all those people coming from different worlds and creating in like 15 minutes, a community.”
Q: I understand you have very unusual shopping tastes, can you tell us what your favorite items to buy are?
Kirsten: “I like clothes that make me happy! They don’t arrive to me like they’re supposed to. I’ll get something and say to myself, I know this is brand new, but I’m going to cut the neck off, I’m going to slice the side up and sew a different piece of fabric in there. When I was a child, my mother would give me and my sister like $15 apiece, put us into goodwill and tell us to go get our school clothes. If that meant you spent the whole $15 on a pimp daddy fake fur coat, that was your school clothes, which I did do one year. When I was in first grade, I got this fantastic fake fur coat that I wore every day, when it was 80 degrees. Right now, I’m on a crinoline kick, I have way more crinolines that any human being should have.”
To read the entire interview, go to about.com.
September 13th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I think Kirsten is fantastic in Criminal Minds, I look forward to the show and seeing her on it. I would love to see her in movies if I knew she was in any. She is a fantastic actress and a perfect example that you don’t have to be a skinny mini to be good at what you do and be admired