This week’s Campus Celebrity is a collegiette whose voice you may have heard floating towards you while walking past the CFRC! Felicia Latour is heavily involved in many extracurricular activities, is a TA, and even hosts her own radio show on CFRC, but when asked about all these roles and which one she considers to be her title, Felicia replied “Student,” because she said, “I feel like I am a student in life! I just happen to do those three things.” So here’s Felicia, a bright and beautiful collegiette that you’re bound to be keen on!
Name: Felicia Latour
Title: Student
Year / Studying: 4th year, Drama Major/English Minor
Tell us about yourself! Where are you from? How many siblings do you have?
I come from a really lovely family. I’ve been very lucky. I love my parents. They actually met here in Kingston at Stages. My mom went to Queens and my dad went to RMC and they met here one fun night in the ‘80s and actually, my dad was my age when they got married. So he was twenty-one and since he was in the Air Force, they [my parents] moved around a lot, had me in Nova Scotia in ’92, and then moved to Kingston when I was a one-year-old and had my twin sisters, born in ’94, and they were beautiful ginger babies. So my parents had their work cut out for them, because they had three kids under 22 months. But, yeah that’s my immediate family and they are all my best friends. I love them, all four of them.
After that our family moved from Kingston to Ottawa in 1999, and my parents are still in Ottawa. My younger sisters have started their second year of university; Selina goes to NSCAD in Halifax for Fine Art and Justine goes to Ryerson in Toronto for Fashion. So my parents are still in Ottawa, that’s home base, but obviously I live in Kingston now, but I’m almost done [my degree]!
So you’re a TA, do you want to tell us about that and other extra-curricular activities, jobs, things you do?
Sure! Like least favourite to most favourite? (Felicia laughs) Because favourite would definitely be TA-ing! Actually that’s true. I love teaching and although that’s not really my career path, I was so lucky when I heard that I was going to be a TA for DRAM 100 this year. It’s basically just an hour and a half a week with ten lovely students that I get to just have fun with, and we get to talk about theatre and all the best parts about theatre. Some other extracurriculars; I work about 24 hours a week at a hotel as the front desk person, I also volunteer at a yoga studio. And I love yoga, that’s my favourite thing to do; I also love to cook. I do a lot of that when I have time. In terms of theatre extra-curriculars, I’m set-designing Problem Child, which 5th Company Lane is doing, I’m co-directing Vagabond’s Julius Caesar apprentice cast and I am the host of my own radio show, Just Hit Play, which is on CFRC and it’s about theatre and music…and it’s really what I want to do for the rest of my life so I supppose that’s kind of my “professional” extracurricular.
How did you come to have your own radio show on CFRC?
It was this summer. I did a course that Queen’s offers with the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. So for two weeks they send, usually third-year students, to a very intensive course where you see all the plays at the Shaw Festival, there were ten offered last season, and you take acting classes with the company actors and we learned how to waltz and learned how to Charleston and had to wear corsets and how to drink tea properly and how to speak in British accents and it was so much fun. And one of the plays we saw, Lady Windermere’s Fan, which is written by Oscar Wilde, had music by Rufus Wainwright and Velvet Underground and Katy Perry and I was like, “Wow! How can a play from the 1800s have contemporary music? That is ludicrous!” There was no Ludacris in the soundtrack, that would not have been very good, but it made me realize that sometimes the easiest way to make something a bit complicated or a bit inaccessible seem easier for people to understand is music! So that’s where I got the idea of combining two things I love: theatre and music, and doing this radio show! So I did all my training in the fall and I have to volunteer – I guess that’s another one of my jobs, is I volunteer with them. So I help with outreach and stuff like that, and then I sort of get free reign of all the recording equipment and studio space and for ninety minutes a week I come in, do my show, and leave.
Next year I hope to go to King’s in Halifax. They have a really good journalism program and one of the things they offer is especially radio, so hopefully I will get into that program, do intensive journalism, graduate, and then they expect an 8-week internship wherever you want, and wherever you can get one. So hopefully the CBC likes me and I can work with CBC Radio, such a dream! Hopefully they like my show and I can just do my show for CBC…but for money. That would be really great.
What’s your favourite part of the theatre world?
I’ve done a bit of everything, actually, I’ve been backstage, I’ve been onstage, I’ve been directing, I’ve been designing, I’ve been writing. I think I like, not necessarily a position, but just the feeling you get in sort of the pit of your stomach when you’re like, “This is something that’s quality. This is going to change people.” So, and I truly believe that you can be in any role and be doing that, so I can’t tell. I really like directing this show because it’s so much fun to get to work with Beck [Felicia’s co-director], who’s just a very talented, intelligent best friend, that’s a great perk, but also a room full of wonderful, bright-eyed, first-years, one second-year, who are eager to get into drama. And I’m really excited for their futures here at Queen’s in Drama, whether or not they’re students of the Drama Department, or just to participate extra-curricularly now and again.
What’s your favorite thing to do in your spare time?
Yoga. It’s so healing for the mind and body. Cooking, because it’s like science that you can eat. That’s what the Magic School Bus taught me. (Felicia laughs) Yeah, I really love to cook. Hosting, I know that’s a bit silly but I sort of host these very Stepford Wive-y dinner parties with my friends at my house, which I get to do less these days because I’m quite busy, but I really like to do that. And I mean, as a student, you know you don’t expect someone who’s twenty to love napkin folding, but I love doing that. It’s really fun! So that’s one of them. And also just, listening to music, watching movies, I love film so I wish I was better at making it. I guess I’ve never tried but I- that’s actually, yeah! If I could go back to first year, I would take Film 110 because I feel like that would be a great course to take.
What do you love most about Queen’s?
I love Queen’s because it’s a university, and I think all universities have the beautiful advantage is that they’re bringing in a very close space, such bright intelligent people, and by that I mean students, staff, professors, everyone! People with so much potential, people who are really passionate about certain things, and then people who may not know what they’re passionate about yet but their minds are open and their hearts are open, and they’re willing to learn. And so I love that. But I think you can get that at any university. Sometimes I struggle with that Queen’s is a bit too “Queen’s-y”, if you know what I mean. I love Queen’s because it’s in a great city and because it’s a university. That’s very not-specific, but I’m sticking to it!
Felicia’s Favourites!
Holiday: Halloween, for the dress-up. I love Christmas, but Halloween’s definitely my favorite.
Colour: Purple, for sure.
Song: The song Beth/Rest by Bon Iver, is a song I can listen to and make a fool out of myself by just like closing my eyes and putting it on so loud and swaying back and forth and like, crying to myself, just because it reminds me of lost love and so that’s a really good song.
Pizza toppings: I have multiple. Our family, when we all lived in the same house, we did pizza night every Saturday, where one family member does one thing, and I was always the cheese grater, I’m really good at grating cheese. We have this Latour special, we’re not remotely Italian but we make pizza all the time, our own dough and everything, and we have our own Mediterranean pizza with sundried tomatoes, lots of garlic, feta cheese, sometimes artichokes, olives, red onion, and oregano, and it’s really yummy. No sauce, just like that. Really flavourful.
Motto: Hakuna matata. I don’t actually say that out loud to myself but I actually think it’s very true, really in the grand scheme of things, “no worries” is the best way to go. Also, like the song, but “This too shall pass” is just a nice thing to keep reminding yourself, like “This may seem like the worst thing today, but it will pass.” And the third one is from a song by The Fray, which is a bit sixteen-year-old girl of me, but “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.” And usually, when it’s really hard to do something it means it’s the right thing to do, so I try to live by that.
If you enjoyed this article and simply can’t get enough of Felicia, tune in to CFRC 101.9 FM Mondays at 4:00pm for her radio show, ‘Just Hit Play’!