I have this other imaginary life where I live in an apartment in New York. The apartment has an exposed brick wall. What I do when I’m not in this apartment is unclear—clickety-clack around the city in of-the-moment high-heeled boots that are somehow also very comfortable while carrying a stylish tote and a cup of bodega coffee, write, maybe teach—but the important thing is the exposed brick wall in my apartment. That’s how I know I’m in New York, living my dream life.
In spring of 1990, that life was within my grasp, because I was admitted to Columbia’s graduate program in Comparative Literature with a four-year free ride, plus a stipend. There was only one problem: I was engaged, and my husband-to-be, who was admitted to Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons at the same time that I was admitted to the Comp Lit graduate program, did not get a four-year free ride, and had he chosen Columbia, we would likely still be paying off his student loans. What can I say? I chose true love and financial prudence over New York. We moved to Los Angeles and went to UCLA. Our Westwood apartment had no brick walls, but it did have a fake fireplace.
So you can imagine my feelings two weeks ago when I got on a Zoom call with Jake Bers, who lives in Brooklyn and is getting his MFA at the NYU Tisch Department of Design for Stage and Film and there was an exposed brick wall behind him, and I was like, OMG this should have been my life.
Don’t get me wrong: I love my life. I just happen to be a person who feels the tug of what if I had done this other thing more strongly than others. Even though I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past 30 years, every time I drive south on Highway 101 and pass the overhead sign that says “Los Angeles,” part of me wants to keep going. I can see it in my mind’s eye: I’ll live in a cute 1920s Spanish-styled bungalow with a red tile roof somewhere in the hills and… I dunno—write? teach? float around in a gauzy white dress and strappy sandals? Anyway, my imaginary life looks amazing.
Many years ago, I read Megan Daum’s memoir-in-real-estate, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, which details her decades-long conviction that she would be happy only if she lived in an apartment in a pre-war building in New York City (the apartment, she stipulates, must have a bathroom floor tiled in small black-and-white hexagonal tile), and I was like, I hear you, sister. Because don’t we all need a perfect setting to live a perfect life?
Which brings me to my conversation with Jake Bers, whose speciality in his graduate program is set design and who knows a little something about perfect settings.
(Full disclosure: Jake attended the same elementary and middle school as my middle son, which means I knew him before he had all his adult teeth and have access to background intel about his high school, college, and graduate school experiences through his mom, who lives around the corner from me and also happens to be a treasure trove of excellent book and TV show recommendations.)
Like my children, Jake grew up in Palo Alto, where—although no one says it out loud—success means taking all the AP or honors courses, getting a high standardized test score, doing as many meaningful extracurricular activities as possible, applying and getting into the same 15 colleges that everyone else is applying to, and entering a well-compensated career field (read: every flavor of engineering, medicine, law, or business). One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Jake is that he graduated from Gunn High School without taking a single AP course (which I learned many years ago when his mom confided in me in a panicked near-whisper), went on to be admitted to every college he applied to, and is now in one of the most respected MFA programs in the country with a full scholarship.
Naturally, I was curious. How, exactly, does a person go from a high school experience he describes as “kind of awful” to living in a Brooklyn apartment with an exposed brick wall, immersively studying a discipline that to him feels as necessary as breathing?
“I hated high school, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life… There was a huge amount of pressure from other students to figure out what you wanted to do by the time you graduate. In retrospect, I didn’t need to worry. Life is a lot longer than it seems like in high school, and you have much more time than you think to decide what you want to do.”
The answer is not surprising—or shouldn’t be, considering how much of it is grounded in common sense. Jake did not shine in his high school classes, but he did shine (pun absolutely intended) in areas that interested him: technical theater (primarily lighting) and astral photography. It so happens that his high school has an outstanding technical theater department, and when he wasn’t working on plays, Jake spent a lot of time learning about the night sky, volunteering at the local planetarium, and going camping in places with low light pollution so he could capture images like this:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2a83050d-0f5e-40c8-8495-372309e3731c_3840x2560.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2a21c4f-2cd4-4ffb-8418-0838a122d518_4000x2666.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F399ba6eb-b1da-4d72-a36e-618319e488cb_3840x5441.jpeg)
Jake considers himself lucky that he was not drawn in by what he calls the Silicon Valley “technology craze” and that he attended a college far away from Palo Alto. At Brandeis University, he initially majored in Computer Science—not because he wanted to work in a tech start-up, but because he originally planned on attending a graduate program in astronomy and a background in Computer Science was a necessary prerequisite. But deep down, he knew he wanted to do something creative, and what began as some theater work on the side quickly moved front and center. In his junior year at Brandeis, Jake switched his major from CS to Theater Arts; a professor in the theater department with an extensive background in set design took him under her wing and told him he was meant to be a set designer, not a lighting designer; he took classes in the architecture department and the fine arts department; he took a movement class for actors where he learned about body awareness and people’s physical relationship to space. He took a random smattering of history and English classes. “When I figured out what I wanted to do,” Jake told me, “my path was very clear.”
When I asked Jake to describe what he does, he put it like this: “On any given week I’m flying through time. I could be researching tenement housing in New York City at the turn of the 20th century or 17th century Ireland. A huge part of my job is reading a script, taking the poetry of it, and saying something visually. I’ve also had to learn trade skills: drafting, building models, painting, sculpting.” His one regret? Not majoring in English, which is not something you hear a lot these days, but which he says would have helped him read a script critically and understand literary references on which so many plays are built.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F411dbe68-ba0b-4d83-a866-8f81c5d06782_3840x2880.png)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c081483-c914-4cb0-95af-7fbef1dc003c_3840x2560.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbfe02e-8b0f-4208-b900-b14676652e1c_4032x3024.jpeg)
A set designer is almost always the second person hired to work on a play, right after the director. Jake’s job is to read the script through once, “as a human being,” and then again as a set designer, taking notes and sketching whatever comes to mind. Eventually, he must translate what he reads into architecture. He is currently working on a play about how scholars have been persecuted through history; it features Bertolt Brecht fleeing the Nazis, the the trials of Galileo Galilei and Socrates, and academic persecution at an unnamed Ivy League school. Jake has spent hours thinking about common themes and architectural connections and combing through the New York Public Library’s extensive image collection, and he is fleshing out what academic offices might have looked like during different time periods. His work is a combination of intuition, rigorous research, and creativity.
Take the set he designed for Brandeis University’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the idea for which, as Jake explained to me, came from his curiosity about what it was like for Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, to grow up on an island without ever seeing any humans apart from her father. What would be a playground for her? In this case, the mangled remains of a boat on which her father and she arrived on the island. Jake wanted the island to feel cold; he was inspired by accounts of sailors getting lost in the Arctic and having to survive in a whaling station. He wanted to evoke the stark black sand beaches of Iceland; he wanted to gesture toward unforgiving geometric shapes that entrapped Prospero, shapes that derived from associations with plane wings and transportation.
To depict the storm and the shipwreck in the opening scenes of The Tempest, Jake drew on his lighting background and suspended lanterns through the holes in the beams on stage. The lanterns swayed in response to the wind and the waves and the actors swayed along with them, casting chaotic shadows everywhere.
In his graduate program, Jake is working with people intensely devoted to their craft—Christine Jones, one of his professors (and an undergraduate English major), designed the sets for the Broadway production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and is invested in creating inclusive public art. He will likely start an artistic co-op with some of his classmates after he graduates; for parents who are reading this thinking, “Sure, great, but will he ever make money?,” Jake has that figured out. He will join the design union after graduation, which will provide him with health insurance and bargaining rights; when set design work is not available, he will take on film and drafting projects, which pay well in the six figures. Jake’s mom told me that he spent much of high school trying to make himself invisible; now, he’s the person everyone goes to.
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Jake about how his high school years compared to his life now, and he did not mince words. “I hated high school, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. “There was a huge amount of pressure from other students to figure out what you wanted to do by the time you graduate. In retrospect, I didn’t need to worry. Life is a lot longer than it seems like in high school, and you have much more time than you think to decide what you want to do.”
He told me he wished he trusted his gut more, been more in tune with himself about what made him happy. That he knew he wanted to be a set designer for years but didn’t realize it. That if given the opportunity to advise Baby Jake, he would tell him not to rush and to take note of what he liked doing—even more than he already did.
I’m writing this from a light-filled, plant-filled coffee shop in Portland called Guilder. There are no exposed brick walls, but there are Princess Bride references sprinkled throughout, including a fancy latte on the menu called The Miracle Pill and a drawing of Fezzik the Giant on the wall. I’m here to spend several days with fellow writers Elyse Fenton and
, both of whom I met over 10 years when I was working as a college counselor, long before I wrote a memoir or thought of myself as a writer. We’ve spent hours talking about Elyse’s novel and Laurie’s collection of poems and my second memoir, about striking a balance between working for money and working to do what you love, even if it doesn’t pay. What we were really talking about, it occurs to me, is how to feel at home in your own life.![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7b3801c8-7472-4c93-a0ae-f490dc41c11b_3072x4080.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69494539-5322-44e9-a4a5-18a1f31df805_3072x4080.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdecbfe89-2552-454d-9f37-384701ec2e62_2602x2939.jpeg)
I really love this article! Chris is also looking at MFA programs that offer "free rides", but in directing. This young man is going to be highly sought after and his sets are amazing!
Great read! So nice to read about JB. I love your words!