lines but was a mime and dancer who was onstage the length of the play. It was an original role that the director let Jennifer create as she felt she did not fit into any of the written parts. She was also writing herself, and published her first poem, called "Riddle-Song Of The Sun," that same year. At age 11, she started a newspaper with her best friend called The Pre-Teen Times where they sold subscriptions that came out quarterly. At age 12, she became passionate about the music of South Asia after her mother returned from a journey across India and Nepal with a bag full of cassettes for her, with Jagjit and Chitra Singh's The Gold Disc being her favorite. She took flamenco lessons as a young teen, and continued to do children's theater and community theater. She studied acting for a summer at Catholic University, and had principal roles in productions at Little Theatre of Alexandria, Olney Theatre Center, and Folger Shakespeare Theatre. She attended the Washington International School, where she studied Spanish and Latin, then the Edmund Burke School, a college prep school she left after she had begun working in professional theatre at Studio Theatre and Source Theatre, and the school could not accommodate her rehearsal schedule. For her last two years of high school, Jennifer attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where she was a theater major. An advanced academic program also landed her part-time at George Washington University, where she studied writing and anthropology. Jennifer's youth in the melting pot of Washington, D.C. was instrumental in her music influence and taste. Her mother had season tickets to the National Symphony Orchestra, which they attended on Friday nights, and her father would take her to hear live jazz at places like Blues Alley, One Step Down, and Charlie's Georgetown, where she saw the likes of Anita O'Day, Mel Tormé, Dizzy Gillespie, Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, George Shearing, and Jamaican jazz pianist Monty Alexander. In her teens, Jennifer would often travel to New York and London, both with friends and on her own. She was turned on to the different sounds in each city - The Lounge Lizards, Diamanda Galas, Lydia Lunch, Blondie, and The Velvet Underground in New York; and The Specials, Gang of Four, Siouxsie, The Slits, The Buzzcocks, The Birthday Party, Cocteau Twins, and The Fall in the UK. But she