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Australian Legal Assistant Wins 2011 Yale Drama Series Award

By Lynne DeVenny

Photo via TheaterMania.com

If you want to be a writer, you frequently hear, "Don't quit your day job."  (And the paralegal profession, with its crazy health insurance benefits, seems to draw a lot of writers). But maybe Australian legal assistant Shannon Murdoch can quit her day job (or already did, see below), after winning the 2011 Yale Drama Series Prize for Emerging Playwrights.

ABC News reports:

Shannon Murdoch's work was selected from more than 870 submissions by Tony-winning playwright John Guare.

Her play "New Light Shine" won the $10,000 prize and will be published by Yale University Press. A staged reading will be held Sept. 12 at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn.

According to organizers, Murdoch's play deals with "four small-town lives linked through a violent crime and their hopeless attempts to erase the past and build new lives."

A quick Google search indicates that Murdoch is also a blogger at You know you want it, and invented a new word to describe how she felt when she learned she won this year's Yale Drama Series: superidiculamazahappy.

Although I'm kind of wondering about the day job after reading Murdoch's November 10, 2010 post declaring, "...I have finally thrown off the shackles of that ghastly institution called a day job."  Actually, it gets better:

It's been about 36 hours and I still find myself thinking "Jesus. I better do [insert meaningless task here]" or "I hope that [insert name of overpaid lawyer here] gets the plague this week and doesn't come in".

Hehe, no one reading this has ever thought that, er, right. She did say she had to look for another job in 2011. Now maybe she won't have to.

Inspired by the idea of freedom from the shackles of your desk? You can follow Murdoch on Twitter at @shanmurdoch. She is also Practical Paralegalism's Girl-Crush of the Day.

Addendum: Just to prove obssessing about food at work is an international phenom, here's Murdoch's tweet from when she still had a day job:


What is a Tim Tam? Glad you asked, because I didn't know either. Oh, lawsie, it is a chocolate biscuit made by Arnott's Biscuits in Australia, and makes an American Kit Kat look like kibble. Here is a picture of someone snorting a Tim Tam up his nose:

Seriously, you're supposed to slurp your coffee with it. (via love and cooking blog)

Source: ABC News

Full post as published by Practical Paralegalism on March 23, 2011 (boomark / email).