TU: University Professor Uses Her Own Failures to Teach Her Students

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A playwright, musician, world traveler and humanities professor, and yet she says that the most important thing she does for her students is to reveal her early struggles and bad choices. And find the lessons and humor in it all.

“People need to hear about the times you failed so they can see that things can work out,” explained Riverside resident Jennifer Chase. “Florida State College at Jacksonville is such a naturally diverse campus, so sharing my challenges can hopefully give insight and be a strength for my students, no matter what stage or background they’re in or from.”

A FSCJ professor in the communications and humanities department, Chase teaches humanities and writing as her day job. The rest of the time, her wickedly honest artistic side is always “on” focused on seeing how the past explains the present, celebrating the under-acknowledged victories of everyday heroes, and exposing the often-times absurd side of rigid traditions, and outdated religious protocol, as a songwriter, playwright and performer.

Chase’s body of work includes five original albums/CDs, six theatrical works, and television, film and musical recording projects in the U.S., France, Spain and Senegal, Africa. Her work is a testimony to the meaning of Soren Kierkegaard’s words, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Her most recent artistic “reveal” is a Holden Cauldfield-ish coming-of-age autobiography that follows her adolescent upbringing in Catholic school through a time line based on the sacraments of the Catholic church. It humorously explores the clash between a typically stubborn kid and her evolved parents trying to instill empathy for community juxtaposed against the pageantry of the Catholic church.

Not only a play, but a collaborative performance and painting exhibition, “Eva, Chase, Wood?” is an event within an event that Chase says came to life because of her interaction with other artists who also create at the art space, CoRK, near Five Points in Riverside. “Talking about the concept of a play with a painter gives you a different way of looking at things and how I express ideas,” said Chase. That’s how Tony Wood ended up creating 40 paintings that compliment her words and how actress Eva Matthews tells the series of stories while acting as the model for his paintings. All this, while the trio of Lauren Fincham, Holly DeCardenas, and Chase herself provide the musical background.

Writing plays, poems, lyrics that expose Chase’s sometimes rebellious experiences, her message ultimately brings out universal commonalities that have all types of people, no matter religion, race or culture to see alike. That’s why, no matter her friend’s background, they all tell her after attending “Eva, Wood, Chase?”, “Hey, that’s my experience growing up, too.”

“That’s what makes theatre and comedy so great – it’s not intrusive – so you find yourself laughing as you identify with the material and start to understand universal themes,” said Chase.

Growing up in Cape Cod, Mass., and later in Sarasota during her high school years, the oldest of three girls, Chase was a skinny, typically awkward teenager trying to find herself by emulating the stars of the day. Then she heard Chaka Khan, female singer with the band Rufus at the time, and Chaka became this budding singer’s idol — frizzy hair, bright, gypsy outfits and all. And she certainly gave this look and being a part of a band more than a fleeting try when Chaka Khan took the song “I’m Every Woman” to number one on the R&B charts in 1978.

With her mom’s encouragement, she enrolled at the University of Florida, got a job as a cocktail waitress and joined the band Karisma singing R&B pop. Not going to classes anyway, she disappointed her parents by dropping out of college to join another band in Tampa, and was fired from that band three days later when hoarseness from a cold made it impossible to sing.

“I really was a lousy singer at the time because I was trying to force myself to be something I hadn’t learned to be yet,” said Chase. With teased hair, a see-through body suit and runny mascara and fear on her face from being left alone in a questionable part of town without transportation, dad rescued her and took her home. “For the next decade I sold ads for Dad’s magazine, ‘Focus,’ by day and lived a party lifestyle at night, expecting something special to be handed to me rather than realizing I had to go out and earn it,” said Chase.

Bored one day, she pulled out a map of Florida and ended up in

Cocoa Beach — where her finger landed — working at a Radio Shack. Weekend surfers convinced her to come to St. Augustine, so she moved again. In 1989 she had her first child, Chelsea, and decided it was “time to grow up.” Then a tragic accident had her young daughter fighting for her life on a feeding tube in a hospital for years while her mom battled against an advance stage of breast cancer, driving to Jacksonville’s Mayo Hospital for chemo treatments biweekly and staying with Chase. This was the time in Chase’s life when everything changed.

“I woke up to a new appreciation for life realized as these two precious people fought for their lives,” said Chase. Her attitude did a 180 as she started pursuing what she said she would do a decade earlier. She was reminded of her dad’s words to her to “pick yourself up and start over when you fail” as she returned to college at FSCJ at age 31, time now seen as a dear commodity. “I’m going to speak French and get my bachelors, write songs, record them, and travel the world,” said Chase. And that’s exactly what she did “with a lot of luck in play.”

When her mother died words influenced by her parents came rushing back to Chase. “A youth filled with stories going to plays, listening to Ray Charles and sharing antidotes,” said Chase. When she came across the poem The Prophet by Kahlil Gibrau, she wrote a song inspired by the words:

“For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?

And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb.

And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”

Now she had found her voice, musically and metaphorically.

Chase completed a BA degree from UNF in International Studies and French, won a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship to study in Senegal, Africa for a semester where she began learning and telling stories inspired by strong, mostly unknown female historical figures. Already enthused by visits to the Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island, when Chase learned more about Anna Kingsley, a 19th-century Senegalese teenager and slave originally named Anta Majigeen Ndiaye, and that her own birth village didn’t know about her accomplishments, Chase had to tell her story. When Chase wrote the play, lyrics and music for Majigeen, her artistic purpose of providing an unexplored perspective on history, began.

“I create creative nonfiction musical plays,” said Chase. “I create a story out of true events while inserting fiction and changing the timeline to heighten the messages and metaphors in the story.”

Majigeen has been performed all over Jacksonville, from UNF to the Jacksonville Public Library’s main branch downtown. Its first run, in 2005, at the Boomtown Theatre and Supper Club in Springfield, had an audience member who would take notice and help Chase achieve her dreams.

The FSCJ President at the time approached Chase after the play asking her to be a part of a Catholic Charities resettlement program that teaches English to refugees at FSCJ downtown and Kent campuses. Her world opened again as Chase learned from these “remarkable people.”

A few years later that same person said FSCJ needed her to be a part of their humanities professor staff but she must get a master’s degree to do it. Foremost, Chase wanted to formerly learn the craft of playwriting, finding a program through the University of New Orleans in Madrid, Spain. Another adventure and more fodder for her theatre ideas and characters, she earned a Master’s in Fine Arts, and even found a husband, in Spain.

In 2008, Chase started working as an FSCJ adjunct instructor creating courses and building her artistic body of work, and now a full professor and six musical productions later, she is living the artistic life she had hoped for as a teen.

Always creating, her next production in-the-works, Renunciant, will be another challenge for her as she plans to perform the monologue herself at CoRK in June. Relevant to what is going on in the world today, Chase will impersonate the various student refugees she’s taught and the lessons she’s learned.

The lessons Jennifer Chase teaches her students at Florida State College at Jacksonville come as much from her personal experiences as they do from any textbook. (Photo by Ingrid Damian)

Whatever the process — performing, writing, classroom, kids — when those special moments happen where everything clicks, those are moments I’m grateful for,” said Chase. “I try to help my students find it, and bring everyone closer to discovering what makes sense to them.” It’s like what Benjamin Disraeli wrote, “The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.”