Parting Shot

A Belated Final Post

It is now a few weeks into the school year and I am back at Wheaton. This summer was amazing and as a final post I've decided to post the final paper that I had to turn into the school. I feel like this paper sums up what I got out the internship and the posts along the way show how I was enjoying myself and exploring the town. Hope you enjoy.

The Impact of Provincetown

The three and a half months of Summer 2010 have been unlike any other in my life so far. I have been to Ireland, Greece, Montreal, and cities across the United States but nothing has compared to the experience of spending a summer in a studio apartment by the sea in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Living alone on a pier in Unit D, a room no larger than my dorm in McIntire freshman year, confronted with the pseudo real world that Ptown offers forced me to mature and think about my life after college at a time when I wouldn’t have thought about it otherwise. I’m twenty and still have two years left in college, why should I decide what I want to do for a career now? Thanks to the generous stipend that accompanied my scholarship I was able to experience life away from my family and friends. In addition, I was thrust into real world situations that I would not have experienced in Norton or Westfield surrounded by familiarities.

This whole summer I felt like I was living the life of Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir or David Séchard in Les Illusions Perdues. Le Rouge et le Noir is hailed as the first realist novel chronicling Julien’s ascent into aristocratic French society and Les Illusions Perdues is a similar realist novel about a journalist and his career. What I got from the novels when I read them back in high school was the importance of hard work, an internal drive to succeed, the profitability of close personal connections, and more importantly how romance can shape and destroy our public and personal lives. This internship turned out to be a little crash course on the transition between the student world and the real world similar to Julien or David’s climb into, and decent from, French society.



Provincetown slapped me in the face with life lessons just like one of the snappy, eccentric drag queens who walk Commercial Street picking on the uncomfortable tourists. I was able to watch people interact in a town that is an illusion; it is a melting pot of wealth and backgrounds where social norms are disregarded and people get to have fun and enjoy themselves, yet there still exists a division among the people—townies and everyone else. Knowing that I was there more for my internship than a vacation, I evaluated my experience more than I would have if it was a regular summer. I was more interested in interacting with “out-of-towners” and those who were able to have their second or third home in town. How could they have a lifestyle and job that allowed them to only live there for a few months out of the year? Like I said earlier, this summer was anything but normal and I learned so much about living, careers and relationships that is impossible to get anywhere else.

My internship was the Arts Management Internship offered by the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM). It is an extraordinary nonprofit museum in the East End with a staff of about ten people who put on everything from gallery openings to concerts and they also run a museum school. I worked underneath an amazingly friendly and upbeat woman named Ashley. We worked great together and she offered me a lot of opportunities to be creative designing and promoting events online and around town as well as putting me to work doing research. The investigating I did focused on creating extensive lists that compiled names of press contacts and businesses such as catering services, wedding planners, and other companies that would be interested in renting out gallery spaces. Through doing a lot of the research I began to see how important it was to make professional contacts that could help support the museum. My last project was to create a Vendors List that would be given to potential renters of the gallery spaces in addition to the Facilities Rental Brochure. This flyer would help potential renters in planning their event because then they would not have to spend a lot of time looking for local businesses to help cater their event, etc.


As well as working in an office environment, the internship entailed catering private events and helping out with functions sponsored by PAAM. At most of the events I assisted with, the prevailing purpose was the membership and the necessity of gaining and retaining monetary support for the museum. These gallery openings and private affairs presented me with people who were of a class that I never really interacted with before—the rich out-of-towners who spend their summers on the Cape supporting the arts, artists themselves, or those who just mingled with that crowd of people because they had money. It was an intoxicating experience that motivated me to think about how I could possibly make contacts and retain friendships in a crowd of that sort. The events reminded me that there are different classes of people here in the United States and I felt similar to Julien who, through opportunities he manufactured and pursued, was able to gain entry into the higher classes of French society.

Mingling with these people I met architects, artists, authors, brain surgeons, a contact at the MFA in Boston, a Wheaton Alum, and gay men with successful jobs who provided me with insight into career choices and, through observation, relationship advice. I was surrounded by examples of homosexual men and women who were successful inside and outside of the town that my friends and I have began to refer to as the gay Disney World.

To keep this paper short I am thankful for a few key things that Provincetown has contributed to my outlook on life and how I will live professionally and personally in the future. Provincetown is a world created by the gay population that you can tangibly feel. As soon as I reached the bluff overlooking Ptown on Route 6, I knew and felt that everything was okay and you could just be yourself. It was a feeling that I have not experienced anywhere else in my life. I don’t think it is a feeling that only gay people feel, but visitors realize that you are supported and judged more by your merit than sexuality. That will probably be the biggest difficulty for me travelling back to the hetero world where I will be relegated to a 2nd or 3rd class citizen again. Living here has given me more confidence in who I am and less shame about it. It was not like I hid being gay before, but being gay you are more conscious that you are different and judge yourself more because of it. Being surrounded by the success of men and women in Provincetown gives me hope that things are either changing, or that you don’t have to be so hard on yourself back in Heteroville, U.S.A. I am more confident as an individual and now have examples of successful gay men that are never shown on T.V. or the movies—yet they ironically produce and have a major hand in a lot of the shows and plays that have dominated American culture.

My internship at PAAM and my summer in Provincetown have given me memories that I will remember forever. The experience of being in a town like Ptown for months and seeing it transform from a pre-vacation village into a bustling town that celebrated summer and being gay ending with Ptown’s version of Maris Gras, a weeklong Jungle Fantasy Carnival, has given me real world experience on how to navigate the dual realities that exist in my life. The student vs. professional, gay vs. straight, and the rich vs. working class are all realities that I was confronted with in a town that boomed from a population around 3,000 to a summer population of 60,000. Julien and David navigated dual realities in their respective novels and that had their share of successes and tragedies transitioning between the two. The experience I had in Provincetown and at PAAM wasn’t quite like that, but through pursuing an interest and passion I had for art, I opened up a whole new career field that I had never thought about yet that I really enjoyed. I liked what my job entailed, the people I had to deal with, and that I got to be both creative and do office work at the same time. I will be taking these lessons with me back to Wheaton as well as into my future career. This internship has made a lasting impression on my life.