Lost Article: Tori Pence

This is a "lost article": Something I wrote under the impression that it would be published, but something went wrong. The goal in journalism is to cover your bases with everyone involved but sometimes you can't anticipate everything. Except, of course, if it's the editor causing your article to go unpublished without compensation, ditch that editor ASAP. In this case, the subject of the article, Tori Pence, no longer is a Virginia resident, which makes her ineligible for Virginia Magazine. 

Buena Vista native Tori Pence is defined as much by her restlessness as she is by her accomplishments. In addition to her role as a cast member and writer on the Utah-based sketch show Studio C , Pence sings, does cover art, knows how to remodel a home, and is a skilled enough puppeteer that she was cast on Studio C’s sister show Nine Years to Neptune.

“I like the idea of being a renaissance person, the ability to build skills is half the journey. So once you learn one thing, it’s easier to learn another. A couple of my [siblings] are opera singers. We are an artsy family,” said Pence.

Since its debut in 2012 Studio C  has been a hit both for its parent network, BYU TV, and Youtube where the show has amassed 2.58 million subscribers. In addition, the show has garnered appearances for its cast members on Late Night with Conan O’Brien; a spin-off group earned a semi-final berth on the NBC humor competition “Bring the Funny”; and been able to bring on Saturday Night Live cast members Kenan Thompson and Will Forte as special guest stars.

Tori, 30, was cast in the show’s eighth season upon her graduation in 2016. She was recruited from the BYU’s sketch comedy troupe Divine Comedy which is where the original Studio C cast members met.

“I never wanted it to be my career, I thought it was going to be a thing that I do for fun. We would do four shows a month for a bunch of college kids who were tired and we needed a pick me up,” she said.

Instead, she had aspirations to be a librarian. She worked three jobs to pay her college tuition and she fell in love with one of them: She was a storyteller at the Provo City Library and used puppets in her performances.

Many of the cast members of Studio C’s current cast bought special talents—one of them has a background in stand-up, one is a ukulele player and song writer—and Tori Pence has been able to work puppets into some of her sketches. After temporarily departing the show after the 13^th season in 2021, Tori was asked to audition for the BYU TV show Nine Years to Neptune where she voiced the characters of Sascha and Pauline in a ten-episode run.

“We searched far and wide for talented puppeteers with improv capabilities. The first time we saw Tori’s audition we sensed we had a winner, and we were right. She was endlessly cheerful and had us all cracking up," said Nine Years co-creator Tyler McKellar.

Tori’s parents, Phil and Ellen, are life-long Virginians who jointly write novels under the pseudonym P.E. Pence. Tori is the sixth of eight children that her parents refer to as Pencelings. Tori's older sister, Rebecca, won the Miss Virginia pageant in 2015 as a way of sharing her religious beliefs. The family made part of their income restoring and flipping houses which meant that Tori moved around a lot as a child from Varina to Richmond to the small-town of Buena Vista.

“You don’t understand, I think Virginia is the greatest state. We moved a lot when I was a kid. I don’t have any connection to a house, I have a connection to the state,” said Pence.

Pence also credits her upbringing in the small town of Buena Vista for helping her develop her versatility. Not only did she act in all the school’s plays, she had to direct them by necessity since the school didn’t have a drama department. 

"Tori loves Virginia and if it weren't for her work, she would be living there still. She has said on more than one occasion how it's the most beautiful state in the country," said mother Elaine Pence.  "She has a group of friends still today that grew up together in B(uena) V(ista). They call themselves the Freakets and they get together as much as possible to celebrate milestones, birthdays and run marathons."

Pence’s state pride also includes being proud of being part of the Virginia LDS Church, which boats a population of 95,000 (the 2^nd highest population east of the Mississippi).

“It really just is a culture culture thing. LDS folks from outside of Utah grow up with people outside of the faith, so they’re more comfortable with non-LDS experience,” said Tori Pence.  

As for Tori’s future, she is re-joining the Studio C cast after a two-season hiatus and has plans to open a soda shop in Provo.

“I tend to do whatever pops up [in my head] next. I’m trying to be a little better at directing myself. My original intention was to become a librarian and Studio C tried to derail that,” she said.

Behind the Scenes of Six More of My Stories

 

The World-Class Bor Brothers: Podium Magazine (2021)

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/running/culture-running/people/the-brothers-bor-a-fast-family-finds-their-place/

One of my earliest beats as a writer was covering my cross-country team for my college so I developed a rare love of watching people run in circles and keeping up with the ins and outs of that sport. That extends to quite a bit of Olympics writing which is centered around track and field in the second week.

A friend of mine at ESPN suggested I pitch some articles and one got in about the controversial WCAP which offers foreign nationals (mostly Kenyans) expedited citizenship for military service and some say that the military service isn’t on par with the average soldier. At the 2016 Rio Trials, 4 of the 18 coveted distance running slots on the men’s Olympic team went to Kenyans.

When I published this article, one of those Olympians, Hillary Bor, found me on Facebook and expressed frustration that I had diminished his military service and didn’t tell the full story. Upon some reflection, I felt there was some xenophobia in my article: I wanted to see Americans do well including the ones that had been running under the American flag longer.

I offered to write a correction of some sort and Mr. Bor just said something along the lines of “whatever.” During the next Olympic cycle in 2021, I had published one Olympics-related piece for Podium Magazine and decided to pitch something about Hillary and his brother Emmanuel who had just given the 5K indoor American record a scare.

If someone messages you on Facebook, they’re still permanently there among your contacts, so I messaged Hillary about my desire to write my wrong, and he barely cared at that point and didn’t have much time to do an interview, but I was persistent with him about working with his schedule and his brother was pretty eagerly on board, so I eventually got it down.

The end result was something I’m quite proud of and I believe helped restore justice in telling the story of these two incredible siblings.

Filmmaker Anne Welles: Falls Church News Press (2018)

https://www.fcnp.com/2018/10/18/comedy-horror-film-mason-alum-debuts-just-time-halloween/

When I first imagined writing about film as a journalist out of college, I was not even aware of all the work that film makers were doing on an independent level. I’ve since learned the importance of shining a light on people working at all scales of film making rather than treating films as a hagiography of a select few blockbuster names. There’s also this image that movies can only be done in the abstract magical realm of California whereas people can get their starts anywhere.

One of these film makers, Anne Welles had a great trajectory to her dreams: She was a stay-at-home mom going through a separation at the age of 32 when she decided to try an acting class and soon booked an agent. Within a few years she was directing short films and by the time I interviewed her, she had a film “An Accidental Zombie Named Ted” on Amazon Prime.

I’m especially proud of the opening line:
“Filmmaker Anne Welles traces the moment she fell out of love with show business to a botched middle school audition. She thanks the film “Jerry Maguire” for restoring her faith in what is now her life’s work.”

Photo Essay on the Set of How Do You Know: Examiner.com (2009)

I generally cite October of 2010 as the start of my professional journalism career, so we’ll chalk this up to amateur stuff. One of my first gigs was as an Examiner for the Film Industry in DC. It was, more or less, a content farm so I could write whatever I wanted about film but getting enough people to read it so that I’d make any money was another story.

Still, it put me in the practice of writing regularly and occasionally, I did something that felt like real journalism. Even though this gig wasn’t very much of a real thing, I was still on the media list for the D.C. Film Office and I got an e-mail alert to the shooting of the James L. Brooks film “How Do You Know.” The film starred Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, and Jack Nicholson in what would be his last role. Very little was needed in terms of clearance to get on the set since they were basically shooting on the street, so as long as I kept a healthy distance, no one really cared.

It was a highly eye-opening experience as to what life on set was for extras and I even remember sneaking a couple glances at Witherspoon and Rudd from across the street. I’m generally embarrassed of everything I wrote when I started writing but I think the photo captions still hold up. The quality of the photos were another story.

Occupy DC Offers Hands-On Learning: Teaching Tolerance (2012)

https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/occupy-dc-offers-handson-learning

Remember the Occupy Movement of a decade ago? It sounds bizarre that a bunch of 20-something underemployed and unemployed bums started camping out on public property in an effort to supposedly change the world or something or other. But stranger things have happened since then.

This is a good example of a story that happens if you go out a lot and keep your eyes open. I went to the Occupy Movement out of random curiosity and was surprised to learn that a teacher at an extremely unconventional high school was taking students along to Occupy as part of an extra-curricular. Whereas a non-reporter would say “well, good luck with that liability, weirdo teacher”, the reporter part of my brain reacted with “jumping jehoshaphat, have I got a scoop here!” But where would I write it up?  This was 2011 and I had little journalistic experience. Another person walking around with a note pad said he was writing for the Truth Pursuit and I asked him for his editor’s contact.

The Truth Pursuit liked my idea and greenlit a piece. This doesn’t happen very often but they gave me a kill fee (a payment for a good faith effort) and someone else picked up my story: The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Magazine Teaching for Tolerance. This was pretty funny because I later wrote for The Federalist and American Conservative and the audiences of each of those publications considers the others illegitimate spewers of hate speech.

Miss Arlington USA, Grace Ashti, Works to Overcome Speech Disability: ArlNow (2019)

https://www.arlnow.com/2019/02/28/miss-arlington-usa-2019-works-to-fight-bullying-overcome-her-speech-disability/

Like the previous story, this was a story I stumbled upon. In this case, this was through a shared Uber ride. My fellow passenger was talkative and I’m naturally talkative with strangers and she was saying she was a beauty pageant contestant, and I thought “hmmm, that could be a story idea.” Once again, I wasn’t “networking.” I don’t go out of my way to find stories but I’m naturally curious, talkative with strangers, and do have a need to mix up my daily schedule and activities. And I always make it a point to carry around business cards.

Grace Ashi was not an immediate hit with the editors I was in contact with at the time, but I banked the story for a later day. When ArlNow was hiring freelancers, I had already worked for them twice so I used this as one of my pitches and voila! Grace is a real estate agent and a fashion blogger so her incentive to be publicized is high and that always helps get an interview moving, but she was also a cooperative subject, and now she’s even a patreon. Check her out

Side note: Uber, can we please bring UberShare?

Death of Rabbi Laszlo Berkowitz, Founding Rabbi of Temple Rodef Shalom: Falls Church News Press (2021)

I went to preschool at Temple Rodef Shalom and vaguely remember that the Rabbi was a Holocaust survivor but I haven’t been inside the synagogue since I was 5 or 6. That’s what made it interesting to hear about the Jewish life I might have led if my parents had opted to continue my Jewish education at Temple Rodef Shalom rather than another synagogue.

One interesting facet of this story was the strange reaction I got from one of my sources: She had a back-and-forth with me where she had nothing to contribute and directed me to people who would have known him better. Memo to sources: If I’m contacting you for a story, be assured that you are clearly important to the story. If you don’t want to contribute that’s fine, but there’s no need to question your importance. I collect the information than sort out what’s important at the end of the day.


https://www.fcnp.com/2021/02/21/laszlo-berkowits-1st-rabbi-temple-rodef-shalom-left-indelible-legacy/