Have you ever wondered who the girl is who wears different colorful wigs and costumes every week? Do you have the guts to do that at school?
Well, senior Kathy Lor does. This is how she expresses what she loves to do – cosplaying, sewing, and drawing. Cosplay is a type of performance art in which participants put on costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea, mostly anime. When she was little, she has always watched “Dragonball Z,” a Japanese manga series, fell in love with the voice actress Masako Nozawa’s acting abilities and decided that she wanted to be just like her. This started her interest in acting. She has been in the drama department from freshman to junior year, and also starred in the play “Almost Maine” last year.
Lor has been doing cosplay for four years now. It all started when she went to her first anime convention, also known as the Sakura-Con, during her freshman year. Sakura-Con is an annual three-day anime convention held every spring at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. There are different exhibits being held including anime music video, cosplay, fan fiction, karaoke contests, as well as a fashion show. She has participated every year and has shown different style of her own. She has always made her own costumes and accessories by herself. She has entered different online contests, and even got accepted to be a part of an upcoming cosplay magazine recently. She has been in Anime Club for three years, and she was even the president for her freshman and junior year. She has always put the club on task by having different drawing contests, playing video games, watching YouTube anime related music videos, and more fun activities.
She never really thought of doing it before so for her culminating project, she made a sword. She wanted to learn how to make a prop that is life size. “I wanted to make something challenging and that since this is my senior project, I should make it something I want to do,” she said. There were a lot more steps put into it than she thought. She worked on it everyday during class, and talked to her mentor a lot to make sure she is doing everything right. Unfortunately, she was also unable to bring and do it at school to work on it during the weekends, one of the reasons she was unable to complete the sword on time. However, she still passed it.
With all the activities she is involved in, she has a 3.4 grade point average, and still able to keep up with school work and academics. She was also in JV tennis last year.
Lor is going to Edmonds Community College this fall, and majoring in Fashion Design and Costume Design. “I enjoy sewing and learning new sewing techniques.” She also wants to learn Japanese, study abroad, and then transfer into a fashion program. She is very dedicated, and hoping to open her own costume store in the future.
