Jennifer K. Prouty Memorial Scholarship
The following is some information given to our dance department from the Prouty family about their daughter and sister, Jennifer K. Prouty, whom this scholarship is named for...
Several of the people who have received the dance scholarship given in her name have asked to have more information about her.
Jenny was born in Mission Hills, California on July 21, 1963. She joined her brother, David, who was three, to form the family of Ray and Joyce in Granada Hills where she lived until she was five and the Proutys moved to Westlake Village. Here she started Kindergarten at the nearby White Oak Elementary School. She played the flute in school bands and graduated from Agoura High in 1981. Jenny also loved the ocean and would frequently walk on the beach to collect her thoughts.
She had an early interested in Dance and was enrolled in local ballet classes at a very young age. This continued throughout her Middle School, High School and at Pierce Junior College for a year before transferring to Moorpark Community College where she appeared in the kind of concert that you did -- but in a much smaller hall -- under the direction of Stella Matsuda.
She partially financed her life with part-time jobs as a hostess in several restaurants in the Greater Los Angeles region.
While at Moorpark, she had decided on a career in international business and so spent a semester at the Sorbonne in Paris and then the next summer at Aix en Provence to work on the language that she had taken in High School.
Jenny was always an animal lover since we had cats and dogs while she was growing up. At the school in Aix en Provence, this became important when a stray cat produced a litter in the basement of the dormitory. The school officials got rid of the mother and wanted to destroy the kittens, but Jenny managed to sneak them into her room and with a doll's baby bottle raised them until they were weaned. Among the other students, she was known as the "Madre de Chats."
She entered UCLA as a Junior in 1987, continued to dance at Debbie Reynold's School of Dance, and to work part time in the accounting office of the UCLA Travel Bureau. It was May of 1988 when she suddenly lost her life in a tragic accident as a passenger on a motorcycle.
Her love of Dance is reflected in a series of journal entries that she kept at Moorpark:
"I went to my first dance production class today. It was wonderful! The class has the same philosophy about dance as I do. 'To dance is to live, to live is to dance.' What that means is that you just can't dance, you have to put your life into it, and life isn't complete (for us) without dance."
"Dance! Dance! Dance! That's how I feel right now. I just came home from a dance rehearsal and I feel wonderful! To me Dance is one of the most important things in my life. It's what gets me through the day. I could be sitting in algebra class trying to concentrate on factoring polynomials, but I'm really thinking about a new dance or some great new music I just heard which would make a great dance."
*** The Moorpark College Dance Department would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the Prouty family for their continued support of our program. ***