The Deree Drama Club has just taken its bows after the premier of Oscar Wilde’s play, “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Nicole Kalogeropoulos, who played grumpy Lady Bracknell, the mother of Gwendolyn, stands outside the Black Box Theater cradling bouquets of flowers in her arms. Every time she starts walking towards the entrance of the Communication building, spectators who want to congratulate her on her performance stop her.

Nicole owns a room the minute she enters it. Several months after the last performance of the play and far away from the stage and applauding crowd, she sat in room 705 wearing a denim shirt and beige pants – and the aura of a star. But the Miami-born Nicole may end up with a life far away from the spotlight.

” I think I want to do something more like constitutional law, something more for the people. I never thought about doing something with drama or music,” she said.

Nicole, a sociology major, said that show-biz has always been close to her heart and that when she was a little girl she secretly dreamt of being discovered and getting on Broadway. She used to sing in Spanish with her grandmother, a Cuban singer, while her mother filmed her. In high school she went to a school that resembled the one in Fame.

But, as for most children, the dream-profession changed almost daily. Nicole even wanted to become the president of the United States so she could give everybody free ice cream.

“I always wanted to help,” she said. “When I was young I even started an organization to save dolphins when they were showing some pictures in Miami of dolphins being brutally killed off the South American coast.”

That selfless side of Nicole is still very vivid. She explained how much she enjoys making other people happy. She said that her friends are very important to her and that she likes to do that special something to show how much she cares.

“I think it’s really important to have that aspect of being a little bit selfless. In that way you are doing things that you ordinarily wouldn’t do and everybody tells you not to, but you end up doing them just because you think its right,” she said.

Nicole grew up in a multicultural family in Miami, Florida, with a Cuban mother and a Greek father. But she said that when she was growing up she never had the feeling of completely belonging to any culture.

“It was a little difficult in Miami, because there is a large Hispanic population. Everyone is like: You don’t look Hispanic! And then you come here to Greece and everyone is like: You don’t look Greek. There is something different about you,” she explained.

Now twenty-two, Nicole said she feels proud to be part of these different worlds. Her gaze was warm when she talked about her parents’ relationship beyond cultural boarders.

“Both my parents have this huge accent when they speak English. They are trying to communicate, and they say that sometimes they don’t understand each other. But sometimes they understand each other without even saying a word, which is really amazing,” she said.

Nicole said she has learned how to understand each culture’s weaknesses and strengths and how to appreciate each one.

It was to find the Greek in her Nicole decided to come to Greece in 2000. She had gotten to know her father in the Miami Florida culture and she did not know much about her Greek heritage.

“I just needed to understand my father more in order to understand myself a little bit better” she explained. “Because I’m half Greek, I really needed that for myself,” she explained.

Nicole came to Athens and Deree from the cold of Rochester in New York where she had been doing a double major, in political science and vocal performance, at the University of Rochester. .

“It was a great school, I loved that school,” she said. “But I wanted to travel, and I really wanted to get to know my family here that I didn’t really know that well.”

Nicole joined the Deree Drama club when her friend, Deree actor Tassos Mikroulis, encouraged her to audition for a part in “I Hate Hamlet”. Despite her background in performance art she had never before been involved in simply theater. It had always a combination of singing, dancing and acting.

Her role as Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Ernest” was not the role she first auditioned for. She had wanted to play Miss Prism, Cecily’s lonesome tutor, which later was cast to Katia Vlassopoulou. Nicole thought that the role of Miss Prism, which was a little smaller than Lady Bracknell, best fit in with how much time she had to rehearse: “In preparation for this school play I was missing in action for a month-and-a- half as I went back to America because of deaths in the family. I told everybody before the auditions, I said to them, ‘Guys, I’m not sure I should audition for this because I’m leaving for a month and a half’.”

But director Katerina Nikolopoulou cast Nicole as the ill-tempered Bracknell regardless of the obstacles her absence might put in the way. “I’m sure Nicole was Lady Bracknell in a previous life,” said Nikolopoulou.

On opening night, many in the audience praised Nicole for the quality of the English accent she adopted as Lady Bracknell. Many months later, when Nicole talked about how she trained to get the right accents she switched it right back on. The room filled with a British that is a mix between Julia Child and Judie Dent.

“The British accent was something I had practiced,” she explained. I was doing it even in the States and my mom was like: ‘Stop it, I can’t stand it. What is that?'”

Nicole graduated from Deree in June, 2004. Christina Gangos, who played Cecily in “The Importance of Being Ernest,” said that the Drama club feels her absence. “One of Nicole’s talents is that she makes people laugh,” she explained. “She also has a way of helping you and telling you what to do without bossing you around.”

Nicole got melancholic when she talked about her days with the drama club being over. She praised her peers in the club and their work on the play. “I think many people, including myself, think that the talent we have within our group is amazing. We may be an immature drama club, but we can be right up there with the professionals. We can pull it together in the end.”

Nicole may have left Deree and the drama club, but she said it will be hard to not be involved in theater again. “It’s sort of like pregnancy. When a woman has the baby she feels like she is dying in the beginning, but afterwards she is like: ‘I think I want another one.'”