“Alexis is everything I love about skateboarding. A misfit. A genius. A skate rat. After entering our hearts to the tune of Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano” in PJ Ladd’s Wonderful Horrible Life (Coliseum,’02), Alexis quit her paychecks from éS and Element and attended a four-year undergraduate degree at Columbia University in NYC with a major in architecture. Serendipitously graduating in conjunction with the ’08 economic crash, she then went another four-year educational run, this time of the “real life” variety–working first at a restaurant (before it burned down and she went on unemployment), then signing up for alternate slots at the Maloof and X Games contest circuits to make ends meet. Four years into the school of Maloof, she again switched gears in ’12. After receiving scholarship offers from Harvard, Yale, MIT, and UCLA, she began a four-year master’s degree in architecture at MIT. Having completed her master’s thesis this past January, and currently working on a graphic novel set 10,000 years in the future, Alexis returned my calls from NYC this morning just in time to tell us about it all. Hey Mambo.” – Mackenzie Eisenhour
Read the full interview at skateboarding.transworld.net.
