Brooks Institute

There was some sort of emergency payment.

student fund yeah yeah well what's interesting though sometime in the mid 2000s i got an order for some calendars and maybe some prints from someone in santa barbara and it was going to brooks institute it was like this woman's name cara brooks institute and so i emailed her and i was like what do you do at brooks and she she was a teacher of some sort, taught some whatever applied science of some sort.

And I said, Hey, you know, I went to Brooks, they kicked me out.

And she goes, I wish they would kick me out.

So cool.

I actually I made plans to I left the university I made plans to go to brooks Institute of photography, which was down in Santa Barbara at the time I don't think it exists anymore, but.

And, but I found a feeder school in spokane Washington and I went and I got my associate of applied science degree in photography there.

And it was all darkroom.

And David Lavon was a photographer, so he was teaching Nicole a lot about photography.

He ended up going to the Brooks Institute, and Nicole eventually one day she says, "Oh my gosh, I wanna go there." And when she was 18 years old, she moved out and she ended up g- moving in with Dave.

And Dave always says, "She's like my little sister." He just loved her to pieces and just wanted to show her everything, and it was so wonderful.

And she took amazing pictures of dogs, of our dogs, of our grandparents, of, you know, my sisters, and just really, really beautiful things.

So she had just moved out, and it, she moved out into a friend of hers' house in downtown Los Angeles because Nicole wanted to be a photographer, and the friend of ours that we met when we moved down to Laguna Beach was a photographer, so he was teaching her all of this.

And, you know, it was such a nice relationship because he was like a big brother to her, and he took her under his wing and said, you know, "I'm gonna teach you everything that I've learned." And, you know, he went to the Brooks Institute up in Santa Barbara.

So all of this, all of this she, she was so into learning that because she lo- the one thing that we don't have of Nicole is a lot of pictures because she loved being behind the camera, you know?

Mm-hmm.