Lauren Felten was on her lunch break when I approached her for an interview. She seemed excited when she said, “I’ve lived here for 10 years and have never been in Flagpole before.”
From getting to know Lauren, it’s clear she is a true renaissance woman. When she’s not crunching numbers and working with finances at First American Bank, she may be taking photographs, gardening in her backyard or even baking “gender reveal” cakes.
Flagpole: You said you’ve lived here in Athens for 10 years. What do you do here?
Lauren Felten: I moved here in 2002 to go to UGA… I studied photojournalism at UGA and worked at Jittery Joe’s for a long time. I actually still occasionally pick up shifts there—I’ve worked there since 2004. After I graduated, I went to go look for a big-kid job, but I didn’t want to leave Athens yet, so I ended up working at a local bank: I work at First American Bank. It has nothing to do with photojournalism at all.
Honestly, I don’t think I would like working at a bank if I worked at a big bank, like SunTrust or Bank of America or anything like that, but they’re a community bank. It’s still locally owned, the president and CEO is, like, right inside the front door when you walk in, and that really appealed to me. I just started working there as a full-time teller—I still didn’t know what I wanted to do—and discovered that I actually was really good at my job and ended up getting a couple of promotions. So, now I work in electronic banking… I miss seeing customers face-to-face, but I still get to talk to a lot of them over the phone, and it’s a lot of the same people that I would see every day at Jittery Joe’s, which is kind of the whole draw of Athens to me. It’s something my parents don’t really understand because they’ve never lived in a town like this, but I see someone I know everywhere I go, which I guess that can be a blessing and a curse sometimes.
FP: Where did you live before you came here?
LF: I moved to Georgia right before seventh grade, so kind of in middle school, right in the middle of my formative years. It was kind of traumatic—coming from Detroit to the South was a big change, and it definitely took me a few years to adjust. And, you know, it’s just a completely different culture down here. I’ve lived in Georgia ever since then. Yeah, growing up in Detroit and then coming down here was a big change. Both of my parents grew up up there, too.
FP: Were they both from Detroit?
LF: My dad grew up in Ohio, and my mom grew up in Michigan, and then they met at the University of Michigan. They had the very typical “dad was a football player; mom was a sorority girl.” Then they had two kids—a boy and a girl—and a dog and a cat.
FP: So, it sounds like… Are you not really looking for that kind of “ideal”?
LF: Not really. I always kind of felt out of place in a super-suburban environment. I bought a house in Athens about two-and-a-half years ago. It’s kind of out near Athens Tech, you know, more out, like, almost in Hull, where it’s kind of country. And both of my neighbors are in their 80s, and they farm, and they’re awesome—I love it, you know. I have a garden and… I have chickens now, and my parents think I’m insane. And I have two Great Danes that love to run around my yard.
FP: Do you live out there by yourself?
LF: I live there with my boyfriend. He also went to UGA, and I met him working at Jittery Joe’s. We actually had a class together in college, sat on opposite sides of the lecture hall. He remembered me later when we figured that out—he thought I was a brat because I raised my hand and I was a teacher’s pet. Funnily enough, almost six years later, we haven’t driven each other completely crazy yet. But, yeah, he lives there with me. He also has a dog, and I have a cat, so we have a zoo. Yeah, two Great Danes, a German Shepherd and a cat, and three chickens now that are, like, two months old and hilarious to me. I have no experience with barnyard animals of any kind, so that was really going out on a limb.
I bake a lot in my spare time. I took some culinary school at the Art Institute of Atlanta and studied pastry arts, so I do that a lot.
FP: When did you do that?
LF: I didn’t completely finish, which really bums me out—I would have liked to finish. But I could only take classes on the weekends, and it just kind of became unfeasible with my schedule anymore at work, and financially, too, it was kind of a strain. But in my spare time now, I still take a lot of orders for cakes. I’ve started doing some “gender reveal” cakes lately, which is something I had never heard of before, but I guess it’s the new big thing.
FP: So, it’s, like, for a party to announce the gender…
LF: Right. Like, instead of having the technician tell them in the office, they put it in an envelope and seal it, and then they give it to the baker… And so they don’t know until they have the party and they cut the cake open with everybody. And that was really stressful for me because I was the only person that knew, and it was for a co-worker of mine, and I had to keep it a secret for almost a week and not tell him every time he came in my office: “You’re having a boy!”
I love doing that in my spare time. I’d like to do that full-time someday. But it’s kind of nice to have a creative outlet…
FP: So, do you think maybe you would enjoy baking less if it became your full-time job?
LF: I don’t know. I think if I eventually decided to try to start a business… I actually feel like my job has equipped me really well to do that some day. I’m really comfortable with finances, and I work with a lot of small business owners.
FP: You kind of know what it entails, so you won’t be in over your head.
LF: Right. Which is why, every time people ask me, “When are you going to start a business?” I’m like, “It will be at least five years.” I want to take care of all the boring stuff before I just take a leap of faith… But, this is a great town for small businesses, and hopefully it will stay that way.
FP: So, are you interested in trying to do something with your photojournalism degree?
LF: You know, I worked so hard at it in school, and I loved it so much, but at the same time, the more that I learned about and met other photojournalists, the more I realized that it wasn’t necessarily the lifestyle that I wanted. It involves, sometimes, a lot of travel… maybe the inability to have a family… also having to cover a lot of events that are just heart-breaking. I really want to spend 40 hours a week doing something that makes people happy, that brings people joy. That’s why I enjoy baking so much—because it’s always for some kind of celebration.
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