 Harper Elena Roselli was born May 20, 1987 to Bridget McCartney and Maxwell Roselli. Despite their very ethnocentric surnames and cultural backgrounds, there was no bad blood between Bridget's Irish family or Maxwell's Italian one, no dramatic Romeo and Juliet/mafia-esque story that was taking its toll on the young lovers. In fact, both of their parents quietly (and not so quietly) wished that Bridget and Maxwell would stop living in sin, which they finally did when Harper was about five years old and capable of making an adorable flower girl. Life for little Harper was peacefully average; she was raised in the same row house that her father had grown up in, in the neighborhood of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, and they were financially secure, although not extravagantly wealthy – Bridget was a middle school english teacher and the Rosellis had owned their own restaurant for about three generations now. School was something Harper loved and loathed in equal parts – she was a very bright student, with amazing comprehension skills and all, and from day one, she proved to be a little social butterfly. However, she was notoriously lazy when it came to actually doing the school work, and teachers were continually scolding her – it not for that, then for talking during class – so much so that even one year she barely saw the outside of the school yard during recess time. It took several years of exasperated groundings from her parents and a few months as a functional zombie (thanks, Ritalin!) before Harper found any working solution and discipline. Growing up, she had been enrolled in any number of classes – dance, cooking, karate, what-have you – a mixture of her parents wanting her to be well rounded, Harper's own whims, and giving her something to do after school while they were both busy. Late in the fifth grade, she began taking singing lessons, as well as piano and discovered a love of music extending beyond cheesy pop hits and trying to reach Freddie Mercury's falsetto when she heard Bohemian Rhapsody when the radio was set to oldies. Through music, she learned something of control – control of her voice, a little control of her hyperactivity, and control of doing her school work when her parents saw that they had ammunition with which to coerce her. Middle school was a breeze, in which she left behind her sordid and lazy grade school years and developed into an excellent student who didn't have to endure parent-teacher conferences on a near monthly basis. These excellent study habits carried into high school and, with the help of some truly impressive SAT scores, paid off in the end. Harper had always considered herself a New York girl, through and through, and after too many trips on the R-line into Manhattan proper, she was dead certain that she wanted to attend New York University. It was it, the dream school. And she was lucky enough, in the spring of 2005, to get accepted (with some scholarship money, to boot!). Unlike her peers, who went off to college never knowing what they intended to do, Harper went in with a direction and hasn't look back since: she applied and was accepted to Tisch's very exclusive Recorded Music program. Now, Harper is in her last semester at NYU, living off campus with a couple of friends and waitressing part-time in a (failing) dinner theatre. While things are constantly in precarious position in her life – will she be able to find work once she graduates, will the theatre she's working at now go out of business – she continues to view the future in an extremely optimistic light.
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