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As part of a series called "My Big Break," All Things Considered is collecting stories of triumph, big and small. These are the moments when everything seems to click, and people leap forward into their careers.

Director and producer Leah Warshawski's big break happened on the water.

It started when she was in college studying Japanese in Hawaii. Her dormmate worked on a boat and asked if Warshawksi wanted a job translating for Japanese tourists.

"I wouldn't say that I really knew Japanese, but I wanted to know Japanese. I was really eager," she says.

So she got the job. In addition to interpreting, she was also began learning about marine life.

"There I was working in Waianae in Hawaii on a dolphin-excursion boat. It was swimming with dolphins in the wild, seeing humpback whales breaching in the winter, and trying my best to speak Japanese to the tourists," says Warshawski.

One of the guests on the boat worked on the TV show Baywatch. He was the marine coordinator, responsible for all that goes into filming a show on the water.

"It turns out he was looking for an assistant to help with a production that he had coming up," says Warshawski. "It happened to be Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding."

She had no experience with film production, but she knew a little bit about the water, which they needed. So she got the job.

Warshawski says her first wrap party included Carmen Electra and David Hasselhoff.

"It was a trip," she says. "It's such an odd entry into the industry, but you have to jump in head-first sometimes. That's where it all began."

Since Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding, Warshawski has worked in the marine department on TV shows, films and commercials, including episodes of Lost and Survivor: Fiji.

She also worked on the TV show Hawaii, which lasted for one season on NBC. One of Warshawski's assignments was to find a modern pirate ship to use in a scene. They found the perfect ship, and Warshawski rented the boat for the shoot. The captain and his crew came along.

"I was in charge of making sure that the captain did what production needed," she says, "and he got pretty sick of production and ended up holding me hostage until we got back to shore and they gave him what he wanted."

That's when Warshawski realized the captain and his crew were real pirates.

"They were actually running drugs on the boat. Nobody knew about it at the time," she says. "It was a mess."

She admits she was scared, but it was all part of her job. This and other adventures all started on that boat excursion in college.

Even though Warshawski says she loves being on the water, she still gets seasick.

"Once I remedy that, it's just heaven."

The fate of Western civilization rests in the hands of an Armenian comedian with a stage name that includes a popular digital music file format.

Aram Mp3, a musician-comedian-bon vivant, is the early favorite to win this year's 59th Annual Eurovision Song Contest. The absence of everyone's favorite and most reliable public events odds-maker Intrade aside, most betting markets suggest that Aram could run away with Europe's hearts and minds this weekend.

When paired against the Ukrainian entry this year, it almost seems like the respective television networks in each country were ready for this moment. As Russia sings about shining and leading into the darkness, Ukraine is looking westward with a western Ukrainian singer doing "Tick Tock." (But seriously: when did Ukraine find the time to host a competition and choose this upbeat dance number in the last few months?)

As OZY sagely points out, there are genuine diplomatic questions at stake in this weekend's competition, with confirmation only a few days ago that votes from the disputed Crimean peninsula would be counted as Ukraine's votes, not Russia's. And it will interesting to see whether outside-Russia Russian voters turn away this year out of protest, or move closer out of symbolic solidarity.

What isn't in question, however, is the Eurovision Song Contest's ability to serve as a strange metaphor for global citizenship. Those of us not living in Europe have no direct voice in the competition's results. We can't vote, and we can't influence the participants from moving in any particular direction. Instead, we watch from afar as our European friends do as they will and find their own way of responding to the appearance of rebellious factions.

Eurovision is the best international singing competition you didn't know you were missing, and it's time you tuned in before the whole thing falls apart. Also, they have an operatic drag queen with a beard. Do you? Probably not.

It's always unfortunate to see potential wasted onscreen, in acting, writing, or directing. It's worse to see it happen all at once with artists universally known as capable of much more. God's Pocket, the directorial feature debut of Mad Men's John Slattery and featuring one of Philip Seymour Hoffman's last performances, is a tonal mess, listless for two thirds until violence erupts seemingly at random. It wants to be Fargo, a tale of crime in an insular community and its mounting complications; instead, it collapses into laughable dramatics that fall flat.

Adapted from the novel by Peter Dexter and set in 1978 in the south Philadelphia neighborhood that gives the movie its title, God's Pocket follows Mickey (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his wife Jeanie (Christina Hendricks), and his stepson Leon (Caleb Landry Jones). Working a factory job, Leon is a loud-mouth, a kid too quick to brag while waving around his straight razor and far too ready with threats for the wrong men. A blow from another laborer that's meant to put him in his place ends up killing him, and when the police arrive everyone confirms it was a workplace accident.

As longtime Philly columnist Richard Shellburn (Richard Jenkins) says at the film's beginning, God's Pocket is a blue-collar neighborhood of working folk. To him, Leon's death is like any other: Men live and die there without ambition to leave but with plenty of resentment for outsiders. They're the kind of sad people who sit in the same bars every night for years living with the same unfulfilled dreams and same repeated delusions. They take drunken swings at each other in those bars, on the street, and at funerals, and it's business as usual.

If his assessment isn't meant to sound simplistic and condescending, it certainly reads that way, but Shellburn walks around God's Pocket like a minor celebrity anyway, venerated for being the only one not from the neighborhood to get what it's really like there.

Slattery's rendering of the place fits that cartoonishly salt-of-the-earth description, for better and worse. The streets and homes appear in grays and browns, cheerless, used places looking at once in steady decay and as if they've been that way forever. The period costumes and production design may be the most convincing elements because the performances, while well-acted, go without the support of characterizing details to shore up their authenticity.

It's not enough to know the basics—that Mickey and his buddy Arthur (John Turturro) work selling meat, steal things, owe debts, and get misty-eyed when they bet on the ponies. The script written by Slattery and Alex Metcalf is so spare on the specifics of character that not even Hoffman can elevate Mickey — who matter-of-factly weathers Leon's death and Jeanie's out-of-nowhere conviction that her son didn't die the way the report says — beyond a cipher of a sad sack.

Shellburn, whom Jeanie calls upon to investigate, may be the most fleshed out. That's an odd choice since he turns out to be both a scumbag who never performs the investigation for which he was brought in (but does trade on his fame to seduce Jeanie) and ultimately tangential to most of the plot.

Lacking stakes and any sense of urgency, God's Pocket exists in the space adjacent to a well-told story. Mickey's struggle to find enough money to bury Leon should be enough to compel, but by not investigating these people's lives deep enough to make them full characters, the movie promises authenticity and delivers a view through the lens of a tourist. In the end it misses the point as much as Shellburn does, wasting the potential of its story and its actors.

A small number of universities are starting to go against the grain, reducing amenities and frills in favor of keeping the costs relatively low.

Neil Theobald is the president of Temple University, which recently began offering students $4,000 per year in grants — if they promise to limit the number of hours they work during the school year and graduate on time.

Donal O'Shea is the president of the New College of Florida, the small honors college for Florida's state university system. There, costs have historically been kept to a minimum by not offering extracurricular sports and amenities.

Morning Edition's David Greene spoke with Theobald and O'Shea about the choices they've made, how they're pulling them off and why they think it is good policy.