For a time, Max Vesuvius Budnick was the first face one would see when entering the school building. Maybe he’s run the sound for one of your devotions presentations, or fixed a piece of furniture you use. Perhaps he’s even the person who showed you how to use your first power tool. However you’ve interacted with Max, you’re sure to have been struck by his sunny personality, impeccable fashion sense, and true care for the world around him.

Max moved around a lot as a kid. Before sixth grade, he lived in New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and China before his family settled down near his Grandpa’s farm 45 minutes outside of Philadelphia. He went to a large, suburban public school. “I think back on it really fondly,” he says. “I really liked high school. I was really accepted, which I think is kind of rare for public school, especially if you’re a weirdo.”

Max spent much of his time in school making art and is still close with many of his friends from his teenage years. His career as a musician also began in school, with his rock band Crisis Mentality. “This was a band with all my best friends at the time,” he says. According to the band’s website from 2006, their goal was to play the middle school talent show. “It’s what the goal of many middle school bands is. That is the mecca. Crisis Mentality regrettably never made it to the stage.” Max did, however, play in a few different bands in high school. Although being the rock star on the talent show stage is no longer his goal, he still plays; “I play [music] mostly by myself or maybe with some intimate friends but I’m never writing a song or sharing a fully-finished piece. It’s always just jamming.”

As a student, Max was “always distracted and thinking about my own thing that I was excited about and would bring that to class rather than the other stuff that was going on.” Outside of school, he worked as a dishwasher, which he values because “it taught me how to have a bad job.”

As a kid, Max’s career goals changed often until an “intense moment of depression” when he was in eighth grade. “I had this really intense dream where I basically died. It was really realistic and sent me into this existential, middle-school, pubescent spiral.” He realized that he wanted to grow up to do something that made him happy — either music or art — and eventually went to Temple’s Tyler School of Art for painting. He now encourages students headed to college to get out of their comfort zones and try new things: “Take as many classes as you can take outside of the thing you’re focusing on because it can change the way you think about the thing you are focusing on,” he says.

Max’s rise through the ranks of Friends Select has been a strange one. He started out as a receptionist and substitute teacher. His favorite part of the job was greeting people, although he found it “really funny to be the face of an institution.” Now, Max boasts the fancier title of Technical Theatre Director. “Hilariously, it started with the old set designer cutting his finger off,” he explains. “He legit cut his finger off and couldn’t come [dismantle] the set.” The Theater Department asked Max if he could take down the set. He said he could. The next year, they asked if he could design the sets, and once again Max obliged. The year after that, when someone had to learn how to use the equipment in the newly renovated theater, Max was the man for the job. After a year of doing a job’s worth of odd work in addition to his receptionist position, Max told the school that it would probably be better to hire someone else to take on the extra responsibilities. “I think the student-centric nature of my vision for the position was ultimately part of the reason I got the job,” he says. As Elena Milliken ‘22 adds, “We also liked you more.”

In addition to his random duties around the school, Max has also taught Technically Theatre for two years. In the class, students learn their way around the woodshop to support school theatre productions and their own projects. “My straight-up favorite thing about being a teacher is interacting with students in a day-to-day way,” says Max. His time in art school shapes the way he wants his students to learn: “[Art school] really enforced that you can learn how to do stuff. [I’m excited to] show people how to look at things in a way that relates to them so they can use their own observation and tools to… do the things they want to do.” He also loves teaching students how to use tools. “I think I like the vertical bandsaw the most,” he says. “It’s weirdly the most fun tool to use because you can cut out all these different shapes.”

Max takes the mentality of learning new skills into his outside-of-school life as well. Lately, he has been learning how to tattoo. “I really like almost all my tattoos for different reasons but recently Frankie (a first-grade teacher at Friends Select) did these two on my arm. One’s a pineapple and the other is a door,” he says. “A door is a subject matter that she has referenced a lot in her paintings and a pineapple is one that I’ve referenced a lot. It’s this lovely grouping of tattoos that kind of feels like a portrait of the two of us, and also of a space in time.” He also has a least favorite piece: “I got these watermelons from this dude Bad Bad a while back. I like them but there’s these drips I almost asked him not to put in, that I wish I had asked him not to put in.”

From caring about what’s happening in the lives of his students and colleagues to trying to improve the physical space of the school in the woodshop, Max takes a keen interest in everything around him. This caring extends to the inanimate objects we interact with everyday, most of us without giving them a second thought. Any student of Max’s knows he loves to have his class talk about the meaning and importance of the objects in their lives.

When asked what single object he would save from his house if it was burning down, Max immediately jumped to “this cardboard pick-up truck… that was made by one of Frankie’s students a few years ago. It weirdly spawned a lot of art that I made, and I have a tattoo of it… it’s this object that has spawned a lot of other things. It’s a funny thing because it could very easily be remade, it’s not expensive. It’s very replaceable, kind of, but it’s also by far the most obvious choice.”