It's 2010, is it? Hmmm...nothing in my day planner looks any different from last year (except I have an iphone now, so it shouldn't even exist really, except electronically), and it strikes me as interesting that I should be aging and growing more patient even as my seeming "unsuccess" sometimes rankles, both me AND my agents! But here I am, the same as you, pursuing dreams in 2010. And it's no wonder. On Broadway or not, the pulse of the American theatre goes on, and so do I, thank the gods.

Doing a play becomes like breathing. It's like eating. It's inside and outside of your corporeal being. It's inside of your mind, challenging lobes right and left, twisting and manipulating emotions and mood swings, forging and bending relationships which alternately buoy and drown your spirits in ways only years of psychology can explain. It's the dust in your nose hairs and lungs, the shmutz on your neck from mic tape, the strains on muscles and vocal cords, pin-curl pain and eyelash glue residue permanently sticking early morning eyelids shut.

But most intensely it's in your heart, which along with your mind invests itself 100% and loves whatever it is you are asked to do during the one week, one month, one year in which you perform it. This is a commitment that cannot be explained, a relationship, a marriage, which rarely brings fame and less often fortune.

I believe in the power of words, poetry, music and dance, in the full body experience of devotion to this ephemeral god of the moment: a play, a work, a "piece". Something keeps me going back into the fray after years of flesh, mind and heart-wounds. It is irrepressible, this longing to belong to a single community all working towards the imagined lockstep of opening-night perfection, which is alchemical, cannot be repeated and the like for which there is no substitution.

And so, this Year of the Tiger, we go,

Onwards...

Come see me as Queen Elizabeth in "Richard III" with New York Classical Theatre, June 3-27th!
103rd St in Central Park
www.Newyorkclassical.org