20 Years on

 

TWENTY years ago at the Palace Theatre in London, this barely 22-year-old made her professional debut in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘The Woman in White’ as Laura Fairlie.

It would be absolutely impossible to explain how much I did NOT know, and how generously those around me lifted me up and escorted me not only in to the professional theatre industry, but in to adulthood itself. Many of those wonderful folks are still close friends and colleagues to this day. 

I look at this itty bitty girl now, and I think “my goodness…”  ...how very much I was still so broken, lost and unmoored; how much I still had to heal, and learn, and mature. I used to be so critical of how—despite flying so high publicly—how frightened, unwell and deeply naive she was… I judged and critiqued and maligned her at the time. I would be more compassionate now.

For now? 20 years in all I want to do is wrap my arms around her and say “well done, little one. This is just the beginning of a lifetime in ART—not *just* ‘show-business.’ There will be such adventures and glorious friendships. Allow this first triumph to be proof that life ebbs and flows, that after such loss and tragedy you can soar again, and(!) that despite this triumph there will be hard times ahead again, and on and on. Such is life…”

I don’t know if she would’ve believed me. For that night, all she believed was her heart.

Happy 20 years to me, to her, and to that lovely company.