Désirée

"Hm. I wonder if someone has made a clerical error."

 

This is how I feel about playing Désirée Armfeldt in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music.

Somebody is allowing me to do this in front of paying, living, customers.

 

To stand in the middle of a theater, in one of my favorite theatre communities in America—Chicago—and sing one of the most iconic songs ever written for the musical theatre canon while gradually removing articles of clothing in the round?

 

Lord Almighty.

 

The entire thing feels like the sort of idea that should have been stopped by at least three responsible adults before reaching production.

 

And yet here we are.

 

Ah, time. You sneaky little bitch. One day you're Anne Egerman. Then you blink. You answer a few emails. You survive a global pandemic. You have several life-saving surgeries. You discover that your knees now occasionally send weather reports. And suddenly you're standing on the cusp of forty-three, learning Désirée Armfeldt. 

 

The sunrise-sunset of it all has staggered me.

There is grief in that realization.

Where did it go?

Where did she go?

 

The young woman who believed forty was impossibly distant. The girl who thought grown women possessed some secret map she had somehow misplaced or never been gifted. The actress perpetually trying to squeeze herself into categories that never quiiiiiite fit.

Because if I'm honest, I always had to really make ingenues work. As in: I worked at it. 

I was never the princess or the porcelain doll. Never the girl who floated effortlessly through a story while everyone else projected fantasies onto her. Whatever "ingenue" roles I played, I played them by smuggling my own strangeness inside them. By bending the material around the oddly-shaped corners.

 

The women, though?

Ooooo the women are different.

Complicated. Funny. Wounded. Wise. Messy. Sexy. Flawed. ones. The women who know things. The women who have lived badly and brilliantly who who carry history in their bodies and alter the temperature when entering a room.

 

I've been waiting my whole life for these roles.

And now they are arriving.

Admittedly, perhaps slightly ahead of schedule? (Glynnis Johns was fifty when she originated Désirée) but maybe that doesn't mean I'm early.

Maybe it means this is merely my first turn.

Maybe it means there will be others.

Maybe it means I can stop treating every opportunity as if it is the last lifeboat leaving the dock.

Maybe it means I can simply be here.

 

 

A realization occurred to me years ago while in the trenches of recovering from an eating disorder.

For most of my teens and twenties, whenever an invitation involved swimming, I quietly declined. Anything involving a bathing suit. The logic seemed airtight at the time: I genuinely believed I was protecting innocent bystanders from the burden of witnessing my imperfect body. And because this was the 1990s and early 2000s—a cultural era that looked women directly in the eye and cheerfully informed us that the less space we occupied, the better—we were all marinating in some fairly toxic nonsense.

 

The tragedy is that water is my favorite thing in the world. Yet I abandoned it over and over again because I had become convinced that cellulite was a moral failure.

 

As recovery slowly arrived—and later, as illness arrived—I began to see the betrayal. I had sold myself out thousands of times and missed irreplaceable experiences because I was busy auditioning for a standard that did not exist with the intensity of a woman trying to secure the last helicopter out of Saigon. Convinced that if I just worked a little harder, sacrificed a little more, and occupied slightly less physical space, someone, somewhere, would finally hand me a certificate declaring me: Acceptable. 

 

What nonsense. 

 

When my body got sick I realized I wasn't negotiating with perfection anymore, but with survival.

Survival means the hierarchy of needs reveals itself with breathtaking efficiency. (I say this with truly extraordinary levels of expertise: survival is exactly like colonoscopy prep: there are no shades of grey, nuance or dilly dallying. There is only what must go and what cannot stay.)

 

When you've spent years wondering whether you'll ever be healthy again, whether you'll ever feel strong again, whether you'll ever get another chance at an ordinary day, you start looking at your body differently.

At forty-two, do I love every inch of it?

Absoluuutely not.

I remain a human woman.

But I am... alive. Astonishingly grateful to be alive.

And after 42 years on the fence, I've also arrived at the radical conclusion that some of me is extremely hot.

 

This, strangely enough, feels related to Désirée, and to "Send in the Clowns."

Désirée is a woman who has finally become more interested in truth than performance. Which may be why she feels less like a role I am playing, and more like a role I've been walking toward for decades. 

Somewhere along the way, I stopped striving for perfection and perhaps more importantly, I stopped performing perfection. I stopped apologizing for being human before anyone had even accused me of it.

When I went to my callback, our director asked me: 

"Aside from the obvious glamorous reasons, why do you want to play this role right now?"

 I paused an really thought about it before answering: 

"Because... once, what feels like both yesterday and very long ago, I took final bows on very fancy stages. And then I got very very sick. And lost so much. And gained so much. And now I just want to be happy."

 

Real is where Désirée lives.

Perfection doesn't survive four surgeries and come back with scars. Or stand in the center of a theatre in Chicago, remove her makeup, her clothing, sing Sondheim's greatest hymn, and laugh at the absurdity of (please pardon the mixed Sondheim metaphor) being alive.

Breathing, living, human beings do.

 

And perhaps 

Cellulite.

Traumatic pasts.

Scars.

Literal and metaphorical.

The whole glorious mess.

is more than enough. 

 

I think I'm learning to applaud it. And if I don't fully succeed this time? 

"Well. maybe next year." 

  

© Joe Mazza for BraveLux (of course) 

Make the thing.

If there is an artist reading this—exhausted, frightened, embarrassed by the size of your own wanting—I want to say something plainly:  

 

Make the thing. 

 

Write it. 

Paint it. 

Build it. 

Stage it. 

Ask the question. 

Send the email. 

Be embarrassingly earnest. 

Be valiant. 

 

Not because the world owes you applause—it doesn’t—but because making things is one of the oldest and most generous acts available to a human being. 

 

Make things because they delight you. 

Make things because they confuse you. 

Make things because they SERVE other people. 

Make things because your heart is trying to tell you something your mouth cannot. 

 

You do not know which strange little act of courage becomes the doorway to your life. 

 

Two and a half years ago this production of Brigadoon was me sitting alone with a laptop with the unearned confidence of a man ordering sparkling water for the whole table, and an unreasonable amount of feelings. 

Now it exists in the world. 

 

You truly never know.

 

Leaving Brigadoon.

Last day in California. 

Leaving Brigadoon. 

And I am thrilled to report: I do not leave hollowed out, but brimming with fullness.

I have spent more than two years orienting my life around these specific six weeks. Not merely writing toward them, but living toward them. Making decisions with one question in mind: ‘when this moment comes, will I be able to be fully present for it?’ 

And somehow—miraculously—I was.

This has been, in every possible way, the richest artistic experience of my life. There is something impossible and sacred about watching a thing that lived only in your imagination for years suddenly live, expand, breathe. To hear people speak words (and play the silences) that once existed only in your own skull (while you were wearing sweatpants and eating shredded cheese directly from the bag) is both deeply disorienting and impossibly moving.

But more than the production itself, I am carrying the people.
 

Katie Spelman—my whyfe and artistic soulmate. To make work with someone whose instincts feel braided into your own is one of life’s great privileges. And to share leadership with so many extraordinary women on this production felt quietly revolutionary.

 

What stunned me most was not that the work reached a high standard — it was how we reached it. This is a standout professional experience of my life where not one single sliver of my integrity had to be traded at the door. Nobody had to become cruel to become excellent. Nobody had to be diminished to make the room efficient. Nobody had to pretend exhaustion was virtue or disrespect was rigor. We worked hard—God, did we bleed and sweat—but we worked with kindness, curiosity, accountability, humor, compassion, and deep respect for one another’s humanity. 

For years I quietly accepted the mythology that great art must emerge from suffering, ego, fear, hierarchy, and collateral damage. This experience cracked that belief open. Excellence and gentleness are not enemies. Integrity is not naïveté. Respect is not the opposite of ambition. Sometimes the highest standard is reached not despite love—but because of it. 

And then there is the thing I can hardly write without crying: I was healthy. For the first time since 2014, I moved through an entire artistic process physically healthy, and surrounded in love, healthy relationships, and true support. That is absolute life. 

I do not take my health lightly. There is an Italian saying: "a healthy person has many wishes; an unhealthy person has only one." For thirteen years I have understood that wish in my bones. Illness narrows the horizon. It shrinks life into appointments and endurance and bargaining and becoming very acquainted with pain and loss and the undignified shadows of human existence, not to mention the particular acoustics of hospital waiting rooms. I think I stopped dreaming for a while there. Perhaps that is the “only one” wish part of the saying. Dreaming began to feel arrogant. I hoped smaller. 
So to arrive here—to this enormous artistic undertaking—and find myself not surviving but actually living inside it? I do not have language for that gift. Health did not solve every problem. I still over-packed emotionally and literally. But health gave me something I had not realized I lost: appetite (in every sense). Curiosity. Ambition. Permission to imagine a future. I do not take my second chance lightly. I intend to use every inch of it.

 

We are nothing without our health, and hollow without a community to uplift us in bounty and in storms. 

I fought for life. I changed my existence consciously choosing life rather than merely allowing it to continue. I was given a second chance and I endeavor every day to make it worthwhile. And as a result of that hard-won gift, two years ago I made a promise to myself: if the work did not nourish me, if it did not feel good, I would stop saying 'yes.' Some of that journey has been chronicled here. The current conclusion? 

Turns out: we do not have to suffer for our art.

I got to do the work I love while healthy, with my mother nearby, and Alec—my great love and world-class hype man—cheering from the front row of my life.

One of the strangest and quietest lessons of this experience had nothing to do with theatre and everything to do with allowing myself to be loved. I don’t think I realized until late last year how much of my life i have spent “bracing.” Not-quite-exhaling. Priding myself on being capable, independent, “low maintenance” and “not having needs” thank you so much. Which sounds noble until you realize sometimes independence is just fear in a trench coat. Hyper-vigilance with good posture. I did not realize how exhausted I was from holding myself upright until people began offering to hold me too. Alec, more than anyone, taught me this. He has loved me not as a reward for competence but as an invitation to rest. 
And then there were the friends—artists who read drafts, gave notes, solved problems, made calls, and friends who crossed oceans and time zones and spent money and energy simply to sit in the dark and say: I see you. I am in awe of that kind of love. I don’t think I understood how much courage it takes to receive support. More courage, perhaps, than to do everything alone.

Now I hand this beautiful show to its gorgeous, gifted, deeply feeling company and move toward the next horizon. But part of me will always live in this, first ever Brigadoon.

So. If this chapter taught me anything, it’s this:

More.

More joy.
More courage.

More community.
More women.
More art that feels like coming home.

Slàinte mhath.*

 

exactly how I feel...

 * Roughly pronounced "SLAHN-jeh-VAR" In Scottish Gaelic, this traditional toast translates to "good health" and is the cultural equivalent of "cheers". It is deeply tied to Scottish heritage and is the perfect way to cap off a hard day or celebrate with friends while enjoying a nice dram of whisky. 

We BrigaDID it.

The glorious company, taking a bow

Our brand new Brigadoon is open.

For nearly three years, this piece existed mostly in private: in notes apps and rehearsal rooms, in half-finished thoughts, in airports and 3 a.m. emails and long walks and seemingly impossible hope. For years it was fueled by a kind of delusional optimism and unearned confidence of, like, a gold prospector? 

 

All to say: I started all of this medium-unhinged because who was I to think that one can simply rewrite a classic musical and emerge psychologically unchanged? 

And then somehow—impossibly, like Brigadoon itself—it all became real.

What moves me most is not that this adaptation exists. 

It’s that it exists because of people. 

Of community. 

Of a love and respect for art-form and one another.

To Katie Spelman—my whyfe and artistic soulmate, our director, choreographer leader and my counterpART. We dreamed this thing together and built it with the strange faith that sometimes exists between two people before there is evidence. (Which feels very “Mr Forsythe” of us…) This world is tattooed with both our fingerprints. 

Danny Feldman and everyone at Pasadena Playhouse took a chance on two women steering a beloved giant and gave us room to imagine. Endless gratitude to the Lerner Family and the Loewe Foundation for this incredible honor, and all of the inspirations imagined and practical (you know who you are).

And then there are the friends. 

Old friends. 

Very old friends.  

Forever friends.  

New friends. 

Colleagues. 

All-grown-up students. 

Mentors. 

Collaborators. 

Heroes. 

People from every era of my little tiny artistic life appearing at exactly the right chapter to breathe life into these beautiful people and gorgeous town, that once only existed in my imagination...

Team Silber-Silver

A special thank you to my patient and inspired husband Alec, the ever-inspiring MamaSilbs, thank you for loving me through the glamorous process known as “watching someone stare silently into middle distance and call it work...”

 

Theatre is never made alone. It is created and consumed in community.

 

I feel very small beneath the size of my gratitude—and very lucky to stand among such giants. 

We all, BrigaDID it. 

All of us. It takes a (magical) village

 

 

I Would Like to Report That I Am Thriving (Deranged Edition)

Oh hello. WTF. I am currently in Los Angeles having the most important professional experience of my entire career.

 

Let me say that again, because it sounds fake even to me:
I am at the Pasadena Playhouse working on the world premiere of my new adaptation of Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon. 

 

Which, yes. I wrote. Like… I wrote it. 

With my human brain. 

And now real actors—gorgeous, talented, emotionally available unicorns are speaking the words and ideas and character arcs out loud while I sit behind a table laughing and crying and pretending I know what I’m doing and not, say, internet-searching “what does the playwright do during rehearsal besides spiral?”

 

To be clear: this is all, objectively, the dream.

So naturally, my psyche responded by committing seppuku. Because, let's not forget: I am me. 

 

At one point, mid-week, I had the very fun realization that maybe I’m “not good enough”… Or maybe I am simply a woman who has been expertly trained—by the ambient noise of culture—to hate myself on a cellular level despite a decade of therapy, a trip to literal Siberia, and several well-intentioned journaling phases.

 

Because here’s what’s wild: nothing around me suggested I was failing.

The work is good. The room is phenomenal. The people are extraordinary.

And yet my brain was like "Yes, but what if you are secretly a fraud and everyone is too polite to say so?"

 

So let's review. Within the span of one week, I have:

• Had a full-body emotional meltdown (positive) hearing my writing spoken aloud

• Had a full-body emotional meltdown (negative) hearing my writing spoken aloud

• Navigated sitting “behind the table” while internally whispering "they’re going to find you out..."
• Experienced an existential crisis so vast it could qualify for its own zip code
• Gotten my period (obviously. the uterus always clocks in for chaos) and "pulled" three other uterus-having humans off their cycle because I'm a trend setter
• Been pulled over by a traffic cop for driving too slowly, which I did not know was illegal exactly, but apparently is if you are radiating panic at 37 miles per hour along the 101.
• Been interviewed for a profile piece in the Los Angeles Times and photographed with legendary American playwright (and Alec's idol) David Henry Hwang, which is the kind of sentence that should belong to someone with much better posture
• Watched my computer die spectacularly! Forcing me to deal with the not-so-genius CARLOS at the Genius Bar, and spend $1400 I definitely don't have on a replacement, while whispering “this is fine...”

 

All of this while my husband was visiting for five too-brief days, during which he demonstrated the patience of a saint who has accepted that he married a woman who will—at any moment—combust over art and printer settings.

 

*

 

And THEN—because the universe is frankly a little aggressive—I remembered: Oh. This is what always happens right before you level up. I have been here before!

 

The migraine during the SATs.

The car dying on the way home from the hospital.
The sinus infection the day of my West Side Story audition.

It’s like life leans in, cracks its knuckles, and says,

“You want this next version of yourself? We'll just… see about that.”

 

Because the true test is not whether or not you can survive the chaos, but whether or not you can you remain yourself inside the inevitable chaos. 

 

Can you still show up?

Can you still do the work?
Can you still breathe, and pivot, and not light your entire life on fire because one thing went wrong? 

(or twelve things went wrong)? Somewhere between the traffic stop, the hormonal spiral, the computer funeral, and the deeply surreal experience of standing next to David Henry Hwang while trying not to dissociate, I realized I wasn’t falling apart. I was expanding. I guess... it just feels identical sometimes.

 

Because, dear reader, growth is not cute!

Growth is not a soft-focus Instagram reel with a voiceover about “stepping into your power.”

Growth is ugly-crying in a borrowed car while calculating interest rates.
Growth is showing up to rehearsal anyway.
Growth is letting yourself be seen before you feel ready.

Growth is saying, I am terrified, but I am not leaving.

 

There’s a psychological term for this —anti-fragile. 

 

When Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term anti-fragility, he was trying to name something that didn’t exist in our literal or psychological vocabulary. We have words for things that break under pressure ("fragile, breakable"—think of a wine glass shattering), and we have words for things that hold steady or bounce back ("robust, sturdy, steadfast,"—think of a levy or damn during a hurricane).  But what Taleb realized what that we did not have a word for systems that actually improve when they’re exposed to adversity, stress, pressure, or volatility.

 

Taleb describes this as a gap in the language with real consequences. 

Fragile clearly means something that’s harmed by shocks. 

Robust describes something that resists them. 

Resilient covers systems that can recover after being knocked down. 

 

But in all three cases, the best possible outcome is staying the same.

 

The central premise of an anti-fragile system is that it doesn’t merely survive difficulty. It actually improves, and becomes better because of it. It refers to systems that strengthen under pressure. A useful way to picture the distinction is as a simple triad:

 

Fragile: weakened or damaged by adversity.

Robust / resilient: able to withstand adversity or return to baseline, but unchanged by it.

Anti-fragile: made stronger by adversity.

Strengthened by the adversity.
Sharpened by the friction.

 

The exact opposite of the part of me that wanted to run.

 

*

 

So yes. Wow. I am in Los Angeles, living my dream.

 

And I am also crying in parking lots, buying emergency laptops, bleeding on schedule, and learning in real time how to stay present in the life I worked so hard to build.

 

Which feels about right.

 

Because maybe the "level up" isn’t the success at all. Maybe the level up is the ability to withstand all the good bad joyful heinous and identity-melting things that come with "success," and not talk yourself out of it.

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be at the Pasadena Playhouse, trying to act like a person who belongs there, while also? Quietly becoming one...

Internal monologue: "Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!"

Thank you, Michael Tilson Thomas

It with profound sorrow that I join the world in mourning the loss of a once-in-generation musician, Michael Tilson Thomas.

I have many memories, (and some shall always remain privately ‘mine’), but what I can say is that MTT gave me was so much more than “a shot” when he selected me—a total nobody— to sing *his* Maria. He also gave me the gift of contributing to the legacy of West Side Story and to crossover music history, happily preserved for all time on our glorious recording.

But above all, MTT unsentimentally taught me how to believe in myself, and the lesson that sometimes? that is a slow process. The story that captures this:

One day, during our week leading up to ‘West Side Story’ rehearsal he brought me in to his office. I truly believed I was being fired. The imposter syndrome was real. But that is not what happened. “You’re singing sharp when you get nervous,” he said. “I know. That does happen when I get nervous I’ll fix it,” I replied, horrified. “Singing sharp often happens when people try too hard,” MTT continued, “They overshoot the note trying to be more than they are. I don’t need you to be more than you are. You are ‘Ein großer Künstler’ Alexandra. A great artist. Be exactly what you are, fully, don’t shrink, don’t puff, and you’ll be perfection.”

I was staggered. I almost cried. 

     “So I’m not fired?”
     “Absolutely not.”
     “But… I don’t know if I can trust myself like that.”
     “Then trust ME. I’m Michael Tilson Thomas and I know what I’m doing! I chose you. And I don’t regret it. Trust ME until you trust yourself. Sometimes belief can be collaborative. Nothing wrong with that.”

May we all learn from this.

May his memory be a blessing. 

I know it shall always be for me. 

None shall part us now. 

 

 

 

 

Brigadoon: Day 1

 

No words. Because *every last word I could ever have*, is in those pages. 

Day 1. Let’s go. Och aye. 

 

John Steinbeck wrote a letter to his publisher when he submitted East of Eden. The letter was then used as the book's dedication. It captures what I feel: 

 

"Dear Pat,

You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”
I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.”
“What for?”
“To put things in.”
“What kind of things?”
“Whatever you have,” you said.
Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts- the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.
And still the box is not full.

John"

 

The Winter I Finally Stopped Bracing or, 'Growth Is Ugly and Does Not Photograph Well'

What I’ve come to understand (slowly, reluctantly, and with the emotional elegance of a rabid possum trapped inside a Panera) is that I fundamentally misunderstood what growth was supposed to look like. I used to believe that growth was a forward motion only. That to become more, you had to do more, achieve more, prove more. More productivity. More striving. More exhaustion disguised as ambition. I thought the evidence of a meaningful life would look like velocity.

 

But this winter taught me something quieter and, I think, more true.

That growth sometimes looks like retreat.
Like stillness.

 

Sometimes it means turning inward and tending to the abandoned rooms inside yourself—the parts that were neglected because survival demanded it. And I should note: this is not glamorous work. It does not photograph well. There are no inspirational montages. No one is posting “deep nervous system repair” content from beneath three blankets while eating stale crackers over the sink and trying not to cry during yet another prescription drug commercial.

But somewhere in the turning of this brutal winter, I realized something had changed.

The cold had finally left my body.

And I don’t mean the weather,  (although I'd like to petition that surviving a New York winter does make you feel eligible for frontier citizenship.) I mean the internal winter I had been carrying for far too long—the emotional frostbite that protected me from pain, yes, but also kept me from joy. The kind of psychic bracing that keeps a person functioning, productive, competent… and quietly absent from their own life.

Then, sometime in March, I noticed something almost imperceptible: I had stopped bracing.

I stopped apologizing for existing.
Stopped treating rest like moral failure.
Stopped experiencing my own life as something to endure.

And once that happened, something else suddenly became possible:

Expansion.

 

 

Of course, because life is not subtle, this period of stillness is now giving way to a season of extraordinary motion.  Spring into summer is arriving like a parade I did not RSVP to but am somehow expected to lead. Projects. Collaborations. Creative opportunities that feel not just exciting, but aligned. As though they were waiting for me to become the person capable of receiving them or, the version of myself capable of receiving them without immediately self-destructing.

 

This is new.

 

Before, work often felt like something I had to chase, or worse, survive.

 

Now, for the first time in a very long time, it feels like something I might actually be able to meet.

 

 

 

Becoming Warm Again

There is cold, and then there is New-York-waiting-for-the-above-ground-N-train-in-deepest-February cold.

 

Ah yes! Welcome back you vicious breeze! You have discovered the one gap in my coat! I hear your raspy whisper threaten: “You will never be warm again...” Y'all? I weathered the Polar Vortex of 2018 in Chicago (where it was -53ºF and colder in Chicago than on the surface of Mars), and I've been to Siberia, and this New York winter kicked my ass. So I would like to formally submit a complaint: 'hear ye hear ye, no human being is meant to stand on an open-air platform while the wind weaponizes itself against your femurs.' 

 

I don’t care how cold it is in the Arctic Circle, Vladivostok or Fargo—are those people waiting for the bus? 

 

Because that’s what this winter felt like.

Not just meteorologically. Spiritually. 

Good ol' 2026. Making itself known. It's not enough that the world is at war, everything is unaffordable and the spine of America has been crushed beneath an orphaned mack truck no one can afford to drive because gas is $5 a gallon. 
No. We also had to have when-will-it-end winter whilst stuck on the 6 train. 

 

This was a winter of sub-zero temperatures, multiple snowstorms, and me, once again trying-and-failing to quit show business like a woman calmly exiting a casino before she sets her own wallet on fire. I called it a “dramatical sabbatical,” which sounds elegant and intentional, like I was sipping oolong and reading Strinberg, but in reality? I was horizontal a lot. I finally did (and remain "doing"), the trauma work. And not the chic, go-to-the-woods-for-a-retreat kind. I mean the kind where you sit inside things you have spent decades outrunning. The kind where your body (which has been quietly holding receipts since childhood) decides it’s time to present the bill. Dad, his parents, disordered eating, ulcerative colitis. All all all. All of it, apparently, has been living in my proverbial basement like emotionally charged raccoons, waiting for me to finally turn on the light. There was a lot of sitting and remembering. A lot of realizing that I had built an entire life around highly functioning.

 

And also—and I want to be clear about this—there were still, like, errands. Getting your shit together does not cancel your CVS obligations. You can be mid-epiphany about your childhood and still have to pick up a prescription and stand behind a man arguing about coupons. 

 

But something began to shift. Very slowly, like thawing. At first, it was physical. I realized one morning that I was not clenching my jaw. Then I noticed I could sit still without immediately reaching for an activity to "accomplish." Then—and this felt revolutionary—I took a full breath without it catching halfway through like a Windows 95 error. 

 

All to say: 

Warmth, I am learning, is not just temperature. 

It might just be your nervous system lowering its weapons, and the body deciding, at last, that it is not under siege.

I did not know, until this winter, how deeply unrested I have been for most of my life. How much of my productivity was powered not by inspiration, but by fear. Fear of stopping. Fear of feeling. Fear of what might catch up to me if I ever stood still long enough to let it.

And now, having stood still—truly still—I can say this:

Nothing caught up to me.

I caught up to myself.

Because when you emerge—and you do emerge—you are not the same person who went in.

You are warmer.

You are rested.

And perhaps most importantly, you are no longer estranged from yourself.

 

This is a kind of abundance that has nothing to do with money or accolades or even opportunity. 

It is the abundance of being present in your own life.

Of feeling your breath fully.
Of trusting your body again.
Of knowing that whatever comes next, you will meet it as yourself — not as a performance of yourself.

 

So here I am.

Standing on the edge of a season that feels, for the first time in a long time, not like something to survive—but something to live. 

If winter was the pulling back of the bow, then this moment is the breath just before release.

 

Not frantic.
Not forced.

Ready.

 

© hula seventy

"All I Need is the Girl" from Broadway Backwards: 20th Anniverssary

From "All I Need is the Girl" with Robyn Hurder

‘ALL I NEED IS THE GIRL’ – 2026

There aren’t words to express what it meant to be invited back to share the stage with my forever girlfriend Robyn Hurder (arguably one of our *greatest* triple threats) and recreate this iconic scene and choreography from GYPSY (originally directed / put on us in 2019 by pal Tony Yazbeck  iconic Tulsa himself!)

Ohhhhh how the world has changed since then. How both of our lives, bodies, hearts and careers have evolved and shifted in those 7 years. And yet, like the magic that is emotional and muscle memory: there it all was, like not a moment had passed for this version of Tulsa and Louise. A very special take on the agony of unrequited love…

Thank you Broadway Cares for the honor and the gift. ✨

📸 📸: Michael Hull and Rebecca J Michelson
_________________

BROADWAY BACKWARDS
Written, Directed and Choreographed by Robert Bartley
Music Supervisors: @tedarthur, @marymitchellc
Music Director: @stevenmcuevas
Choreographer and Associate Director: @adamant9
Co-choreographers: @tinylamotte, @colby_q
Production Stage Manager: @esarab
Props Designers: Jenna Snyder, @alexanderwylie87
Lighting Designers: @jeffcroiter, @colleenashleyd
Sound Designers: Marie Renee Foucher, Josh Maszle
Costume Designers: @kittycassetti, @jgersz, Alex Rocky, @tiecarlton
Hair Designers & Supervisors: @meganburkeartistry, @wigkedtiff
Makeup Designers & Supervisors: @joshuabarrymua, @meganburkeartistry
Casting Consultant: @castingbyarc

(Re) Rehearsing for Broadway Backwards: 20th Anniverssary

There are certain nights in the theatre that feel less like performances and more like communal acts of remembrance. Broadway Backwards has always been one of those nights. For twenty years, this extraordinary event benefiting Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS has gathered artists together not only to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community through the re-imagining of beloved musical theatre canon, but to remind us why theatre matters in the first place: because storytelling can raise money, yes—but more importantly, it can raise one another.

 

So to be invited back for the 20th anniversary celebration at the Gershwin Theatre was already beyond anything I could have dreamed. To be asked to revisit not one, but both of my previous numbers — “All I Need Is the Girl” with the incandescent Robyn Hurder and “One Day More” alongside this glorious company of artists—felt almost impossible to process emotionally. There are moments in a creative life where you feel yourself quietly admitted into the room you spent your entire childhood hoping existed. 

 

This was one of those moments. 

 

And what moved me most deeply was not merely the nostalgia of recreating these performances, but the realization that while the work remains frozen in time, we do not.

 

When Robyn and I first performed “All I Need Is the Girl” in 2019, I had just met Alec—my now-husband—and I could not possibly have imagined the life that was waiting for me. I had not yet endured four life-saving surgeries. I had not yet learned what it meant to rebuild a body, a career, and a sense of self simultaneously. Robyn, too, has transformed beautifully: artistically, personally, professionally. Watching her ascend has been one of the great joys of my life.

 

And when I stood in “One Day More” in 2022, the entire world still felt bruised and disoriented from the ravages of COVID. I was still struggling physically and emotionally in the aftermath of illness and survival itself. We were all, in some way, trying to remember how to gather again.

 

That is the strange and holy magic of theatre. We return to the same material, but never as the same people. Every revisit becomes a kind of archaeological dig into who we once were and who we have become. A lyric lands differently. A harmony carries new grief or gratitude inside it. The body remembers what the heart has lived through.

 

 

For aspiring performers, I think this may be one of the greatest lessons this art form offers us: your work will evolve because you evolve. Life will mark you. Love will mark you. Loss will mark you. Survival will mark you. And if you are fortunate, you will someday return to a familiar stage carrying a deeper humanity than the person who first stepped onto it.

 

What an honor to revisit the past in service of the future. What an honor to stand among this community. And what a privilege to still be growing inside the work.

 

Where is "The Handbook for the Recently Adult?"

I have long believed that adulthood is poorly organized.

Not in the broad philosophical sense—we’ve always known life is chaos—but in a customer service sense. There is no on-boarding. You simply wake up one morning responsible for a health insurance deductible and three kinds of laundry detergent, and are expected to proceed with confidence.

This seems unfair, given that when one dies—at least according to Beetlejuice— a courteous supernatural bureaucracy provides "The Handbook for the Recently Deceased." You are welcomed to your new existential status with documentation. Instructions. Diagrams. A table of contents. And a (admittedly: dubious) customer service system. 

Meanwhile, when you turn 25, society hands you a car-rental eligibility, at 26 you have your parents' health insurance revoked, and society just sort of quietly expects you to *k n o w* how taxes work.

I guess I had always believed adulthood had a little more ceremony. Something to signify that childhood was absolutely over, and at the bare minimum you'd get a poorly filmed instructional video about the ins and outs of Adult Life. 

Or better yet! Like in Beetlejuice, at some point, a courier appears. They approach you, require a signature, and without emotion hand over a leather-bound Adulting Manual. Inside are instructions for taxes, bank accounts, conflict resolution, grief processing, how to iron a shirt without Googling it, and how to not panic when the pharmacy receipt is longer than a novella.

Instead, adulthood appears to be a slow leak of realizations, all which feel like everyone else you've ever met has figured out first. 

So you're left to fend for yourself, pretending we're grown without a manual. 

No manual. Just episodes?!
This is an outrage. 
Where is "The Handbook for the Recently Adult?"

To heck with the stoic courier! Perhaps its arrival is even more discreet—slipped under your door at midnight on your birthday in a tasteful, intimidating binder.

Chapter 1: Your Parents Are Now Mortal.
Chapter 7:  Friendships Become Appointments.  
Chapter 14:  How to advocate for yourself
Chapter 17:  Taxes: You Will Never Fully Understand. (Includes a reassuring flowchart ending in the words “probably correct.”)
Chapter 20: How Your Childhood Shaped You
Chapter 24: Rest is Not Laziness
Chapter 29: Boundaries!
Chapter 32:  Bodies Keep The Score and Charge Interest. (You cannot out-schedule biology.)

Chapter 38:  How to buy a mattress without having a crisis

Chapter 40:  Cooking For One (With and without existential despair)

Chapter 47:  How to talk to doctors without saying “sorry” for symptoms.

Chapter 55:  Sorry, but Reddit is not Your Primary Care Physician. 
Appendix B: The Apology You Owe Yourself.

 

My suspicion has always been that everyone else did, in fact, receive this manual. They simply are sworn to a kind of Knights-Templar-like secret society pact, or perhaps just forgot to mention it. Because I watch people refinance mortgages calmly, select appropriate throw pillows, maintain long-term relationships with dentists—and I think: *Ah, yes. They must be familiar with what I assume is page 347. The chapter on ‘knowing what you’re doing.’

But adulthood, I’m discovering at the ripe old middle age of 42, is not the possession of knowledge. It is the gradual acceptance of permanent partial understanding. Because you see: NOBODY received the manual. We are all just gently pretending, passing notes in the margins of a book that has never been printed.

And occasionally, if we are lucky, I suppose we get to write our own chapter.