Start Wearing Purple

My Helen Hayes nails are chipping already.

Another year, another ceremony. I was very lilac. I love my shoes. I live most of the year in the most practical shoes possible (this year it has been a pair of Clark’s clogs, literally every day in those same friggin’ clogs) and so once a year I wear completely impractical shoes and get to be a girl. It’s fun, on some level.

So many congratulations this year to Joe Calarco, who swept the awards with his production of Urinetown at The Signature Theater. It was encouraging to hear every person involved with that show mention in their thank you’s that working on the show was about feeling safe to explore and take risks and even, potentially, to fail. That’s what theater should be about.

Joe directed me when I was fourteen years old in a local summer theater production of Godspell - one of my first shows outside of a school setting. He was all of nineteen or twenty, and it was this thrilling experience because he was so damn smart and creative. I remember we did this exercise where we got in touch with our chakras – chakras! – and I was just a kid but I thought, wow, this is really what I want to do with my life. To have the chance to explore and create and discover what was going on inside of me and try to translate that to an audience, well, there didn’t seem to be anything more worth doing with my time. That experience was indeed one of the reasons I stayed in it. For better or worse. Hearty congratulations to a Rochester boy.

And so proud of the Clean House folk as well. Again, a group that seemed to truly adore the work they were doing. I love that. When you get the sense that a show was great because of, not in spite of, the process.

The party, well the party was overwhelming. It always is. I was loud and talked too much and found that I was overly connected to my emotions. Nothing new there.

But I love my shoes.

And to be able to go into rehearsal today and leave all the other stuff behind makes me feel like the luckiest woman in the world. To be able to put on jeans and a t-shirt and the aforementioned clogs and sit in a half designed room and work with people I love and respect on a play that I care deeply about. Really, could I ask for anything more than that?

No.

It may be an escape. But it’s my escape. And still, now, sixteen years after working on that production of Godspell I still feel like there is no better way that I could be spending my time.