THEATRE
My first love was the stage. While I didn't enjoy it so much as a four-year-old ballerina and tap dancer*, I discovered the joy of performance at ten-years-old in the role of Will Scarlet in Robin Hood. It wasn't just putting on a costume and make-up and exploring the life of someone else that thrilled me; it was the connection and response of the audience.
That is where the magic is for me: being able to take people on a journey, out of their respective realities, and involve them in the story; make them laugh, make them cry, change their lives.
Stephen King calls his medium of storytelling the 'most amiable sort of magic' he knows;
performing is like that for me.
While any opportunity to tread the boards is a boon, my true love lies with Shakespeare.
As Orsino would say: 'Give me excess of it!'**
My husband cannot comprehend how I can be so enamoured with a chap who has been dead over 400 years, but I am wholly content to sit and read, study and discuss the Bard for hours
(at least until everyone else around me has fallen asleep!).
Goals are important to me. Performing at The Globe in London?
Definitely on the Bucket List.
* There's something innately embarrassing about being the only left-hander in the dance troupe and never quite managing to start a routine on the correct foot....That and the fact that for our end-of-year tap performance I had to dress in a pink lycra toothbrush suit - bristles and all - and sing "I'm a pink toothbrush, you're a blue toothbrush".
There are events that happen in our formative years that never really leave us. This was one of those.
** Shakespeare's, Twelfth Night; or What You Will, Count Orsino, Act I, Sc. I