My Theater Story
When I was 29 years old, I decided to pursue a second career in theater. I am a huge fan of Maya Angelou. One thing I always admired most about her was that she never put herself in a box. She was best known for being a poet and author, but she had several other skills. In her lifetime, she worked as a cook, cable car operator, actor, dancer, journalist, and she even had a small stint as a sex worker. I remember reading her memoirs while I was in college studying math and thinking, “Wow, I can do many things in life!”
My passions outside of teaching are travel and musical theater. I have always loved musical theater as a spectator, but for most of my life, I believed I couldn’t do theater. I thought theater was only open to a special group of people who were either born with some kind of theater gene or started it at a very young age. When I was 29 though, I got a divorce and in my mind, suddenly the world seemed to open up to me. Something about the divorce and the birth of my son broke me free from many of my limiting beliefs about life and myself. I decided to try theater out as a performer. I started out by going to a small community theater audition. That audition was terrifying for me, but somehow I got through it and I got into the show. I soon realized that if I wanted to perform on a professional level I’d have to get some training, so I started taking private voice lessons (because I wanted to focus on performing in musicals) and going to acting classes. At one point I was going to two-hour voice lessons four times a week and then coming home and practicing for two hours. My experience with learning mathematics taught me that I could learn any skill with time and discipline. There had been so many times in my graduate and undergraduate math classes that I didn’t understand a concept at all. Then after several hours (or weeks, or even months) of repetition, all of a sudden the concept would make sense. I applied that discipline to singing. Slowly, I started getting roles with professional companies in the Bay Area and in 2012 I got my first equity acting job. Equity is the national stage actors’ union. Being a member of Actors’ Equity guarantees certain pay scales and fair labor practices. Also many professional companies audition equity actors before they’ll see non-equity actors, so being equity would give me access to auditions to which I previously would have a hard time getting access. It was an exhilarating moment getting that phone call offering me the opportunity to go equity with a theater company I love. Eight years after my first community theater audition, I was actually getting paid a decent wage to perform!
Photo Credit: Luis Escobar
Photo Credit: Christine Fisk
Photo Credit: Erik Scanlon
Photo Credit: Mark Kitaoka/Tracy Martin
