Inspiring Women : November 2020

I have met some famous people during my career. I
was in a movie with Topher Grace and Anna Faris. I
was just an extra but I talked to them a few times and
they were super nice. I also met Kevin Kline at a
fundraising event for a Shakespeare company and he
and I joked around for a bit. I kept quizzing him to see
if he remembered his lines from the movie Dave, one
of my family’s favorites. I made him laugh, so I would
call that a win. My favorite experience with a famous
person was taking a workshop with Anne Bogart and
SITI Company. Anne is famous for her VIEWPOINTS
technique and her work is just fascinating. I learned
so much in just one workshop. It was an incredible
experience! Highly recommend. Meeting people has
been fun but I would give my left leg to work with
Meryl Streep. She is such a chameleon, completely
embodying her character to the point where her body
of work is so varied you can barely recognize her from
role to role. I just think she is a fabulous talent and I
would be so honored and inspired to work with her.
Me with actor Kevin Kline
My work performing in schools has been the most
challenging yet rewarding experience for me. While touring with a children’s theater company, we
would arrive at a new school at 6:00 a.m. every day and strategize about how to make that particular
cafeteria work for our show. Every space is different, so we had to adapt quite a lot to make it work
with our set pieces, blocking, etc. We really had to trust each other and communicate effectively. At
the end of the day, the schoolchildren loved it, so it made the struggle worth it. Did I mention that we
did not have a crew? It was just me and two other actors who did the load-in, set-up, load-out,
monitored sound, washed costumes, etc. All of us traveled around in just one van. Just amazing. We
were like a well-oiled machine.
But my favorite artistic medium is to use theater in healthcare settings. For the last 11 years, I have
been a proud member of the Phoenix Theatre Company’s “Partners That Heal” program. We are an
acting ensemble that uses improvisation, music and storytelling to perform for sick kids at children's
hospitals. The goal is to humanize the healthcare experience and enhance overall wellbeing. This
type of work is incredibly rewarding and
I absolutely love it.
When I moved to the Netherlands, I
could no longer do “Partners That Heal”
and I missed it immensely. One of the
silver linings of the global pandemic is
that I was able to re-join the program
(from Amsterdam)! The time difference
between Arizona and the
Netherlands has made it interesting, but
I don’t mind it one bit. We have
been doing virtual visits with the
kids and it’s been going really well. The
kids need it now more than ever, since
many of them do not have access to
visitors or the freedom to leave their
rooms with all of the COVID restrictions.
Our equipment ready to set up for a performance in a school
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