I believe my entire life and lifestyle can be traced back to the first three Broadway shows I saw.
- Peter Pan - It was a class trip. I saw it with Sandy Duncan at the original Helen Hayes Theatre on 46th Street. Which, just so happens – fun fact – was destroyed at the end of the run, along with four other Broadway theaters – to build the Marriott Marquis Hotel, where I worked at the eight floor ticket desk… if you go to the New York Time Photo Archives, you may even be able to find the photo our class posed for with the demonstrators outside the theatre which ran in the paper of record
- Dreamgirls – With the original Original Cast! I saw it with my mother – I’m sure she didn’t know it was going to have such adult themes… I don’t think she’d've brought her 12 year old budding gay if she did. I’ve a vivid memory of questioning her the next day, in our basement laundry room, folding towels, not asking about the unwed mother storyline or the drug use, or the domestic violence, no, what I couldn’t wrap my head around was ‘how did the doves know the right time during the song to fly up to the rafters and after the show, how did they know to come back?’
- A Chorus Line – I begged and begged to see this show, and finally, after my mother took my sister to see Cats!, I got to go see A Chorus Line. I saw it with most of the original cast, a few years after it opened… I remember I thought it was funny that Donna McKechnie who originated the role of Cassie had left the show for bigger and better things had returned, just like her character – I didn’t know then that that was the nature of the business. I still have my souvenir brass ticket key chain some thirty twenty years later. It was the fist time I knew what gay was…
SO, to conclude, I’m fat, black woman who won’t grow up and wants nothing more than to wake-up to find she has somewhere exciting to go… It all makes so much sense!
