"Each man reads his own meaning into New York"- Meyer Berger

Saturday morning I got off a MegaBus there at the corner of 7th and 28th in Midtown Manhattan and walked over to 26th between 8th and 9th.

To pick up a performer's pass.
In New York City.
Where I would be performing.
On stage.
In New York City.

Saturday morning, almost exactly 30 years after the horrifying incident* that rendered me stage frighty for what I thought would be the rest of my life, I walked into a New York City mainstage and said to the girl behind the ticket counter, "hello, I'd like to pick up my performer's pass".
Things got swimmy for a few seconds.  It was all pretty surreal and totally not something I would have ever said that I could have ever done in a million years.

Sure it wasn't Broadway.  We didn't pack the house like we do in Philadelphia.  There were no names in lights or flowers thrown onstage or leafing through the Entertainment Section the next morning over coffee and toast to see what people had to say.  But it was pretty effing special.

That's me in the black and purple dress.  Our performer's passes were just wristbands- those orange things we are all wearing.  I cut mine off and put it in my grandmother's sewing box which I guess is my sewing box now.
This is the part of the show where Caroline and I were chain-smoking Schnauzers named Cookie and Tootsie who worked on the docks and ate scraps from back alleys in Little Italy.  No one knew which one was Cookie and which was Tootsie.  Including us.  But we pretended like we did and gave everyone else a really hard time about thinking that all Schnauzers look alike.


*that horrifying incident was me being switched last minute from an elephant to a camel in the preschool rendition of some play about animals and I came out trunk swinging and trumpeting like a pro (I can still do that, it's incredibly life-like) with the camels.  I was an elephant when I should have been a camel.  Everyone laughed.  I was convinced I ruined the play, and when the teacher gave me a jar of bubbles afterwards, I gave them back and said I didn't deserve them.  I still remember what I was wearing.  A plaid romper that tied at the shoulders.  Purple and teal and cream.  With some magenta strung through.  I remember it because I spent a lot of time that night looking down at it. 
That night ruined my confidence for a long, long time.