Sometimes you think
What are you even doing here?!
You left Australia to pursue your dreams
And trip the light fantastic!
And then there was drama school
And Aaron
And stupid forking cancer
And an even more stupid entirely preventable pandemic
And raising a puppy
And trying to make peace with living
In a place you didn’t want to be
And dealing with the dumpster fire of hell that is New Jersey Transit
And then there was divorce
(To quote Sondheim
“One word means all that”)
And so much heartbreak
And (to quote Jonathan Larson)
Revolving door roommates
And working all the jobs to pay rent
And just get by
And here you are panicking because
It’s almost fifteen whole years since you boarded that plane
And what exactly are you doing?!

And then your friend invites you to see a show
By a comedian you knew nothing about until tonight
And it’s a show all about being a theatre kid
And you’re surrounded by fellow musical dorks
(Who are actually, in your very humble opinion
The coolest people in the world)
And there is storytelling and laughing and singing
And it reminds you why you’re here
Because despite the absolute forkery that is
The Business of Show
This theatre thing
Oh lawd help you
It is your heart and soul
Your first language
The thing that you keep coming back to
Through heartbreak and struggle and all the forkery
A bit of singing and dancing makes it all better
Easier to bear
And when you take a breath
You remember you have done extraordinary wonderful thrilling things
That if you told Younger You you were doing
She would lose her goddamn mind

So what am I doing here?
I’m doing the thing I came here to do
One day at a time
Imperfectly, to the best of my ability
With the resources I have on hand and
(The best part)
Surrounded by a glorious group of
Theatre kids.

Sometimes you see a play
That cracks you open
Leaves you sobbing in the aisles
The story of a woman
Trying to know her mother
Know and understand the
Person she was
Before she was
Mom
When she was
A young woman starting a
Consciousness raising group
In the basement of an Ohio gym
In 1970
Before no fault divorce
Before women were allowed to have their own bank accounts
Before marriage equality
Before the narrator’s existence
And trying to understand the question
Was it worth it for her mom
To have kids?

In the second act
I could hear the
Sniffles and sobs
Of people around me
Sitting in the dark
Undergoing a collective catharsis
The extraordinary ability of a well-written,
Well-executed play
To provide a place for healing
For processing
For saying out loud
We need to do better
For women

At the end of the play
I couldn’t face going home
There were too many feelings
Too many thoughts to process
So I walked up to Rockefeller
And admired at the tree
And even though it was freezing
I walked down Fifth Avenue
All the way to 59th
And the lights sparkled
For the little child
Within

​I didn’t know singing in a cemetery while watching two Brits lug stone and ice and fire was on my bucket list
But here we are
How to explain this transcendent experience
That even days later I’m still processing
The magic of it
The meditative-ness of it
The rareness of it
The extraordinary nature of it

MasterVoices were the guests of
Kaleider’s Arch
A performance piece that has been done around the world
And this weekend was to be performed at
Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn
We rehearsed on Friday night
Learned all the elements of
Verity Standen’s gorgeous music
The revelation when she said
It doesn’t matter if the pitch drops
“That’s the human voice isn’t it?” she said
That’s the human voice!
And she said it didn’t matter if we made different vowel sounds
Because different vowels sound and feel different in individual voices
And wow, what a relief it was to hear that!
It’s not to say I don’t love the discipline that’s usually expected of the chorus
But it was so freeing to just SING
I floated home from rehearsal

The Saturday show was canceled
Due to inclement weather
Damn those weather gods!
But it made showing up on Sunday
All the more exciting
We rehearsed in the afternoon
Had dinner on the grass
A peak Victorian activity
In the midst of life we are--
My friends arrived
Ella, Miles, Opus, Emma, Heidi, and Molly
And somewhere in the crowd, my roomie Artur
Friends from very different parts of my life
UNSW, the Theatre Royal, Buck’s Rock, SP land, and NYC
All sitting together on the hill behind me
It was overwhelming and dizzying and wonderful

At dusk
The audience and the chorus
Sat among the gravestones
Lenny Bernstein up the hill
(Earlier, a number of us made a little pilgrimage to pay our respects
His grave is blink and you miss it
Not at all what you’d expect for one of the musical giants of the 20th century)
And witnessed the building of an arch
Out of stone and ice
A fire was fed in a metal drum
While 5 glorious singers intoned
The elemental nature of it
Water, earth, fire, and breath
Brick by brick and block by block, it was
Quite something to watch these two men haul the building blocks
While we all sat there and watched
Could we have gotten up to help?
Why do they do all the work while we just sit there?

At first the arch didn’t quite come together
It took a few goes of moving stones in and out
And readjusting and hammering
Before they took the wooden former out
The audience broke into applause when the arch stood on its own
Then Seth dragged the fire underneath
And the voices sang and intoned and rose and fell
And the ice slowly melted
It felt like we might sit there forever
Then the arch suddenly collapsed
The singing faded away
And the audience and the chorus, without guidance,
Gathered around the fire
It doesn’t get more primal than that
Humans gathering around a fire
To tell stories
Like moths to a--
As we did, the clouds parted to reveal (I kid you not),
A full moon

It was a meditation
It was immersive theatre
It was civilization and humanity and human endeavor
Everything we build will crumble
Everything we know matters
Nothing is important
What we do is vital
What we do is irrelevant
What we do is -

To quote Ali Smith
remember you must live
remember|you|most|love
remainder|you|mist|leaf
To witness it, experience it, be a part of it
I am thankful thankful thankful

Even though it was in black and white, and quite grainy
It was an emotional experience
Realizing that the dancers were just a few years older than Mum
Seeing the embodied dancers of voices I’ve listened to on repeat since I was 10.
It still amazes me that the stories of dancers in New York could resonate with a 10-year-old living 10,000 miles away.
That incredible Marvin Hamlisch score
Hearing the audience hear it for the first time.
Imagine being able to see A Chorus Line for the first time?
Remember seeing A Chorus Line for the first time?!
Remember being 10
Remember taking ballet lessons
Remember tights and leotards and having your hair in a bun and hair nets and hair pins and hairspray
Remember ballet shoes and cross over wraps
Remember practise shoes and the pretty satin shoes 
Remember the smell of the studio
Remember being awed and intimidated by the older girls 
Remember wishing you were an older girl 
Remember dancing in the living room and the light was your spotlight
(How did you know about spotlights?)
Remember the rush of joy.  

I had a wish
To live in a place
Where I could eat breathe and sleep theatre
Talk about theatre all day long
Immerse myself in a world of musicals and plays and art
And how do you know what you want til you get what you want and you see if you like it?
Well I’m here
And pardon my French
But I fucking love it
I’ve had the most excellent fortune
To see literally hundreds of shows
And it never gets old
The thrill of walking into a theatre
And wondering what magic awaits
To be handed your playbill
And rifling through the names
Oh I remember her from -
I loved them in -
And increasingly
Having had the pleasure of actually working the people on the stage and behind the scenes
Going to the Performing Arts Library to watch archival recordings on a weekly basis
If my sixteen year old self could see me now!

​When you’re in a room with several hundred people
And you collectively experience a night of transformative theatre
That makes you laugh and weep
And hold your breath
And turn to each other and say
Are you feeling what I’m feeling?!
And you walk out into the New York City night
On the autumnal equinox
And there is a man in a t-shirt and tattered jeans with grime-blackened feet at the end of them
Passed out on the pavement