My grandmother had always played show tunes from classic musicals at the piano when we were growing up, so that helped me fall in love with Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Lerner and Loewe, etc.
I may have gotten my first job from 'Backstage.' I remember going to the Equity offices, and I signed up for an audition. I left. I was grabbing a coffee somewhere and looking at 'Backstage' and saw that there was an audition for another project going on at the same time. It was called 'Almost Heaven: The Songs of John Denver.'
For a while, I was all sports all the time. Then, as I started to get into theater, they dropped away, but I hung on tight with a highly competitive Ultimate Frisbee team. It was probably less intense than I remember, but it was fun.
I like to pick out a certain part of each show I'm in and I watch it when I'm not onstage or in my dressing room. I'll go down to the stage and watch that part of the show each night.
We all have friends and family who see one path for us, and we go a different path, and it's not necessarily what they would have wanted.
I have a tattoo that I got in Memphis, and another I got in Dayton.
