Dr. Seuss wrote, “when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up in mutual weirdness and call it love.” I have found my loveable “weirdos” in the theaters where I have performed – from the pink and frilly hallways of the American Girl Place Theater in a Manhattan doll store to the pungent basement cafeteria that served as a dressing room at the Archbishop Stepinac High School for boys. In these diverse environments of creativity, I have...

I sing. I open my lungs and release gusts of emotion and beauty and truth. I have a talent. My riffs and melodies and breathy low notes stir even the hairs on the arms of cynics. Music makes people happy. Each note thrills me, moves me to tears sometimes. But it is the silence afterward. The hollow, hateful silence. That lingers. And then the real tears come. Because I am singing someone else’s words. I am lying. How can...