As of today, I have now been fully vaccinated for over a month, and, in many ways, it’s everything I expected it to be. A visit from a New York grad school friend spiraled into a spur of the moment road trip, and the slow return of full-fledged in-person theatre has been downright marvelous to behold.
I will never forget the first time I acted on camera. My agent had brought me in to work on a commercial read. With only two to three years of theatrical experience, I walked in and did what I was accustomed to on stage…umm…whoops. Poor, naive, eight-year-old me was completely unaware of how “big” my audition had been.
As a child, I grew up watching tons of movies. It was because of movies, I was introduced to musicals. Musicals turned movies get some flack in the theatre world.
In honor of May being Mental Health Awareness Month, I wanted to take the time to discuss a bit of my own journey, while also creating a space for others to share and find comfort in Unscripted – a place of no filter, reflection, hope, and of course, my path to the live theatre and entertainment business.
If this is your first time reading, Hi! I’m Bridget- you can find my first blog post here where I introduce myself and explain where my passion for arts and entertainment (i.e. theater) stems from.
Well, now that you know how I got to where I am and what I do, I’d like to talk a little more about who I am.
Though I have now lost count of the number of times that I have tried to leave the orbit of the theatre, something always seems to drag me back. Ever since I, as a pre-teen, emerged entranced from my very first Broadway show, nothing has ever quite managed to eclipse my passion for it, nor has any supposed change in priorities kept it from taking center stage in my life.
For most of my adult life, I have firmly believed that everything happens for a reason. Maybe it’s the native Floridian in me that came up with the following analogy, but I always remind myself to ride the universe’s waves and whatever wave I get at the time is for my best interest.
As a marketing professional somewhere between a young millennial and an old gen-z, one thing is for sure: I grew up in an incredible generation for arts and entertainment. I am lucky to have grown up in an evolving era of rapid change and growth, and it helped me quickly adapt to change and learn to accept it at an early age.
In the past five years, I have lived in five cities.
Meaning those “most important years of my life” (really just those crucial years of young adulthood in terms of identity and relationships) have been hectic, often lonely, and incredibly full of change I chose to accept and embrace.
I was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas…yes, the same place as Dorothy and Toto. And yes, that annoying flat stretch of farmland you have to fly over to get from one coast to the other. It’s not the most popular destination spot on the map, but to me, it’s home.