Saturday, June 7, 2014

Welcome Back

When I was four years old, I rummaged through drawers of mismatched, too-sparkly fabric and accessories until I found the perfect red scrap and a clashing wand. Whisking them around my body like a cocoon, I declared myself Mary Poppins and went parading around the halls. When I was seven, I wrote and filmed a low-budget ($0) movie with my grandmother about a rabbit and a chicken gallivanting through the woods. You could barely hear the dialogue over the crumple of dead California leaves beneath our church shoes, but the giggles shot through the noise. Then, when I was nine, I found myself searching for the breath squeezed below my excruciatingly tight yellow dress to send high notes soaring to the back of the church basement in my first real show. There were purple flowers in my hair, and the lipstick tasted like strawberries, and the momentum of the raucous clapping made me unstoppable by any human force.

I never could have guessed, after all those years of putting on someone else's skin, that I would feel so explosive in my own. To everyone who stood up for me last night, even though their chairs clacked loudly against their backings and their knees groaned like a car settling into the ground after the engine turns off: Thank you. I can't thank you enough.

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