About me

Since graduating college, I have been finding opportunities that build on what I learned there. This has often coincided with working with children. At the Susan B. Anthony House and Museum, where I gave tours for two years, I often found children, whether with families or in school groups, to be some of the most interested visitors. They noticed things and asked questions that adults rarely did. I suppose I expected to work with children at Rochester Children’s Theatre. There were none in ‘Cinderella,’ but in ‘Peter Pan’ they outnumbered the adult cast. I had a lot of fun working with them, whether they were besting me in a sword fight on stage or goofing around with video games, jewelry braiding, and sign language off stage.

I was kind of the middle cousin, with only three cousins much older and the rest younger, so my earliest childcare responsibilities were with family. I also babysat a few of the neighborhood kids in high school. Working as a Child Wrangler was great, because I was passing along my own knowledge and love of theatre to the kids I looked after. The directors had covered teaching their parts, but I emphasized the importance of being ready to go on stage, listening for specific cues from stage management and letting the stage managers know they’d been heard, and being respectful of the show and the adult cast and crew. They seemed to come to love the routine we established of making the show happen, from little games we played to get them ready for the start of the show to collecting money for Broadway Cares after it was over.