How I Got My Equity Card

After getting my master's from Trinity University (through the graduate program at the Dallas Theater Center), I spent a while bouncing between New York and Mexico. In New York, I attended countless open calls, banged on a lot of agents’ doors and did a few Off-Off and way Off-Off Broadway shows. 

When I started in Montreal, Canada, professional acting meant radio. The union then was ACRA, the Association of the Canadian Radio Artists, and when I got my first job I automatically became a member of it.

I was waiting tables at the Lion's Rock on 77th, between 1st and 2nd. The year was 1976. It was a cold January night — after my shift — when I got a call from my agent. When I answered the phone, she said, "Darling, you're on Broadway!"

I had been working in Chicago for a year at Equity theatres under non-Equity contracts. Sometimes the roles were small, sometimes they were extraordinary.

I was graduating from Sarah Lawrence College and I won the McKnight Fellowship in Acting to the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, MN.

It was 1975 and I’d been a fixture on the Off-Off Broadway theatre scene for years when director Neil Flanagan offered me the lead roles to be performed in rotating rep out on Cape Cod.

It was early 1982 and I was a voice major at the Manhattan School of Music. Houston Grand Opera was mounting a revival of Show Boat starring Donald O’Connor and they were looking for male legit singers over six feet tall for their ensemble. So at 6’5,” I thought I had a pretty good shot

I was a grade school music teacher in New Jersey playing the title role in Little Mary Sunshine in a community theatre when a producer of an Equity summer stock company came backstage and said, “You should audition for our chorus next season.”

It was 1972, could have been 1973 (could have been 1873), and there were open auditions for Equity members for a production of Promises, Promises at the Woodminster Amphitheatre in Oakland, California.