Myself in the Archives and in Theatre

Hello, all! The HistoryMakers Digital Archive 2023 Black History Month Contest is still among the current events at PVAMU. After a silly April Fools prank, the winners have been announced via Instagram.

The participants are very excited to be honored in the upcoming award ceremony whose date is still TBD. During this ceremony, I plan to give the winners their prizes and showcase the archive’s uniqueness with demonstrations and clips. This is my form of campus outreach before the closing of the ambassadorship. In addition to this, I will continue to post on Instagram, showing some of the work from my previous blog posts. I will start next week with a clip on bugs - which I think is relevant given that is spring.

As for my impactful clip, I choose to display actor Billy Porter and his story on his first exposure to the theater:

“There was so many things that you could do. You know, and the afterschool program was on Wednesday and like everybody would stay after school...So I read it [the activity board] and I was scouring and there was a thing called Reizenstein musical theater, and I didn't know what theater was but I knew I sang in church…and I liked to sing, so I went to the meeting. And at the meeting we were informed…as to what a musical was and that we were having auditions the following week, so you could come in and sing whatever you want for the audition, which you would then be cast in a role. And we would rehearse every Wednesday through the top of the year and then in February we would ramp up those rehearsals for more than one day, and then at the end of March we would do four performances of this musical ['Babes in Arms,' Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart]...This is in the sixth grade. I didn't know what it was…It was the day before my birthday. The next day, my [maternal] grandmother [Martha Richardson Johnson] and my great aunt [Dorothy Richardson Majors] took me to see the touring company of 'The Wiz' and I was like, "Oh my god, this is a musical, this is a musical." And…it just was happenstance, it was just happenstance. And so at the end of the show, you know, the character Dorothy, sings "Home," (singing) "When I think of home, I think of the place where there's love overflowing," and I was decimated. Like (laughter) I was in my seat, I couldn't move. I was completely decimated and...so I went to my music teacher the next day and I said, "I want to sing this song called "Home" for the audition next week…She figured out a way to get me the music. I don't know how she did it. I think it was--you know there was a store called Volkwein's Music, which was a big store on the North Side in Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania], which is the Andy Warhol Museum, the building is now the Andy Warhol Museum. I think she went down there and got like--got me the album and the--and she got the sheet music for herself. I auditioned the following week, the cast list went up. It was literally a hundred people in the show, every single thing was double cast, except me. I was like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I'm the only one out of all these people that gets to do this show four times in a row (laughter). I don't have to share the part with anybody? So it was logged in my head that I might be good at this. This might be something that I can do, like just to make friends. And I did, all of a sudden I had friends, you know people would hear me sing and I had friends. People wanted to be my friend. People stopped wanting to beat me up (laughter) and wanted to be my friend, you know…It was a dramatic shift in like how I could exist in this thing called childhood and middle school (laughter), which is just so traumatic sometimes.”

This clip resonates with me because of my own connection to musical theater. As a child, I performed all the time; I started out in my living room with my parents as my audience but then I went straight to the stage in front of hundreds of strangers. I can relate to everything he said. I also went from not really knowing what a musical was to having long, vigorous rehearsals everyday of the week when I was little. But I didn’t hate how long it was; I loved rehearsing. And I loved theater, including watching others perform. Like Billy Porter, I saw the Wiz when I was little and was blown away by the song “Home”. So at my local theater, I learned it. And although I never auditioned with it, it was one of my favorites.

Musical theater is a fantastic expression of self. It helped Billy Porter find a community; it helped me find myself.

My Identity + HBCUs

Howard University Update