My Favorite Fairy Tale

I would say I have a pretty obsessive personality. When I love something, I love it with all my heart. I learn absolutely everything I can about it and it’s basically my favorite thing in the world. But the only thing I can think of that has spanned my whole life, without me even realizing it, is theatre.  

It started when I was 5. Every spare moment of everyday I would beg my mom to play my favorite movie The Little Mermaid. Every time my mom popped it into the DVD player and the opening played my eyes would light up and I would be entranced. Maybe it was because of the pretty mermaids or the fun sea creatures, but I loved this movie more than anything else. Anytime a song would start I would sing along. I have always liked singing but these songs brought out the performer in me. My sister and I would jump around the living room from couch to couch belting out a, very likely off-key, rendition of ‘part of your world’ and dance around stupidly to ‘under the sea’. Sometimes we would even try our hand at a scary evil ‘poor unfortunate soul’. The little mermaid was my first taste of what a musical could do. How exciting and engaging something could be with a little song and dance; I would go through about 12 different emotions repeatedly in the span of an hour and a half long movie.  I was in love with musicals and I didn’t even know what they were called yet. In hindsight, this was the first indication that I would be a weird theatre kid.