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After I graduated from BJU my acting took a sideline as I worked in an inner city youth ministry in Philadelphia, PA for three and a half years. I participated in a lot of singing groups and the occasional camp skit. When I moved back to Lafayette, IN I wanted experience in a musical. So I tried out for Happy Hollow Players production of Roar of the Greasepaint, Smell of the Crowd directed by Doug Noll graduate of Purdue theater department. It was performed at West Lafayette High School as part of the City Parks Summer program. I tried out and got cast as one of the street urchins. The neat thing about this musical is that the whole cast was on stage practically the whole time. So we got to do a lot of acting. And not only did I finally get to sing and dance on stage, but since this production was done on a raked stage (slanted forward) that was made to look like a gameboard, I got to sing and dance while trying not to fall off the stage! The cast was comprised of high school students, career people and college people, and it was my first experience with men and women sharing the same dressing room! That did not happen at Bob Jones.

Right after performing in The Merry Widow, I took the role of Susannah in Hair. This was performed at the Long Center. Producing Hair in Lafayette, Indiana, without any black cast members, and with an ordinance against nudity proved quite a challenge for our director and producer Kevin McGuire, but he was up to it. He turned down the lights, put us at the very back of the stage, backlit us, and had us wear beige leotards. There was talk among the cast of actually doing the scene nude anyway, but in the end everyone backed out. So I don't know to this day if I would have done the nude scene in the nude. Actually I had a worse problem than the nude scene. I loved the show and my fellow cast members, who were so talented, but one scene was simply too sacrilegious for me to participate in. After wrestling with the problem silently, I bit the bullet and went to Kevin. I told him I was so sorry and that I would resign. He just shrugged it off and told me to find a way to get off the stage before the scene started and to get back on the stage (unobtrusively) after it ended.

Like I said. Only in Lafayette Indiana.