Carol Burnett said that "Comedy = Tragedy + Time."

I love math and that equation in particular seems like a true stand out. The theatre I am attracted to, the theatre I create, offers a reflection of that equation.

Finding the humor in the wake of sadness interests me personally and professionally. Making lemons into lemonade is one thing. Making lemons into a lemon pie, that then gets thrown in the face of the person who brought the lemons to the party in the first place ... that's where the fun is.

When I work, I look for the character who gets the proverbial pie in the face.

And then I look for whoever is left cleaning up the sticky, but doubtlessly delicious, mess.

That's usually where the story begins.

At seven years old, growing up in Chicago, I was lucky enough to get tickets to the BOZO show. I even got picked to introduce the next segment - "Now here comes that Wacky Wabbit ... Buuuuugs Bunny!"; - God, was Bozo great. Puppets, and jokes, and floppy shoes. A contest where you had to throw ping pong balls into buckets. It was all stellar entertainment as far as I was concerned. Is there a girl Bozo? I wondered. My mother didn't think so. My mother who refused to hang a needlepoint of Raggedy Ann & Andy that my grandmother had made above my crib, because Andy was dragging Ann by the hair, my mother who sometimes dared to refer to God as a woman, my mother who bought me Legos from the boy aisle, she wondered too. She brought me home and showed me Lucille Ball on the television. She showed me Madeline Kahn and Phyllis Diller, Mary Tyler Moore and Gilda Radner. We'd laugh and laugh. She gave me a doll and let me name her Lilly Tomlin. The babysitter was told I could stay up late to watch The Carol Burnett show.
Thank goodness. Without Carol, perhaps I never would have learned the equation I spend my life trying to solve.