Ageism is interesting for me because I've been playing someone in my 40s since I was 20 or so, but I have experienced it. I've been lucky in that I haven't had to play the ingenue and feel that slip away.
'Hedwig' was the first audition my agent ever sent me on. I still have the slip of paper where I wrote down the appointment. I wrote down, 'Headwitch and the Angry Itch. Yitzhak. Croatian ex-drag queen billed as the last Jewess of the Balkans Krystal Nacht.'
It would be fun to be eighty-five and have a Broadway debut. That's the goal I'm shooting for. When they revive 'Driving Miss Daisy' for the seven-hundredth time.
What I love about Encores! is that it's a tremendous amount of work in a short amount of time, but it's just so festive and so celebratory and fun. It harkens back to the old days of just getting together and putting on a show.
As the director, it's just a constant stream of meetings where you meet with all of the creatives who make all of the decisions for every part of the episodes. You're also scouting for locations, deciding on the locations, meeting with your first associate director; mine was Jennifer Truelove. She's one of my favorite people on the planet.
If I could go into a time machine and be in my 20s again and do 'Flora the Red Menace,' I would. That was always the one. I mean, have they done that? I don't think so. No one's done that show. That was sort of a dream role of mine.
Eating good food is, to me, one of life's greatest joys, and I will never punish myself for it.
My sister gave my two-and-a-half year old this book called 'And Tango Makes Three,' about the gay penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo. They cared for an orphan egg 'til it hatched and then raised the baby penguin as their own. I cannot get through this book without copious amounts of tears and snot running down my face.
I've been a fan of 'High Maintenance' since it was on Vimeo. My husband and I were obsessed with it. It's one of the best things ever made, period. It's a completely unique perspective.
I do feel like, especially nowadays, we are inundated with the message that, 'Oh my God, you aren't making your own clothes? You didn't make your own bread? And you also don't have a career, and you don't look unbelievable, and you have 5 pounds on your frame? Where is your book that you haven't published yet?'
Reading 'The New Yorker' - I start on the last page and go backwards, reading all the cartoons. Then I read 'Shouts and Murmurs.' Then I read the reviews. Then I read the articles that immediately appeal to me.
My very first show that I ever did was a show called 'Then Came You'. It became a huge hit - no, it didn't. But it was a sitcom with some great people involved, and the story was about an older woman and a younger guy. I was the older woman's best friend. I was 27 years old.
It is hard to be unhappy in a gay bar where everyone's singing show tunes! In fact, I've spent many a night in those kind of places - in that particular place, actually - Marie's Crisis: it's truly a New York establishment.
The thing I know about Diana Trout is that she's the hardest-working person. She even says it in season one - that nobody works harder than she does. I believe that's always been true about her. That is why she has high expectations of everyone around her.
I think that, as women, we're often asked to apologize for our own power, or we're asked to undercut ourselves, and it's deemed unattractive to have faith in our abilities.
We are in love with youth culture in this country... It permeates every aspect of people's lives.
