BWW Blog: Maty Cameron - College Theatre: The Family I Never Knew I Had

I joined community theatre when I was fourteen. I had played sports my entire life. Playing sports with the same group of girls my entire life was competitive, caddy, and miserable. And then I joined the theatre world. Yes, the theatre world is competitive, and there are many people who can be caddy, but it was different here: there was an entirely new aspect to this: a sense of family. They were a shoulder to cry on when I needed it, they supported me when I was in shows elsewhere, they were there. It was the first non-biological family that I had formed myself, and that was the first time I realized I would never leave theatre.

A lot of the shows that I had done in high school were at the community theatre, and I was often one of the youngest in the show. There wasn't a competitive nature about these roles because we all did it for fun, and nobody could really play anybody else's role. This was the biggest hesitance that I had heading into college. I mean, was college going to have a Smash feel to it? Was it going to turn into a Megan Hilty vs. Katharine McPhee situation every show? Would they damage us so mentally through competition that it would turn into Black Swan?

I was so fearful of this damaging competition that I didn't audition for the first two shows. My first audition in college was The Nutcracker. Now this story needs a little background: I had no business auditioning for The Nutcracker against collegiate ballerinas. Yes, I did have seven years of ballet-from the time I was three to the time I was ten. And I was definitely still holding on to those glory days. I struggled through every combination - granted, I did better than I thought I would. I was able to correctly assemble the order of the steps and execute them so that you knew what the step was. But I'll tell you right now that I would not pay money to see anybody dance ballet the way I did in that audition. The only reason I survived this audition was out of the sheer kindness of the actual dancers auditioning. I asked them questions about the combinations, made self deprecating jokes, and not a single dancer had a mean thing to say to me. In fact, I even got a "good job!" from a couple of dancers. After the audition, the choreographer was kind, told me I worked hard, and that I should come take classes from her with a smile on her face. I, of course, did not get cast, but I realized I wasn't going to die in these auditions.

I love the people in my department like family. We have parcheesi nights with our professors. Our professors are our mentors, and we can tell them anything. They support us like proud parents. We play rounds and rounds of catch phrase. We have whine nights. We are there for each other. We are mean to each other. We get in fights. We are siblings. If anybody said anything horrible about one of them (that was not in the theatre department) they would definitely get verbally accosted into oblivion. We create Facebook group messages to give each other answers on the homework (because tech week will kill us all someday). Somebody always has a cough drop or a piece of gum for another. You don't ask to have part of somebody's snack; you just take it. By the end of the year, we all want a break from each other, but at the beginning of the next fall, we are all hugging and saying how much we missed one another.

Some days, I am horribly miserable in theatre. I hate being at rehearsal for five hours. I have hours of homework ahead of me, and I am about to go bankrupt from spending hundreds of dollars eating out of the snack machine. Classes can be long, and some days I just want to sit in a lecture hall like a normal student and play on Pinterest, not stand and stretch and perform every day, working on technique and motivation and character development. But there are days like today, where I sit around a table of food made by my dialects classmates, sitting next to my professor who is my fairy godmother, and smile. I love these people. I could be in a program where nobody knows my name or cares if I come to class. But instead, I am in a program with my family.

Stay humble and kind, Broadway World, and never stop reaching for your dreams.