How I Discovered: Musicals (part one)

There is nothing like a Broadway musical. Irving Berlin said it best in Annie Get Your Gun: the costumes, the scenery, the makeup, the props, the audience who lifts you when you're down...
I've had the pleasure of seeing a few musicals throughout my life. The following are ones I saw before my junior year, which is when I started to really fall in love with musical theatre.

The Lion King
I saw The Lion King with my mom very early on. I must have been around eight or nine. In any case, we saw it at either DPAC or Memorial Auditorium downtown, and I was amazed by the spectacle and the grandness of it all. In fact, years later when I was invited to see it again, I used that word- spectacular- as my way of encouraging my group to go.

Junie B. Jones (?)
I wasn't even going to write about this, but I did see it on a field trip with my elementary or middle school. My mom and I would make jokes about how cheesy it was all the time.

Little Shop of Horrors
This was Millbrook's spring musical my freshman year. At the time, I didn't realize
 that I would one day be able to perform on that very stage myself or that some of the performers in lead roles would become some of my closest friends years later. I just knew that one of my oldest friends from elementary school was in it, and I enjoyed seeing her.

Spamalot
I was so torn as to whether or not I would audition for this show my sophomore year. At the time, I was a member of the track team and had a pretty decent shot of making varsity. It seemed like a good idea to stick around. I believe that everything happens for a reason, and I made many great memories on the track team that season. However, I can't help but wonder how different my life would be had I landed a role in that musical early on. Would I have gotten a good role? Would it have bumped me into a role in the next show? How different would my friends be? Spamalot was a silly show, but it planted seeds in my head that my passion lay somewhere other than the track.