I’ve always loved musicals. I love the torch songs, the big dance numbers, the choral harmonies, the over-the-top theatricality. They are the ultimate escape from reality. A world where people speak in song, “jazz hands” are normal, and everyone gets their moment in the spotlight. I think I know the words to more musicals than to pop songs. I know I’ve seen more musicals than concerts. I even reference lines from musicals more than from films. They have had a big impact on my life and, in some way, I think they have saved my life, or at least steered it in a better direction.

I grew up in an alcoholic home. My early child- hood was full of a lot of dysfunction and trauma, but it was also full of music and dance. That was one of the ways my sisters and I managed the stress, emotion, and confusion. Storytelling and performance allowed us to process our experiences and move that energy through us in a good way. It’s no surprise that we all became performers. And we still remember all the words to those early musicals we sang together when we were children.

There was one song in particular that became my personal anthem. When I was twelve years old, I was part of a children’s choir that toured with Raffi to the United Nations in New York for Earth Day. I was invited to my first Broadway show, A Chorus Line, and my world was changed forever. I watched a bunch of people sing about their love for performance, their desperate need to be seen, and their struggle with rejection. Almost halfway through, a Puerto Rican actress sings a song called “Nothing,” with lyrics by Edward Kleban and music by Marvin Hamlisch.

Before the song begins, a spotlight comes up and I see a young Latino woman (the character’s name is Diana Morales) who kind of looks like me. With my Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi mixed heritage and dark features, I was already used to people looking at me and asking, “Um, what are you?” I was also used to not seeing people that looked like me on stage or screen. So in that theatre, when this woman who looks like me introduces herself as an aspiring actress, I completely lose myself in her story. With humour and so much heart, she describes an acting class with ridiculous theatre exercises that make her feel nothing inside, and an acting teacher who makes her feel like she is nothing. On so many levels, I could relate.

At this point in my life, I had already put in four years at performing arts school, and had yet to make it into any choirs, dance troupes, plays, or musicals. It was as if I was the only one who knew I was really talented. And that’s what I heard when Diana Morales sang “Nothing.” She knew she was special, even though no one else around her saw it or believed it.

Even worse, the people around her denied her talent and crushed her dreams.

There’s a point in the song when her acting teacher says she’ll never be an actress—never! It is a critical moment, a moment I have faced hundreds of times throughout my twenty-five-year career as a performer: rejection, dismissal, humiliation. Instead of crumbling into despair, Diana finds her power. She realizes: this man is nothing, and if she wants something, she just has to find a better class. Then she’ll become an actress.

I learned a lesson in that song that has stuck with me to this day. No one’s word means more than my own. No one’s opinion of me means more than my own. It is all perspective. And in an industry that offers me a success rate of 9:1 (nine auditions for every one job booked), I had to find a way to know my worth and value and truth, regardless of what anyone else said.

It’s not that what other people think of me means nothing. It’s just that what I think of myself means everything. And so, almost thirty years later, I sing this song regularly to honour that teaching, to thank Mr. Kleban for his words, and to remind myself of my own power.

Tamara Podemski is an actress, singer, dancer, and screenwriter. She won the Special Jury Prize for Acting for the 2007 film Four Sheets to the Wind, and starred on Broadway in the musical Rent. She has recorded three albums, two in the Ojibwe language. With her actress sisters, Jennifer and Sarah, she produces, writes, and facilitates multimedia work- shops for Indigenous youth.