Good morning. It's Friday, April 17, and today's message comes from the brilliant theater performer Nick Garrison.
"I'm so glad I got asked to do one of these messages to the city because I've been watching them a lot lately and they're really comforting and lovely," Nick says in his message. "When they asked me to do this they asked if I would sing a particular song, and I was very happy to sing it, but it was also weird because I literally two days before had been teaching it to my niece."
Her name is Camoya, she's six years old, and she appears in the video. Some of her toys make appearances, too. As Nick says, "This is the perfect song to teach a kid about, well, the origin of love..."
"I was teaching her this song because I was trying to teach her things that I could actually manage to teach, that I have knowledge of, and so we were studying ancient Greece. Not that I'm an expert," Nick says.
"But we were talking about all the great things about ancient Greece like philosophy and democracy and theater, and some of the not so great things like them having slaves and women not being citizens. We didn't like those things. But I did realize that I know something about philosophy and theater. And so this song came up."
Nick's list of credits is long, but he is most well known for playing Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch better than anyone except John Cameron Mitchell himself. (Nick and John finally met for the first time after Mitchell's appearance at the Moore in February.)
Nick has played the role in multiple Seattle and Chicago productions. The Seattle productions were in 2000 and 2004. The Chicago productions were in 2001 and 2009.
Thank you so much for singing to us today, Nick!
And thank you for your guest appearance, Camoya! And for letting Nick use your dolls to show us how things work.
Happy weekend, everyone.
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Previously in this series:
