No one expects a Broadway musical comedy to be in the vanguard of what is bohemian, raunchy, folkloric, academic or aggressively experimental. That is not its job. Its job is to synthesize musical and social traditions with high-styled vivacity, especially those that dwell on different sides of the tracks in real life. The highbrow meets the lowbrow; sweet meets hot; uptown, downtown, all around the town.

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.

The theater let me dramatize inner struggles, the push-pull between the inner life and the world, the various selves I presented according to what each world required. And it let me use my body.

Creativity isn't far away, or outside of you. It's an inner movement, a heart-shift, a joy making its way out of your throat or hands or feet. So go for it. No one's watching. The payoff is magnificent.

Depression isn't the almighty ruler of your destiny. Even its familiar traits - grief, anger, despair - you find that you can use in other ways. I can create with them in my writing and my life, mix them up with excitement and pleasure. I can name that terrible, numbing paralysis and know it will pass.

The world I grew up in had both a literal and mythological quality. We were on the borders of several worlds - the larger black world bordered us on one side. More distantly, there was the larger white world. We interacted with some, but not others. If you think of it as an internal geography, it is a land, a contested space with these very charged historical, cultural, and emotional borders.

For better or worse, there is not a situation in one's daily life that does not have feminist subtext, superstructure, implications and one is constantly aware of it, even when you want to rest it stands up and hits you in the face.