I got the bad press and the blogging and the email threats because people really didn't understand. They thought I was anti-gay. That's not true at all. My spiritual mom has a gay son. Even he was telling his friends "No, that's not true. She's so accepting of me." That doesn't mean I accept his lifestyle. It means I accept him as a human person and as a creation of God and a person of value.

I got the bad press and the blogging and the email threats because people really didn't understand. They thought I was anti-gay. That's not true at all. My spiritual mom has a gay son. Even he was telling his friends "No, that's not true. She's so accepting of me." That doesn't mean I accept his lifestyle. It means I accept him as a human person and as a creation of God and a person of value.

You get typecast. You have to find a niche in this business. So, the roles that I got cast in were the Latina or the Italian spitfires. The woman with a passion and the woman who didn't want to listen to anyone, did everything her own way, very self-willed.

As I got older, the role that I ended up (playing) on One Life to Live was a mother because, by then, I had a stable marriage - so I thought - and a beautiful son and mother roles became what I was doing well. I was still the Latina mom who very much related to people who love family. All those traditional values (were) coming back into my life.

The experience I had all those 40 years of working on Broadway and working on television, I bring it to students and I let them kind of drain me dry but they all feel at the end of the class that they are getting so much out of it. The students grow in my classroom because they feel safe. They don't feel like they're going to be yelled at.

I had known David Ham and Marco Santiago from having met and worked with them on The Cross and the Switchblade which we worked on together at Times Square Church. We joined together as Trace Life Media to be a directing/producing team to be able to assist churches in the production of a play in their own community or to bring a fully-produced productions - something that will be ministering to the Body of Christ.

When you hit the things that are relevant to the next generation, - it's a way for young people to feel like "Somebody understands me. Church is not irrelevant. I feel that my hurts are being addressed. Things that I am concerned about are being talked about."