I gave my heart to Jesus. I accepted him as my Lord and Savior, started reading the Bible, started going to a church (and) started a relationship with Jesus.

I had a very marginal understanding of what faith in God was growing up because, although I went to a Catholic school, without having parents who really were actively involved in faith there was no reinforcement of it. So, as a result of that I guess I just kind of thought that God was somebody that you put in a box and you put Him on a shelf and you called on him when you had crises.

If I could look back at the seeds of faith, they were planted back then. I remember in my early teenage years - when, naturally, we become more rebellious, prideful, self-directed and self-willed - I had this nun, Sister Mary Martinella, I'll never forget her - only because of one thing that she said that stuck in my spirit. And it was a rebuke.

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.

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.

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.

It's very hard to find good and wholesome, edifying and challenging writing for the students to perform. In my classroom I strive to do that as best as I can.