Harvard University

Lunch and recess were opportunities to ‘play’ Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, so we murdered our friends. We’d bake the dead into meat pies and scream cacophonously, “WE ALL DESERVE TO DIE!” Nine-year-old me even teased my hair, donned my Mrs. Lovett costume for Halloween, and rambled on about Australian penal colonies and how dead fiddle players make for “stringy” meat. You cannot imagine my disappointment when everybody thought I was Frankenstein’s Bride. Like Gypsy Rose Lee, my siblings and I spent our formative years at rehearsals and performances, where I was indoctrinated into the cult…