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Chris Velardi: Hey, it's Chris Velardi. Glad you found the 'Cuse Conversations podcast. Our guest today, Katie Zaffrann, a 2004 grad with a BFA in musical theater from VPA and her audition story, it's a good one.

Katie Zaffrann: So, I remember I auditioned across the country for a number of programs. Syracuse was my first audition and it ended up being the standard that I held every other program up to. And I remember so clearly I was singing my song and the auditor who was later one of my professors got up from behind the table and started acting with me.

Chris Velardi: What happens next? You'll have to listen to the conversation. She'll finish the story for you. We cover a lot of ground in this 'Cuse conversation, including Katie's time at SU. Her new venture as an instructor with Greenhouse Music, which is an online conservatory, she's teaching a class called The Whole Musician. We also dive deep into the importance of dealing with anxiety and mental health, but we're going to start with the challenges of the last year when you're a performer in a world without performances. So, how are you doing?

Katie Zaffrann: I'm hanging in there and I'll be honest. I think I might be doing a little better than some. I wouldn't have said that a year ago, but I actually gave birth about two weeks into lockdown. So, certainly at the time I would not have said, oh, this is beneficial, but now I was never planning to take a year off of work. And I didn't have to really take a year off of work, because the industry took this year off of work. And I ended up getting a whole year with my new daughter that I probably wouldn't have had in such an intense and intimate way. So, she's been an amazing silver lining.

Chris Velardi: That really is such an important way to look at whatever your experience has been over the last year plus is to try to find those silver linings and they try to say, this is something I wouldn't have had the opportunity to do under whatever normal is, but normal circumstances.

Katie Zaffrann: Yeah. Yeah. And I won't sugar coat it, it was really hard. I wasn't allowed to have a lot of the support that I was expecting and planning to have for my birth, including support afterwards. I think the first person beside, well, there's the pediatrician, but besides my husband and I, my mother was the first person to hold my daughter and that was when she was two months old. So, plenty of other people have harder stories and different stories. It was incredibly difficult. But now I really feel like after this whole incubation time, I really feel like it's just been a blessing on all sides.

Chris Velardi: Yeah. It's good to be able to be in that position and have that mindset at this point. But the reality is you work in a field that absolutely was shut down, had to be shut down. As a performer, as somebody who kind of in many ways makes a living by going in front of audiences and doing something. I mean, it seems like an obvious question, but how did that affect you not being able to do that?

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Katie Zaffrann: Hm. What can I say? It's been really hard and even now I feel ready. I'm really ready now to get back to work. If I wasn't, whatever I could say six months ago, okay I'm still here. Now I'm really itching and the door's just starting to sort of peep open. And I think it's a reckoning of sorts in a way, because there are many ways that it feels like our society already sort of devalues or downplays the role of the artist in society. We certainly don't fund artists the way that countries like Ireland or Germany do. And this is of course, it's a very complex issue and a pandemic is different than governmental policy, but it sort of plays into that sense of, okay, well, sports is reopening. Restaurants are reopening. We're doing all these things to reopen all these industries and steps are being taken certainly to reopen Broadway. And they've made announcements about that, but it's been slow going when film is opened in a way that theater is not.

Chris Velardi: Yeah, there's no doubt. And one of the things that I've heard along those lines is yeah, it isn't the only industry, but one of the things that the pandemic has done is it has absolutely shone a spotlight on some areas where maybe we didn't quite have it right before [crosstalk 00:05:05] one, right?

Katie Zaffrann: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think that's very true that shining a spotlight, I think, is a really great way to put it.

Chris Velardi: And not just for the theater analogy.

Katie Zaffrann: Yes, of course, I'm hopeful though, that now that the lights are on, it's the kind of thing as we're seeing, again, across society in many different ways, how do we move forward from here? It's like people saying, oh, we're going to go back to normal. I don't think we'll ever go back to normal after this time, there has to be a new normal. And so what does that look like? And hopefully we all get to create it in the image that we want.

Chris Velardi: Yeah. One of the things that certainly I noticed about watching many of the folks who are performers do is that idea of kind of figuring how to do what I do, but in a different way, using a different venue platform, whatever you want to call it and just kind of somewhat reinventing yourself. Did you find yourself doing that along the way?

Katie Zaffrann: Well, for my past year, again, I've been largely in the nursery, so I'll just say, my husband is a classical singer. We've done a lot of harmonizing of lullabies. I've made up whole albums of music based on my daughter. So, I know that's not what you're asking, but I feel like that's been the primary way that I've reinvented myself this year.

Chris Velardi: Absolutely, I think about [inaudible 00:06:40] Syracuse alumni and Patti Murin and hearing kind of how she and her husband, who's also a performer, Colin Donnell, have done many of the same things, because they have a young child and I've seen them do a few concerts online together, and those kinds of things.

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I think certainly whatever it is you're doing has to be fit around the fact that you've also got a very small human being in your life.

Katie Zaffrann: Yes. In fact, I'm just starting to rehearse for a potential concert this summer. And I was emailing my pianist and I was saying, she said, "Can you meet in the evening?" I said, "Well, no, it's after bedtime. I don't like to make a lot of noise." And she said, "Well, can you meet at noon?" I said, "Well, no, that's her nap time." But I finally just said, "Look, my whole life is her schedule. I don't really have my own schedule." But that's these few years. It's these early years. And then you open up a little bit.

Chris Velardi: [crosstalk 00:07:29]. I was a parent of teenagers. I'm not sure [crosstalk 00:07:33] different. It's just different. Obviously music is important in your life. I mean, it's what you do. It's what your husband does. It's, at this rate, what your child will do if she's being sung to every night. But if I ask you where that came from, are you able to identify for you, pinpoint things that led you in that direction?

Katie Zaffrann: When you asked that question, the first thing that comes to mind is falling asleep to the sound of my mother practicing hymns on the piano and my dad playing guitar. And we had this silly family band when I was five years old. So it's in my blood. I don't think I could say when I chose it, it kind of chose me. I've been singing and dancing and running around the house, making stuff up since I can remember. And it was always like, there's really no other option.

And people used to say, I remember people would ask all the time or say, give this advice to young performers that if you could do anything else you should, because it's such a hard career. And I used to really balk at that and I'm a smart girl. And I would say, well, I could do plenty of other things, but I finally have sort of come to this peace with it, is that sure I could have done many other things and I have. I've had to. We have survival jobs and things, but it's truly the only thing that makes me feel alive and that makes me feel like me, like the me that I'm here to be.

Chris Velardi: Yeah, and that's a consistent thread among people who do it, because it is so hard. There has to be that it's in your blood, you're born with it. It is the thing that drives you. It is the passion, because otherwise you get knocked down once or twice and you're like, I'm done, I'm out. I'm going to do something else.

Katie Zaffrann: Right. Yeah. What is the thing that keeps you getting back up again?

Chris Velardi: Yeah. And it's got to be something like that. So, as you were a youngster singing with your family and kind of feeling like this is all I know, this is what I know. This is what drives me. This is my passion. What led you ultimately to find Syracuse University?

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Katie Zaffrann: Well, I mean, high school, it was also all I did. I went to a very arts driven high school. And I remember one day being called down because I hadn't gone to school, but I had gone to rehearsal the day before. I had called in sick, but then I showed up after school for rehearsal. Of course, that's not allowed. You have to go to school to do the extracurricular. So, but that was just already where I was headed. And so I remember I auditioned across the country for a number of programs. Syracuse was my first audition and it ended up being the standard that I held every other program up to. And I remember so clearly I was singing my song and the auditor who was later one of my professors got up from behind the table and started acting with me.

And he walked out of the room as though he was the lover that I was singing to and fighting with. And out of me, I grabbed him by the arm and turned him around and was singing to him. And this passion came out of me that was, of course, totally fitting for the song, but not anything. I was like, I'm here doing this college audition. And I was probably so nervous and stock still in the middle of the room. And he brought all this life and energy out of me. And I thought, oh my gosh, I tore the teacher's coat off and I was so flushed afterwards. But I remember thinking later that was his way of seeing what was really inside of me. It certainly didn't happen at any other audition and it also showed me the way that they were prepared to work with people and not just to go with what was on face level, but to really work with potential. It ended up being an impression moment.

Chris Velardi: I mean, you make a choice like that and either you're getting in, or you're getting charged with assault.

Katie Zaffrann: Luckily it was the former.

Chris Velardi: Luckily. Exactly. Exactly. And when you think back on your time at Syracuse, what is it about that experience and about the education you got, the experience being in central New York and being a part of that program and the larger university community. What is your takeaway now?

Katie Zaffrann: I think Syracuse was the perfect place for me at the time in my life. Coming from the Midwest, I grew up outside Milwaukee and I was shy. I still am fairly shy and I don't think I could have moved to New York straight out of high school. I couldn't have gone to NYU for instance or afford them. And so Syracuse to me was this perfect blend being upstate was sort of half Midwestern, half East Coast. And I could kind of slowly acclimate myself over those four years to what it would be like to actually live in New York and make a career in New York.

And I still remember, I know this isn't exactly answering your question, but when we got our dorm assignments, my freshmen year dorm room number was the same as my birthday. And I remember my mom and I looked at each other and we said, oh, it's a good sign. And it really was the right place for me at that time. And that I could be in the theater, totally immersed in the theater, and

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then also have the rest of campus life. And the study abroad program that we had in London at Shakespeare's globe. We had our own faculty that traveled with us. So there was like a safety too. We knew these people who were coming with us and it really just, it was the perfect place for me.

Chris Velardi: Wow. Yeah. Well, what was that freshman dorm?

Katie Zaffrann: Lawrinson.

Chris Velardi: Lawrinson, okay. So you had a nice view too, maybe a view.

Katie Zaffrann: Best view, yeah.

Chris Velardi: Excellent. Yeah. That's such a good spot. That's a good spot. In terms of your time, what performance, what show, what thing do you remember most? What is kind of like your little, this is the one that really would bring me back? Is there a song right now, or a show that you see that you think, oh, I remember, that takes me back to Syracuse?

Katie Zaffrann: Yeah. Twelfth Night. I did that my senior year and I got to play Olivia and I really hadn't done Shakespeare prior to that. I was a musical theater major and was navigating my way through that program. But then, well, I'd studied in London and we had done the Shakespeare's Globe program. But we had these incredible teachers who had come from Shakespeare & Company. And they had been through that training there, that professional training. And they brought this very pragmatic professional atmosphere to the classical acting program.

And I just fell in love with it. And Shakespeare verses, it's the next thing to singing to me. They're so linked, that verses, the way we speak when we can't just speak in prose anymore, when we were so full of emotion, we have to speak in verse, it's speaking directly from the heart, the heartbeat of the verse. And that's the same thing in a musical. When a character is too full of emotion to speak any more than we sing. So, they're exactly the same. And so, to me, I found a home in it and the production of Twelfth Night was really the culmination, I think, of my time there.

Chris Velardi: It may be equivalent to singing, but it is such a challenge for an actor to do well. To be able to deliver Shakespeare lines and have the audience who may or may not be somewhat well-versed in Shakespeare to say, oh, I get this. Because if it's not done well, it's just a lot of very English sounding words that just kind of rattle around the brain of the audience.

Katie Zaffrann: Totally. And I think that's actually what our professors were speaking through us and were getting across to us, was that if you are emotionally honest enough with what you're saying, if you know what you're saying as the actor, and if you are emotionally honest enough to be vulnerable and allow the heart of the piece to speak through you, the audience doesn't have to understand every

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word. They will get the play, because you get the play and you get what you're saying, and you are imparting it that almost the vibration of it, again, it's very musical, will come across. And I really found that to be true, that our audiences were, they were right with us, whether they knew every single word or not. And it's hard in that play, the comedies are difficult, because it's topical. He has all that topical stuff that nobody knows.

Chris Velardi: No. Absolutely. And obviously it made an impression, because it was not the last time you did Shakespeare and doing Twelfth Night. You have continued to do that at a professional level as well.

Katie Zaffrann: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. It's again, they're like twins to me.

Chris Velardi: Yeah. And that's an interesting thing, because a lot of people will take that, I'm an actor and I'm going to take kind of that route, or I'm a musical theater person, and I'm going to take that route. You found a way to really kind of straddle those and just keep them both in your life. I guess that says something about how much you like doing both of them.

Katie Zaffrann: It does. And I think there are a lot of actors that see there's a sort of middle way path where people can have one foot in both. I also feel like there was a time that I had sort of abandoned music and it was actually at Shakespeare & Company I heard Bill Barclay who went on to become a music director of Shakespeare's Globe, gave a talk about the music of the spheres and music and Shakespeare. And I sat in the back crying, because it had been so long since I had sung. And then there was the time when I went and didn't do a play for a few years, because I was helping to found a chamber choir that is now in its 13th season and award-winning, and that I've since left. But I feel like my whole career has sort of been navigating through one or the other and concert world and the theater world and the musical theater world. And to me, I think all roads lead to Rome, hopefully. And it's just different ways to say what we want to say and express what we want to express.

Chris Velardi: And if you're enjoying and feeling the reward of doing it, then why not do those things? Is there something in particular that you, as we emerge from this kind of fog of the last year plus, is there something that you really would like to do next?

Katie Zaffrann: Hm, well, I have a show that I wrote after I got married, which I like to joke that when my husband proposed, it was the worst moment of my life, because it actually woke up-

Chris Velardi: Does he like that joke? How does he [crosstalk 00:19:21].

Katie Zaffrann: Well, getting married was the best thing I ever did, but the road between those two things, it was the hardest year of my life. And it woke me up to my anxiety in a way that I had never experienced, I can see now I look back and I think, oh,

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that was anxiety. Oh, that was anxiety. Actually, right before we started speaking today, I suddenly remembered this moment, this time in college, when a famous Broadway composer was coming to VPA and I was chosen to perform for him. He was going to do basically a masterclass and I was sick beforehand.

And I had to call out, because I had gotten sick. And I look now, I think, oh my God, I was just so nervous. That was my body manifesting my nerves. And I had no concept of how to deal with it. But anyway, I was really woken up to my anxiety, because my husband's down on one knee and I was ready to vomit basically. And I thought well, he's my best friend. How could I say no, but how could I say yes, I absolutely can't do this. But not many people are prepared to talk about that in our culture.

Oh, doubt means don't and he must not be the right one. And so, I was faced with that, but I kind of knew that he was, and so I was just grappling with this all year and he knew, he knew. I mean, we lived together. It was impossible for him to not know, but a producer called me up at some point in that year. And he said, "I'm looking for people who have like an evening of songs to come up this summer to the theater, do you have something?" And when you're an actor and a producer calls and says, do you have something? You just say, yes.

Chris Velardi: I doesn't matter. You don't have something, you'll get something, you'll make it.

Katie Zaffrann: Exactly. I said, "Oh yeah, yeah, I have an evening." And so I started, but what was on my mind was getting married. So, I started pulling together songs into a cabaret that were me grappling with getting married. So, it was these silly things like, let's call the whole thing off. But then Sondheim songs and things from Company about what is it to be married and what is it to be single. And I was really just working this out for myself and that producer whose something of, I wouldn't call him a confirmed bachelor, but he's not exactly a warm, fuzzy guy about love. He came to me afterwards and he said, "Oh, you have to tell all the stories. I want to know how he proposed. I need to know all that." And so, I started developing it into this show and we got married and then I continued to perform it. And a woman once said to me afterwards, I've been engaged for three years and watching your show did more for me than all those years of therapy.

Chris Velardi: Wow. That's powerful.

Katie Zaffrann: And I thought, well, then I need to keep doing it. And yeah, I just told the whole story about just times I would be ... I wake up every morning at four o'clock going, I have to leave this guy. And then I would wake up in the morning and there he'd be. And I go, how could I leave this guy? But anyway, just all of that, about things that are difficult to talk about, I think in our just day-to-day lives. Most people, they would see me on the train with the engagement ring and they just want, oh, you're so happy. Oh, it's so exciting. And that's a side of things, but there's another side of things. And anyway, so that's still in me and it

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hasn't left. And maybe there's an act to about a baby. I don't know, but we'll see.

Chris Velardi: And it really does seem like this would be the time. This is the space for something like that. I mean, again, shining a light during this very difficult time on things that we haven't handled real well, anxiety and mental health is certainly one of them. So, it seems like things would be set up well for story in a musical that deal with an issue like this.

Katie Zaffrann: Yeah, I think so. I think so. And that's another way that you mentioned Patti Murin, she's been so open about her journey through all of that on social media. And I just, I went to school with Patti and I just admire her so much for how open she is. And I'm starting to dabble a little bit at that. I mean, I have my show, but just, even on social media, things like that, just being so free to be honest about our stories. And I just don't know that there's a downside to it, because we recognize ourselves in each other. And I think it opens the door for people to see someone shining as bright as Patty and to see, oh, that she goes through all this too. We're all human.

Chris Velardi: Yeah, actually, her story came to mind when you were talking about your own. That is the kind of thing, because the public, the people kind of the perceptions are they're superheroes, I mean, they can get up on stage and sing to crowds of thousands. And they're rock solid and it doesn't impact them at all. And I think talking about those kinds of things, whether it's a performer, an athlete, someone who you kind of put into this category of not feeling those things. It's important to talk about that, because as you said, we're all human and that's part of it. Something else that obviously must be important, particularly you mentioned you went to a, kind of a performing arts high school kind of setting is music education. If I were just to ask you, how important is music education, what does it mean to you? How would you answer an open-ended question like that?

Katie Zaffrann: My goodness. I think it's vital. I really think it's vital. And it is just as vital to an education, to the growth of a human being, as any math, science, English, those are vital and so are the arts. I remember at that high school, that it had a great arts program, but it wasn't necessarily an arts high school, but the valedictorian was always an arts kid. They were always in orchestra or band or choir. I mean, always, for years, my whole family went there. So, we always knew.

And art kids are smart. It develops the brain. It helps us become well-rounded people. We watch kids, I was just this morning, I had a little sing class with my daughter and it's just, that's who kids are. It's totally natural. But then there's a point at which we say, oh, we start separating things. And, oh, well, music is over here and arts are over here and then learning is over here, but to a young child, it's all of a piece. I couldn't separate it if you asked me to.

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Chris Velardi: Yeah. Well, and again, not to get thematic with the idea of the pandemic shining light on things that maybe we didn't do so well, but I think of music education in schools, and so many kids haven't been in schools. So, what they've been getting from music education has been some kind of shell of what they got before and you can debate all day whether or not that was enough. I mean, so that's another one of those areas that, is there something that we can learn here and lean into. And so, let's talk about one of the things that you've also got on your plate right now, which is kind of leaning into that education space. Tell me about what you're working on there.

Katie Zaffrann: Yeah. So, well, it's music education and it also goes back to the piece that we were talking about before actually about performers and people in the public eye that there's this image of it, that it's glamorous, it's easy, that it becomes if you are at that level, or if you are a performer at all, that those things must just come totally naturally to you or be easy in any sense. And so, I'm developing a course for Greenhouse Music, which is a new online music conservatory. So many things are online now and it can totally be debated whether that's for the best, but it is, it is with us. And I don't think that's going away. But Greenhouse is being founded to make the music education accessible and fair to all.

And the course that I'm developing is called The Whole Musician. And it's all the non-musical things about the music life, the musician's lives, the artist's life. So, it's a lot of these things that we've been talking about, about how am I going to do it? How am I going to get out of bed over and over again? Is it just the love that's going to pull me through, or what are the tools that I can use if I have those moments of self doubt or even depression. What are the things that will carry me through a career? How am I going to deal with nerves and stage fright? And there's all these apocryphal stories about Laurence Olivier who was throwing up before all his performances, but then if it doesn't manifest for me as throwing up, or if I'm not as famous as Laurence Olivier, what am I supposed to do with that?

And what do I do when I'm just procrastinating? And I'm supposed to love doing this, but I can't get myself to practice, because I'm so resistant to it. And it's all this inner life stuff that is kind of intangible and difficult to talk about. And some of it is mental health-related, could be anxiety related. And some of it's just like, what do I do when the conductor or the director says something to me that is hurtful, and then I have to get up and do it again, but I feel I'm dealing with what's going on inside of me. So, there's just so much that goes on in an artist's career that can derail people. That I think we need talk about it.

We need to create a space to talk about it and it needs to be okay to be honest about our experience. And to bring it into the conversation, I think at the level of the conservatory or at the level of part of education, then it normalizes it so early on. So, we don't get five years into career, if we even stay in it for five years, we don't get that far and then go, I'm the only one. We have this

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epidemic of loneliness of people thinking that we're the only one. And we're just not. It's part of it.

Chris Velardi: Yeah, there's so much strength in that. And knowing you know what, what you're feeling, chances are, there are thousands of others who are feeling the same thing who are in a very similar position. I like to ask people who are in a field like yours, that requires thick skin, that requires that resiliency to take criticism and do something with it and come back. And I like to ask people how you do that, how you get yourself to that place where you take the bad critic, you take the director who just hates what you're doing. And look, I worked in TV for almost 20 years. I had to do it too and I can't answer the question, but I like to ask it anyway. So, what advice do you give to people who are just getting started in need to find a way to develop that thick skin?

Katie Zaffrann: Yeah. It's hard for me to call it a thick skin, because what makes our art meaningful is vulnerability. So, we have to have some way to be as open as possible, as open as humanly possible and be totally honest about what we know about life. And then when someone says, I would like a different flavor of that, to walk away and go, okay, that's okay. So, yeah, how do you do it? I think the closest I've come. I don't even know if I do it, but the closest I've come to an answer to that is, it is a journey of self knowledge and self love. And the times that I do what I really want to do, whether that's in an audition or in a performance or wherever, just talking to somebody. If I go in knowing what I want to say, knowing what I want to do, knowing what I can do and then doing it, it can still hurt to not get the job.

Of course, it always hurts to not get the job. It can hurt if somebody says something about it. But if I know that I did what I wanted, it doesn't matter so much. I think when we're young as a young artist, it's hard to know. We don't know ourselves that well, and we don't know our capacity and we don't always know whether we're even doing what we want to do. We do things and they happen. And I think it takes time to develop that, but when we can go out and know ourselves and also be ready to pick up our own pieces at the end of it, then what somebody else says is, it's kind of more about them.

Chris Velardi: I love that answer. I love the idea of vulnerability and approaching it with that, because you're right. I mean, you can't do what you do without allowing ... You can't do it well without having that vulnerable approach. And even in the business that I was in for many years, there's so much more of a, hey, you need to approach this with more empathy than just kind of coming in guns blazing, if you will, microphones out and all that kind of thing. And I think there's a lot, but again, it goes back to, as you've been talking about, those things that we haven't really wanted to talk about for a long time and being open to talking about that and having those conversations applies to a lot of things, which I think makes it really interesting.

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I want to wrap with a question that I always like to ask people. When you go to Syracuse, you become part of something bigger. You become part of this great network of you're in the city of, you're in New York, walking down the street, someone's wearing a Syracuse sweatshirt and you've got a friend instantly. What does it mean to you to be a part of the orange family, to be orange?

Katie Zaffrann: The drama department has a term that we call about our community in New York, which is the Syracuse mafia. And well, say what you will about that.

Chris Velardi: [inaudible 00:34:43] has a similar ... got the same term. They use it. So, we're all parts of our own mafias.

Katie Zaffrann: I think there's a real familial aspect to, I can really only speak about the drama department because that was my home, but there's such a family. And I think to what we've been saying about the difficulty of this path, when we see each other, which certainly this year is not as often as we'd like, there's just, there's a support there. I mean, it's like family, you have a shared history. You don't have to talk about it. You all know, you were all there. So, there's sort of a shorthand. And even just if you want to talk about the winters. That alone, we're all there.

Chris Velardi: A bond.

Katie Zaffrann: So, yeah, there's like a homecoming there to know what we went through together or just to know that there's an understanding. And I think, I guess that's largely what we've been talking about here, is there's an understanding among people that's really nice to have.

Chris Velardi: Hope you enjoyed that conversation. Really an authentic conversation about so many things. You can find out more about Katie by clicking the link in the description, send you to her website. Also learn more about Greenhouse Music where she's teaching that whole musician course. Thanks for listening to the 'Cuse Conversation. Thanks again to Katie for being a part of it today. I'm Chris Velardi. See you next time. In the meantime, stay healthy, stay well and go orange.

CC with Katie Zaffronn '04_mixdown (Completed 05/18/21) Page 11 of 11 Transcript by Rev.com