It was happening again.
I was at rehearsal when Mary Ruvolo tapped me on the shoulder and said, sheepishly, that Trisha didn’t want me to watch her.
“Excuse me?” I said, confused. I was nineteen years old and had just joined the national tour of Grease in San Francisco. Trisha played Sandy Dumbrowski, and I was her understudy. My job was to watch her.
“Or even look at her,” Mary added. “I’m sorry. I feel bad about telling you this, but you’re driving Trisha crazy.”
I could feel my chest tighten. I knew Mary was simply a pawn in the mean-girl game of telephone that was happening.
I also realized at that moment that I had two choices:
(A) Try to ingratiate myself to Trisha and protect myself from the new-girl hazing that felt certain to follow.
(B) Find another way to contain the anxious feeling now coursing throughout my body.
I knew from experience that A would not work. And so, in order to survive the tour, I needed something to do that would ground me. Something that had nothing to do with the show or its social politics. Something that I could be in complete control of. That was how I started to cross-stitch. I call it my gateway craft.
It’s funny, because I always thought of cross-stitch as my mom’s hobby. Over the years following my family’s move to Detroit, my mother’s social anxiety began taking hold of her. She left the house less and less, and as she retreated, her bitterness seemed to grow. Cross-stitch was one of the few things I had ever seen her really enjoy. I’m not exactly sure why I chose such an antiquated art form, other than that it was a connection to a happier time in my youth—and a happier version of my mother. So instead of trying to insinuate myself into any of the cliques that had formed on the tour, I decided to teach myself how to cross-stitch.
It was a form of self-protection: I don’t need to socialize! I have a project to work on!
That was my thinking as I went to Jo-Ann Fabrics one afternoon in search of a cross-stitch pattern book. I decided to make my mother a Christmas gift and chose a scene that had three Victorian houses, side by side, each with a wreath on its door and smoke curlicuing out of its chimney. The instructions called for the houses to be a cranberry red and the wreaths, garlands, and pine trees a vibrant hunter green. While others in the cast went out for drinks after the show or went bowling on our days off, I went back to my room, excited: I had something else to do that gave me a purpose beyond performing.
I didn’t know then what a profound impact this would have on me throughout my career.
With cross-stitch, you start in the middle of the fabric and work outward in concentric circles. This ensures that you don’t run out of space. Some of my most content moments from that tour were sitting cross-legged on my hotel bed, watching Days of Our Lives, poking and pulling my needle through a panel of linen kept taut by an embroidery hoop. With each red x I made, slowly but surely, a double-hung window emerged, followed by a shutter, then a shingle, then a door. It was thrilling! And addictive. Not only was I cross-stitching obsessively during my off time, but I started doing it in between shows as well. In hotels, in dressing rooms, and on airplanes. I saw how having a hobby gave me something to do other than obsess about the social dynamics around me. The more I cross-stitched, the less I cared what other people thought about me. I knew that was important. I didn’t want to end up in the emergency room again.
Two years earlier, when I was seventeen years old, I had joined The Will Rogers Follies national tour. This meant skipping my senior year of high school to travel with a group of virtual strangers—some of them gals twice my age, several of whom were Broadway veterans and one of whom had even worked as a real showgirl in Vegas! This was mind-blowing to me, as my nearest brush with anything even close to “professional” had been losing to a thirteen-year-old Richard Blake on Star Search and making the final round of auditions for the 1989 reboot of The Mickey Mouse Club. (I didn’t get the part because I was too old and too tall to be a Mouseketeer.)
I still can’t believe my mother let me go. Even though I was deemed too mature for Disney, I’m astonished that I made the cut as a sexy Follies girl. I was so young and inexperienced! To give you a sense of just how sheltered I was at that time in my life:
And yet my insular and overprotective mother was the one who not only found the audition for me but also told me to lie about my age when the Will Rogers casting call came through Detroit in the spring of 1992. They were looking for new, undiscovered talent, and were hosting a nationwide search. The flyer specifically said you had to be eighteen, and I had only just turned seventeen that March. My mother insisted that we should go anyway. After I did a tap number from “Will-a-Mania,” the show’s opening number, and sang “I’m Not at All in Love” from The Pajama Game, Jeff Calhoun, the assistant choreographer to Tommy Tune, approached me and asked, “How old are you?”
“I’ll be eighteen on my next birthday,” I said, as my mother had specifically instructed me. While I wasn’t technically lying, my heart began pounding beneath my leotard in anticipation of a clarifying question.
“Keep tapping, and we’ll see you in New York,” he said with a smile.
I made it through that second round of Manhattan auditions, and the next thing I knew, I was packing two brand-new turquoise Samsonite suitcases that my parents had bought me to go on this yearlong work trip. I had no clue what I might need “on the road,” so I made sure to bring all the essentials: my stuffed gorilla, my special pillowcase, and seven boxes of tampons I asked my mother to buy for me because I had never bought them on my own and wanted to delay that responsibility for as long as possible.
That summer, as all my friends were getting ready to start their senior year, I had to ask my principal for permission to skip it. I only had two credits left to graduate, so he agreed and arranged for me to complete them through correspondence courses. My drama teacher, Mr. Rick Bodick, agreed to oversee one, in which I would read plays and write reports on them. Mrs. Clark, my speech teacher, set up a series of school visits in which I would go speak to local high schools throughout the tour, in the cities where we would perform, about my life on the road. It sounded way more exciting than sitting in class, but I was still sad to miss West Side Story, our senior musical that year. Prom? Not so much.
My parents dropped me off at the Hotel Esplanade, an apartment building turned temporary resident housing on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where most of the Will Rogers touring cast was being put up during the five-week rehearsal. I was assigned a one-bedroom suite with two roommates: Wendy Leahy was blond and from Ohio. Wendy Palmer had short, sassy brown hair and, I soon learned, a boyfriend. Both were in their midtwenties. Neither had packed a stuffed animal.
Rehearsals were at the Nederlander Theatre on West Forty-First Street, and my first challenge was getting there. My mother had warned me about the subway. That was where Midwestern girls got raped and murdered! She also told me never to walk in Central Park. More rape and murder. Mind you, on her deathbed, my mother cautioned me about air conditioners falling out of New York City windows: “Be careful! Always look up!” Oh, and when I bought a car in my twenties, it was, “Don’t drive in the rain. Ever.” And, “Never pass a semi truck on the highway! They can’t see you in their blind spot.” Everything seemed to lead to a premature death. And so rather than risk that on the 1/2/3 train, I walked to and from rehearsal every day, stopping for a Hot & Crusty bagel on my way. Buying my own breakfast made me feel independent, even empowered—until I hit the mid-Forties and started passing all the peep shows and sketchy characters smoking and drinking from paper bags outside of them. That was when my mother’s voice started up in my head—again with the rape and murder. But then I also saw all the theater marquees with the titles of Broadway shows whose cast albums I owned back home: Miss Saigon! The Secret Garden! Les Misérables! The thrill was bigger than the fear.
To add to that excitement, the legendary Tommy Tune, who both directed and choreographed the show, was at those early rehearsals, as was Jeff Calhoun. I had just come from starring as Guenevere in my junior year production of Camelot, and now here I was doing warm-up yoga (having no idea what that was or meant) with the entire cast on our first day of rehearsal. It was all a little surreal.
I learned fast that I was in over my head when it came to maturity and experience offstage, too. That very first week, Wendy P. invited her boyfriend to our apartment. I kept waiting for him to leave. Instead, Wendy announced, “We’ll take the living room sofa bed.” I was mortified and waited for Wendy L. to be outraged as well. Instead, she lay on her double bed, flipping through Cosmo, completely unfazed. I quickly changed into my nightgown and slipped into my bed with my stuffed gorilla, thinking, OMG, they’re going to have sex! I hadn’t even gotten to second base with my high school boyfriend Chris Kuechenmeister, who was the Will Parker to my Ado Annie in my tenth-grade production of Oklahoma! I don’t think we had even French-kissed, and we most certainly never talked about sex. There was no health education at our high school, so when I heard someone mention the word “orgasm” at school one day, I went home and asked my mom, “What is an orgasm?”
“Ask your father,” she said, a bit taken aback.
I found him watching football in the den.
“Dad, what is an orgasm?”
He stared at me, then back to the TV.
“Ask your mother.”
I tried another tactic.
“Does it have to do with sex?” I asked my mom.
“Sutton,” my mother said, with a frustrated, dismissive wave, “sex is bad. That’s all you need to know.”
Following this conversation (if you could call it that), she bought me a book about Christianity and sex, which made it crystal clear that it was a sin to have sex before marriage. I was raised Presbyterian, but we only ever went to church on Easter and Christmas. However, my best friend at the time was a devout Christian. I knew that she was “saving herself” for her wedding night. I devoured the book, which, P.S., also claimed that masturbation was really bad, because it would distract you from your relationship. I had questions, like “What the hell is masturbation?,” but I knew better than to ask my mom.
Meanwhile, Wendy P. was likely doing both in the living room with her boyfriend, and I thought it was scandalous. And yet, I was playing a Follies showgirl! My character dressed in bustiers and garter belts, no less (or rather, not much more!). Talk about bad casting. In two numbers, I wore powder puffs over my boobs. In another, I wore a cow-patterned unitard and horns on my head; swinging my tail was key to the choreography. No one else in the company seemed to mind these racy and suggestive outfits or moves, but I was gobsmacked by the number of butt cheeks and boobs I saw onstage—and off.
All eighteen Follies gals shared a dressing room, and there were these two gorgeous women, Paulette and Lisa, who would strip naked and keep talking as if they were not naked. I’d avert my eyes and try not to blush. The only other boobies I had seen were in the movies. But I was also fascinated. I had never been around so many strong, confident, sexual women.
After five weeks of rehearsals, we all flew to San Francisco for the first leg of the tour that would take me to twenty-seven different cities over the next twelve months. Even more exciting: during the New York rehearsals, out of the eighteen girls, I was selected to be one of the “six single sisters,” which was considered a special role because we had extra numbers and costumes. The strongest singers were chosen, so that was a huge confidence boost. I was out of my element in so many other ways, but I could hold my own onstage. That made me feel like I was making a good impression and getting recognized for my talent. What I didn’t realize was that it also made me a target.
Julie Lamar was another single sister. She was a dimpled blonde with a Cheshire cat smile that could crack a mirror, and she would always show up to rehearsals in a thong leotard and fishnet stockings. Julie was the cool girl on the tour—a married professional Vegas dancer! For a number called “Our Favorite Son,” we wore red-white-and-blue bustiers, garter belts, and hats that doubled as tambourines. Julie sat right next to Keith Carradine, who played Will Rogers, and I was placed next to her, with my hair dyed auburn for symmetry—the girl on the other side of Keith was a tall blonde like Julie, and next to her was a slightly shorter reddish-brunette. It was my favorite number in the show, and I always gave it 150 percent. I thought I was doing really well until a couple of weeks into the tour, when the stage manager pulled me aside and said, “We’re going to change the positions in the ‘Favorite Son’ number. Victoria Waggoner is going to swap places with you.”
“Okay,” I said, confused.
Every other girl down the line did the opposite choreography from the girls next to her: A, B, A, B, and so on. This meant that I had to learn the opposite choreography from what I had been doing, as did Victoria. No one really explained the change. Victoria and I just had to be at rehearsal the next day to learn each other’s parts.
That same afternoon, I was just about to walk into the dressing room when I overheard one of the other girls ask Victoria, “What’s up with the switch?”
I stopped short of the door so they couldn’t see me.
Victoria shrugged and said, “Apparently, Julie complained that Sutton was too energetic.”
Someone else, I don’t know who, laughed. “Ha! Of course.”
That felt like a slap in the face. I had a hunch Julie didn’t like me. More than once during rehearsals, she’d said, “Stop being such a spaz, Sutton!” This was always in front of other girls, who would laugh or roll their eyes. She’d also complained about my volume. (I can project!) I had not yet learned how to control my voice, so each dig hurt my feelings. I had no idea how to respond to the comment, other than to dance with less enthusiasm, to sing with less volume. To tone it down. Make myself a bit smaller. Knowing she had specifically requested for me to be moved away from her was devastating, really. I felt so out of my league—I was a senior in high school, used to getting accolades from my peers. I started thinking maybe I had made a mistake. Maybe I should go back to high school and finish out my senior year with my friends and peers. Auditions for the school musical would be soon. Maybe I would get cast. But quitting did not feel like an option. I kept hearing my mom and dad’s advice whenever things got hard: “Stay sweet” and “Keep smiling.”
So that’s what I tried to do.
Not long after that change in the number, I noticed that cliques had begun to form. I have since learned that this can happen on a tour: there is the diva, who holds court, and she picks on the newbie. It felt like a hazing. I would come bounding into a dressing room with my seafoam-green Caboodles makeup case and Sweet Valley High novels, brimming with energy and volume, and would be greeted with annoyed glances or turned heads. Julie really was the queen bee of the tour, the cool big sister. Everyone, including me, looked up to her. That made it all the more painful. The more I tried to ingratiate myself, the more intolerant she seemed.
I did make two friends: Laurel was twenty-three and, like me, more goofy than glamorous. We often went on fun adventures together—once renting bikes and riding over the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito. Holly was only two years older than I was, but way more experienced. She’d take me dancing at eighteen-and-older clubs where I had to lie to get in. I never really talked to either of them about Julie. They both seemed to like me, and I didn’t want to tarnish those relationships. They looked up to her, too! I didn’t want to give them a reason to ditch me.
Two months into the tour, we went to Houston. Like every other new city, it felt like an opportunity. Maybe this time I’ll walk into the dressing room and feel like I belong. Maybe Julie will smile at me and ask me how my day off was. Maybe the girls will ask me over to their hotel rooms after the show for pizza. Maybe.
Instead, as I made my way to my seat, I noticed several girls turn their heads away from me as I passed. It felt like an orchestrated diss, like there was a secret pact among everyone to ignore me completely. I finally made it to my chair and felt this crushing realization: I would never fit in. I didn’t blame Holly or Laurel for not coming to my rescue—they risked being in the same line of fire. I was in a room with seventeen women and felt utterly alone.
And, really, I was. Even though I called my parents from the hotel lobby, using my prepaid calling card, I never told them what was going on. My mom certainly would not have understood. Mary Anne was still her only friend, and I started to wonder if, like her, I was unable to cultivate friendships. Even worse, the ways in which the girls would ignore me reminded me of my mom’s favorite form of torture. Silence. I can’t count how many times I would walk into a room and she wouldn’t talk to me or even acknowledge that I was there. I never knew what I had done to deserve the silent treatment, but it could last for days. And it always ended with me apologizing or begging her to talk to me—I couldn’t stand the silence. With these girls, I decided to wait it out.
I was miserable, but on my weekly phone calls home, I kept things sunny and light. “I found a new dance class that Holly and I are going to check out!” I’d say.
My mom would reply, “Well, that sounds nice! Have fun! Be careful.”
The dressing room tension continued for several weeks in Houston, and so I just focused on my job. Being onstage was a relief, because I could at least perform and sing and dance and do things I knew I was good at. The stage was the one place where I felt free.
But then one Saturday evening, during the act 1 finale, “We’re Heading for a Wedding,” I felt a pang in my stomach. I was dressed in a pink negligee, patting a powder puff up and down my leg as part of the number. I thought it would pass, but instead, I felt another stab in my gut, so strong I stayed doubled over for a moment to regain my composure. I kept singing and dancing, but I suddenly felt light-headed, like I might pass out. I tried to catch someone’s eye onstage, wondering if anyone else could tell I was in trouble. Gina Keys saw me looking at her and immediately glanced away. Feeling woozy and panicked, I caught Stacie James’s eye. She, too, turned her head from me. I barely made it to the end of the number, where we all wound up on the floor, on our backs, with our legs spread out in second position.
The audience always loved this number, and this night was no different. There was an eruption of laughter and applause, but it sounded very far away. As the curtain fell, I felt as if I was being swallowed by a tunnel. The rest of the cast was getting up and leaving the stage, as we had done countless times, and I tried to do the same. But I couldn’t move. I started frantically looking for anyone to notice. I wanted to scream, “Please don’t walk away! Please don’t ignore me!” But I couldn’t. I was paralyzed.
I was still on the stage in my final position when I began to cry. All of the trying to keep it together. All of the trying to rise above it. Stay sweet. Keep smiling. The dam broke. And I began to wail. It was all flowing out of me. The homesickness, the months of not fitting in. The dream job turning into a nightmare. Being ignored. Feeling so alone and so scared. As much as I wanted to run away, I was also desperate for someone to help me, to hold me. To tell me everything was going to be okay.
Thankfully, one of the girls noticed, though I can’t remember who.
I vaguely recall the stage manager walking me back to the dressing room.
“What’s wrong with her?” someone asked.
By then, my sobs were punctuated with sharp inhales.
“She’s just being melodramatic,” someone else said.
The next thing I knew, someone was pulling off my negligee and putting me into my jeans and T-shirt, like I was an oversize toddler. I was still in false lashes and streaky makeup when two EMTs arrived and strapped me on a stretcher. As they carried me out the stage door, I remember thinking, Am I crazy? Am I going crazy?
At the ER, I cried for another four hours straight. I know now that this was a full-blown panic attack, but at the time, I was discharged with “abdominal pain” as my diagnosis. I don’t remember much else about that night other than that the stage manager came to check on me, and that the ER doctor hit on me. When he asked me for my number, I was weirdly flattered! In my flustered state, I gave it to him. After so much meanness, I appreciated what then felt like a kind gesture.
Somehow, I made it back to the corporate housing apartment where I was rooming on my own. Holly checked on me the next day and told me there was an announcement at the theater saying that I was okay and that I just had gas. That was mortifying, but at that point, I just didn’t care. Maybe I did just have gas. Maybe I made the whole thing up. Maybe I did just want attention. Maybe I was going crazy.
I ended up taking a week off, and I’m still amazed that I didn’t get fired. I’m even more amazed that I didn’t quit! How the hell was I going to face that dressing room again?
Meanwhile, the doctor called me, and in my naïveté, I invited him over! I don’t know what I was thinking other than he was young and handsome. And frankly, I was thrilled that anyone was giving me any attention. I guess I thought we’d play Scrabble? When he knocked on my door, I nervously let him in and almost had another panic attack when he lay down on my bed! What was I thinking? We didn’t kiss, or anything close. I still don’t know how I got him out of my apartment—maybe I told him that I was seventeen years old. But how fucked up to be hit on by a doctor while I was having a nervous breakdown! Shame on you, Houston doctor, wherever you may be.
Of course, as luck would have it, someone saw him come into my apartment. My first week back in the show, one of the girls said, “Sutton, you just had this epic episode and now you have men coming to your apartment?”
That was it. I gave up. I stopped saying hello. I stopped engaging. I felt like I was tainted—no matter what I did or didn’t do, these girls would never accept me. So I basically stopped talking. I tried to stop caring how they felt, too, which was still hard. But I never missed a show. I kept my head down and focused on my work, and otherwise got really insular. Not surprisingly, the girls didn’t even seem to notice. I continued to room by myself. I journaled a lot. And I never told my parents what had happened. When they got the hospital bill, I just said I had bad stomach pains. Later in life, my father told me that they were very close to snatching me off that tour. I think they knew I was struggling, no matter how rosy a picture I tried to paint. I am grateful they didn’t try to rescue me.
I turned eighteen that March, and I decided to apply to Carnegie Mellon after visiting the campus when the tour played in Pittsburgh. Holly had started dating Patrick Wilson, who was studying musical theater there and showed us around. Seeing students my age being teenagers helped me realize what I was missing. That June, the tour went to Detroit. My parents had moved to Memphis by then, so I stayed in corporate housing with the rest of the cast, but I got to see my high school’s production of West Side Story and bawled my eyes out sitting in the auditorium. There I was on a national tour, and yet in that moment I felt such regret that I had missed my senior play. I took a Saturday night off to go to prom with a bunch of my high school theater friends, and a Sunday off to walk with my class for graduation, as I had finished those correspondence courses amid the dressing room drama. That weekend was the highlight of that entire year for me.
By the time I left the tour in August, the girls had started being nicer to me. They chipped in to throw me a “happy trails” party. Julie Lamar even gave me towels! Everyone seemed really thrilled for me—or maybe just relieved to see me go. I made it through one year of college, and another half year of living at home with my parents before I wound up back on another national tour—this time with Grease. That was thrilling—I knew the movie by heart, and after playing Patty Simcox in middle school, it felt like a triumph to be cast as the understudy to the trifecta of Marty, Rizzo, and Sandy. Three powerhouse roles! I was excited to be back on tour and being paid for what I love to do: perform! My brother Hunter was doing Grease on Broadway with his girlfriend Jen, so they taught me all the dance moves. That gave me an advantage when I went to the open call, and I was cast on the spot.
I began that tour in San Francisco, at the same theater where I’d started the Will Rogers tour two years earlier. But this time, I was determined that it would be different.
So when Mary Ruvolo told me, the very first week of rehearsals, that Trisha didn’t want me to look at her, it was déjà vu. My voice was too big. No one knew how to handle it—not even me at that point in my life. And so, like I had done with Will Rogers, I did my job onstage but otherwise turned inward. I didn’t even try to get Trisha, or any of the girls on the tour, to like me.
Instead, I started to cross-stitch.
After I finished that Christmas scene for my mother, I decided to make her another piece. I flipped through the pattern book and chose a very colorful design: it was an arrangement of at least twenty baskets of various shapes and sizes. One had a bunny next to it, another was shaped like a heart. It reminded me of something you might see framed at a Cracker Barrel. My mom collected baskets, which she displayed in her kitchen. This pattern reminded me of her.
Whereas the Christmas scene had two colors, this one had at least two dozen: several shades of blue and green, reds, yellows, and peach, as well as warm browns and creamy whites. It was far more complex and less forgiving.
I liked that my new hobby gave me something we could talk about on our weekly calls that reminded me of a happier time in our lives. I would picture her as she used to be, sitting on that living room couch, watching soap operas or The Carol Burnett Show while making such beautiful things. She couldn’t help me navigate my social circumstances, but she gave me a way to distract myself. Whenever I felt lonely, I had my cross-stitch to keep me company.
One afternoon, I noticed another girl on tour named Laurie working on a cross-stitch project. When I asked her about it, she said, “It’s like meditation.” We started rooming together and would sit in our double beds watching television while we worked on our various projects.
Six months in, the woman playing Marty left the tour, and I was moved up to play her onstage. I was excited, but talk about more bad casting: she was the most sophisticated of the Pink Ladies, the high school gang who loved to make fun of the more virginal, square Sandy. The other Pink Ladies (Rizzo, Jan, and Frenchie) were all cool girls in real life, too, and had formed their own backstage clique. They were a tight-knit group, and I was the odd girl out. Truthfully, I had no place playing Marty. She was the “sexy” and “experienced” one. Three weeks into the role, I was called in for a meeting with the producers.
“Sutton, we don’t think you’re right for the role of Marty,” one of them said. “We’re going to let you go.”
I knew I wasn’t the best fit for Marty, but I wasn’t expecting to be fired. I went back to my hotel room in a daze. Instead of calling my parents or starting to pack, I just picked up that basket scene and sat on my bed. Each stitch was sewn a little tighter that day.
The very next day, the stage manager called: “Sutton. We’re in a bind. Trisha is sick, and we need someone to step in to play Sandy. Would you mind doing it?”
I was fired on a Thursday and rehired on a Friday—and was too naïve to question any of it. I just said, “Sure!”
Trisha was supposed to come back the following week, but she never returned. And I continued to play Sandy for six weeks until they asked me to play her full-time. That was another pivotal moment in my career. I could have easily moved home and been done—left the theater world once and for all. Instead, I played Sandy, who was a much better fit for me, on the stage and off. As the lead, I also got my own dressing room, which meant that I could cross-stitch in the quiet. That was even more gratifying than doing it to insulate myself from a crowd.
That basket scene took me an entire year—the duration of my time on the stage as Sandy. It was so intricate! And each stitch got me that much closer to a revelation. I was an extrovert onstage but an introvert in my personal life, much like my mom. I needed this quiet contemplation in order to continue to perform well.
I also saw how each craft I made could be an act of love. In my family, we didn’t talk about our emotions. I can remember two times when my mother said the words “I love you” to me. I didn’t share the isolation I felt on the road with her, nor did I tell her thank you for pushing me to audition for Will Rogers or for inspiring me to cross-stitch. Instead, I made that basket scene for her. I don’t remember giving it to her, and I don’t know if I consciously thought about my intentions, but I do know that every time I went home when she was still alive, it was hanging in the front hallway, the very first thing you saw when you walked in the door.