My husband and I spent most of last week in New York City with the Hale Center Theater Founders Board. The Hale Center Theater is an incredible community theater in Utah that has plays of the caliber of any Broadway show I’ve seen. Each year this board takes a trip together to go and see Broadway Shows, usually in NYC or London. We had just over 100 of us on the trip. During the trip I was able to see my favorite Broadway show of all time, Hamilton, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda who I had the pleasure of getting to know over lunch last year. Lin-Manuel is not only incredibly talented, he was also a genuinely nice person.
I also saw an amazing play I had never even heard of before called Come From Away and it turned out to be another favorite for totally different reasons. Come From Away is the story of what happened in a small town in Newfoundland when 38 planes carrying over 7,000 passengers were stranded when their flights were grounded their unexpectedly on September 11th 2001. It’s an amazingly heartwarming story of how the town of Gander, which had only 7,000 total residents living there to begin with, took these 7,000 stranded visitors into their homes, fed them, gave them clothing, cared for them, etc for five days. I hope everyone gets the chance to see Come From Away someday because it shows the good that can exist in humanity when people come together, put aside their differences, and just be kind…
There are many exciting things to do and see in New York and seeing the shows was a lot of fun. But truth be told, it wasn’t the place we were in or the things that we did that made the trip great – it was the people that we were with that made it awesome. That’s not just the case on this trip. I have had the opportunity to travel to places all over the world and each of these places has had incredible sites to see and exciting and fun things to do, but those memories are never what stand out most… It’s the people we spend time with that make life special and meaningful. So whether you get to be with those people in your own backyard, or in your hometown, or somewhere across the country, or even halfway around the world – the place doesn’t matter…the people do…
~Amy Rees Anderson (author of the book “What Awesome Looks Like: How To Excel in Business & Life” )
