My coat is linty. It’s January and it’s one of the first cold nights we’ve had in Florida in years. This coat—my favorite—goes down to my calves, with a long lapel that makes me feel like Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham in Downton Abbey, all dressed up for an ordinary dinner.

I try to get as much lint off as possible while I hustle from the parking garage across the street to Orlando’s new performing arts center. I want to look nice, sophisticated; I’m about to meet and interview a Broadway star, someone who originated Mary Poppins in New York and played Belle on stage (my longtime secret dream despite having zero singing or acting talent).

I press my hand to my chest, inhale slowly and hold the breath there, remembering last night, seeing Sound of Music at this very theater, when my breath was concentrated in that exact spot every time Ashley Brown opened her mouth to sing.

As I cross the downtown Orlando streets I inhale the people milling about, thankful for a moment to step away from home. I’ve been working from home for the last seven months, months that I thought would be glorious—months without travel (I’d just “left” my own business where I traveled to speak at community colleges across the country), with a solid home base and a comforting routine; months that I thought would feel like a creative renaissance but have instead started to feel like unemployment. When did I start to feel so irrelevant? I wonder. I’m not sure, but I do know this coat and walk is helping.

I’m supposed to get security to tell Ashley when I arrive, but to my surprise she’s already in the backstage lobby to meet me, face fresh and primed for stage makeup, a loose cotton blouse gracefully revealing a sweet baby bump that was imperceptible in the Mother Abbess costume I saw her sing in last night. She smiles, making her instantly recognizable.

I tell her how much I loved her as the Mother Abbess in Sound of Music last night as we walk to her dressing room where we’ll do the interview; she thanks me genuinely. We get to her dressing room and as she opens the door a short, stocky, white ball of fur comes at me, shaking his whole body, big eyes staring up, begging to be greeted. Ashley apologizes and introduces me to her faithful traveling companion Eddie, a nine-year-old French bulldog.

Eddie was kind enough to give me his chair for the interview.

I forget myself for a moment and crouch down to give Eddie the attention he desires, which I’m only too happy to give. It relaxes me. I don’t usually get nervous interviewing people—it’s one of my favorite things to do. I don’t get paid for this; there’s simply no other way I’d rather spend my time than hearing someone else talk about their life.

But it’s been a while since my last interview. And Ashley and I have never met, talked, or emailed until this very moment. Her manager arranged it. At this point I have no idea what she thinks about any of this, or me, or why she agreed (or was told) to do this interview in the first place. I hug Eddie close and suddenly feel like it’s going to be okay. Someone who loves and travels with a dog like this must be as lovely as I predict.

I peel myself away from the happy furball, secretly wishing I could plop him on my lap for the entire interview, and begin with my questions. “What does creativity mean to you?” I ask. As soon as she begins to speak, I exhale, relaxing into what I love, listening to someone talk about what they love and how they pursue it. I’m about to learn more about how this small-town girl from Florida made it to Broadway.

“I think creativity is just being able to make something your own,” she begins. “Whether it’s brand new or whether it’s something that’s been done a lot.  I think that’s what’s really exciting.” Ashley was the first to play Mary Poppins on Broadway, but she’s also played roles that have “been done a million times.” We talk about how creativity isn’t about being the “first” or the most original, but about how you “put your own stamp on it.”

But where does the courage to put your own stamp on something come from, I ask her. How do you know if your “stamp” is any good? “It has a lot to do with being comfortable with who you are and being able to bring yourself to the part regardless of what it is,” Ashley says. “And sometimes it’s challenging. Sometimes roles just pour out of me and sometimes they don’t.”

I feel comforted to hear sometimes things don’t pour out of her. I wonder what she does during those times. I make a note to follow up on that soon and press on to ask the next question carefully typed out in my phone’s notebook app: “What’s a particular—”

“Rurrrrrrruuuuugghhhhhgggggghh.” Eddie burps. Loud.

Me and Ashley laugh. Louder. Ashley leans into the recorder to clarify: “That was Ed’s burp,” she laughs. “Not Ashley’s burp.”

I sink deeper into my chair, excited to find out more about how this lovely person with the burping bulldog was able to “make it” in the ever-so-risky rollercoaster of the arts. “I’m the youngest of four,” she begins, with a tone that makes me think she loves her family a lot. “I’m from Gulf Breeze, Florida, and no one in my family does this at all.  My mom and dad were always like, ‘I wish you came with an instruction booklet because we don’t even know where to begin.’  But they were so supportive.” Ashley started singing in church when she was seven years old. But so did all her siblings, so she didn’t think anything of it. I laugh and tell her how I sang in choirs when I was seven too; you’re not thinking anything of it then. “Exactly,” she laughs, “I wasn’t born and bred to think I was anything extra special.”

It took a little while for Ashley to start to take her voice seriously.“It wasn’t until high school,” she says, “where I realized I was something different, that I was unique in a way.  Not that I was so extra talented, but that I had a love for something that was not seen as ‘normal’ there; I went to a very sporty private school so there wasn’t really a place for me because I cannot play sports to save my life.” But instead of lamenting her awkwardness or flailing through basketball tryouts she focused on her own music. Which was purely her own choice. “My parents never made me practice,” she says. “I always did it because I loved it.”

Ashley chose this.

She could have chosen a million other paths. Being born with a great singing voice might make a musical theater path seem easy, written in the stars, guaranteed to succeed. But there are a lot of people with great voices—just watch any season of any singing competition. But what turns a great voice into a profession? What gets someone to Broadway?

At some point, there is another kind of choice—the decision to go down a path that isn’t predictable and dedicate your life to work that will always challenge, often disappoint, and sometimes ask for more than you think you can give.  If it wasn’t your choice to begin with, that might make the down times more difficult to weather. But for Ashley, the choice provided an armor of perseverance that would get her through what was to come. She also reassessed that choice often. “Every year,” she says, she and her parents would sit down and discuss if this was what she wanted to keep doing. “And every year I was like, ‘I want to go back to choir, I want to go back to voice lessons.’”

She took voice lessons with Debra Ross for years, starting when she was 14 years old, and still trains with her when she returns to her hometown.

Then, during her junior year of high school she attended a Broadway theater project in Tampa put on by Anne Ryan King that changed her life. “Thousands and thousands of kids around the country auditioned for this and only 200 of us got in,” she says. Ashley’s practice was beginning to pay off, and during the three-week theater camp, Ashley practiced even more, rehearsing all day to put on shows at night. It was intense. But she loved it. “I was just in my element.”

At the theater camp, one of the top casting directors, Dave Clemmons, cast Ashley in his project for the week. After one of their first rehearsals, Dave pulled Ashley aside and said, “You have to do this for the rest of your life.”

What Ashley did next made all the difference. She didn’t get a big head. She didn’t question his opinion. She asked him what to do next if she were to pursue this as a career. Clemmons recommended the top school for musical theater, Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. “If you can get in there for musical theater,” he told her, “go.”

Ashley applied to Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Clemmons wrote her a recommendation. Ashley got a full scholarship. She couldn’t believe it.

But when she got to school, she felt a little out of her element. It seemed like all of her classmates were already embedded in the industry. Their moms were on Broadway. Their dads had Tony awards.

But Ashley’s first instinct upon realizing she wasn’t like the other kids was not to decide she didn’t belong or would never make it. She focused on another question instead. One she asked herself and still does: “Am I doing what I need to do to get there?” A question rooted in faith. Faith in what you might be capable of. Faith that perhaps worrying about other people’s advantages, however real they are, isn’t the best way to “get there.”

Ashley started by assessing her goals and thinking about where how she measured up so far—not compared to anyone else, but to her own version of excellence. For her, that was Broadway, and she knew that would require more than just her singing voice. “I could sing a twelve-minute song for anybody and feel fine,” she says. “But getting up to do a twelve-minute monologue would send me into a tailspin.”

At the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (CCM) Ashley decided to work on what she felt were her weaknesses at the time. Acting. Dancing.

She also learned about the business side of working in the arts, like learning how to manage the politics of the audition process and develop the interpersonal skills required to perform with a team. “I came in as this southern girl who wanted to be on Broadway,” she says. “I left as a business woman.”

When she talks to high school kids they often ask her, “What’s the scariest part?” She answers with “You don’t want to know.” She laughs, explaining how she thinks naïveté in the early days is a gift, and how she thinks hers shielded her from the harder parts to come.

I wonder to myself what you do, though, when you do know the risks, when you do know the hardships ahead, or when you’re in the thick of them and all the preparation in the world can’t keep the doubts at bay, or that little voice from whispering that everything you’ve invested in this creative pursuit is a waste, that it’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made, that you’re delusional. How do you know if you should go on? Try again? Ashley unknowingly offers me an answer when she says, “just loving something so much that you couldn’t imagine living without it.”

That love gets tested.

She didn’t get parts she desperately wanted. She hit creative brick walls. But as always, she focused on what she could control. Which for her, has always been training. “I still train,” she says. “I still work with an acting coach, and I’m still working on my voice.  Because it’s constantly changing.  Because you’re constantly changing. You can never be too good.”

That attitude—along with her mentors and years of training—led Ashley to sell out Carnegie Hall as a singer with the New York Pops.

I turn off the recorder and tell Ashley how much her voice meant to me last night, how I postulate that years of training not only give a person the chance at a Carnegie Hall moment, but also become a gift to all the people who get to benefit from that person’s well-honed talent. I tell her how I could hear her nineteen-years worth of training in that final note. I tell her how grateful I am for her dedication to her craft. We hug goodbye and I give Eddie one last hug.

I walk back to my car and I think about the way another song she sang made me cry a few days earlier, her version of “Feed the Birds” as sung in a Richard Sherman PBS special.

I’d wept like I’d never wept at a song before, let alone a song I’d already heard many times. But I hadn’t heard her version yet, and that made all the difference.

I notice a little white hair of Eddie’s on my coat. I smile, leave it there, and keep walking.