“We’ve been listening to Wagner, which is so great.”

George M. is where I met my dear friend Joel Grey. We connected at rehearsal one day during a five-minute break. We were both looking out the same window and we knew in five minutes that we’d made a connection.

Stephen Sondheim told me that Oscar Hammerstein believed everything that he wrote. So there’s great truth in the songs, and that’s what was so wonderful to find.

I know Mama Rose is a great role and I love having a chance to do it.

You’d look out and there’d be little babies watching the show, and boys and girls. They loved the cowboys, and they loved Annie. There were young people seeing the show for the first time. I stayed for two years because I enjoyed it so much.

I love Some Enchanted Evening, and If I Loved You. And as I sing them more and more, I find new favorites.

It was one of the most exciting, perfect evenings of my life, my solo debut at Carnegie Hall. And knowing we were all there to raise money for Gay Men’s Health Crisis made the evening an extraordinary experience.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Anton Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

I’d like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie.

Working on behalf of companion animals is so important. We start to realize how healing they are.

Singing lessons are like body building for your larynx.

“Into the Woods” was… a lot of running around in the woods! I can’t wait to see the show again. People didn’t realize it back then, but kids still come up to me-young people-and they talk about it. It really made its mark.

I feel strongly for gay marriage to be accepted.

I don’t smoke, I don’t drink much, I don’t eat red meat. I stay out of the sun.

Animals speak with pure affection. It’s important to me to get something going in NY so we can get to be a no-kill city, and give the animals homes and more attention and love.

I love pasta with the homemade marinara sauce I had as a kid.

It Might As Well Be Spring… I used to sing that as a young girl in my voice lessons. Then I picked it up again and it spoke to me in a whole new way.

Learn that every flatterer Lives at the flattered listeners cost.

Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.

Ah, the first step in humility: Listening.

Here’s how a child listens: you tell him something, and he puts his own interpretation on what you said. That’s what he hears. No one has ever heard you.

Don’t be a VICTIM of negative self talk – remember YOU are listening.

If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.

I worry that I can come off smarmy. I wonder if I was listening to myself if I’d want to kick my own ass.