Well, I don't know that it's turning to the arts in a time of need, but I've never, ever been happier than when I'm in a theater.

And that's been true since I was a child.

And so I'm only really comfortable in a theater.

Hi, I'm Ann Harada, and this is how art changed me.

I'm from Hawaii.

I was born and raised in Hawaii.

I have no actual Hawaiian blood in me.

I'm 100% Japanese-American.

And so all the people in like the shows that I saw in community theater, there were a lot of Asians represented on stage and in Hawaii, you know, they just sort of tend to cast whoever is the best person for the part, kind of regardless of like what their heritage is.

And I just thought, oh, well, that's normal, like in my mind.

And it wasn't until I moved to the mainland that I went, Oh, no, that's not the norm.

It's all white people all the time, usually, at least in the kind of projects that I was pursuing, it soon became pretty obvious once I started trying to get jobs professionally, that I was going to have to get cast against my type or I would never work.

Because in all the shows that there was a specific type of looking for Asian women, I was not it, you know, nobody wanted to see me and King and I nobody wanted to see me in Miss Saigon.

Nobody like, I'm just not that type.

And I was like, Well, I'm never going to work.

If I sit around and wait for this to happen, I have to start trying to convince people to just cast me for who I am, you know, not traditionally.

And luckily that sort of worked out for me and my first job in New York after college was I got an internship with a Broadway producer who had gone to my college.

And through that internship, I got to see every single aspect of what it is to put a show on right in New York.

I helped out at the backers auditions and I typed the script and I, you know, made copies and took the new pages over to the actors houses.

I mean, like, literally, I did all of those kinds of jobs as well as sitting in on like, the meetings for the poster.

And this is, you know, sometimes I would go to casting sessions and I got to see what it was, all the different parts that make a show happen.

And I sort of think of my career as before Avenue Q and after Avenue Q That before Avenue Q Nobody cared about any show that I ever did.

But after Avenue Q I never had to explain who I was again to anybody.

And it was really great.

If you saw the Apple TV show Schmigadoon!, which I was on, there's a prop in season one, there's a there's a story line where the two leads, Josh and Melissa, are each given a heart, a stone rock that has their names carved into it, and they give each other their heart to signify like, This is, our, I gave you my heart.

You're giving me your heart.

And then one of them loses it and the other one gets mad.

And there's, like, a whole subplot about it.

Well, the creator of Schmigadoon!

gave us all hearts with our names on it.

And of, like, all the tokens that I've ever gotten from, you know, opening night or whatever it is, this one is so precious to me because, like, that was the first TV show that I ever was a series regular on, and it was kind of the first TV show that I'd ever thought I'd be playing a part where people really see me for me, you know what I mean?

And it also reminds me of the lyrics of one of my favorite songs, which is for all we know, and it's like, I'll hold out my hand and my heart will be in it.

And I was doing Cinderella on Broadway when my father passed away, kind of suddenly like he got ill. And I was one of those things was like, You better go home right now.

So I went and when I came back, I went right back into the show.

You know, I didn't have any time to process or anything.

And I just remember at the end of Cinderella, there's a big old song that the fairy godmother sings about, like, you know, there is music in you.

And it's it's one of those things.

And I just started crying so, so hard at that point in the show.

And I thought maybe I can sort of pass it off as like, I'm crying with happiness or something.

But like when it happened, I realized that it was the first time I'd really allowed myself kind of like that letting go.

But it was really emotional And I just thought that's, I think, how theater works for a lot of people, you know, movies to whatever it is that helps you express yourself.

Some people can't let go without that trigger of a shared story, and I think that's very precious.

Reading a book, seeing a movie, going to a show, that's a way to open yourself up to new worlds and new ideas and people that you ordinarily might not meet in your daily life.

If you can't put yourself in somebody else's place, you're not a complete human being.

And the arts, I think, is the number one way to help you do that.

If here's the thing about the arts, they inspire you to say, Maybe I can be more than what I think I am now.

I didn't know when I was a little girl growing up that I was going to be an actor.

I didn't know that I would kind of be able to live out so many kind of dreams in my work, you know, to have the experience of like, creating all these different fantastic worlds and places that's like crazy.

Not very many people get to do that, and I get to do that.

And I've gotten to meet the most incredible people because of it, right?

I've gotten to go to wonderful cities that I never dreamed I would ever see, never dreamed.

I certainly never dreamed I'd ever work in.

You know, I was in Prague once dancing around the streets at midnight because I had been hired to go shoot an 18th tea commercial with Wes Anderson.

Now, I don't dream these things.

They sort of happen to me.

Stuff happens to me.

That's the great thing about being an actor.

You can't predict it.

You have no idea what's going to happen to you the next day, right?

That's kind of what I love about it.

It's like you have all these crazy experiences and at the end of your life you go no ones ever going to believe I did this, but it's true, and I did.

And so I guess I would just say, like, if that's the kind of life you aspire to, you might as well try you.

I mean, you don't know what's going to happen.

I'm not promising you you will go to Prague, but I'm promising you things are going to happen to you that you just don't expect and that you could never have thought of in a jillion years.