♪♪ I'm Amy Burgmaier and I am a professional performer, mostly musical theatre.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: Long story short, I ended up moving to New York about 10 years ago.

As it turned out my career path changed for various reasons and I felt like there was nothing else to do than to move to New York.

Amy Burgmaier: I had to learn everything just by grit and resilience and sort of climb my way to the top.

And the competition there is indescribable.

I mean, you have to be in line on the sidewalk at four o'clock in the morning and hope to be one of the two people in your group of non-union talent that gets seen that day.

And I did that for about a year before I started getting callbacks and finally getting the chance to hone my craft.

And then it was sort of, it just all dominoed from there.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: Nearly 99.9% of all the actors in New York City, unless they are from New York City, fled just like I did.

It is so expensive to live there and without a job for over a year not very many people can handle that.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: While I was in New York I feel like I was in a place where I could thrive.

I had all of the artistic and creative outlets where I could tap into.

And although I love Iowa, the pace here is so different, especially on my parents' farm literally in the middle of a corn field.

The stillness and the quiet sometimes is deafening.

I went sort of in a tailspin.

I'm not going to lie, it was really, I went through some grim times, I did.

It was hard.

I just wanted to be, I just wanted to be able to be creative in ways that I didn't feel like I could be here.

I didn't feel like I was understood here.

And what I bring to the table, I didn't feel like it was valued.

I lost my apartment, I lost my home, I lost my livelihood, I lost my dreams.

I lost everything and in some ways it felt like I lost my identity.

And I had to really embrace the quiet and find how I could cope with that.

Amy Burgmaier: I had friends that were like me that went into great depressions because their lives were flipped upside down.

I had others that pivoted with purpose right out of the shoot and have flipped into parallel careers in other complete different things that are still creative but like in a coffee shop, they have changed in that direction, or teaching.

A lot of people have gone into voice coaching and things like that.

And a lot of people went back to school too.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: I just knew inside of me that I needed to find people and be with people that I felt were creative and that also defined themselves as being creative.

And so I look around in Creston, Iowa.

Where do you find such a group of people?

And it just dawned on me, I remembered they have a music program.

So I contacted Dr. Fox, Dr. Jeremy Fox at SWCC and we ended up having I think a two hour phone conversation the week before classes were to start.

I was just inquiring about the studio here and by the end of that conversation I signed up to be a student again.

Amy Burgmaier: Pre-pandemic I had already had some of these thoughts in my head about rolling into voice acting.

Amy Burgmaier: So I had already started taking some special classes and different workshops with special coaches and people in New York.

So I had some of that.

And in New York pre-pandemic I would just be the actor that walks in and talks behind a microphone and there would be an engineer in that studio that would just hit all the buttons and edit my audio together and viola.

That's not how it is anymore.

You have to have a professional home studio to be competitive in this field because of the pandemic.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: Well, little did they know they were going to get me for so long.

I mean, at age 43 a child of theirs is moving back in with them.

I mean, it's kind of crazy, right?

And thank God I have parents who are able to accept me back into their home like that.

And they just wanted the best for me too and if it was something, that I could kind of pivot into a different direction and eventually rejoin the workforce and have employment again they were in support of that.

It's to the point now that I am able to put my education into action.

And I am mentally in a better place and have accepted this is where I'm going to be for a while and I'm able to kind of roll forward.

I will resume musical theatre when that time allows but it is a good idea for me to have a parallel career.

♪♪ So you don't move too far stage left, if you could end up somewhere around zero to two to do your hop and your circle, -- Amy Burgmaier: Here in Des Moines, or here in Iowa rather, theatre has been halted as well and I had the chance to audition for the first production in 14 months in Des Moines called Some Enchanted Evening and it's at the Des Moines Playhouse and that is where I got started, right, that's where I was Roxie Hart in Chicago and a number of other shows that kind of really cemented this acting bug inside of me.

And it has just meant so much to be back on this stage.

♪♪ Amy Burgmaier: I am so much stronger than I ever knew and I was put to the test.

I feel like my resilience is at the core of who I am, it always has been.

What I learned about myself is how desperate I am to sing and to be on stage and how deep that is inside of me.

It is I believe my purpose on this Earth.

There is nothing else I would rather do.

Sure, I could go into advertising, I have a degree in that.

I could go into journalism, I have a degree in that.

I could go in these different directions.

But at the end of the day what is going to satisfy my soul the most is singing and acting and being on stage and in commercial venues across America or on Broadway, all of those specialty -- I love the polish of commercial theatre and what it is all about.

That is really special to me.

♪♪