My years in theater taught me that leadership isn’t about standing in the spotlight — it’s about making sure the whole production can rise. Managing high-pressure live events and building a company that supports women over 40 both required the same things: vision, steadiness, humility, and the courage to make a decision when it counted.

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I learned that the hard way one night at the Drama Desk Awards at Lincoln Center in the early 2000s, when 1,900 people showed up to a packed house and every single ticket had been printed wrong. Thank God there was a party going on in the lobby. While the wine kept flowing, my assistant GM, our team, and I physically mapped out the house, seat by seat, and hand-wrote every single ticket ourselves in under two hours — so quietly that no one outside my own staff ever knew there’d been a problem at all. People told me afterward they’d never seen grace under fire like that from me and my team. That’s the job: keep the room calm, fix what’s broken, and let the show go on like nothing ever happened.