Penny Arcade is definitely one of the most unapologetically herself and magnetic people I’ve ever met. Her in-your-face personality is so weirdly charming and she knows exactly how to use it to captivate her audience. She gives a voice to the “outsiders,” those who are marginalized by society, and she uses the stage and her boisterous, rowdy performances to shed light on some very important issues that are so used to being in the shadows. She encourages us to use our voices, like she does hers, and she has an endless amount of care for all of us. At the end of her conversation with us, she even gave us her email so that we could email her any thoughts or concerns we had about literally anything.

Before that class, when I was watching one of her past performances of Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! for the first time, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking at. It all seemed so messy and chaotic and I didn’t understand what she wanted her audience to take away from it. I knew it had to do with the constant name-calling the LGBTQ community is subject to in our society and it acted as a commentary on the amount of censorship we as a society have placed on sex and nudity, but I didn’t think the show itself provided any more context than the title did. However, after meeting her in person and getting a chance to hear her story of how she ran away from her abusive mother and mentally ill father when she was just 13-years-old, stole money from a sandwich shop she worked at and left for New York City with almost nothing to her name, and changed her name to Penny Arcade after an LSD trip, I decided to look at her art from a different point of view. Now, she’s a successful American performance artist, actress, and playwright who has performed her shows all over the world. She is definitely an acquired taste, as her art isn’t what most would consider a high-class performance you can sip wine and nibble on cheese cubes to, but she is an artist through and through and I respect her for it.

Penny Arcade is just a ball of energy and full of refreshing authenticity and she’s what you never thought you needed, but you just gotta see her for yourself. Although she can be quite vulgar and melodramatic at times, I think she is truly a unique performer and she’s opened my eyes to a different side of the arts I didn’t know existed. She doesn’t sing, she doesn’t dance, she doesn’t perform acrobatics. She just preaches very real problems about very real people, and I’m glad I went into that room with her with an open mind, because she gave me a new perspective on the people around me and the world that we live in.