Gina Simone was last week’s guest and she’s an actress with one of her prominent roles being Lady Day. With her visit, we got an inside look as to what it means to be an actress. Gina talked about acting classes and casting calls. With quarantine, she explained that casting calls were done on zoom and she told us what she has been up to since the beginning of the pandemic. I greatly admired her dedication to her role in Lady Day: she studied Billie Holiday and tried to understand her as best as she could so as to create her own interpretation of Holliday and not replicate previous portrays. The best part of me, however, was when she told us about her discomfort with public speaking. I never thought that ‘disliking public speaking’ is something an actress would ever say. Gina explained that when she comes onto stage, she becomes a different person and gauges the audience’s reaction to adjust her performance accordingly. I guess it humanized artists a bit more for me. Looking back towards the beginning of the year made me notice that I thought artists were unapproachable, talented people, whose minds just work differently. These guest speakers humanized my perception of artists as just hardworking and talented people (and not creative aliens).