Jamie Pavlofsky

No Excuses

Richard and I in Fiddler on the Roof, October 2016. No Excuses Three weeks after my 10th birthday, I had an experience that would be the beginning of a change in the way I see myself. I walked into the Dayton Jewish Center multipurpose room, hit a button on a CD player, sang my best “Colors of the Wind,” and went home. There was no way I’d get to hear the word "yes." No way the kid who looked like me would get a shot. Two days later, I got the phone call informing me that I had been cast into the ensemble of a production of Fiddler on the Roof. The seemingly impossible had happened—I was being told yes. After what seemed like a lifetime of being told I couldn’t, I was being given a shot. That was when the theatre bug bit—hard and fast.