Alice in Wonderland is my favorite children’s book. When I did summer stock theater in Vermont before my senior year at Penn, I fulfilled one of my dreams and played Alice in an adaptation of the story. The tale of Alice resonates with me because she and I believe in madness, impossible things, and the reality of imagination.
We’ve got to be a little bonkers to dream up something and believe we can breathe life into it through sheer will. But that’s exactly how it happens. It’s exactly this kind of madness that built New York and every other city. It’s this kind of madness that invents, explores, inspires, and creates. This is the madness that sees the present state of the world as just the beginning, rolls up its sleeves, and starts to change it. Madness makes the world go ’round.
Christa Avampato 