Christine came to me through another actress who turned down the chance to play Claire in the No Nude Men workshop of Mathew 33:06 due to a scheduling conflict but was convinced she knew the right person to fill her shoes and then some- and she couldn’t have been more right. Warm and emotionally open from the beginning, Christine met me for coffee, teared up when talking about the play, and was cast on the spot: the feeling I got from her was just that good, and it paid off in spades. An actor and poet living in San Francisco, she has been active in the theatre community since 1990, with appearances including MJ in Elizabeth Gjelten’s What the Birds Carry at Pear Avenue Theatre, as well as her own piece One Instance of Burning at the Mission Church at Santa Clara University. She has twice been a performer/producer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland and she was a resident artist at the Z Space Studio for five years, enjoying many fruitful collaborations. As if that pedigree wasn’t enough, she received her theatre training at Circle in the Square in New York, and if the poems she gave us all on our closing night are anything to go by, her writing is just as good as her acting. Her Claire was truly a miracle: the perfect balance of intellect and feeling, confidence and anxiety, brave and flexible and adamant all at once. There was always a fifty-fifty chance she would cry during her monologue each night, but since it worked either way it didn’t really matter; it was just one more wonderful surprise of the many wonderful surprises that came wrapped up in her.