If you talk to an actor you will often find that becoming an actor was through many different routes: excuse to get out of lessons, parent/teacher sending a shy/introverted child to bring them out of themselves, a way to meet boys/girls. For me the entry point was stories.
As a child I loved stories – all stories. Watching dramas on television, occasional cinema visits (we rarely lived near a theatre) and hundreds of hours of reading supplied by weekly trips to the local library. I was lucky that I came from a reading family. If there was a treat for being good/working hard it would often be in the form of a book: and I can remember Christmas and other holidays with us all sat at a family, each of us engrossed in a book. As I grew up I also learnt the power and the comfort of retreating into a book when life around you was tough; a habit I keep to this day. When life is getting too much curling up with a book (usually a childhood favourite) and being transported into another life whether it be a happy go lucky or an unloved challenging one (think Jane Eyre) seems to make things feel a bit better.
The love of stories, how you can especially love one story came back to me again earlier this week reading an interview with Rakie Ayola who played Hermione in Harry Potter and The Cursed Child in 2017. In the interview she mentions meeting fans of the production and the books; and the Twitter hashtag #whyigobacktocc. Follow it and you will find stories from those who have seen the production, once to multiple times, sharing their stories of what the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child story means to them. Some share very personal reasons how it has helped them and why this particular story means so much to them. I am not going to add any more – the stories speak for themselves.
One final note, anyone who knows me well knows though I am on a number of social media platforms, I am a cautious social media user with reservations about the whole industry. At a time when the social media industry has been under increasing scrutiny for the behaviours that they allow of their users and their failure to address these behaviours: here is an example of social media doing good, doing what it should and what it was created for: bring together people, many who have never actual met in person, who can connect, share a common interest and may be support each other.