“'Calamity Jane' inspired me to be a performer. I still want to be her.” — Gayle Rankin Quote

“'Calamity Jane' inspired me to be a performer. I still want to be her.”

“I didn't think I was right for 'Cabaret'.”

“I went to school at Juilliard, and most of our training there is the classics, and as much as I thrive in contemporary, weird, experimental work, I really am excited about finding a pioneer woman or something from a different era that I could really sink my teeth into.”

“To me, self-description is a calamity.”

“You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.”

“For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.”