Growing up in fly over country, I lived for the Tony Awards every year. It was my one chance to see excepts from the nominated musicals and hear snippets of scores that hadn’t yet reached the record store.

I’m approaching my one year anniversary of moving to New York, and what a year it has been! I saw all of the Best Musical nominated shows and all but one of the Best Musical Revival nominees. I saw all of the nominated Leading Actors and Actresses in a Musical perform their roles, and a lot of the Supporting nominees (chalk it up to Jeff’s curse).

So, watching the Tony Awards last night was a totally different experience; like rooting for the home team.

Since I was on-call this weekend, I decided to throw a last minute party (attended by Jeff, Mike, and Dan). We filled out our ballots and I came out on top with 17 out of 21 correct predictions. It would have been cool for Tonya Pinkins to win and clinch a quadrafecta of black actresses winning all the acting prizes, but I’m glad for Idina Menzel (her’s was the performance I most enjoyed this year).

And nobody expected Avenue Q to actually beat Wicked. I had keenly followed Avenue Q’s development since it was first announced. I had tickets to see it off-Broadway during my cancelled trip to NYC. And it was the first Broadway show I actually saw after moving here. I really enjoyed Wicked, but Avenue Q is the show that speaks to my generation (far better than Rent did) and it’s great to see it recognized.