Let's have a little fun!

Today was International Women's Day, a day to celebrate women from all walks of life, everywhere in the world.  To all women, you are wonderful, beautiful, hard-working people who have always and continue to deserve far greater respect and equality that you receive.  As a white male in America, I don't pretend to understand all you go through, but I stand with you.

We are also approaching the NCAA College Basketball Tournament - MARCH MADNESS!  I also don't pretend to know the first thing about college basketball; I barely follow the NBA.  But I do know this is the time of year where everyone has fun with brackets of some kind.

If you have followed me at all, you know I have always been a huge fan of theatre, particularly musical theatre.  I have had an idea rolling around my noodle for a couple of years for no particular reason.  I've worked on it a little bit, but now, in light of the day and that we are all in need of a slight distraction due to our shared national/global disaster, I have decided it is finally time to present my BROADWAY LEADING LADIES BRACKET! 

So first of all, let me apologize for the poor quality of the photo.  The bracket was created in Excel and I'm not bright enough to figure out how to just copy that into the blog, so we get a phone pic upload instead; I hope you can work out how to read the names.

Second, I need your participation in this!  To give you time to fill out your brackets, voting will begin on Monday, March 13.  Each day, I will give you match-ups on which to vote and then tally the results until we get a winner for our greatest living Broadway Leading Lady!  Please share this with anyone you know who enjoys Broadway!

Third, all of these extremely talented ladies could go into just about any category description, but in case you don't understand my four brackets, here is an explanation:

• Ethel Merman Memorial Bracket is for belters.
• Mary Martin Memorial Bracket is for "legit" singers.
• Gwen Verdon Memorial Bracket is for "triple threats" - actor/singer/dancer.
• Elaine Stritch Memorial Bracket is for character actors.

Finally, for those of you who are following me looking for more than fluff and diversions, don't worry: I will not abandon my other writing for this over the next couple of weeks (or however long it takes to get through this - I'm very informal about it); I will simply add each day's match-ups at the end of the post; feel free to not participate if it doesn't interest you, but it would be really fun to have a lot of votes each day!

So warm up your warblers, put on your tap shoes, and sparkle those jazz hands as we honor our favorite Broadway ladies!