Gianna Imbronone, about to celebrate her four year anniversary of moving up north, reflects on joining the local theatre community in Traverse City. Imbronone majored in theatre at Western Michigan University but made different career moves post-graduation. “I studied theatre and worked part-time as a waitress while in school and acted in all of my free time. After I graduated from college, I moved to Chicago and acting quickly fell by the wayside, because I started bartending in Wrigleyville during Cubs season and started making a lot of money, and decided that being a starving artist didn’t seem like as much fun anymore. So I put acting on the back burner and started bartending and bar managing,” Imbronone said. She then found herself back in Michigan after five years in Chicago. “I moved back to Michigan when my dad got sick and I had to take care of him, and during that time I was trying to get a better job than just bar-tending. I was offered a full-time job as a distributor with a promotion and a move to Traverse City, so they moved me up north,” Imbronone said. After years away from the theatre, her friends convinced her to audition for a community theater after her move to Traverse City. “I researched local places like P45 Theater and Riverside Shakespeare and of course the Old Town Playhouse, and I promised my roommate I would audition for the next show. The auditions for Mary Poppins at the playhouse turned out to be the next day, but I am a woman of my word; so I practiced my music all day and printed a resume and headshot. When I got there everyone was surprised at my professionalism, but that’s how I was taught in school,” Imbronone. She ended up doing multiple shows at the Old Town Playhouse including ‘Mary Poppins’, ‘Annie the Musical’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and got a full-time job as a realtor and flips houses.
Gianna Imbronone
identityin
traverse city
by: OLIVIA HALE staff writer
In our spin-off of Human of New York, the Black & Gold Quarterly went out into the Grand Traverse community in search of uniquity. Our mission was to find inspiring stories and share them to encourage self-expression. Through a variety of randomly selected people, we were about to find one commonality: passion. Stories like theirs are what makes us believe in the power that comes from expression through journalism. People are art. We feel combining their words with a visual story, a unique and inspiring message is created. Members of our community have conveyed their identities and inspired us through their words and sense of passion. To us, this is the truest kind of journalism--finding moving stories and sharing them. 18 // BGQ // October 2019
