When Monica Sanchez was a middle-schooler in Mexico, she acted in her first play, a story about a father and son who go to a big city and try to sell their donkeys. 

Sanchez portrayed one of the characters they met along the way, but before she went on stage, she was so scared her legs shook and she even cried. 

But this didn’t push her away from the theater; instead, she said, it drew her closer to it.

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