Audra McDonald: It’s an incredible rush, especially the live aspect of it.  It’s easy to spend — especially in this day and age — to spend your time not being in the present.  It’s very easy to be way ahead. What’s tomorrow and the day after that? Or fixated on something in the past, or virtually somewhere else. Whatever, watching a football game online, whatever, just not being.  And the one thing about live performance and what makes it so scary is all you have is that moment.  You must be in that moment.  You cannot be ahead of it, you cannot be behind it.  You can be making sure you’re aware of what you have to do next, but regardless, that moment forces you to be in the present.  And that’s a rush.  It’s something that a lot of people run from, because it can be scary.  But that’s also where life happens, I think.  And so for me it’s — maybe I’m an addict. I’m addicted to that rush. I’m also addicted to those moments when you’re on stage and the audience is so quiet you could hear a pin drop and you realize that you’re in communion.  That’s an incredible experience. That’s a cosmic experience, as far as I’m concerned, without getting way out there.  But you feel the communion of the collective consciousness in that moment when you’re on stage doing something and the audience is absolutely with you.  And the audience becomes a collective entity as well. They come in from separate places and socio-economic backgrounds, and places across the world and days that they’ve had, and then they come together and they become one collective thing, and experience something in a collective way.  That’s a powerful, powerful thing to experience.  So I’m definitely addicted to that, too.