She rushes onstage midway through the second act, beautiful and barely put-together, apologizes for missing her entrance due to an uncooperative shoe, then launches into a huge, tongue-in-cheek chorus number about her ordinariness. She sings:

I’m your average, ordinary kind of woman:
Competent and neat,
Making life a treat.
Others as nice
You meet often, I know.
At least once or twice
Every decade or so.

This is Catherine from Stephen Schwartz’s musical Pippin. And, truly, she’s anything but ordinary: a widow raising a child and running a farm — two things that couldn’t have been ordinary in the time of Charlemagne but made perfect sense in a 1972 musical comedy.

Also, this is CMBC’s very own Marketing Communications Manager, Alicia Grasso, who played Catherine while pursuing a BFA in Theatre at Montclair University. Like Catherine, Alicia will insist on her ordinariness, but anyone who knows her and works with her will attest to the fact that she’s anything but.