It all started when Veronica Matricardi spun in her wheelchair in the middle of the stage and yelled, "I'm back, I'm back!"
It was June and she had just seen a show at the Colonial Players theater house in Annapolis. Other audience members were filing out, but not Matricardi. She longed to experience the joy of being onstage again.
She didn't have to wait long. Joe Thompson, director of Colonial Players' Cabaret for Kids, was there and invited Matricardi to join the cast.
"My dream has been to become an actor again," said Matricardi, who in 1979 as a teen-ager performed in a Colonial Players production of Rumpelstiltskin before suffering a stroke the next year.
It has been a long recovery process for the Arnold resident, who realized her dream last weekend by appearing in Cabaret for Kids, a program in which adults and children perform 34 songs, poems and skits. It celebrates childhood, imagination and dreams.
"She was beaming, she was just glowing," Thompson said of Matricardi's reaction after last weekend's show. The revue runs through tomorrow night.
Matricardi is 40, but most people think she is in her 20s, said Irene Norton, her mother and primary caregiver.
Born with a heart disease known as Transposition of the Great Arteries, or TGA, Matricardi was originally given three months to live.
She defied the odds with what her mother describes as her fighting spirit, but she faced one hospitalization after another as the years passed. With a limited amount of oxygen flowing to her brain, Matricardi suffered from reduced mental, psychological and physical development.
Her mother persisted despite the negative prognoses given by many doctors and specialists along the way.
Then tragedy struck in 1980.
During a surgical procedure, Matricardi suffered a massive stroke on both sides of her brain. She went into a coma and was put on life support. Doctors told her family she would be a "vegetable."
At 18, Matricardi began a long process of relearning everything, from talking to eating to embroidery.
"It's been 23 years of growth," Norton said.
Aided by a three-person team made up of her mother, younger sister Lisa, and her mother's then-husband Charles Sanders, Matricardi began to develop all over again.
"Now look at our `vegetable,'" Norton said, gesturing to her smiling daughter in their family room.
