Daffydil: Past, Present & Future
Past
Rachel Currie, 2T3 Cast (1st & 2nd year)
“Honestly, as cheesy as it sounds, Daffy is family. And beyond just the people that you work with immediately, it’s incredible to think about how long it’s been around; hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people have done this before you. There’s something so lovely about talking to your non-medicine friends and family about these people that you spend so much time with every week and then finally get to show them the performance and be like, ‘Look, these are my friends. Aren’t they amazing?’”
Dr. Hosanna Au
, Sound and light crew (2nd year)
“I think Daffy is a great way to showcase the amazing abilities of the students. And of course, it’s a source of donations for the Canadian Cancer Society, which is amazing. I had a friend who passed away from cancer—she was my age—and another who is a cancer survivor. And certainly in my practice here, we see lots of children that have cancer and so I think it’s definitely a worthy cause.”
Julia Dmytryshyn, 2T2 Cast (1st year), Co-Director (2nd year)
“Daffy showed me that 1) it’s possible to do medicine and do musical theater at the same time, and 2) there are a lot of connections between acting in musical theater and practicing medicine. I think that the skill of acting and character development has really translated into the way I practice medicine and how I relate to patients… it’s all about putting yourself in that patient’s shoes and being able to step outside yourself.”
Dr. Lori Albert, Chorus
(1st & 2nd year)
“Daffy was a real highlight during medical school because I was a part of this additional community of people who were working on a special project together. I have gone to see Daffy every winter. For the last few years, I was really fortunate to have cameos a couple of times! The feeling of going backstage with all these excited, young people around me... just having a little taste of that again was wonderful. It’s just got a very special place in my heart.”
Present
Nicole Mfoafo-M’Carthy,
2T4 Writer (2nd year)
“Daffy is a family; we engage with each other and support each other and give each other the leniency that we deserve. Additionally, we’re mindful that we’re all medical students and life still goes on. Therefore, I think that for me, Daffy—the Daffy family and Daffy in general— exemplifies the idea of coming as you are in your full honesty and your full grace and knowing that people are going to love it, and that they’re going to help you through it as well.”
Maya Biderman,
2T4 Cast (1st & 2nd year)
“Daffy, to me, has been an incredible community of support, where people who are passionate about things—including medicine, but also art and expression—have decided to make each other a priority. It’s been this wonderful journey that sort of parallels the journey through medicine: Daffy is a community of people that you can check in with, a couple times a week, throughout the year, and that accountability to each other helps see you through the harder parts of this journey.”
Eliot Winkler,
2T4 Cast (1st & 2nd year)
“With Daffy, you have the opportunity to show off your creative side, which doesn’t necessarily always get used in medicine, and to work together to create a beautiful piece that’s larger than us. Daffy pulls us all together from all of the different academies to work together to create these new relationships on stage which then translate into relationships offstage that I’ve continued; some of my closest friends are from Daffy.”
Aleksandra Uzelac,
2T4 Assistant Director (1st year), Director (2nd year)
“Everyone is here because we either enjoy it, we want to try something new, or we want to meet other people. Some people join because they love musical theatre and they don’t want to give that passion up in medical school, and there are others who’ve never done [musical theatre] before and want to do something outside of their comfort zone. So I think what makes Daffy really cool is that it brings a lot of different types of people together.”
