Politics & Power Quote by Christy Romano

Childhood is supposed to be the part of the story where you get to be small. Romano’s line flips that script with a casualness that’s doing a lot of work. “I also never went there” sounds like an offhand add-on, the way you’d shrug about missing a local fair. Then the reason lands: “too busy working and traveling on national tours.” The collision between kidhood and professional grind is the point; it’s not framed as tragedy or triumph, just logistics. That matter-of-fact tone is the subtext: when your life is production schedules and tour buses, ordinary milestones get quietly erased.

As an actress who grew up in the entertainment machine, Romano is likely talking about a place that reads as “normal” to everyone else (a theme park, a hometown staple, a childhood rite). The specificity of “national tours” matters because it’s both glamorous and isolating. It signals legitimacy - this wasn’t after-school theater, it was real labor - while also hinting at a childhood shaped by adult expectations, contracts, and the constant churn of being “on.”

The intent feels less like complaint than recalibration. She’s naming the trade-off without dressing it up: success arrived early, and the cost was access to the very experiences her peers used to define being a kid. In a culture that romanticizes child stardom as nonstop sparkle, Romano’s understatement works like a pinprick, letting the reality seep in: sometimes the dream job is the reason you miss the dream childhood.