There's a moment in 1992 that tells you almost everything you need to know about Cheryl Booker's resolve. She'd just left an abusive marriage, moved back to Atlanta with her three children, and was rebuilding a life from the ground up. Money was tight, and the future was unclear. And in the middle of all that, she heard an audition announced over the radio.
A name mentioned in the announcement caught her attention. "I knew the name Sharon Lewis," Ms. Cheryl says. "I called her and she was happy to hear my voice. I was happy to hear hers." She started acting with Sharon that year and hasn’t stopped since.
That's the through-line of Ms. Cheryl's life: not the absence of hardship, but the refusal to let hardship be the last word. At nearly 70, she's a working actor in Atlanta with stage, film, and television credits stretching back to childhood, and the momentum underneath it has never been a lucky break. It's been one move, repeated for more than fifty years.
She kept her hope and her dream alive, no matter what her circumstances handed her.
A Twelve-Year-Old's First Stage
Ms. Cheryl was 12 when her older sister, babysitting for the summer, took her along to Booker T. Washington High School, where the Academy Theater had just adopted the school for an outreach program. She'd already been the family entertainer, dancing for relatives who visited, but getting her own moment on stage sealed it. "That experience with the Academy Theater, being on stage and performing, that did it for me," she says. "I've been doing this since I was 12."
Her mother was an educator and wanted her to have a "real job," the way most parents of that era did. So Ms. Cheryl built her own path instead through church drama groups, holiday skits, audition notices on bulletin boards. At Georgia State University in the 1970s, there was no theater major built for what she wanted. "I took film study. I took language arts so I would know how to enunciate properly and speak from the diaphragm and not the nose," she says. She pieced together her own course of study, then never finished it. The registrar's office repeatedly confused her with another student, and after the third threat to her enrollment despite paid bills and solid grades, she walked away. "I just decided when y'all get y'all's act together, I'll come back," she says. "Never did go back."
Decades of Day Jobs, One Dream
Ms. Cheryl never had the luxury of choosing between supporting her family and pursuing her craft. She's done both, simultaneously, for decades.
She worked retail in college, then temped as a file clerk and receptionist, hosted at restaurants across Atlanta, and learned billing through temp agencies until she landed something with benefits. She eventually landed a billing specialist role she held for 20 years, retiring in March 2020, just before the pandemic shut the world down.
"I would work during the day, and I would go audition for a show," she says. "And if I got the show, which I mostly did, I would also have to go to work, get off at five, go home, change clothes, go to rehearsal. That was my life from before children, even till now." Her children grew up inside that rhythm, learning her lines with her as she walked her blocking at home. "They were also my scripties," she says.
She's clear about why she shares the unglamorous parts of her career and life. It’s for those who have "regular jobs" and secret dreams they're too afraid to face. "You were an individual before you were a mother, before you were a wife, before you were an employee," she says. "You were an individual with a dream, with a vision, with a hope. And my hope was to act."
The Role That Found Her, and the One That Healed Her
By the time Ms. Cheryl auditioned for a community theater that had never seen her work, word of mouth was already carrying her name through Atlanta's theater circuit. She landed the lead in The Amen Corner as Sister Margaret Alexander, and the calls kept coming. "Nine times out of 10, say yes, because I've worked with these people before, or I've heard of them," she says. "That's how I stay busy. Word of mouth. My work speaks for itself." She's never had a traditional agent. "Personally, God's my agent," she laughs. "He's been doing all right so far. I still eat. I still get paid, and I still have a car."
But the role that did the deepest work wasn't one she performed for an audience first. It was Domestic Damages, written by Cynthia Williams from interviews with survivors of domestic abuse. Ms. Cheryl played the therapist, a part she returned to four times over more than a decade, and it became the language she'd never had for her own marriage. "When I did that play, that was my therapy," she says, "because up until then I was just masking. I was just surviving." She hadn't been able to name what happened to her as abuse while living it. The role gave her the words. "When it's non-consensual, it's rape, and when it's belittling, or put down, that's abuse too." Every time she performed it, something else broke free.
She holds her survival and her faith in the same breath, often returning to a gospel song called "Worth." "You thought I was worth keeping, so you saved my soul," she says, reciting the lyric that's become her own theme. "If I get a no on a script, okay, I got another one. I can write my own."
Steal These Moves
If you're like Ms. Cheryl, trying to build something meaningful while still clocking in somewhere else, here are three takeaways to help you stay in motion.
A dream doesn't need a clear path to be legitimate. Ms. Cheryl had no theater major and no agent for most of her career. She built her own curriculum from whatever classes and stages were available, and let word of mouth do the rest.
You don't have to choose between the job and the dream. For decades, Ms. Cheryl worked full-time, from file clerk to billing specialist, while still auditioning and performing on nights and weekends. The "real job" and the real dream ran side by side.
Your dream can become the thing that frees you. Ms. Cheryl spent years unable to name what happened in her marriage. Returning to the stage, in a role built from other survivors' testimonies, gave her the language to finally understand her own story.
Keep Moving From Here
Cheryl Booker has never had a single defining break, the kind that turns a career on its axis overnight. What she's had instead is a steady hope she refused to let go of, through a marriage that nearly cost her everything, twenty years of billing reports stacked beside rehearsal schedules, and every audition that didn't land. She's still working it, showing up, and saying yes.
"We are still breathing," Ms. Cheryl says. "So we have yet to accomplish the purpose for our lives." That's not a line for the stage. It's the move underneath every other move she's made.
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