Today is the birthday of our colleague Ioana Dragoș Gajdo.

Ioana Dragoș Gajdo knew she would become an actress since she was a little child. "I had no doubt about the acting profession. It was my dream since I can remember. I think I'm in one of those lives where I was given the chance to do what I love and make a living from it," the actress confesses. "Things somehow flowed naturally in my life. I took the train and went to Târgu Mureș. I was the first to enter college. And I caught the times when exams lasted three weeks, there were 30 of us in one place and college lasted four years," the actress recalls. After graduating, she obtained a scholarship abroad, at the Limoge Theater, where Silviu Purcărete was the director. Several seasons followed at the theater in Sfântu Gheorghe, her hometown, and then she moved to Oradea. "I had fallen in love with Oradea a long time ago, since my first visit to the Short Play Festival. The place had a special, radiant energy, and I congratulate myself from the bottom of my heart that I listened to my intuition. The guardian angels of my debut in the Oradea theater were Elvira Rîmbu and Victoria Balint. And the guardian angels of my later career were Daniel Vulcu and my stage partner, Richard Balint.

Among the most beloved shows she performed in on the Oradea stage, Ioana remembers: Fiddler on the Roof, audition, Seagull, After the rain, This Child, but also the recent FAD (Nodes and Plates), roles for which she received praise from critics and the audience, who often greet her with lines from the repertoire. Behind the scenes, Ioana relaxes by refurbishing furniture, sewing and embroidering. "I don't remember how I started refurbishing furniture, but it's certain that I've always liked to get lost in the area of flexures or nails. With embroidery, however, it's a different story. I graduated from a high school with a philological profile where I also did industrial practice. That's how I learned to weave and sew. For me, it remained a way of relaxing. I also learned to make theater costumes, for one of which I won a prize when I was an actress at Sfântul Gheorghe. And because I really like discovering new things, now I want to learn pictography," says Ioana. She also likes to travel, alone, because it gives her the opportunity to study people. "For example, when I enter a museum, I first stay in the buffer zone and watch the people who enter. I study them, make up a story in my head about each of them, then I enter the exhibition rooms and watch their behavior, their reactions. Somehow this is also related to my profession, because a good actor must first be a good psychologist," explains Ioana.

One of the actress's greatest assets is her audience. "Life is holding me in its palms because it gave me this extraordinary chance to do what I love and be rewarded with applause. The one who applauds you does so with great joy, and you make efforts for several hours for a minute in which you hear that envelope. You live between two palms," said Ioana.

„"There is a tribe, somewhere in Tibet, where the first thing people do when the sun rises is to clap. It's a way of saying, 'I love you, life! I'm grateful that the sun has risen. I'm grateful that I've received a new day.' I am grateful that in my 44 years, I have never had to say to anyone: I'm sorry I met you. And I wish that in no year will I meet such a person. The people around me are all gifts of my life. Therefore, my desire for the years to come is to help as many people as possible. I already do it, but I want to do it more actively and associate my name and my image with the causes I will fight for."„