The first play that I attended, you ask? It was Hansel and Gretel as a kindergartner at Louisa May Alcott grammar school in Cleveland, Ohio. My memory is vivid — screaming so loudly when the wicked witch first appeared that my parents were forced to remove me from the auditorium, never to return.

In high school the drama class circumvented our all-girls’ status by changing “Twelve Angry Men” to “Twelve Angry Women.” “Battle Cry” was trickier as it dealt with former soldiers facing PTSD, but in “The Chalk Garden,” a mystery, it worked.

Between then and now I have seen hundreds of plays. For example, the Broadway revival of Hamlet in New York from April 9, 1964 to Aug. 8, 1964. Recently out of college, I treated myself on that final day to hear Richard Burton recite many of the 4,024 lines in Hamlet. His unique baritone voice still resonates with me today as it did sitting in the last row of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

I followed the breadcrumbs through Broadway musicals to serious dramas, comedies and farces to tragedies. And, yes, even “Hamilton,” a preview with the original cast. Over 17 seasons, I enjoyed the offerings of the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) in San Francisco.

And it was in that city that my short bucket list added another wonderful goal when I became riveted to August Wilson in an ACT production of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” A monologue by Levee, a belligerent, cocky trumpeter, silenced the audience when he describes to his fellow band members how a group of white men debased his mother. I knew I was experiencing a new theatrical voice, original and profound.

August Wilson wrote 16 plays, but it was his ten-play Pittsburgh cycle where decade by decade he wrote about the perspective of black Americans. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” his only play outside the Pittsburgh hill district, was set in the 1920s; “Radio Golf,” his last, in the 1990s; “Two Trains Running,” the 1960s.

I saw the last one in Ashland in 2013, thus completing my August Wilson bucket list — all ten Cycle plays, many several times, in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York and Los Angeles. This Mother’s Day you’ll find me at Portland Playhouse, enjoying Joe Turner’s “Come and Gone” for the third time. It sure beats breakfast in bed.