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Trump wants to defund the arts. Will Republicans defy him for a third time?

‘Maybe I’m a sucker, but I don’t believe they were lying to us,‘ says ‘Rent’ star Anthony Rapp

Anthony Carrigan was a shy kid whose hair kept falling out. He had trouble making eye contact with others and wore hats to cover his bald spots. That’s because Carrigan suffers from a disease known as alopecia, which causes body hair to fall off in clumps. The disease was tremendously damaging to his fragile self-confidence. That is, until Carrigan began acting in a children’s community theatre.

“I was a pretty poor student,” says Carrigan, who now stars in HBO’s “Barry,” playing an affable Chechen gangster named NoHo Hank. “But once I found my love for acting and the arts, it made me a better student. It gave me more confidence. My social life became better. It affected me in such a drastic way across so many different arenas.”

Carrigan was one of several actors on Capitol Hill on Thursday for the Creative Coalition’s advocacy day, during which Republicans and Democrats alike assured the entertainers that they would fund the National Endowment for the Arts despite President Donald Trump’s antipathy toward the program.

View the complete May 10 article by Clyde McGrady on The Roll Call website here.

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