A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
I brought a sweater to a wedding I attended in El Salvador last year. I didn’t plan to wear the thing at the ceremony or reception, of course, but to one of the auxiliary events—a dinner on a beach. I figured the sweater would be appropriate since it’s made of relatively porous material and has […]
The height of my Sondheim fandom coincided with my first couple years of college. Some freshmen do keg stands; others hole up in their dorm rooms with the original cast recording of Anyone Can Whistle. I couldn’t tell you for sure why I was drawn to Stephen Sondheim’s oeuvre specifically. The standard explanation offered by […]
One of the pieces of furniture I have owned the longest is a skinny stack of wooden drawers that looks like it could have come from a library’s card catalog section. I use the cabinet to store my CDs, almost all of which I acquired during the 1990s. Basically, the whole setup is a Russian […]
While I was in college, I wrote a very meta, very pretentious, very bad play called That Day This Day. It’s about Adam, a gay man from the South (ahem) whose coming-out to his family didn’t go well (ahem, ahem), so now he’s restaging the episode with a cast of his own choosing in order to […]
Back when we still lived in Chicago, my husband, Frank, came home from a street market one day with a stack of square ceramic coasters bearing ghostly photo collages depicting sites of regional interest. There’s a coaster each for the North Side’s Andersonville area, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Goodman Theatre, Evanston’s Northwestern University (my […]
When my parents dropped me off at college, my mom gave me a laundry basket. Taped to the bottom were instructions, written in my mother’s perfect penmanship, for properly washing and drying clothes—tasks I had never attempted up to that point. I no longer have the cheat sheet, but, as I recall, its author was […]
The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum once argued that Breaking Bad is a TV show you crave and dread at the same time. As it happens, I feel a similar way about The New Yorker. It contains the best magazine writing there is, but the articles are long and a new issue comes out approximately every 11 minutes. […]
Indirect Objects 