A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
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 […]
My new rice cooker looks to me like it has a face saying BLEHHGH. The eyes are the appliance’s Cook and Warm lights; the mouth and tongue are the on switch and its casing. The face kind of reminds me of Alfred Jarry’s drawing of Père Ubu. My husband, Frank, however, thinks the rice cooker […]
During the summers of my childhood when my parents signed me up for baseball (contrary to my wishes, talents, and fragile sense of self-worth), my triumphs on the field and in the batter’s box were small in number. I was scared of the ball, couldn’t throw, couldn’t hit, and, frankly, didn’t have the firmest grasp […]
Did you know I’ve written like a million theater reviews? Back when I lived in Chicago, that was a side gig of mine. Most of my bylines appeared in the Chicago Reader, to which I contributed pieces of performing arts journalism on a weekly basis from 2005 to 2016. Then I moved to New York. […]
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 […]
I majored in theater at Northwestern. At the time, I figured that made sense given my interests, which included Sondheim and homosexuality. Technically, I majored in theatre since that’s how the word is spelled in the name of the university’s department overseeing skits and dance belts. But I prefer theater because here in the United States, theatre feels […]
Seems like I should have more mementos from the 11 years I was a freelance performing-arts journalist in Chicago. But I have no scrapbook full of saved programs or even a single past issue of the Chicago Reader containing my byline somewhere within the yellowing pages. The theater section of the Reader—which is the city’s alt-weekly—is where […]
Indirect Objects 