Tributes: Edward Albee

There is a moment near the end of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?—Edward Albee's 2002 tour-de-force play exploring the outer limits of love, fidelity, morality and tolerance—where the emotional crisis at the center of the narrative boils over into such catastrophic levels of heartache and rage and such Greek-tragedy levels of destruction and retribution that the first time I saw it—and the second time and the third time and the fourth time—the audience collectively gasped to the point of almost screaming and then sat rigidly and almost palpably silent until well after the final stage light had extinguished and the last emotionally drained actor had silently moved into position for the company bow.

It's one of my two favorite—if there even exists a favorite-not favorite continuum of cataclysmic emotional destruction—moments in modern theater ... the other being the last three seconds of David Mamet's Oleanna before the stage becomes abruptly, dreadfully dark.

He's largely a genre unto himself, so it's difficult to pigeonhole Edward Albee as a playwright. He wrote or adapted about 30 works that embodied movements like Theatre of the Absurd and brought popular works of narrative fiction like The Ballad of the Sad Café and Breakfast at Tiffany's to the stage and screen.

My favorite Albee works—Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (embodied in this movie still by the incrementally calculated Richard Burton and desperately braying Elizabeth Taylor playing the American-experiment patriarch and matriarch George and Martha [the latter of whom the script deliciously describes as "large, boisterous woman, 52, looking somewhat younger"]), The Play About the Baby and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?—all share the format of four characters on stage interacting to varying degrees with one character who may or may not exist offstage. It's an intriguing conceit, and one that keeps bringing me back to these three plays for my own contemplation. In an odd double standard, though, I can't stand reading them; the characters for me seem to be clumsy and dry with no meaningful depth on the page, but they grant a glorious latitude for actors to make fascinating choices as they flesh them out.

Today is the ninth anniversary of Edward Albee's death. I'm not one to be sad when famous people I've never met pass away—and having seen only seven of his works (that I can remember) I'm certainly no slavish Albee devotee—but I'm profoundly thankful for the emotional roller coasters he's put me on in various theaters over the years ... and for the body of work he's left that I can continue to explore in my own way in my own time.

I have a couple favorite quotes from these works that I'd love to mention here in closing, but they're all potential spoilers. So I'll just lift a glass of bergen to his memory.

Art: September

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter has developed a signature visual vocabulary of sometimes photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks, and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb. 

His September (2005) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

Remembrances: 9/11

24 years ago this morning I ran a little late and got caught in the rush-hour crowds that prevented me from getting a seat on my EL train. But as I stood there—a relatively new Chicagoan—I was still in awe of the fact that I actually lived in Chicago and rode a train to work and I reveled in the fact that I was one of THEM: my fellow Chicagoans packed in the train car with me, commuting to (or from) our jobs as waiters, insurance brokers, construction workers, actuaries, janitors, bankers, personal trainers, writers, and every other career and purpose in our big, always-moving city.

When I finally arrived at work and got off the elevator, I saw everyone in my office crowded around the TVs in our glass-walled conference room. My first thought was that my colleagues would see I was late. But after joining them—both in front of the TVs and in shared abject horror—and watching the towers burn and fall, seeing the gaping wound in the Pentagon, learning of the disappearance of an entire airplane and its passengers in a fiery pit, I was struck by the fact that my underground commute that morning with my fellow train riders—a microcosm of the city, if not the country—was our last collective moment of innocence before we had access to any news and we suddenly had to face the sickening, horrifying, misanthropic enormity wrought by other human beings on a scale none of us could have ever imagined.

24 years ago today I never felt closer to colleagues, friends, family members and even strangers as we worked to understand the hatred and comprehend the savagery of perhaps the ugliest tragedy in our lifetimes.

24 years ago today we lost a certainty in our collective safety but we gained a powerful strength in our ability to care for and protect and even love each other when we needed to ... and even when we didn't.

24 years ago today, our world changed immeasurably. Our hearts broke irreparably. Our determination grew mightily. Our humanity spread defiantly. Time may erode the intensity of our initial united magnanimity, but we will never forget.

Happy 184th birthday, Antonín Dvořák!

Though a proud native son of Czechoslovakia, Dvořák is perhaps best known for his mighty, highly melodic Symphony No. 9, which is most commonly called "From the New World" due to its early American musical themes and the fact that he wrote almost the entirety of it in the United States—more specifically in Spillville, Iowa, just 100 miles north of Cedar Rapids.

It's the last symphony he composed, and in my opinion its enduring brilliance lies in its endless accessibility. Its dominant six-note theme, often sung to the words of the American folk song "Goin' Home," is never far from the surface no matter how many variations or complex contrapuntal themes he weaves it through.

As a composer, he was rooted firmly among the late Romantics with their heroic storylines, soaring emotions, and confident nods to the nascent but growing fascination with the shimmering textures of the Impressionists and the gorgeous discordances of what would soon be revered around the world as American jazz. And this symphony sits right at the confluence of all that history, all that emotion, all that foresight and all that promise.

 
It's a gorgeous, centuries- and continents-spanning legacy ... built on a mere six-note theme he encountered on an 1893 stay in the humble American Midwest.

Books: Slaughterhouse-Five

On its surface, Slaughterhouse-Five (actual full name: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death) is a profoundly disjointed narrative of author Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of war told through the eyes and experiences of his fictional proxy Billy Pilgrim.

Vonnegut occasionally inserts himself into the narrative or acknowledges that the work you’re reading is autobiographical historical fiction, creating a meta universe that both draws you in and sets you outside the characters and plot.

Billy’s adventures unfold in short, jarring sentences and jump through time and literal space—which are key aspects of the novel’s postmodernist structure and spirit. Postmodernism in literature (which thrived in the second half of the 20th century, with this novel being written in 1969) broke away from linear, plausible storytelling to embrace logical impossibilities, ponder questions about existence, and often create imperfect character and story arcs that never get resolved.

It’s through this everything-at-once literary lens that poor, beleaguered Billy Pilgrim jumps randomly from surviving the cruelties of war and the (historically true) bombing of Dresden to wetting his pants in childhood fear at the top of the Grand Canyon to losing his wife in a string of bizarre circumstances after he survives a plane crash to being abducted by aliens, ensconced in an interstellar zoo, and mating with a fellow earthling and adult performer with the delightful name Montana Wildhack.

And it’s through this structure that Vonnegut processes the horrors he experienced in war and illustrates the disassociative struggles of living with PTSD.

The story is by its very nature absurd and peppered with droll humor and truly singular characters (many of whom appear in other Vonnegut works) with names like Kilgore Trout and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. This being a novel centered around war, the frivolity is heavily balanced with often nonchalant accounts of death … always followed by Vonnegut’s “And so it goes” expression of existential futility.

The novel’s other recurring expression—”unstuck in time”—provides succinct, efficient shorthand for not only Vonnegut’s narrative structure but for the scattered aftershocks he continues to experience from of war itself, the upheaval it creates, the lives it redirects and the metaphorical slaughter it wields on his psyche … and by extension the world’s.

Happy 107th birthday, Leonard Bernstein!

His Candide Overture is perhaps the singular most joyful piece of brilliantly scattered, wickedly intractable music ever written, with its collisions of overlapping themes; fearless jumps between walls of boisterous brass, swirls of tittering piccolos and swells of velvety strings; and headstrong, disobedient asymmetries that have no doubt awakened every conductor on the planet in cold sweats since 1956.

Here he is conducting his thrilling juggernaut with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1989. I know the musicians know the music. I know HE knows the music. But I fail to see any sense of dialogue between them as he conducts. Yet they fly together with effortless confidence and musical delight. It all makes ME break out in a cold sweat, so I can't watch it as I listen in rapture.

You can watch at your own peril. But do take four and a half minutes to just listen.

The 2020 Iowa hurricane

Five years ago today, a massive derecho—a Category 4 inland hurricane defined by its straight-line winds, which exceeded 140 miles an hour here—appeared out of nowhere and with less than 30 minutes’ notice pummeled Cedar Rapids for almost an hour. The National Weather Service literally called it unprecedented.

Roofs were ripped off; buildings were destroyed by hurricane-force winds, high-velocity debris and crashing trees; sewers were overwhelmed and flooded streets, yards and houses; literally all electricity, cell service and light disappeared for over a week … it was a war zone nobody had time to prepare for, and nobody could fully comprehend when it was over.

And our trees. Our beautiful trees. By most estimates, we lost almost 75% of our trees. Many of them were centuries old. They provided essential shade for us and fertile ecosystems for our wildlife and insects. With no place to nest, our birds all but disappeared for weeks and weeks.

My niece—who’d just lost half of her senior year of high school to covid—also lost the young tulip tree she’d chosen and we’d just planted to celebrate her graduation.

And—shockingly ... infuriatingly ... heartbreakingly—people outside of Cedar Rapids had no idea what had happened. Without electricity or cell service, nobody here had any idea what was going on even a block away unless we could get there on our own—and with roads buried under light and electricity poles and massive debris, that was often literally impossible. With virtually zero coverage on the national news, my colleagues on the West Coast had no idea why we’d all gone radio-silent for days. I’d assumed reporters from every national news source had descended on what was left of our city to cover the carnage, interview our citizens and raise national awareness of what had happened. But without cell or TV service, I had no idea that wasn’t the case. Nobody came.

We felt so alone. We had no idea how or where to start cleaning up. People were left homeless and immediately needed covid-safe places to stay. Some of those people were still living in technically uninhabitable housing a full year later.

Gas stations were knocked out without power, and people with low gas in their cars were pretty much screwed. My neighbor and I had to drive almost 45 minutes to find a gas station that actually had gas—and even then we had to wait at least 30 minutes in a line while a gas truck filled the underground tanks as desperate Cedar Rapidians filled their own tanks and as many gas cans as they could find.

Stores had no electricity to run cash registers to sell things. Produce and meat spoiled. Generators were impossible to find.

Three people died.

People and cities in hurricane zones have the benefit of buildings built to withstand hurricanes; protocols in place to manage the preparations, durations and aftermaths of hurricanes; well-publicized warnings that give everyone many days to prepare their homes and businesses, stock up on gas and water and groceries and survival supplies, and get out of town if needed for safety; and the benefits of the aforementioned publicity to generate after-the-carnage relief efforts across the country.

We had none of that. NONE.

And many of us talk about how we’re still kind of resentful when we see other disasters that get lots of warnings, national coverage and organized help.

But we immediately started our slow recovery here. People mobilized to help each other day after day after day. They set up free food trucks and gathered clothing and supplies and bottled water for people who suddenly had none. Churches and other organizations dispatched teams of volunteers to provide all kinds of assistance to all kinds of people. I randomly had just purchased a sharp, really awesome collapsible hand saw, and I found people who needed help chopping up and hauling trees every day and every night after I was back at work and every weekend for months. And I was far from alone.

The city chipped the massive amount of downed trees and made it available to everyone as free mulch. There was so much of it that people were still using it two years later to cover new plantings in newly sunny gardens and yards. Two years later, buildings were slowly being repaired or torn down and rebuilt entirely—though most insurance windows expired two years to the day after the derecho with many repairs still not even started as the backlog of demand slowly cleared. I had very low expectations for seeing foliage the next spring, but even the most stripped tree trunks and stumps were blooming with tufts of green leaves and came back back surprisingly stronger—even though they bloomed in weird ways that are still hard to picture what they’ll look like in the long term.

I'd randomly taken the first of the above three photos of my sister's street on July 4 the year before the derecho because it had looked so lush and beautiful. I found it in a folder on my phone after the derecho and took the next two from the same spot the year after the derecho to show just how devastating the change in our tree canopy had been.

We've planted so many young trees along streets and in boulevards that they've made me extremely contemplative about how trees are gifts from the past to the future. We'd been enjoying trees planted a century ago by our long-forgotten Cedar Rapids forebears, and when our young trees mature we'll be the long-forgotten forebears who've gone to our graves content in the knowledge we'd managed to perpetuate the cycle as we all rose from the ashes.

The world may not have known what happened to us in the days and weeks after the derecho, but I did hear national reports about the one-year anniversary on NPR last year.

So we’ll be recovering for years and maybe even decades, but we relatively quickly got well ahead of what I'd initially expected. 

And we all have LOTS of pictures.

Theater: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald was arguably ahead of his time when he published his novel The Great Gatsby in 1925.

America was still too deep in the weeds enjoying its Jazz Age freedoms, nouveau riche excesses and related pursuits of wanton indulgence to notice the cautionary tales about those very activities that Fitzgerald had embedded in his narrative. The novel was initially dismissed as boring and artificial—but with time comes perspective, and as America rebuilt itself after the Great Depression and then World War II, the novel’s wisdom, metaphors and objective warnings came into sharper clarity and made the novel a perennial staple of our collective literary curricula.

By the time the novel entered the public domain in 2021, it had seen countless adaptations for the stage and for the big and small screens … except as a musical. And once that source material became free, not one but TWO musical versions started their journeys to Broadway.

The version currently playing—launched on the shoulders of powerhouse Broadway royalty Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada—got off to a rocky start thanks to some highly questionable choices in reframing the narrative. But in the five short months between its pre-Broadway tryouts at the Paper Mill Playhouse and its official Broadway opening, it underwent a massive overhaul that kept it more faithful to the novel and made it a massive hit.

Traditionally narrated by the outsider-observer Nick Carraway, it tells the story of the mysterious wealthy recluse Jay Gatsby, the hedonistic parties he throws, and the clandestine reasons he acquired his wealth so he could throw them. (I know the story is literally 100 years old, but I think the narrative and supporting narratives are pretty fascinating and I don’t want to reveal any spoilers to the six of you who don’t already know what happens.)

I got enough “meh” reviews for this show from friends that I put it on my backup list for my Belated Birthday Broadway Binge. But since three of my original picks closed early, Gatsby eventually climbed to the top of the leader board and I got a ticket.

And I really enjoyed it. I did find parts of it to indeed be “meh”—how many belty operatic “I Want” ballads does one small cast of characters truly need?—but it’s overall an indulgent feast for the senses.
For starters, the set is a breathtaking mashup of intricate Art Nouveau tendrils and soaring Art Deco geometries. (Producer Chunsoo Shin famously landed ridiculous amounts of investor money, which he poured directly into the uncommonly fabulous production design.) The costumes, choreography and orchestrations also got massive glow-ups from what audiences usually expect to experience.

I’m not a huge fan of the score. It has many extraordinary moments, but it feels a little ponderous at times. (The song “New Money” SLAPS though, and it more than makes up for any quibbles I have with anything else.)

Fitzgerald’s novel had a lot going on—as novels do—and I’ve seen so many stage and screen adaptations that over time I’ve honestly forgotten what storylines and plot points are original and what I’ve seen added or modified for subsequent narratives. This production includes everything I remember being germane to the story, with some additions that flesh out secondary characters and a bold dramatic update to an already shocking plot development.

Of the many iconic images/metaphors/themes in the work, Jay Gatsby’s obsession with the green light on Daisy Buchanan’s dock is arguably the most enduring. From a character standpoint, it represents love and longing for an idealized version of the past. From a literary standpoint, it represents the promises of the American Dream and the futility of yearning for the unattainable. (And for Brian and Stewie Griffin, it’s just the light from a gay gym called The Pump House. That Gatsby parody is peak Family Guy brilliance.)

The Gatsby musical features a gorgeous projection of the green light twinkling in the distance over rippling waters as its show curtain. And if I have one overarching criticism of the show it’s that all that significance, all that imagery and all that setup get explained to the audience so quickly and unceremoniously that I’m guessing the majority of people attending the show don’t get it. I was literally looking for the exposition to see how it was presented and I almost missed it.

And I hate to diss fellow performers—even the ones on Broadway who are presumably used to criticisms—but two actors in the show I saw felt extremely miscast. I’m not going to name names in case their moms are reading this, but their performances (though gorgeously sung) were so awkwardly anachronistic that they were literally distracting. They were perfectly OK, but they were NOT the green lights of my Belated Birthday Broadway dreams.

Theater: Maybe Happy Ending

Maybe Happy Ending first appeared on my radar in a dismissive review that said it’s about two robots who go on a road trip to see fireflies.

First of all, now that I’ve seen it I don’t see how ANYONE could be dismissive of it. And second of all, that plot description—while technically accurate—is exactly like saying Dorothy met a scarecrow and he could talk.

Now, robots and sci-fi are usually a hard sell for me. So the show wasn’t high on my list of priorities when I planned my belated birthday Broadway binge. But people whose taste I completely respect insisted I see it, and I’m so, so glad I did.

The robots in the show are humanoid workers and companions—not agents of combat or video-game characters as I’d feared—and their story is one of self-discovery and mutual attraction as they slowly come to terms with their growing obsolescence.

I like to see a new show as free of information as possible, so I’ll leave my synopsis there to avoid spoilers. But the two robots—played by the always impressive Darren Criss and by Helen J. Shen more than holding her own in her Broadway debut—share a story arc that is part standard romcom, part sci-fi-techy (in a way I whole-heartedly embrace), part self-aware meta and always ALWAYS endearing.

The score ranges from a cohesive collection of hummable show tunes and pop songs to numbers that sound like crooner jazz standards (sung by a one-man Greek chorus who is so handsome he’s almost a distraction). And the orchestrations are as delicious as he is.

The biggest takeaway—as least visually—is the set … and the ways it travels around framed by moving apertures that are so technically precise that they sometimes pull you out of the story as you wonder how they operate.

And the voices. I just want to sit in a room and have the actors sing to me for a couple hours.

Really. I can’t say enough good things about this delightful masterpiece of theater. Make a point of seeing it if you’re in NYC or (hopefully) when it finally tours.

I’m also giving a special shoutout to the Belasco Theatre. I was certain by now that I’ve been in every Broadway theater, but I don’t remember ever seeing an interior like the Belasco’s. It’s easily the most gorgeous, most resplendent space I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing a robot musical in, and it made the entire experience even more magical.

Theater: Death Becomes Her

For some reason I’ve never seen the Death Becomes Her movie. I’ve seen enough clips of it that I’ve gotten the general gist, but they clearly didn’t compel me to seek out and watch the entire film.

So aside from knowing some sight gags about horrific injuries, I went to the Death Becomes Her musical with a pretty clean slate.

And I came out with quite possibly a new favorite musical.

I think what kept grabbing me the most was the relentless evidence of quality in the show—especially the music and lyrics. The songs run a gamut from campy to ominous to ridiculous to self-aware to epic emotional meltdown. (SO MUCH emotional meltdwn.) Some are standard show tunes, some are jazzy, many are meticulously asymmetric, and a few are frantic patter songs along the lines of Sondheim’s “Getting Married Today” … but they’re somehow even more delightfully unhinged.

But those are just the classifications. Internally, the songs are rich with texture, voice and counterpoint (all of which shine in the gorgeous orchestrations), and the lyrics are an endless barrage of clever wordplay, brilliant character development, organic scene progression, and a seamless match to the tone and humor of the script (which wasn’t written by the lyricist).

Beyond that, the sets are exquisite when they need to be, ridiculous when they need to be … and Viola’s Gothic dungeon deserves its own Tony for looking like it extends miles into the back of the stage without ever giving you a glimpse of how its visual magic might be working.

Layer into all of that the women’s gowns and wigs (OHMYGOD!) and the script that keeps outdoing itself in humor and character definition (though don’t think too hard about the logistics of plausibly faking/not-faking deaths at the end) and the show just never stops being both thrilling and enthralling.

And then there are the actors. I’m 100% sure that histrionics is listed as an instrument in the score. The songs need to be chewed up and spit out as thoroughly as the book and the scenery, and the four leads just. don’t. let. up. These are crazy people in the prime of their careers and skills, and there’s no way they’re going to let one moment go under-the-top or unridiculoussed. They are truly running marathons for our entertainment, and they do it with undying (ahem) grace and charm. And crazypantsness.

I’ve had a another chronic flareup of insomnia on this trip, and my general baseline has been grogginess, lack of focus and even some unsteadiness on my feet. I’ve worried that I’d completely space out watching all my shows, but they’ve all been thoroughly engaging … ESPECIALLY this one. I truly can’t give it enough praise … especially for the way it kept me alive. Ahem.

Theater: The Outsiders

I can’t remember if I’ve ever read or seen The Outsiders (a 1967 novel adapted into a movie in 1983), but the plot seemed vaguely familiar when I saw this mighty stage version. And WOW does it pack an emotional (and visual and visceral) punch.

Written when the concept of “teenagers” was still finding its footing as a cohesive demographic beyond an age bracket, it’s a complex, touching, violent, heartbreaking coming-of-age story told through the lens of a brutal gang rivalry between the working-class Greasers and the upper-middle-class Socs (pronounced so-shiz, short for Socialites) in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma.

 
Ponyboy Curtis, the 14-year-old protagonist and a fledgling Greaser, maintains the Greasers’ point of view throughout the narrative, which in this stage adaptation explodes in a mix of gutteral choreography, an indie-rock score tuned to a wide range of intensities, thoroughly inventive staging (the floor is hilly and covered in dirt and a massive car drives through it at one point), and stage combat that is both brutal and balletic.

 
The show got its early buzz from an all-out gang rumble choreographed in flashes of slow motion and real time, murky dark and blinding light, and an orchestral score that throbs ominously and occasionally explodes in shrieks of terror … all while it’s literally raining onstage. It’s both gorgeous and gripping—and though it ends badly (as violent rumbles do) it generated cheers and applause from my audience.

The story and the characters are imperfect and complex, and the world they occupy is relentlessly unfair—and every visual and musical aspect of the show supports and amplifies those baselines. It’s all truly breathtaking. But it’s also built on a foundation of violence, brutality and profound heartbreak, so it might not be for everyone.

 
If you weren’t aware, every show that includes lifts or fights has an onstage lift call and/or fight call before the audience is let into the house. In the interest of absolute safety, these focused runthroughs ensure the intricacies of lifting and carrying people and/or believably fighting with them are fresh in the actors’ and dancers’ bodies. I’ve been in shows with enough stage fighting that our fight calls were 30 minutes long. Given the frequency (and intensity) of the fights in this show, I can’t even imagine how long and focused the fight calls are. But what they allow to happen live onstage is unforgettable.

Theater: Oh, Mary!

I want to be Cole Escola’s best friend.

 
They—meaning Cole—wrote Oh, Mary! in response to the idea that maybe Lincoln’s assassination wasn’t such a bad thing for Mary Todd … and then while reportedly never looking up more history than how to spell Abraham and Mary, they took the idea and ran it into the most ridiculous places most of us only wish we could imagine.

 
Cole and I desperately need to hang out some night, do each other’s hair, call boys and giggle, and crack each other up until dawn.

Speaking of cracking up, Oh, Mary! is exponentially funnier than I even dreamed. It’s slapstick meets droll humor meets bizarre characters meets massive plot twists meets very dubious history meets ridiculous wigs and costumes … all at a pace that doesn’t give the actors time to laugh at what they’re doing.

 
I’ve never been a very demonstrative laugher—people have actually accused me of not having fun or of being judgmental and dismissive because I wasn’t busting a gut with them in an audience. (Seriously.) I smile and chuckle, but that’s pretty much all my body ever does to show glee.

 
Reader, let me assure you that I laughed so hard I almost wet myself watching this delightfully ridiculous piece of brilliance.

 
Cole Escola originated the role of Mary and has since been replaced by Titus Burgess (who will soon be replaced by Jinkx Monsoon). I’ve seen Cole Escola perform so I know their pacing and humor and aptitude for ridiculousness, but this role felt perfectly tailored for Titus Burgess’ brand of ridiculousness. And I’m sure Jinkx Monsoon will chew the scenery with it too.

 
The show is profoundly clever, gaspingly hysterical and way more than any person’s diaphragm can handle. Go see it if you’re in NYC. Or just wait a bit—I’m sure every theater in the country will be snatching it up once the licensing begins.

 
AND I CALL DIBS ON PLAYING MARY.

Theater: Call me Izzy

A one-woman play about a battered wife in rural Louisiana who escapes her trauma by writing poetry, Call Me Izzy doesn’t give itself much room to explore plot points and character development outside of exactly what you’d expect.

 
And that’s pretty much all it does. No unexpected side narratives, no quirky character details, no monsoons or mortgage foreclosures or school shootings or other outside forces that could reframe the story in a fresher context … and no overlooked elements that the audience would tacitly expect after reading my 18-word summary above.

 
Don’t get me wrong; I very much liked it. It didn’t set me on fire, but I was never bored or upset that I didn’t feel whisked away to someplace I haven’t seen outside of a TV movie of the week.

 
The script is charming when it needs to be and traumatic when it needs to be. But you kinda know where it’s probably going to end before it even starts. (I’m not going to tell you if you’re right or wrong in the interest of avoiding spoilers, but I saw it ending one of three ways and I was only a little bit off.)

I think the show wouldn’t have much emotional traction without a familiar (and beloved) name on the marquee. Because OF COURSE we all root for Izzy, but we wouldn’t really care if we couldn’t also root for Jean Smart.

 
She’s everything you want to see and more, by the way. She brings Izzy a mix of humor, humanity, heartbreak and hopelessness (I swear I didn’t plan all that alliteration when I started this sentence) in a nuanced, emotionally controlled (and sometimes not controlled) performance that makes you want to hug her protectively and also shake some damn sense into her.

 
On a side note: She spent almost the entire show sitting down with her leg up and being helped to move between scenes by tech crew. I assumed it was because of an injury Izzy’s violent husband inflicted on her and it would eventually be addressed. But it never was. And when I got home and googled the show I learned that Jean herself was injured and forging ahead with the show nonetheless. Which is both impressive and profoundly kind to her many fans.

 
Another side note: Patrick Paige and Paige Davis sat right in front of me. So I got to see some Broadway royalty to kick off my Belated Birthday Broadway Binge!

#Pride101: What the hell do LGBTQ+ people have to be proud of?

We’re proud because despite decades and decades of relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes they try to disguise as so-called “religious liberty,” when the entire Republican party perpetually enshrines a pledge to strip us of our legal equalities in its national platform, when communities and cities and entire states keep trying to codify our families into second-class citizenship, when small-importance bakers with the backing of the big-money hate industry take their unhinged loathing of us all the way to the Supreme Court, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what systemic bigotry and the ugliest sides of organized religion work so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay.

We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly sometimes to the point of being defiantly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on social media … and even on national television.

We're proud because we've worked tirelessly to achieve legal equality in marriage, adoption, parental rights and many other ways that make our families recognized as Families in our states and across our country. And though we have much more to accomplish—and though bigotry disguised as morality and religion and the supposed mandates of constituents work and sometimes succeed at eroding our newfound equalities—we have the momentum and intelligence and motivation and humanity and ability to keep driving back the hate as we continue to drive forward with both our newfound and future equalities.

We’re proud because in just the last few years an openly gay married man was a long-viable, highly qualified, unquestionably respected candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries—something most of us never even considered would EVER happen—and not only does he enjoy enthusiastic support across the Democratic party, but leading Republicans seem to have learned that while they can attack him for reasons they’d attack any other candidate, attacking him for being gay is completely unacceptable.

We’re proud because through our tireless work and the prevailing powers of common sense and compassion, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Proposition Hate and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act long ago collapsed onto their illogical, immoral, meritless foundations … and new legislative attempts to dehumanize us—especially during election cycles—gain little to no traction or visibility and soon die on the trash heap as well.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and careers and relationships and the way we live our lives—and by using our lives as examples of success and humanity and love that other gay people can see and respect and emulate and achieve more and more easily.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world increasingly continues to notice and respect us and enthusiastically appropriate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because more and more often and in more and more contexts our country and our culture see the fact that we’re gay as unthreatening and commonplace and frankly boring.

We’re proud because our tireless efforts to be seen have engendered (which is the perfect verb in this context) massive visible support for us with rainbows and Pride messages on everything from clothing to flags to television commercials—and while we can legitimately be worried that companies are merely riding the Pride wave for profit, we can also celebrate that the explosions of these rainbows on our apparel and flags and televisions overwhelmingly normalizes the understanding that we have a place at the table and a presence in our communities.

We’re proud because especially during this past Pride month and always all year we’re celebrating with parties and street fairs and parades—all mostly virtual in 2020 and 2021—that are overflowing with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, dad-bod queens, glitter queens, nonbinary queens, you’d-never-know-they-were-queens queens, people who prefer not to be called queens and even straight-but-honorary-queens-for-a-day queens, and together we can see beyond the pride in the parades of our lives and together celebrate the underlying Pride in the parades of our lives.

We’re proud because 56 years ago a small crowd in a bar in New York City reached the tipping point in putting up with endless harassment and oppression and instigated a violent retaliation to a police raid that escalated to a week of riots and then to a march for equality that grew unstoppably to a national movement for equality and respect that continues proudly to this day.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so incredibly much to be proud of.

Floating through Chicago Pride

I didn’t really know anybody by the time the first pride parade happened soon after I moved to Chicago. So I went by myself to watch it. And, standing among thousands and thousands of cheering, smiling, happy, proud people who were watching with groups of friends and waving at other friends who squeezed by on the crowded sidewalks, I never felt more alone.

 
It was actually so devastating in my mind that pride weekend literally filled me with dread for the next 15 years I lived in Chicago.

I did notice that first year that the people dancing and waving on the floats looked very happy—and they didn’t have to be surrounded by friends or even anybody as they enjoyed the parade from their glorified perches. So I made up my mind that I needed to make the connections to get myself on a float by the next pride parade.

 
As I slowly—finally!—made Chicago friends and watched the next few parades with them, I still harbored an irrational, unshakable dread that I’d lose them—or they’d actually leave me—and I’d be alone all over again in the crowds. So I kept trying to figure out how to get myself on a float.

 

Then I joined the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus. And we marched in the parade! But not on a float. And I very very stupidly decided to wear my rollerblades and they hurt and I was bad at stopping so I kept running into people and I was so miserable I had to hobble home the moment it was over so I couldn’t hang out and celebrate with anyone afterward so as far as I’m concerned the whole experience didn’t count and I don’t want to talk about it.

 
Then! Finally! I got on a float! And let me tell you: Though standing in a Speedo sucking in your abs and holding on for dear life on a lurching, frequently stopping vehicle technically sucks all the fun out of it, having hundreds of millions (in my fantasies my math says I have hundreds of millions of adoring fans so shut up) of people screaming and cheering for you is ALMOST as awesome as dancing and waving high on a moving platform where the cooling breezes are plenty, the jostling crowds are penned up on the sidewalks below you and the scenery changes by the second to keep everything interesting.
Plus you get to dance to your favorite disco hits.

 
I got myself onto many more floats for the rest of my years in Chicago. The weather was always perfect, my cheering, adoring fans swelled into the billions (shut up), and the joy and pride were always plenty. And my irrational dread—though never gone—was always in check.

 
Thoday is Chicago’s Pride parade. My Facebook and Instagram feeds are already filled with joyful, excited, rainbow-colored pictures of my Chicago friends and acquaintances already celebrating, and while I’m thrilled and proud to have (eventually) been a part of those traditions, our dramatically more subdued Cedar Rapids Pride festivals are now WAY more my speed. And not my Speedo.

 
So I wish all of you celebrating Pride in Chicago and everywhere else—whether on the sidewalks or on a float—an awesome day and an awesome experience both personally and with everyone around you. I’ll be folding laundry and digging in my garden and tackling DIY projects and running whatever miles my knees will allow in a vain attempt to not stray too far from my underwear-on-a-float body.

So happy Pride to all of us!

#Pride101: The Stonewall Uprising

Fifty-six years ago today, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn—a mob-controlled gay bar in Greenwich Village that catered mostly to drag queens—in an ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation specifically targeted at people wearing clothing that didn’t conform to the conventions of what the laws called their “assigned gender.” These arrests usually led to people’s names, photographs and home addresses being published in the newspapers … which carried the high risk of further targeting, job loss, eviction, and family ostracism.

Usually the bar patrons submissively complied as they were being arrested. But this night—clearly fed up past their breaking points—they fought back. When an officer clubbed a Black lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie over the head for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight, the crowd that had gathered outside the club had had enough. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black drag queen and beloved heart of the community, and Sylvia Rivera, a popular Latinx queen, were two of the first to actively resist the police that night, and their fellow queens joined them in throwing bricks, bottles and shot glasses at officers and effectively shutting down the raid. I’m including these people’s ethnicities and orientations here to give credit to the non-white, non-cis-presenting people who showed the courage and gumption to initiate the fight back and start what ended up being six days of riots in the neighborhood surrounding the Stonewall Inn that finally ignited a national fight for the rights and equalities that *everyone* under the LGBTQ+ rainbow enjoys today.

Stonewall wasn’t the first riot in defiance of police raids and harassments; in 1959 angry gays fought police after a raid of Cooper’s Do-Nuts—a gay-friendly diner—in Los Angeles, and in 1966 a trans woman threw a cup of hot coffee in a police officer’s face in a raid at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, sparking a riot that inspired the city to acknowledge the trans community and develop a network of trans-specific social, mental-health and medical services.

But Stonewall was the emotional—and ultimately cultural—turning point. The police raid there quickly drew a large mob whose collective lifetimes of oppression and discrimination boiled over into a violent revolt that trapped police in the bar until the NYC Tactical Patrol Force was dispatched to rescue them. Riots erupted the next night and through the week in the Christopher Street and other nearby gay neighborhoods, including one mob that threatened to burn down the offices of The Village Voice for mocking the gay rioters and describing the riots as "forces of faggotry" and "Sunday fag follies." The next year, an organization called Chicago Gay Liberation organized a parade on the anniversary of the Stonewall riot, and the city has staged a parade on the last Sunday in June ever since—with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic causing the first exception.

Now, every major metropolis and many smaller cities have Pride parades and events—though in 2020 and 2021 they were mostly held virtually—and many of them usually spill beyond the last week of June to pop up in celebrations all month and all year.

But June is officially Pride month in the hearts and minds of LGBTQ+ people—and an exploding population of straight people and businesses large and small—and we owe it all to the brave LGBTQ+ people—more specifically, the extremely marginalized drag queens and people of color—who had had enough and fought back at great risk to themselves and even to our community and started our slow march toward equality fifty-six years ago today.

THIS IS WHY WE CELEBRATE PRIDE.

#Pride101: Marriage equality

Ten years ago today, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples are guaranteed the right to marry under both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Marriage inequality had been enshrined for decades in a “one man and one woman” state-by-state propaganda crusade—which cycled up to fever pitch in every election cycle—led without irony or shame by “sanctity of marriage” charlatans and adulterous divorce junkies like Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh.

The Republicans’ desperate “states’ rights” argument also subjected couples to being married then being not married then being married ad infinitum every time they crossed state lines as they traveled—which is not only ridiculous and cruel, but also engendered very real concerns about the couples’ rights regarding hospital visits and property ownership if they had accidents in marriage-hostile states.

The fight against our equality made us perpetual punching bags and political props by the Republican party and the religious right, who positioned themselves as the only moral authority on the issue as they tore apart families, turned citizens into pariahs, and incited both verbal and physical violence against gay people who wanted nothing more than basic equality that posed no plausible threat or danger to anyone.

Republicans’ longstanding argument that same-sex marriage would undermine and destroy heterosexual marriage was desperately ridiculous and honestly called into question the stability of the heterosexual marriages of everyone who parroted this talking point.

The LGBTQ+ community was forced to organize and fight our way through endless battles and setbacks in the lower courts and then wait on pins and needles when our equality finally reached the purview of the Supreme Court, which in the height of the 2015 Pride month finally issued its 5-4 party-line verdict that our relationships are, in fact, equal and legally valid. And despite this, we’re still forced to combat hostile anti-equality eruptions that pop up every election cycle in red and swing states that need to sway voters by manipulating their baser instincts.

But for the last ten years, those of us who want it and all of us who’ve fought for it have finally been able to enjoy the stabilities and joys and ups and downs and contentments of legal and social marriage equality.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Pride 101: Protester hate

Virtually every pride parade and public LGBTQ+ event draws a crowd of hate-filled, mouth-frothing religious bigots carrying massive-lettered, professionally printed signs (that always use the playground word “homos,” always say we deserve AIDS and ALWAYS obsess about gay sex) and screaming at us with bullhorns, trying to goad us into physical fights so they can videotape them and whimper to the police and public about the cruel persecution they endure just for violently perverting their First Amendment rights.

At bigger events like the Chicago Pride Parade, they're walled off in pens like the rabid swine they are at the end of the routes where they're more of a nuisance than a violence-inciting threat—and so they can ruin the joys and kill the highs that people in the parades have experienced and inspired along the routes. But at smaller events like the Cedar Rapids Pride Fest, they wander freely in much smaller numbers at the perimeters, hauling massive signs as if they were crosses, yelling into bullhorns and goading us from afar so they can run like the cowards they are if they feel outnumbered and/or want to stoke their wannabe persecution complexes.

 
(Cisgender straight people: Raise your hands if you’ve ever endured any of this for being affectionate in public, having wedding photos taken outdoors, being seen with your kids or just basically existing.)

But despite these relentless, organized, violence-inciting attacks, LGBTQ+ people and our allies keep showing up to our Pride events, not letting the bigots’ cruel, puerile, relentless harassment undermine our celebration of who we are and how far we've come.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Pride 101: Pinkwashing

Until this year’s brutal backlash, every June companies across America and around the world have added rainbow stripes to their logos and their advertising; sold rainbow-themed clothing, food and other merchandise; and even sponsored Pride events. It was optically done in support of LGBTQ+ people and in celebration of Pride, and most of these companies were—I should note that some of them still are—acting in a genuine spirit of support and celebration.

But now many are vehemently (cowardly?) not.

Pinkwashing—a practice where companies ride the wave of Pride in order to garner public favor and persuade the LGBTQ+ and ally populations to support them as consumers year-round—first appeared in the national dialogue in the 2010s as a parallel concept to whitewashing (emphasizing the histories of European caucasians over the histories of other populations) and greenwashing (promoting—sometimes dubious—claims of environmental consciousness and stewardship by companies and organizations).

Arguably more of a hop-on-the-bandwagon public-relations tool than a genuine show of support and allyship when bigger corporations are involved, pinkwashing annually draws ire and mockery from the LGBTQ+ population, our allies, and the smaller companies and organizations that truly support and celebrate us. With good justification.

And while I agree in spirit, I have a slightly different take: Even if stores selling rainbow clothing and decorations and knickknacks are truly just using us for profit, they’re still helping normalize our existence by getting rainbow clothing and decorations and knickknacks—not to mention in-store merchandise displays—in front of the greater population.

And while it’s true that they seem to start selling this stuff on June 1 and abruptly stop on June 30, they do the same thing for Valentine’s Day and back-to-school and other holidays and events that are typically celebrated in a very specific block of time. Stores don’t waste floor space on things that customers aren’t currently buying, which is why you’re not finding Santa hats and parkas clogging up the retail racks in the middle of June.

Yes, my take can be seen as grasping at crumbs in a larger zeitgeist of oppression and discrimination. But in our MAGA-driven culture—I use that term very loosely—of open hatred, brutal backlash, and often death threats and violence, it’s still rather honorable for companies to stick their necks out for us.

So I say stock up on rainbow flags and hats and T-shirts and decorations now, and then display and wear them year-round when Pride month is officially over. Retail may follow a calendar, but we certainly don’t have to.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Pride 101: Supreme Court Employment Protection

Five years ago today, the Supreme Court ruling protecting gay and transgender workers from job discrimination and outright firings kicked the right-wing propaganda machine into high gear as it blustered predictably on and on about about “activist judges,” “religious liberty” (note: “liberty” is a right-wing dogwhistle that translates to “legal protection for hating LGBTQ+ people”) and the especially-laughable-in-the-context-of-its-adultrous-presidential-administration chestnut “family values.”

Right on cue, people like the homosexuality-obsessed Franklin Graham called the ruling “a very sad day” because he’d be “forced to hire” filthy gay and transgender people—and he cloaked his lust for hatred and discrimination as “a traditional Christian ethic” with the clear subtext that he and his brand of Christian cover story hold the monopoly on ethics and morality in this or any other discussion that fires up his mouth-frothing base.

But the fight is far from over. The May 2022 leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade left room for the conservative-majority Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 ruling in favor of marriage equality. And when Roe v. Wade was (as predicted) overturned in June 2022, Democrats in Congress had to pre-emptively write and negotiate to pass with Republicans the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified protection of same-sex marriages into law so the Supreme Court couldn't touch it.

Imagine being such a shitty Supreme Court that the President and Congress had to make laws to protect its citizens from you.

Cisgender heterosexuals: Have you ever needed a Supreme Court ruling to protect you from being fired just for going to work? Have you ever felt threatened enough that you had to lie about yourself and your relationships just to keep your job? That’s how bad things still were for gay and transgender people in 2020, more than half a century after the Stonewall Riots that sparked our collective demands for equality, justice and our right to live in peace.

It’s why we still have to carry the campaign and continue the fight and rely on your support and advocacy in our struggle TO THIS DAY to achieve basic, foundational equality so we can hopefully just exist without fear from repercussions incited by so-called moral leaders like Franklin Graham. He and his ilk are stubbornly not going away, but as the 2020 ruling shows, we keep making incremental progress toward maybe one day being able to live our lives free from their manufactured hatred and fear—and the destruction it causes in our lives.


THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.