And Another Thing....

Coram Boy

Coram Boy is a miracle of a play. Heartbreaking, surprising, it is a Dickensian knot of mistaken identities, children lost and then found, betrayal, murder, and the redemption of angels. There is a cast of 50, a wrenching underwater scene with floating actors, and a curtain call that features no less than a full-throated Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah.

It sounds ridiculous, I know. It shouldn't work. But it does.

Coram Boy closes on the 27th. If you live in or near NY, see it. Find a ticket however you can; pay whatever you have to. It is extraordinary. It is the play Broadway was meant for.

Fado

My cousin is in town for a week, and last night I joined her and two of her friends at a Portugese restaurant in the Village, called Alfama .

Cecilia, one of my cousin's friends, is Portugese herself, and joked with the waiters and gave us suggestions on what to order. When the old women in their pearls and black shawls started singing the traditional Fado--music that is both melancholy and mischievious--Cecilia sang along, and soon all of us at the table were joining in a chorus we didn't understand.

Working

Just had a really great interview with a woman who was denied a bed in a homeless shelter in Chicago because she is gay.

Look for the story next week on 365Gay.com.....when it's up, I'll post a link here.

Women's sacrifice

Friends, you know I hate being one of those aggregators, just posting links to other places. Nevertheless. Do try to read Debra Dickerson's interesting commentary on  Michelle Obama. I like it not because of what it reveals or doesn't about Michelle herself, but about how Dickerson brings to the front a worry I have, too: What happens when America's smartest 30something women start exiting the office in droves in order to raise their families?

I'm really not judging (unlike Dickerson, who keeps saying she isn't, but then does). I think--nope, I know--that I would make the same choice were I to have a child. Yet I look around at my Wellesley cohort and see woman after woman dropping out to raise their kids, and I think about the loss of brain power for America and stunted job experience for my friends (or stunted life experience for lawyer friends who don't want to have kids until they make partner), and I worry about how this is going to play out.

I don't have answers or even thoughts of answers. Just concern.

Columns up...

Thoughts on mothers day, now up on the column site...

Also, the Equal Gay and Lesbian Rights Amendment, Ann Coulter, the Faggot Wars, the Snickers ad, added to the archives. We now have all columns back through Feb. 2006!

Thanks for reading, as always.

Jay

Coney Island

Sliding around a Wonder Wheel car: $5

Anticipating the drop on the Cyclone: $6

One ticket to the Coney Island museum to see Thomas A. Edison's early film-viewer: .99.

A perfect afternoon alone at Coney Island: Priceless.

Jeff McCourt dead at 51

Jeff McCourt, founder of the Windy City Times, died last month at 51. Jeff was the first person to take a chance on me, a young writer, eventually giving me the column I still write.

Jeff was difficult, needy, an asshole, a bastard. He would storm through our windowless office sucking on cigarettes and booming out curses or praises, depending on his mood. I am grateful for his early support---and I wish I could be sorry  about his death.  When I was hired, he was already deep in decline, from drugs, from AIDS, from his pinwheeling narcissism. But it' thanks to him that the WCT---and eventually the Chicago Free Press--became the papers they did.

He was interesting. He was a personality. He will be remembered---not always well, but hey, remembered. And that's a hell of a lot more than most other people get.