“Hey, Billy Strayhorn, we’re going to change piano players at this point. Would you come over here to the mic, please? I think it only fitting that Billy should have the responsibility of the concluding statement.”

Duke Ellington casually, if scripted, trades seats with his longtime collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, to preface the final portion of “Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald.”

“In our musical search for a total portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, we find a melodic parallel in which royal ancestry, greatness of heart, and talent beyond category are the principal components in the quest for total jazz.”

Long before Beyoncé passed…

I’m 20. My friend, Melissa, takes me to a house party hosted by a 30something gay couple. Not knowing anyone but the friend who brought me along, I could politely detach from small-talk and let my gaze wander through the sea of gay men with a few islands of women sipping out of plastic cups and tiki mugs. Some clusters laugh uproariously, some are speaking quietly and covertly, some seem to know everyone while everyone else seems to know someone who knows everyone. Lots of folx are in Hawai’ian-style shirts, there are fake leis here and there, flowers behind various…

“There’s so few nice surprises in life. Seems to me that it’d be kind of a shame to squander one of them, don’t ya think?” O’Neal Compton’s Jim Soams in Big Eden

“This is like Schitt’s Creek,” my husband said suddenly, “but, you know, before Schitt’s Creek.”

Arye Gross’ Henry Hart is a successful artist in NYC who returns to the small town in Montana where he grew up to care for his grandfather, George Coe’s Sam, who suffered a stroke. By the time he arrives, the town’s schoolteacher, Louise Fletcher’s Grace Cornwall, has already developed a plan to help…

an (almost) daily reflection in the month of June about the people, events, and experiences that shaped my story

Vince, Billy and two girls were right in the middle of the floor, and the other couples were stopping and watching. The two girls were doing a rather abandoned heterosexual version of the Flop. Vince and Billy were not. They were doing the gay boogie. And they were doing it as I had seen it done only in films and at parties in New York.

The gay who is a good dancer can turn even the fox trot into an uninhibited…

“I choose not to collaborate in my own oppression by restricting a basic human right. To me this is a matter of conscience.” Sr. Jeannine Gramick, SSND

Like my siblings before me, I attended our local Catholic school from junior kindergarten through eighth grade. Part of my family’s parish, the school was primarily staffed by Sinsinawa Dominicans, an order of women religious based in southwest Wisconsin. Photos from the parish’s early days showed dozens of women in wimples and habits that looked like stylized and oversized widow’s peaks filling the front pews of the church. …

weekly reflection, updates & good stuff 6.23.2021

Friends,

I hated summer as a kid. If I wasn’t in camp, I was alone. One summer, I made my way through the World Book Encyclopedia that had been on the shelf in my parents’ den since Rhodesia was a thing. I copied over the Phoenician alphabet, learned the capitals of the world (well, at least the capitals of the early 1970s), and collected tidbits of information that still serve me well when watching Jeopardy!, but otherwise I was alone.

Summers in high school were a little better — I worked in coffee…

I’m five. I’m with my enormous family in the enormous Arie Crown Theater, and we’re seeing the touring production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It’s colorful, every song is different, and it dawns on me that I’m Joseph, I’m the little brother that gets picked on and left behind. When his brothers debate leaving him in a well or selling him to a passing group of nomads, I think about the times I was trapped in a toy chest or dangled over a laundry chute to amuse older siblings. …

“Thank you, Ellen, for giving me a shot at a good life.” Kate McKinnon

At the 77th Golden Globe Awards, Kate McKinnon introduced Ellen Degeneres, the second recipient of the Carol Burnett Award. Read that sentence again.

At the 77th Golden Globe Awards, Kate McKinnon introduced Ellen Degeneres, the second recipient of the Carol Burnett Award.

Three generations of genius comedians who share a common thread that McKinnon articulated beautifully: “a desire to bring everyone together by laughing about the things that we have in common” and “a way to be funny that is grounded in an expression of joy.”…