E.B. Boatner
A Word In Edgewise: For The Audience – Delight!
Comedy can be a trickster. So many ways humor can go awry: Cruel instead of comic, flat when you’d aimed for effervescent. Adding comedy concerning other cultures into the mix sets the bar dauntingly high. Fortunately, Ty Defoe and Larissa Fasthorse, working closely with their creative team, have been equal to the task. The germ…
Books: Holiday Gift Guide
Songs of Irie Asha Ashati BromfieldWednesday Books$20 Jamaica; 1976; warring political factions are coming to violence pre-election around the lives of Irie, whose Daddy runs a record shop in an impoverished area of Kingston, and Jilly, privileged daughter of a wealthy politician living in a mansion on the heights of the capital city. They’ve just graduated…
A Word In Edgewise: Untethered
I cheered Simone Biles’s return in August’s 2023 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. Some cried “coward” when she withdrew from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after a potentially lethal bout of the “twisties” left her airborne and lost. Their verdict; “She shoulda’ just pushed through it.” Biles did it her way, vindicated in Antwerp bringing her World…
Books: 741
Night of the Living QueersEd. Shelly Pag and Alex BrownWednesday Books$12 YA Horror anthology with 13 tales spanning a rainbow of frissons; goose-bump raising to slapstick candy corn. Some end happily, others…don’t. Ryan Douglas’s “Knicknack” concerns a revenant party clown, killed by a boy’s cruel prank, who now kidnaps and kills local kids. Tonight, he’s…
A Word In Edgewise: The Importance of Seeing ‘Earnest’
Google Wilde’s glorious confection, and you’ll find a myriad ways to parse it: SparkNotes, CliffNotes, LitCharts, OwlCation, and perhaps the most telling, EssayPro, all eager to help. There’s socially, politically, morally, a gender Gordian knot, how to use the lovers’ bon mots to predict their futures.. My personal advice is: heed the playwright’s subtitle, “A Trivial Comedy…
A Word In Edgewise: Attachments All The Way Down
When I was little, my folks often read to me or told me stories. Occasionally, Dad related history, most memorably the fate of a big ship, the biggest, most luxurious ever to sail: RMS Titanic. “She set out to take 2,223 souls across the Atlantic from England to New York,” he began …”but never made…
Books: 739
Inverse Cowgirl: A MemoirAlicia Roth WeigelHarperOne$18.99 Moving, powerful; a lived look at the least understood position on the GLBTQIA+ spectrum. An earlier amniocentesis had shown XY chromosomes, yet baby Wiegel appeared with a vagina (though no ovaries or uterus). Doctors diagnosed with “complete androgen insensitivity syndrome” (CAIS). The ”problem” was, and is still to a…
A Word In Edgewise: Because I’m Not You, Doesn’t Mean I’m Not Me
Reading Alicia Roth Weigel’s Inverse Cowboy (see the “Books” column in this issue) how little many of us not personally in the “I” category of “LGBTQUA+,” know about “Intersex,” not even how many in the general population are affected. Weigel says they’re statistically, “about as common as redheads–about 2% of the world’s population.” Online sources…
A Word In Edgewise: Settling For Second Needn’t Be Second-Rate
I’m fond of a Fall Get-Away. In more flush times, I take my getaways in the autumn. It’s still warm (with prospects of ever-warmer) the light is still languid and lengthy, the air, depending on your destination, still crisp and the leaves luxurious. Even short trips offer all these with-benefits of Mother Nature. Between COVID…
Books: 737
Dreaming HomeLucian ChildsBiblioasis$16.95 One chance instant can reverberate through decades, for good or ill. Cruel or kind may hinge on the flip of a coin. Here, 12-year-old Rachel and her pal find Kyle, Rachel’s 15-year-old brother, drawing from a gay porno magazine. Teasing might have done for some sibs, but Rachel and Kyle are being…
