Another Winter in a Summer Town

I'm coming to you from New York City this week. How's the weather, you ask?

Well. Use the following in a sentence: It's cold.

As in ... Holy fucking shit, it's cold. Sweet Mother of God, it's cold.

In the immortal words of Thornton Wilder, the dogs are sticking to the sidewalks.

Kicked off the whole thing with a stop at John's Pizza in the Village. As in ... Sweet Mother of God, that's good pizza.

And kicked off the theater (seven shows in four days, kids) with Grey Gardens, the new(ish) musical about Jackie Kennedy's aunts who went from society doyennes to nut jobs. Living with Jackie will do that to you, I suppose.

So the show is daring but not ultimately that successful. Still, I'd pay double just to watch Christine Ebersole tear up the f'in stage again. God love that woman. She's the talk of the theater community now and for good reason. As my fellow theater junkie, Miss Virginia, likes to point out, Christine doesn't take any of it home with her; she puts all of it out there on the stage. When at the end she realizes she'll never escape the mansion and her mother no matter how decrepit either becomes, and the tears don't just well up in her eyes but come in big, heavy rain-like drops, you're taken to your own most scary, vulnerable place.

And that's what really good theater is all about, peeps. So my scarf's off to Christine. Word. Engrave the Tony, because it's hers.

Here's a clip of her performing the second-act opener at the Drama Desk awards. She's a flippin' genius, and I want to have her babies.




And at an ASCAP Foundation peformance, she trots out "Around the World" from the second act as well. Note that she's singing the hell out of this thing while maintaining a nearly impossible New England accent.