9 years ago I had a degree in English and a job selling ballet shoes for barely above minimum wage. I had left Vassar the year before assuming that a job would make its way to me in the way jobs did in the books I grew up reading, in which smart people made livings…More
if i could only make me better
In the spring of 2010, not long before my college dance company’s annual gala at the local opera house, I borked something deep in my hip. The gala took place each year in the dead of upstate New York winter, which meant that there was always a spate of injuries right before, mostly slip-and-falls down…More
heaven is other people
Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung. People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists, as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and…More
2020 in books
I thought this might be the year I beat my 2015 reading record: 89 books, 32,379 pages (thanks, Goodreads). Even a pandemic is no match for commuting from Astoria to the Meatpacking District, I guess. I came close this year with 79 books, 31,284 pages. That mismatch between books and pages relative to 2015 is…More
a very covid christmas
Reader, I got it. More
any other name
At 31, with my faculties and most of my dignity intact, I’m hard-won. People know me and know of me. More
nuance, but nuanced
I lapsed briefly the other day, while reading about Eleanor Roosevelt’s course at an English boarding school, into cursing anew my subpar secondary education. I’m tired of the Internet right now, the barrage of too-pat memes that flatten every systemic failure into a hot take with a solution simple enough to fit into a hashtag,…More
writers: they’re just like us!
I recently read two books written by people I know. (It’s cool. I’m fine! I love the choices I’ve made and that I expend my creative energy tweeting on behalf of a corporation.) The first, a collection of essays, was by a friend with whom I share not one but two alma maters: our performing…More
BODY
Spotify’s Throwback Thursday playlist was Pride-themed last week. This post is not about how many of the songs on the playlist I had sung (4), choreographed (2), or danced to (7), but even setting the memory of my star* turn as Alexi Darling in the 2009 Vassar College production of “Rent” aside, I associate many…More
31
I thought this morning about the past year and God help me but the first thing that came to mind — from a year when I got engaged, moved to London, and survived at least the first wave of a global pandemic — was being pitched by a San Francisco ad agency. They took us…More
