Liars and Saints

Tidbits . A new oral history of "Angels": "The World Only Spins Forward." Confronted by dissatisfied voices, voices upset with the length of the "Angels in America" plays, Tony Kushner said, "It just takes so long! It takes so long to get these characters to change!!" Roy Cohn figured prominently in Cleve Jones's AIDS quilt (and Cohn seems to me one of the top three great discoveries of "Angels," nothing shocking here; Cohn is the embodiment of the idea of a DIVIDED SELF). The quilt panel said something like this: "Roy Cohn: Bully, Coward, Bigot." Perfect five-word encapsulation of precisely the thing that makes Cohn catnip for a dramatist. Do you know F. Murray Abraham was in one of the early casts? And Kathleen Chalfant seemed to have her characters--including the rabbi--in her "back pocket"; Kushner said she just "pulled them out, fully formed," at the first reading. And at some point it was sugg...

It's worth noting something about Susie Essman. Her character--Susie Greene--ranked high among the greatest TV characters of all time (along with Larry David's character) in a recent poll. It seems to me Essman is an example of the Drea de Matteo phenomenon: If an actor is especially gifted on your show, you'll give her more and more to do. (See Season Five of "The Sopranos.") Essman even has a signature saying: "You fat fuck!" (It's especially grating/thrilling to see her drone on in her child's fancy-school interview. "Traditions!" she says, in her *Good Housekeeping* voice. "Traditions are so very, very important." You want Larry to poke a hole in her right there and then. And indeed he does--via contraband-flowers-stashed-in-a-purse.) I'm fascinated by the deterioration of Greene's marriage to "Jeff"; you see Jeff shoot daggers at Susie in the Vivica A. Fox season. (And the candid depiction of extramari...

Phillip Lopate, the essayist, has made his name by taking on sacred cows. He says there's something thrilling about picking a well-loved thing--such as "love" or "joie de vivre"--and going on the attack. He says the value of a good personal essay is the way the essayist swerves suddenly--the unexpected, idiosyncratic territory the essay takes us toward. Here are some of my favorite contrarian observations from Lopate's writing manual, "To Show and To Tell": (1) E.B. White is a little insufferable. Lopate says one of White's famous essays is "perfect," and "I hold that against White." Lopate suggests that maybe perfection is not something to strive for. He prefers the big, baggy monsters of James Baldwin's late career; he says these essays are "a mess" (and that's certainly a contrarian viewpoint)--and he says the reason he loves them is *precisely* their messiness. (I tried to write about "Charlotte...

When we talk about world-building, we tend to think of Stephen King's doorstop novels, or of "Game of Thrones." But I'd like to call your attention back to two old SNL skits--"Do It on My Twin Bed" and "Back Home Ballers." These are six of my favorite minutes in SNL history, and they create a universe as quirky and persuasive as anything you'd find in "Under the Dome." The idea is simple. Some fairly self-deluded women, leading presumably unfulfilling lives in big cities, return to suburbia for the holidays. Having failed to negotiate a smooth transition from adolescence to adulthood, these women must now occupy an awkward liminal state, at least until Dec. 27th or 28th. We can all relate. The big joke is that--instead of sweeping all the awkwardness under the rug, as most of us do, in our twenties--these women seem to think that their shameful status is cause for celebration. With silly intensity, the women detail all the recogniza...

Other schlemiels, other unwritten laws: (1) Law. Have breathless reverence for acting and actors. We see this parodied with Jason Alexander's "Acting without Acting." Alexander's readers are meant to find this stunningly brilliant; "he's so good you don't even think that he's giving a performance! " But leave it to Seinfeld and David to poke fun at this nonsense. "It's really acting WITH acting, that's what you're saying," says Seinfeld, as Alexander becomes visibly irritated. "The acting you do to conceal the acting counts as acting, so it's acting *with* acting, and so your book is mislabeled. And it's not so much a book. It's a pamphlet." (2) Law. Pretend that passive aggression is really nuanced thinking. There is a social convention that says we must nod respectfully when, for example someone says: "I think you're a wonderful dancer. Having said that, I noticed some areas for improveme...

Vaping! The children are vaping. You need to draft a firmly-worded parent letter, but the wording can't be too firm, because anything viewed as harsh or punitive is unacceptable in gentrified Brooklyn, in 2018. There will be "healing talks" about vaping. There will be restorative justice. One especially precocious child, a tenth grader, comes to your desk. "What are you doing?" she asks, not unkindly. "What do you do all day? Don't you have a college degree? Why aren't you using it?" Try to produce a reply. "I make purchases! I schedule meetings!" (And meetings about the meetings.) Your young friend is not impressed. She looks at you as if you might be what you in fact are: a person in his mid-thirties, with a few degrees, who spends several work hours per day on the Internet, investigating Janet Jackson's Nipplegate, or trying to determine whether Taylor Swift is now an ex-friend of Karlie Kloss. Do you know the theater...

Questions Molly Haskell asks: If you make a gender transition, which gender are you then attracted to? (The answer varies wildly.) Is it possible that the reason some people have such strong reactions to transgender people is that there's actually gender fluidity within all of us, and we're nervous to see someone doing what we might at times want to do (or even half-want to do)? Why is it that pre-K kids tend to be among the most militant about gender norms? Is it because there is even more potential for gender fluidity among little kids than among adults? ("I militate against this because, if I didn't enforce and reenforce the rule, I might actually forget about its existence.") What are the differences between "transsexual," "transgender," "transvestite"? Is it OK to use the term "gender dysphoria"? Haskell has also taught me that the reason some heterosexual men dress in drag is that the proximity to women's undergarm...