The Neurotic Creative

Selected Articles

Earlier this year, just days shy of my daughter’s 12th birthday, I was changing her bed’s sheets when she said, in an offhand but discreet way, “Just so you know, I started my period. But it’s fine. I’m taking care of it. I’m just letting you know, because you asked me to tell you.”

Putting on my best poker face, I offered a quick hug and kiss and told her to let me know if she had any questions or needed anything — but I secretly marveled at how she’d seemingly taken this transition in stride, when my own first period experience, in the 1980s, had been shrouded in fear, confusion and shame. (You know. The kind that makes a frantic fifth grader wad up half a dozen tissues into her underpants.)

Then, a few months after my daughter’s low-key pronouncement, two 11-year-old Girl Scouts arrived at our door and asked my husband for a donation to their Bronze Award project. They were assembling first period kits — packed with a variety of pads and tampons, starter Diva Cups (donated by the company, after the girls pled their case via Zoom) and junior-sized period underwear — for every fifth grade girl in the school district.
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On a recent Tuesday night, 16 women gathered backstage and changed into costumes to play their roles in a production of Shakespeare’s “Othello.”

The space hummed with the giddy electricity of actors preparing to perform in front of an audience. The actress playing Iago, wearing brown slacks, a white shirt and a dark-red sash (which also holstered a foam sword), huddled up with Othello to do some last-minute line cramming.

Brabantio tucked her long, dark-blond hair up inside a hat. Cassio smirked and held up a spare handkerchief, jokingly noting that this all-important prop went missing onstage during the previous week’s performance. And Desdemona pinched the sides of her white, long-sleeved, knee-length dress and girlishly skipped across the stage.
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Usually when I see a show for review, I don’t end up on stage, singing a Pogues song.

But then, most shows are nothing like Taylor’s Mac’s Holiday Sauce, which UMS brought to the Power Center on December 14 and 15.

Mac has so many talents that I’d wear out my hyphen key if I tried to list them all. A MacArthur “Genius” and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Mac created Holiday Sauce as a tribute to the playwright-singer-artist's drag mother, Flawless Sabrina. “She used to always say, ‘You’re the boss, apple sauce,” Mac said, referring to the show's title, and Sabrina regularly hosted "judy" and others during the holidays. (As Mac told the Los Angeles Times, "[M]y gender pronoun is 'judy’ because I wanted a gender pronoun that is an art piece.”)
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Essayist. Journalist. Adequate Mom.