The Inattentive Reader, 1919 https://botfrens.com/collections/48/contents/1113963

-- FOR Outstanding COSTUME DESIGN For A Series (1987)! A first nomination and award for the brilliant Nanrose Buchman, who would go on to nab 4 more noms (most recent: "Perry Mason" 2023) & 1 more award ("The Queen's Gambit" 2021).

It was the sixth and last season of FAME; Hans and I were invited in to pitch. One of our stories was a "42nd Street" homage; we almost didn't pitch it, because we figured they MUST've already done something like it already. But they hadn't, and they bought it! (And shot it!)

39 Years Ago Today: An episode of FAME I co-wrote with Hans Beimler -- our second produced TV script! -- got a "Close Up" in TV GUIDE magazine. Not bad for a little show running near-invisibly in syndication (and a troubled script that went to "Third Blue" [i.e., multiple rewrites/revisions)... 🧵

Nov. 13, 1925: A Charleston dance contest in front of St. Louis City Hall.

Passed the time tonight with these two time-travelers.

Edvard Munch in his studio at Ekely in Norway Photo: Ragnvald Væring, 1938.

(Okay, it’s her birthday, so. . .) Hang on, when did reading become performative? 📸: Michael Berresse

I need to sell my rear-mezz ‘Oedipus’ ticket for next Tuesday, November 18 in case anyone wants it at a discount: www.stubhub.com/oedipus-new-...

Dorothy Dandridge rehearsing at the Cafe de Paris nightclub in London with Phil Moore at the piano, 1951.

‘A New (Old) Look at Peggy Fears: Sapphic Showgirl, Broadway Producer, Queen of Fire Island:’ mayacantu.com/the-world-of....

Nov. 8, 1925: A theater troupe in Zhytomyr in Soviet Ukraine.

Nov. 5, 1925: Italian playwright and producer Luigi Pirandello rehearses his actors for a staging of his drama "Henry IV" in Berlin.

The world is healing.

this giant dime is still just sitting in my apartment btw

If it hadn't been his actual mother's name, "Foxy Sondheim" would be a great burlesque name

Tallulah Bankhead by Mortimer Offner.

‘WILL YOU CONDEMN OR FORGIVE HER?’ I love both the art design & marketing copy for this herald for the ‘33 MGM film adaptation of Bradford Ropes’s ‘Stage Mother,’ for which he co-wrote the (much more nuanced) screenplay. A holiday gift to myself; now to figure out how best to display this two-sider.

How did Cyndi Lauper and Theresa Rebeck turn ‘Working Girl' into a musical (at La Jolla through Nov. 30)? By focusing on the absurdities of 1980s work culture and continuing inequalities. 

I was going to go as a Zombie Tradwife this Halloween, but it just ended up Valley of the Dolls.

Pyewacket and Kim Novak, co-stars in Bell, Book & Candle 🎃🪦💀 📷 Eliot Elisofon, 1958 Happy #Halloween !

Oct. 31, 1925: Lee Grant, an actress who overcame the Hollywood blacklist to enjoy a movie renaissance in the 1970s, is born (as Lyova Rosenthal) in New York. Turning 100 today, she is the only Oscar winner for both acting (“Shampoo,” 1975) and for directing a documentary.

For Slate's Biopic Week I wrote on two new films from Richard Linklater that reimagine the artist biopic as act of criticism: Blue Moon, with Ethan Hawke as the mid-20th-century lyricist Lorenz Hart, & Nouvelle Vague, which re-enacts the 1959 filming of Godard's Breathless. slate.com/culture/2025...

oh my god

Remembering Ruth Gordon on her birthday 🎂 📷 Alex Gotfryd, 1980 “She is neither cozy nor sentimental; she has the authority of a woman who knows she has grown perversely sexy and commanding with age.” - David Thomson

Gypsy Rose Lee https://www.wikiart.org/en/max-ernst/gypsy-rose-lee-1943

If the studios are going to put together hopelessly mismatched talents, why don't they just go all the way to lunacy? Why not Alejandro Jodorowsky and Bernard Slade? John Milius and Edward Albee? Stanley Kubrick and Sam Shepherd? (Kubrick and anybody!) (1981)

There are only two kinds of people in the world: those who love Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria with all their heart and those who’ve never seen it

Nothing captures American life in 2025 better than Chair Company

As a teenager, I had the privilege of meeting Dana at the Ziegfeld Club in the late 1990s; she was so lovely and still so stylish.

Rereading 42nd Street, the first of Bradford Ropes’ “Backstage Trilogy,” & my new favorite insults (for a long-in-the-tooth star showgirl) are “she’s got callouses on her fingers from sewin’ sweaters for the Rough Riders” & “she’d have to get on a stepladder to kick higher than her head.”

Baron Nathan, the celebrity dance teacher of the 1850s who danced the hornpipe blindfolded, surrounded by eggs. There's something SO malevolent about this image. It's powerfully frightening.

The revival of the 1980 ‘42nd Street’ with @suzietoot.bsky.social as Peggy Sawyer and @thebiancadelrio.bsky.social as Dorothy Brock.

Always audacious to musicalize this wildest of Wilder plays (my favorite of them) & not sure everything clicks here yet—but this surprisingly faithful version of ‘Skin of Our Teeth’ is a smart, engaging trip performed by a stellar cast; loved Ruthie Ann Miles as Mrs. A and Micaela Diamond as Sabina.

Loooove this Jesse Green piece about what BLUE MOON gets right and most Broadway movies don’t: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/m...

Photographs by American actor, filmmaker, and artist Diane Keaton, 1970s, published in her 1980 photobook "Reservations."

'Cross-dressing guests for a gay wedding in Petrograd, 1921. The “wedding” had actually been organized by a secret police officer who arrested all the attendees at the end of the ceremony, but the charges were eventually dropped.' www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-e...

Oct. 26, 1925: Evelyn Law, renowned as the highest kicker on the New York stage, gives children a dance lesson using her physics-defying ability on the roof of the Hotel Astor.

Cole Porter And Moss Hart by Lusha Nelson Vanity Fair, 1935 Their hit show Jubilee had just opened at the Imperial Theatre.

Astonishing prescience and moral vision in Sally Carson’s 1935 play (which she adapted from her 1934 novel) about the infiltration of Nazi ideology into family life. A chilling watch at the Mint, but also imbued with real human warmth and feeling.

So yeah, the Berliner Ensemble keeps a lifelike mini-Brecht on the premises - 'Brecht is back from his summer break'

On the birthday of the Divine Sarah, dare to live large, be a polymath, persevere, and should old age at last catch up with you, dance on one leg and blithely play 18-year-olds.

Janelle Monáe and Lucy Dacus link up for Rolling Stone's Musicians On Musicians 2025 💫 The artists with expansive visions talk about gender, faith, futurism, and why some records feel like movies. Read/Watch: www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

Through the jumbled kaleidoscope of second-wave feminism, a jubilantly exploratory show about freedom and revolution: where those lines meet and where they diverge. I was happy to pack up my phone at the door and enjoy the dialectical fireworks in ‘Liberation.’

I have many thoughts about ‘Blue Moon,’ which I loved as a work of musical theater history, of cinema & a tonally true tragicomic valentine to the man F. Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the poet laureate of America.’ It’s a miracle this film got made & a gift that Linklater and team pulled it off so well.

The way this headline got me extremely excited about a project called "Oedipus & Muppets".

If this was the 1850s in a frontier town called Horse Shoe, I feel like a local resident called Miss Abigail would be anxiously peering out the window looking for her glass bead delivery so she could make a fine pair of earrings & trim a lampshade on a lamp given to her by her Great Aunt Beryl.

Remembering Jerry Orbach on his birthday 🎂 📷 Jack Robinson, 1968 "He makes gangle into a verb, because that is just what he does. He gangles. He also sings most effectively, dances most occasionally, & acts with an engaging & perfectly controlled sense of desperation." - Clive Barnes

Happy Birthday, Divine! Today would have been his 80th birthday. 🩷💙🩷💙

Oct. 16, 1925: Christian Krohg, a Norwegian painter and writer who employed a sometimes biting social realism, dies at 73 in Oslo. He turned one of his paintings, of a prostitute waiting to see a doctor, into a novel, and was founding director of the Norwegian Academy of Arts.