This is a collection of connected excerpts (edited/reworked; songs and stage directions removed) from “Birth of the American Baroness”, written by me and subsequently performed at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater (2015), Oberon at A.R.T. (2016) and Dixon Place (2017).

When I was a kid, in the 1970s, I loved reading my horoscope. The first one I ever saw was in Teen Beat magazine. They had everything in there, even centerfolds of male heartthrobs, shirts unbuttoned down to their bellies, belted bellbottoms ragged at the hem. I remember tearing out the flimsy insert poster of Jack Wild, and double-sided taping it up on my bedroom wall.

I was at the (in)famous Joni Mitchell concert on the Boston Common, in the summer of 1983, on a date. At the time, I was less than two months away from starting my junior year abroad in France, and I'd been working 7 days a week at Faneuil Hall so I could save up enough money to travel around Europe. When I first wrote this story, I titled it “Sherry Merry Is Mad At Me”. You'll see why.

This is an excerpt from Birth of the American Baroness, about my first time in a disco, at the age of 14, which just so happened to coincide with my first feelings of love, the kind of love you hear about in a Donna Summer song. 

I wrote this academic paper, titled, “ The Impact of Voluntary Childlessness on Meaning in Life, and the Potential for Positive Childfree Living”, in 2015. It was published 3 years later in the esteemed International Journal of Existential Positive Psychology.

My masters degree dissertation was titled “Mysterious Potential: Toward a New Understanding of Fertility As Fullness of Being in Childfree Women.” Here it is, in full, for those who like that sort of thing. 

I wrote this piece to read at one of our holiday shows, a few years back, at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in NYC. It’s my tribute to a family I lived with while I was a student at Boston University, and how their lifestyle made me long to be Jewish.