794 Days Later

Ever watch an actor goof a line? I’m not talking about when someone goes up, (which is terrifying) and the words from a script disappear into the ether, forcing the actor to call out for help.

 

“Line?”

 

I’m saying that sometimes, in that search for what comes next, a line comes out of your mouth that is not what the playwright intended. It is improvised.

 

Like this: our late friend, Bob, told the story of music-directing a national tour of Les Miserables. The actor playing Javert, having no clue what his next lyric was, offered an alternative one. The lyric he improvised both scanned to the original, and rhymed, stating that he (the policeman) had watered Jean Valjean’s (the escaped convict) plants.

 

So, this is what happened to the actor Douglas Sills, on what turned out to be the last night of our 2020 theatre season. We were at the City Center Encores! production of Mack & Mabel, and Sills, playing Mack Sennett, marched from stage left to introduce himself to another character.

 

Shaking the man’s hand vigorously: “Hello, Mr. Sennett.”

A pause. A think. His face turns red.

“Oh, I’m Mister Sennett.”

 

The audience roars with appreciation. That’s live theatre.

 

Part One, 2020: ​​Cynthia Nixon would not have canceled Broadway.

 

On Saturday, March 7, 2020 a video is posted to social media: “People rush to catch the last trains leaving #Lombardy after government declared the quarantine and lockdown of 16 million people in Northern #Italy.” In the 21-second clip, dozens of figures race, wearing backpacks and dragging overnight suitcases behind them, across the station and down the stairs. Every day for months, I will wonder about these people; where they ultimately went, and how they were able to make that decision to flee at a moment’s notice. For now, I watch the video again.

 

We do not have the ability to go anywhere. We will ride this out in New York City. We will be fine. I stock up on non-perishable food for an unknowable Armageddon. Will the bodegas and grocery stores close? If they do, I have 60 days’ worth of Chef Boyardee.

 

I read stories of Italian hospitals refusing to accept anyone over the age of 65. Having been blindsided themselves, the doctors put together an ethics policy; a hierarchy of who will be treated, and in what order. My husband has just had a birthday. We are, still, hungover from his party at a solidly packed pub; the pleasure of good friends, fiery cognac and juniper gin. He is 70 now.

My husband, who teaches musical theatre, often to a packed room of writers, cancels an entire week of classes on Sunday, March 8th.

 

In hindsight, our march towards that spring was like watching a too-tall truck endeavor to ram itself through a small tunnel. You scrunch your whole face up, willing it through. What is going to happen? Our tickets to Girl from the North Country, the new Bob Dylan musical, are for Thursday, March 12.

 

For days, we debate. We are cautious, but why? The cases are mostly upstate in New Rochelle. We have plenty of plastic gloves, plenty of Lysol wipes. I order an obscene amount of delightfully named hand sanitizers. Strawberry Pound Cake. Sprinkled Donut. At The Beach.

 

We stop going to work. We stop taking the subway. We stop pretty much everything.

 

Wednesday, March 11: It’s reported, first by reddit, that a Broadway usher has the virus.

What the public does not know at the time is that even before Peter McIntosh tested positive, he was seen in an emergency room. Later, he is hospitalized for a week, the severity of his illness so extreme. He waits alone in a room for forty-five minutes while the doctors and nurses don hazmat suits to treat him. McIntosh had been sick since late February, but continued to go to work, performance after performance. He told Buzzfeed later, that being a Black man, he was focused on paying his bills. Focused on surviving.

 

Meanwhile, the message board biddies are apoplectic. They argue over the governor’s emergency powers. Come on, it’s the flu. No one is worried about getting too sick. They admit that selfishly, it would be just great if Broadway could hold out until they can see Company. Those tickets were expensive. They use the word “unfortunate” a lot. It’s all so unfortunate.

 

The theatres where Peter McIntosh worked are deep cleaned. The shows continue.

 

We still have these tickets for Thursday, the 12th. We brainstorm excuses as to why we cannot go, so that my husband won’t lose his spot on the second night list. Strangely, “there’s a pandemic” isn’t one of them.

 

Ultimately, Governor Cuomo makes the choice for us, banning any gathering of 500 people or more.

 

I interrupt my husband’s work Zoom, to tell him Broadway is about to be closed for four weeks. It seems completely untenable. I can’t decide if it’s laughable or chilling. Four weeks of dark theatres, save for a single bulb, the ghost light, that is kept lit at all times, to keep the stage from descending into complete darkness.

 

Broadway shutters for 540 days.

 

Part 2: The Moulin Rouge: Life Is Beautiful.

 

My calendar from this time is a fossil; a snapshot; a live wire with shorted power.

 

Canceled: work - Travel Policy Guidance Meeting

Canceled: Six (musical), Love Life (musical), Hangmen (play), Company (musical)

Canceled: 40th birthday party

New appointment: Virtual Happy Hour (ALL STAFF)

 

In beforetimes, March, April and May were crowded with theatre dates, as every show aims to open before awards season, and thus, to be eligible for Tonys in June. This year, we watch YouTube and TikTok.  Here’s a guy with a sock puppet, pretending that the puppet is eating cars. Extraordinary. I binge watch ER, again, my fondness for the show heavily tipped towards the earlier seasons, where Anthony Edwards, Eriq La Salle, and George Clooney hold court. My husband, a close-up magician, records videos of card tricks for our nieces and nephews. One video per day; they take hours to rehearse, nothing left to chance. I remark that he should keep sending them every day until the pandemic has passed.

 

And we worry; how will the industry survive? Actors have left town, for summer houses and parents’ basements. Virtual events vie for attention, and more importantly, donations.

 

There’s a livestream (mostly pre-recorded) for Stephen Sondheim’s birthday that starts off disastrously wrong, and it is the highlight of our dark spring. In one of the few live segments of the evening, Raúl Esparza (who starred in Sondheim’s Company in 2006) tries again and again, and again, to launch into his opening remarks. There’s no sound; Raúl shakes his head and walks offscreen. We sit, sipping drinks, on our couch, for what must have been a half hour, knowing that so many of our friends are doing the same thing. Eventually, the technical problems are rectified, and by that point, we are well drunk. Melissa Errico, one of Sondheim’s favorite singers, delivers a haunting “Children and Art”, from Sunday in the Park with George, and it’s exquisite, but we are focused on the bookcase behind her, where a thin blue volume, “Erotic Irish Art,” is prominently featured.

 

The pinnacle of the evening: from separate locales, Christine Baranski, Audra McDonald, and Meryl Streep sing “The Ladies Who Lunch” from Company, in white bathrobes, while mixing martinis, pouring whiskey, and trying to open a bottle of scotch.

 

We sit, my husband and I, howling, but also ghost-hearing what should have been the roar of an audience. Stephen Sondheim, largely considered to be the most important musical theatre artist of our time, has just turned 90. He will only live to see 91. He deserved to hear our applause. For now, we are granted a two and a half hour reprieve, of song and laughter.

 

Pushing into April, and May, and June, there are so, so many digital options, but they don’t meet the moment. Not when the sirens are so loud outside, I cannot think. I was good with the erotic art in the bookcase. I don’t want to watch someone sing inside a closet.

 

But there is music happening outside, too, and it shakes the world. What may be lost to history is that every night, at 7pm, the people of New York opened their windows, and cheered like our team had won the goddamn World Series.

 

The ritual began as a thank you, to the people who walked into the virus' fire every day. Doctors who came out of retirement, only to be felled by an illness nobody understood. Nurses like Kious Kelly, who comforted the dying, while using threadbare trash bags to protect themselves. Bus drivers who had no choice but to keep delivering people to points distant. The Korean family who continued to run that bodega.

 

I found myself outside one night, maybe in May, coming back from a walk, just as the clock struck the magic hour. The streets and sidewalks were empty, save me. I was carrying two bags of takeout from a place we’d never been to; it had previously been too difficult to come across a reservation. It had been my intent to be long home by seven, but the food was delayed, or my gait was slow. I found myself, on a side street, hearing at first a cowbell in the distance, and then, like the roar of a tsunami, the voices of New York. And because our apartments are stacked to the sky, the cheering and pot-banging came from every direction.

 

If the noise was boisterous from inside my home, it was deafening on the street. Roaring, raucous energy pointed at strangers. Young men, hanging out their windows. Pajamed children screaming next to their weary parents. Doormen, keeping watch. Sometimes, this happening would be the only time you saw another human being all day, and on this particular evening. I wept. I put my takeout bags down on the sidewalk, and wept.

 

For a brief time, every evening, sirens were drowned out by voice, clanging metals, whistles and prayer.

 

“Have you heard what Stokes is doing?”

 

Brian Stokes Mitchell is one of those theater people who everybody loves. His voice is warm and robust, but his eyes shine with vulnerability and kindness. He has the range to play villains, martyrs and kings. As Coalhouse Walker, Jr., in Ragtime, a Black man whose body and family are desecrated by racist violence, he is forever enshrined in fans’ minds, standing on stage, with his young wife, Sarah (Audra McDonald, here, as well), singing to their son of the “Wheels of a Dream.”

 

We find ourselves, on Sunday, April 12th not going back to the theater, as had been previously announced, but watching a video of Stokes hanging out his apartment window, singing “The Impossible Dream.”

 

The song, from Man of La Mancha, could not be more apt. We are all chasing, for a brief moment, the chance to escape mortality. And here, in this strange and unyielding expanse of time, our neighbors are making it happen.

 

 More and more people find out about what Stokes is doing, and his neighbors gather like pigeons, downstairs, in the streets; masked, yes, spread apart, yes–  but attending a performance.

 

Time slips away. May becomes July. The sirens quiet. The pots and pans at 7pm, as well.

 

In September, someone takes to the sidewalk outside the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, where Moulin Rouge first opened on July 25, 2019. Centuries ago. In bright pink and orange letters, the chalk words shout: MISS THEATER? WEAR A FUCKING MASK

.

Part 3: We See You, White American Theatre

 

2020 is not done with us. When George Floyd is murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, on Monday, May 25, the volcanic year improvises again. His murder occurs on an otherwise slothful Memorial Day weekend, as the cases of virus have started to ebb. Mr. Floyd’s death changes the calculus for mass gathering. Folks start showing up.

 

As is our current right to do, Americans take to the streets. In New York, protestors are beaten, maced, and jailed. It gets worse after the mayor installs an 8pm curfew for a city of 8 million night owls. Our bridges burn. I mostly stay inside; I fear being killed, fear catching the virus, fear interacting with the police, fear anything that I have not meticulously planned.

 

But the curfew tries my patience. One night, well past 8 o’clock, I walk by the bodega, where there’s a long line of people trying to buy food. I take a photo of two dozen cop cars, neatly making their way up West End Avenue, past the tony brownstones, where protestors have marched by, just a moment before. I keep my distance. The photograph I take is dappled with blue and red law enforcement hazards, smudged with whitish headlights and mustard streetlamps. I am breaking the law,  just being outside, but they drive past me anyway.

 

Something changes. Something is coming. Is it early to call it a reckoning? An awakening? Over the next few weeks, almost every corporation in the country puts out a statement about racial justice. These messages have manufactured graphics and corporate jargon promising a more equitable future. Some are clumsy. The musical, Wicked, posts an Instagram graphic of two girls (one white, one green) holding hands, next to the words “when we defy hate, we defy gravity.” And while the musical, Wicked, certainly has allegorical themes of racism, well, between the kumbaya nature of the message and the winky wink to the show’s lyrics, the actual gravity of the situation makes the gesture seem cruel and oblivious. It gets deleted pretty quickly.

 

That summer, a coalition of artists of color put up a website, called “We See You, White American Theater: Principles for Building Anti-Racist Theatre Systems.” The twenty-nine pages of demands envision a Broadway reconstructed. Stolen lands are acknowledged; descendants of slaves are centered; harms are prevented, or if not prevented, there’s restitution and reparation to be paid. Every interaction, from the hiring of the creative team to the policing of audience reaction, is addressed, pulled apart, and discarded to make way for What Is Coming.

 

In rare instances, concrete is laid for a new world. There are so many voices calling for change; many will drown, waiting for help to arrive. We pretend things are better until they are.

 

Wicked originally opened on Broadway at the Gershwin Theatre on October 30, 2003, and re-opened on September 14, 2021. After approximately 7,000 performances on Broadway, on February 14, 2022, Brittney Johnson became the first Black actor to assume the role of Galinda in Wicked.

 

Part 4: Conductor Cam

 

On September 18, 2020, Rob McClure, a stage actor whose credits include Avenue Q, Honeymoon in Vegas, and the title roles in Chaplin and Mrs. Doubtfire, uploads a video called “Conductor Cam.” Mrs. Doubtfire had been in previews for three days when the shutdown started.

 

There will be fifteen of these videos in all; many quite funny, all of them touching on the yearning that we all had, to be back at a show. For a few minutes, every few weeks, Rob brought us there. I am particularly fond of Episode 9: “Learning Your Lead Has Friends In The Audience” where the off-screen actor chooses to belt unnecessarily, and Episode 14: “What Happens in Philadelphia...”, uploaded on November 5, 2020, wherein Rob begins by conducting to the sounds of President Trump, bragging about his alleged COVID-immunity.

 

But the one that sears into me is the last:  Season 2, Episode 1. “Coming Attractions.”, uploaded on March 12, 2021, one full year into the seventeen month and three week Broadway shutdown. It is more than five minutes in length, and begins with Rob, in bed, waking up to the voice of a woman nudging, “Company, this is your places call. Places please, for the top of the show. Places, places. Places. Thank you.” The caption on screen: Cherie B. Tay, Stage Manager, Hadestown.

 

On screen, Rob, our conductor, begins to go about his day. The camera follows him around his house, setting up his video equipment, as we hear the off-stage voices of crew members, actors and front-of-house workers, who are also getting ready. Their names and positions are given to us on screen, as we hear the Stage Manager check in with each one.

Lights: Sing Street, Chicago, Plaza Suite, Hamilton, Wicked, Phantom of the Opera, Mean Girls, Frozen, Beetlejuice, Jagged Little Pill, Book of Mormon, To Kill a Mockingbird

Special Effects: Aladdin, West Side Story, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Stage Management: Tina, Freestyle Love Supreme, Caroline, or Change

Cast: Moulin Rouge, Company

Sound: Six, Come from Away, Girl from the North Country

Wardrobe: Ain’t Too Proud, The Lion King

Props: Flying Over Sunset

House Management: Diana, Hadestown

Hair and Makeup: Dear Evan Hansen

Conductor: Mrs. Doubtfire

 

Tay chimes back in, “Alright, friends, we have places. Have a good show everyone.” The imagined audience roars. Rob holds his orchestra at bay, blinking away tears, until the swell of applause engulfs him.

 

As he raises his arms to meet the first note, Tay signals, “Go.” The screen goes dark.

 

In white letters on the black background, I read: WE WILL BE BACK.

 

On May 5, 2021, the governor will announce that Broadway will reopen – in September. I buy tickets immediately.

 

Part 5: “Lackawanna Blues is the first play in this theatre in 18 months.”

 

The date is September 7, 2021. I step into a place called the West End Bar and Grill, on Eighth Avenue, having a half-hour to kill before the show. I’ve picked Hadestown as my “first show back” not for any sentimental reason, but because the producers have managed to open the show two weeks before most other productions are slated to arrive. And I prefer Hadestown to Waitress, which is also open.

 

At the bar, I look at my phone. Why did I leave home so early? I am just looking for a drink in a place that is not my living room. In a photo from that evening, I’m wearing a frilly white rented dress with pink flowers, gazing at the camera like this is the apex of life. I order a scotch on the rocks, which I proceed to nurse. There are only a handful of people at the bar. We aren’t fully human yet. How do I do this?

 

When I finally arrive at the Walter Kerr Theatre, I take picture after picture after picture after picture of myself outside. Here’s me across the street. Here’s me in front of the marquee. Here’s the theater without me. Wait, here I am again. I’ve seen thousands of Broadway shows, dating back to the evening that my friend’s mother took us to see Romance/Romance at the Helen Hayes Theatre, but tonight, I’m eight years old again, and this is the very first time.

 

The facade of the Walter Kerr is adorned with thousands of red carnations, from the show’s logo. They spill from the balconies, so bright with hope I can hardly breathe. After having my vaccine card checked, and walking through a metal detector, I take yet another picture of myself inside, wearing a cotton mask.

 

There’s a moment in Hadestown where Orpheus, the lovestruck young poet who will later be the cause of his own tragedy, gives a toast. It happens in the lull between choruses, in a song of celebration; an anthem to homecoming; to spring; to renewal. Persephone has just arrived back above ground, having served her sentence; six months of winter with her husband, Hades. The cast of characters, in a re-imagined New Orleans-style saloon, celebrate her as she sings “Livin’ It Up on Top.” Like the show itself, the lyrics sing of a monumental juncture, when we realize that we have survived a winter in hell. The poet raises his glass to an unknown future, but also, also, then, he offers a nod to the current state of affairs; the way we live today.

 

When we saw the show, back in the spring of 2019, Reeve Carney, playing Orpheus, gave the toast straight through, with only the slightest pause between the two phrases. Having memorized the cast recording in the interstitial time between viewings, I had been anticipating this moment for months. I wanted to soak it in, because, as I recalled, it went by quickly.

 

 

Having finally arrived in the fall of 2021, the actor took a long, long moment between toasting the future, and circling back, toasting the days we currently inhabit. Everyone on stage was crying. This was their fifth performance back.

 

A few weeks later, we went to see Lackawanna Blues, a one-man virtuoso play by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, wherein he re-tells the true story of the boarding house he had grown up in. It is a tour-de-force; Santiago-Hudson plays more than a dozen roles, including his boyhood self. The normal pre-show announcements (turn off your cell phones, unwrap your candies) were replaced that night with a single declaration.

 

“Lackawanna Blues is the first play in this theatre in 18 months.”

 

Part 6: You set the tone, Dr. Walker

 

On the pilot episode of ER, the close knit staff of the Cook County Hospital Emergency Room is rocked by the suicide attempt of Nurse Carol Hathaway (Julianna Margulies). Dr.  David Morgenstern (William H. Macy), the head of the ER, asks the chief resident, Dr. Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) if they should even be trying such aggressive measures to save her. Dr. Greene answers that they have to do everything, because the morale of the staff is at stake.

 

Morgenstern replies with a phrase that is now so familiar to fans, and will be repeated, in different contexts and by different characters, several times over the series’ 15 season run. ‘

 

“The unit’s looking to you, Mark… you set the tone.”

 

It’s just a line in the script, but it’s the heart of the show. Improvise, do what you need to do, to get this group of people through an unbearable time.

 

On the morning of Saturday May 14, 2022, the president of the Outer Critics Circle reported that actor Anthony Edwards had appeared as Dr. Walker, in Girl from the North Country the night before. The Friday evening show had been on the brink of cancellation, with so many actors testing positive for the virus; every understudy and standby already stretched too thin. Mare Winningham, the show’s leading lady, called her husband (Edwards) at home, six hours before curtain, and asked him to step in. He drove from Connecticut to New York and arrived on stage, script in hand, to perform the entire evening. He would, other announcements said, play the part all weekend.

 

Reading this, I am unhinged. It is not that I am still enraptured by a crush I have had for almost thirty years. I buy a fourth-row ticket for the Sunday matinee. Okay. It’s a little that.

 

Still, I am curious to see this show; not just to see the show, but to reconcile a part of me that had wanted to see that show in that theatre on Thursday, March 12, 2020. There’s a part of me that’s wondered what would have happened; if the governor had waited one more day to shut the theatres down, and if we’d dismissed our fear, and gone out that night. What part of me would have survived?

 

Waiting on line outside the Belasco Theatre, on May 16, 2022,  I look at my phone, noting the time until the curtain will rise. I am only 794 days late.

 

When asked later how he could possibly join a show at a moment’s notice, Anthony Edwards said “he decided to give it a try, counting on the kindness of audiences.”

 

Endnotes

 

  1. Actress Cynthia Nixon ran against Andrew Cuomo for governor of New York in the 2018 New York gubernatorial election.

  2.  C. O. V. I. D.-19. (2020, March 8). People rush to catch the last trains leaving #Lombardy after government declared the quarantine and lockdown of 16 million people in northern #italy#covidー19 #coronavirus #covid2019 #covid #covid19italy #covid19italia pic.twitter.com/enbkxyct7b. Twitter. Retrieved August 6, 2022, from https://twitter.com/COVID_19Disease/status/1236480584244846592  

  3.  Reinstein, J. (2021, March 12). "I was the one who broke Broadway": Meet the first usher to test positive for covid. BuzzFeed News. Retrieved August 7, 2022, from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/covid-broadway-usher-shutdown-anniversary 

  4.  The Broadway League reserves complimentary tickets for press and other theatre professionals on a “first night list” (prior to opening) and “second night list” (after a show opens). It is a privilege to receive these tickets, and we try not to cancel unless we are deathly ill. One time, I fell down a flight of subway stairs and we still went to a show that evening.

  5. Broadwaycom. (2020, April 26). Take me to the world: A sondheim 90th birthday celebration. YouTube. Retrieved August 7, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A92wZIvEUAw 

  6. Genzlinger, N. (2020, March 31). Kious Kelly, a nurse in the Covid fight, dies at 48. The New York Times. Retrieved August 6, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/obituaries/kious-kelly-dead-coronavirus.html 

  7. cdgross. (2020, April 12). Brian Stokes Mitchell leads Broadway cheer with "Impossible dream.". YouTube. Retrieved August 7, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr-5BP2ssKA&t=100s 

  8. “We demand that theatres create a safe and anti-racist environment for BIPOC audiences on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in the Regions. Abolish the policing practices of audience response and promote statements of inclusion for BIPOC audience cultural practices. Abolish the policing of BIPOC audience members inside of lobbies, rehearsal studios, and other theatre-related spaces.” Our Demands. We See You W.A.T. (2020, June 10). Retrieved August 2, 2022, from https://www.weseeyouwat.com/demands

  9.  YouTube. (2020, September 17). Conductor cam 🎼 episode 1 "in the pocket". YouTube. Retrieved August 6, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm8Qtzs1UYk&list=PL9F4aAUcQ3nV_FrigyReSaExO3vcny5Pc

  10.  YouTube. (2020, September 17). Conductor cam 🎼 episode 9 "learning your lead has friends in the audience". YouTube. Retrieved August 6, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efl669U-zZQ&list=PL9F4aAUcQ3nV_FrigyReSaExO3vcny5Pc&index=9 

  11.  YouTube. (2020, November 5). Conductor cam 🎼 episode 14 "what happens in Philadelphia...". YouTube. Retrieved August 6, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=silSJy7FKp4&list=PL9F4aAUcQ3nV_FrigyReSaExO3vcny5Pc&index=14 

  12. YouTube. (2021, March 12). Conductor cam 🎼 season 2, episode 1. "Coming attractions.". YouTube. Retrieved August 6, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RdStOjpDCE 

  13. I should stop here to note that one of the stars of Waitress, Nick Cordero, died of COVID and COVID-related complications on July 5, 2020, after an extended hospitalization in Los Angeles. The triumphant return of the show, which had actually closed two months PRIOR to the Broadway shutdown, felt to many like a tribute to Nick, his widow, Amanda, and their baby son, Elvis. The show goes on.

  14.  Crichton, M. (1994, September 19). 24 Hours. ER. episode, NBC.

  15.  Gordon, D. (2022, May 14). According to the production, Anthony Edwards returned to Broadway on last-minute notice last night, stepping into girl from the North Country as the doctor, opposite his wife Mare Winningham. Twitter. Retrieved August 7, 2022, from https://twitter.com/MrDavidGordon/status/1525480647548084224

  16. Jeffrey, J. (2022, May 14). 'E.R.' star Anthony Edwards saves Broadway musical opposite his wife. Yahoo! Retrieved August 7, 2022, from https://www.yahoo.com/now/e-r-star-anthony-edwards-190856686.html 

Amy Cook is an MFA candidate at Pacific Lutheran University (Rainier Writing Workshop), and participated in the 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has been featured in fifteen literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including Bi Women’s Quarterly, great weather for MEDIA, Thimble Literary Magazine and Apricity Press. She was a finalist for the 2023 ProForma competition (Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts), a finalist for the Disruptors Contest (TulipTree Publishing, 2021), a semi-finalist for the 2022 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize, and received an Honorable Mention from the New Millennium Writing Awards (2022). Amy is an award-winning lyricist (BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, 2008 Harrington Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement) whose work has been heard at Broadway’s Minskoff Theatre (Easter Bonnet Competition, 2010), the Metropolitan Room and the Algonquin Salon. She is the Legal Administrative Manager of Lambda Legal. Amy was a charter member of the Youth Pride Chorus (2003), as well as a singing and associate member of the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus. She holds a B.A. in Political Science, summa cum laude, with Distinction, from Rider University. Outside of her professional work, Amy is also a spin bike junkie and a marathoner. She is married to lyricist Patrick Cook. Instagram: amycookuws, Pronouns: she/they