Every so often, when I remember that I’m at least half extrovert and I need human interaction in order to continue resembling a human being myself, I take myself out to a bar or a comedy show and see if I can strike up a conversation with a stranger. It’s a very high-risk-high-reward endeavor: high risk because I’m a fundamentally awkward person, but high reward because I’ve gotten some of my better stories this way. For instance, there was the time I took a stranger to see dinosaur tracks in Colorado, or the bad date I debriefed with an entire cafe once the unlucky couple had departed.

I’ve met some cool people this way, too, like the secret service agent who’s inspired me to travel to Slovenia, and the guy from Ohio whose friends hold an annual DnD campaign and reunion in New York. And it’s a great way to pass the time if you’re waiting for any kind of show to start: music, theater, or what have you.

More than anything, though, it’s a great way to get out of my own head and remember there’s a whole universe out there, full of stories and connections and adventures just waiting to be discovered. I highly recommend it, as pastimes go.

Prince F*ggot

Please bear with me, because even a month out, my thoughts on this play are messy and unformed, largely because I’m one big ball of AAAAA HOLY MOTHER OF GOD EVERYONE GO WATCH THIS IMMEDIATELY!!!

To the other 299 people in the audience, Prince F*ggot is a play that imagines a future where Prince George (of the British royal family) is gay, as posited by 2017 tabloid discourse. What might his romantic entanglements look like? How might a gay royal marriage bear out? Those other 299 people in the audience might draw parallels to Red, White, and Royal Blue, or maybe The Royal We.

To me, though, Prince F*ggot is about Dev Chatterjee, George’s college boyfriend within the play’s imagined reality. And I think the play agrees: though this is ostensibly George’s story, George is listed last in playbill, while Dev is listed first. Prince F*ggot is about being a brown queer — a multiply marginalized queer — and what it means to exist like that in white spaces, in white relationships, forever choking down a flavor of resentment that a white queer will rarely have to taste.

Amongst everything that knocked me sideways about this play — the explicit scenes onstage, the reminder that kink is inseparable from pride, the sheer joy of 1/3 of the cast being trans, a queer brown first billed actor — there’s a scene where Dev gets a phone call from his father. In desperate Hindi, he explains that he really likes George, pauses, and then, while holding back tears, begs for forgiveness for relishing his queer love. I couldn’t stop myself from whispering “oh god”, or slapping my hands to my face to hold back a sob of my own. The man sitting next to me looked at me askance, and I think a little peeved, at my effusive reaction. He didn’t know what Dev was saying, of course, nor why it might explain my reaction. He didn’t understand how viscerally I was seeing myself in Dev in real time — how this was a scene catering to me and me alone amidst a sea of white theatergoers.

This idea, of seeing ourselves in other queers, but also of putting ourselves in positions where other queers can see themselves in us, feels to me like the core theme of this play. This theme is grappled with diegetically — Dev outright confronts George about the fact that his brown queerness will never be front and center like George’s white royal queerness — but the actors also break the fourth wall to share their own personal stories of moments where they saw themselves, or were seen for themselves, in their full authentic queer glory. Even as George grapples with whether his queerness is palatable to the royal family, that struggle takes a backseat to everyone else on that stage talking about queernesses that are unpalatable on a global scale: Black queerness, brown queerness, trans queerness.

I know that we’ve seen enough of queer tragedy. I know we want to see other queer stories onstage. And although Prince F*ggot answers this call in a lot ways, giving us a story about the one that got away in the same frank, explicit terms that we’ve seen from a thousand heterosexual romances, I’d be lying if I said it had a happy ending.

Yet despite that, this play tells multiply marginalized queer folks in the audience: we see you. We know you. We ARE you. And maybe it’s a consequence of when or where or how I grew up, but that entreaty will never stop being powerful to me.

Prince F*ggot is running in NYC until December 13

Prince F*ggot roundhouse kicked me into a royal romance rabbit hole. I spent most of November revisiting my favorite KJ Charles books and then venturing into the royal romance realm at large. Most of these books are nothing to write home about, but I’ll highlight my favorites.

A Gentleman’s Gentleman by TJ Alexander (⭐⭐⭐⭐): Lord Christopher Eden is a “man of unusual make.” He hires a valet to keep up appearances as he begins a reluctant search for a wife, but (entirely unsurprisingly) falls for his valet instead. A sweet, low-stakes romance, this had me grinning like an absolute loon. Get it on Bookshop

Dark Rise by CS Pacat (⭐⭐⭐⭐): This book (and its sequel) made me CRAZY!! Pacat is better known for the Captive Prince trilogy, but Dark Rise is the undeniable standout to me. Set in an alternate London where magic pervades and a Dark King seeks rebirth, Dark Rise follows 16-year-old runaway Will as he amasses allies to aid his fight against the Dark. Pacat is a phenomenal writer, if a little provocative, and these books had me fully shouting out loud at multiple points. The third book in the series should be released sometime in 2026, if you’d prefer to wait until the full series is out before reading it. Get it on Bookshop

The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen (⭐⭐⭐⭐) + A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) by KJ Charles (rereads): There’s not a whole lot to say here. I love KJ Charles to pieces. She’s perfected the noble + scoundrel + romance formula, and she’s especially skilled at setting romances within the context of larger, non-romantic plotlines. Her characters always feel fully developed, and it’s clear that her settings are informed by copious research; the Country Gentlemen duology, set against the backdrop of wartime smuggling, is no exception. When I was craving well-written complex nobility romance, of course I turned to a tried-and-true Charles to scratch that itch. Get them on Bookshop

November has been a surprisingly creativity-driven month! I published my second fanfic in 3 years, finished 3 jigsaw puzzles, completed a book nook, did a diamond painting. It’s been really lovely to flex my creative muscles. It feels like the first time in a long time that I’ve had the luxury of making art for art’s sake, and not because I had a commission to fill or in a desperate bid to refill my creative well.

For Thanksgiving, I had a bit of a self-care day: I made mashed potatoes, put on a mediocre romcom, and dug into one of the crafting subscription boxes that have been piling up in a corner for the past year. The box I chose was the mosaic craft box. Armed with glass, glue, and a glass of moscato, I slowly assembled and grouted 2 mosaic coasters and a mosaic vase. It was a lot of fun! I don’t think I’m going to become a mosaic artist anytime soon, but I enjoyed picking out glass in coordinated colors, as well as arranging them into geometric patterns.

Someday I’ll do a proper review of this crafting subscription service, but in the meantime, a cursory shoutout to the Craftsman Crate will have to suffice. This service provides a full starter kit for a new and unique craft each month, delivered directly to your front door. In addition to mosaic making, I’ve enjoyed wood burning, origami, wire sculpting, and kintsugi, and I’ve got at least 6 more boxes to break into when I have a chance. If you or someone you love enjoys crafting, or even just collects hobbies like Pokemon, I cannot recommend this service enough!

Get a Craftsman Crate subscription here

Mummy Joe

The Youtube algorithm has done it again! This time, it introduced me to Mummy Joe, a sort of surrealist artist and animator who creates what I can only describe as children’s stories for adults.

It’s hard to explain what I find so compelling about Mummy Joe. Maybe it’s the silly voices he does that lodge themselves firmly into my brain; maybe it’s the childlike whimsy that suffuses each of his animations, even as he talks about adult topics like murder and owing money to the mob.

Mummy Joe balances childlike aesthetics with genuine talent in a manner that I find endlessly fascinating. There’s some proper skill on display in his videos: a tightly honed sense of comedic timing, sharp composition, and musical and lyrical talent that has really been shining of late. More than anything, his videos are sincere to their core. It’s refreshing to watch a minute or two of silly hijinks every so often, amidst the landscape of…everything else that’s going on.

I really struggled to decide on a proper starter Mummy Joe video. List of Dangerous Aminals and Dupree get honorable mentions for having phrases that live in my head rent free (“lizzler” and “Dupree is crazy!”, respectively), but ultimately, Blorgween was the video that initially made me fall in love with Mummy Joe, and so Blorgween I must share.

December 12 @ 8pm: GVCS presents: Voices of the Soul

📍 Church of Our Lady of Pompeii, 25 Carmine Street, NYC

🎫 $28 online; $30 at the door

📝 My choir’s winter concert is fast approaching! We’ll be performing a wide selection of pieces from living NYC composers, as well as pieces by Britten, Guastavino, and Debussy.