Online January 17, 2021 at 7pm
“On Sunday, January 17 at 7 pm, play pretend “let’s meet at KGB” to raise a little money to keep KGB going. Click below to register, throw $10 to one of the greatest, long-running literary venues in the city that gives a stage to writers just starting out and often to my writer heroes. Get your cocktail or mocktail ready and join three of the most fascinating writers I know: Ada Calhoun, Laurie Gwen Shapiro and Darcey Steinke on zoom for some brief readings on Beginnings in Real Life, then conversation and your questions. Ada will be reading from her recent beloved bestseller, Darcey from the book Maggie Nelson called an “instant classic,” Laurie is going to give us a glimpse of her upcoming, highly anticipated nonfiction book about Amelia Earhart and I’m going to read a bit about the scary days leading to an inauguration…in 1861. Please join us! Talk, joke around and imagine we are in that glorious space up the staircase at KGB.” – Biz Mitchell
I was joined by Kevin Fitzpatrick of The Dorothy Parker Society. (And host George Bodarky) It was so fun to tell this tangled tale together.
On February 6, 1965, Dorothy Parker signed her last will and testament in her small suite at the Volney Hotel, on East Seventy-fourth Street, in Manhattan. A friend named Pauline Kraft signed as a witness, as did an employee at the Volney named Richard M. Moyer. Parker’s French poodle, Troy—short for Troisième, because she was the third of her litter—was by her side. Her second husband, the writer and actor Alan Campbell, had died two years earlier, of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. Parker was seventy-one, small and thin with big dark eyes, and suffered from a weak heart, bursitis, and reduced eyesight. Widowed, with no heirs, she had spent months mulling what to do with her estate. After her debts were paid, her assets amounted to some twenty thousand dollars, but her estate also included future royalties and licensing fees for her body of literary work, which was substantial.
Back in the Stone Age of the early 1980s when people still relied on landlines, I was a latchkey kid who often answered the phone for my parents before they got home from work. A six p.m. call was always for my people-person workaholic mom—never for my dad, a workaholic in the computer field with the social grace of Attila the Hun.