The reckoning of a prodigal daughter who returned to Appalachia to care for her dying father, this one-woman live-action memoir with music and images wrestles with the messy truth of what family does for and to each other.
Gooder Than Gold
“I suppose we have to start where it all starts. And where it ended. In Kentucky. And before anyone makes a fried chicken joke, my mother’s mother actually did know Colonel Sanders before his KFC fame.
I can’t remember if that was before or after she left her husband and 5 daughters and drove a Vega Station Wagon to California to marry her pen pal who was serving time in Folsom Prison. He had knocked over a liquor store. (Her second husband, I mean. Not Colonel Sanders.)”
“When a good old boy prick on the Board of Directors I ran took issue with me ‘speaking when not spoken to’ and being in general an uppity woman whose face he didn’t like, my nephew began researching native pernicious bugs that could be planted to infest his house. Very biblical.
My sister’s eldest took the long game and began planning a political campaign to oust him from office. My niece, the most savage of us all, quietly plotted arson. That is love I can feel.”
“The City made me hard in all the right places. New York isn’t magical for the bright lights of Broadway reasons people think. It’s magical because literally anything can happen at any moment—you could turn a corner and bump into the person who makes you a millionaire, or you could get stabbed and left in a gutter.
Rolling the dice like that can make you feel electric. It was not always the healthiest of relationships, but New York loved me too.”
“It's alarming how arousing simple competence is when you have been screaming into the void. It can just walk in with amazing hair and expensive sneakers and REMEMBER YOU FROM WHEN YOU WENT TO GRADE SCHOOL TOGETHER and be completely appropriate in its sympathies and chaste one-armed hug.
The literal only thing he is giving is complete professionalism and basic kindness, and it’s all I can do not to try and take his pants off.”