If I wanted to make a lot of money with 'Hedwig,' I could have spent all my time on it. But that's boring.
Compared to other liberal cities like San Francisco and Amsterdam, New Yorkers are always trying to do something, make art or love or money or whatever, and they have this phobia about standing still.
'Hedwig' is unabashedly analog.
Acceptance and assimilation, you know, breeds mediocrity and perhaps an even more sheep-like conformism in terms of what kind of music you're supposed to listen to if you're gay... What are you supposed to look like? What's your body supposed to look like?
My favorite playwright is probably Samuel Beckett, and he was always laughing at the abyss.
Isn't it funny - why is it called a tennis bracelet? It doesn't seem very tennis, does it?
I would love for 'Hedwig' to be in every tiny shopping mall so every freakish kid like I was can have a broadening experience.
I realized that theater was the perfect thing for me, in short bursts of intense community building.
I think I was scared of the drag thing, as a lot of gay boys are. It's sort of knocked out of you in junior high. I wouldn't find guys who were very feminine attractive. Then, doing 'Hedwig,' I got to be man and woman, really butch and really femme at the same time, and I realized, this is kind of the ideal.
Bob Fosse, even though he wasn't gay. He was certainly queer and had a huge effect on the 'Hedwig' film, as did Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, who had a weird butch queer feeling about him. His films almost flirted with camp but in an extremely realistic acting way.
Nothing is a calling card. Everything is what you do. If you do it in order to get somewhere else, you're not actually doing it. If you're thinking, 'What is the weird thing I want to make with my friends?' money and other things will come later.
I studied meditation, knowing it would be a huge new calming skill.
Getting the blood moving through your body does do wonders for your complexion.
I quickly found that I didn't really fit into 'gay culture,' as identified by many gay people, and that it can be just as confining as straight culture, not least in the way that bisexual people are told that 'they can't make up their mind.'
London is the English-speaking theatre capital.
There's nothing more Broadway than 'Hedwig.' It's very family-friendly. There's innuendo and stuff, but not more than you'd see on TV.
The think that we hung the film version all on was 'Hedwig' on tour. On stage, it's one theatre, one show. It just seemed natural to change it. In the film, we were able to go to flashback rather than have her talk to the audience. And we had the play to practice and to see where we had made mistakes.
Queerness isn't just Lady Gaga and overpriced drinks and fauxhawks. It's James Baldwin and Bea Arthur and Gertrude Stein and Gore Vidal.
I walk out of my apartment, and St. Vincent's is standing there like a ghost ship. That was the ground zero of AIDS in New York: a conservative institution that quickly adapted to its unconventional patients and made heroic efforts to try and save them.
I'm an honorary old Jewish lady of the West Village.
