Marc Acito is a playwright and librettist best known for his novel How I Paid for College and his collaboration with George Takei on the Broadway musical Allegiance, which addresses the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. His latest work, “Secrets of the Universe and Other Songs,” will have its world premiere at the […]

The Holiday 2020 season is upon us. We’ve made it through Thanksgiving, and, having given adequate thanks for the families that we alternately want to hug and garrotte, we now await the horrors of Hanukwanzmas. Yes, the agony of coerced celebration is well upon us. Perhaps for those who have great jobs, loving partners, beautiful […]

I’ve written about bikes several times before in this column. Cycling seems to be something that ignites a fire and unleashes a glorious abandon within many of us. Suspended between heaven and earth, wheeling along on our rubber tires, just a little lower than the avian swifts in their tar-black feathers, we are released from […]

Whew. We’re into November now and 2020 is still barrelling through all social norms and historical precedents at a blistering pace. At the start of this year, I wrote about an event at the Oriental Theater that over 600 people attended, packed in shoulder to shoulder and drinking in front of each other. My last […]

I went out in public. Yes, all the way outside of my house, to a public event, where there were strangers that I did not know, and I sat in a row of seats and watched these unfamiliar humans who, and I am not making this up, were in the same exact room as me. […]

Lookout Mountain is benignly described as a “7,377-foot (2,249 m) peak located in Lookout Mountain Park, 1.7 miles (2.7 km) west-southwest (bearing 245°) of downtown Golden.” This seems like an understatement because over the last few years, this “7,377-foot peak” has turned into a beacon for me that outshines even the antennae farm on its […]

If we ever needed a blithe fairy tale about gnomes and knaves and wolves and witches, this is the time. I can’t tell you how many months we’ve all been sealed off into our little isolation chambers because time has become meaningless. Performing artists have struggled to find new formats to connect just as audiences […]

My New Year’s Resolution for 2019 was “Stick to a Meal-Planning Regimen.” If you Google this idea, you get all the kitchen-blogger schtick about how preparing meals in advance saves you time and money, helps you lose weight, yadda yadda yadda. These things are both completely true and exceptionally boring. I wasn’t trying to save […]

Usually, I write this column about theater and performance. Well, we are all performing now, in the public theater of this nation—the world’s last, best hope of democracy. I try to keep things lighthearted and positive, but sometimes you have to just tell your story as it is. In this moment where the violence and […]

I’ve read that it takes four to six weeks to develop a new habit, which is to say, it takes four to six weeks to normalize a new behavior. We’ve all been under stay-at-home lockdown orders for…a solid five weeks and counting. Our personal interactions have been shrunk down to pixelated screens and a desperate […]