I'm Allergic to Boys' Spit

When my father passed away, one of his items I took was his stack of playbills. He grew up in Brooklyn, and after being in the Navy, came back to the Big Apple where he studied accounting at NYU, and then got a job with the New York office of the IRS. He traveled, he went to hip nightclubs, and he loved going to the theater. In his stack were Playbill with a capital P: Broadway performances for some of the most iconic shows, mixed with smaller shows on smaller stages with casts of familiar names a decade or two later.

I carted these playbills with me from apartment to apartment until 2001, when I moved in with my then-boyfriend, now-husband to our it’s only for a couple of years home we still live in today. Back then, the house had one bathroom. I decided to decoupage the bathroom walls with the pages from my dad’s playbills. They’d be seen, they’d be read, and they would have permanence.