Just One Thing with Michael Todd Cohen

Michael Todd Cohen’s essay “Williamstown, Summer 2003” is lit with the sparks of brushes with fame, the dazzle of nights at the theater. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:

“Though Karen Ziemba — dancing, singing star of My Favorite Broadway: The Leading Ladies — did not know who I was at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2003, a diva met will be a diva returned to when moving in circles of queerness, camp, and the broadway stage. Several years and a failed acting career later, I was another marketing manager at a composer's party in Brooklyn, hip-cocked into the grand, a white-haired companion dancing fingers on the keys. Karen Ziemba toed out of the shadows into my light and I sassed her for it. She goggle-eyed me with a giggle, we raised our vodkas, and hung on each other, new intimates, to duet our union: "On the Street Where You Live," for the wildly applauding guests. At the kitchen island afterwards, in what felt like the gauzy realization of a deferred dream, she whispered me her phone number.

I have not called her.”

Photo credit: Matt Goias