Ali Wong’s Dear Girls will make you laugh, cry, and will also make you hungry. But overall you will be happier, and it seems like maybe in 2020, we’re going to want some more happy.
I had every honest and heartfelt intention of telling you to get this book for your friends and families for Christmas. But obviously I missed the boat. And then I thought, a Lunar New Year present. But I missed that boat too. So now I will tell you that you should just go get a copy for yourself.
Not for the hilarious list of how to tell a good Asian restaurant from a bad Asian restaurant which made the internet rounds when Dear Girls first came out — you don’t need that. But for Wong’s complete candor about every aspect of her life, from her childhood to “Tips on Giving Birth” to the adventures that led to the disclaimer “Dear Girls, you are prohibited from reading this book until you are twenty-one years old.” If you don’t already know, the eponymous girls are Wong’s two daughters and the book is meant as a letter to them. Especially sweet is the note Wong’s husband wrote as the epilogue.
It’s enormously fun to read, and if you can hear Ali Wong’s voice in your head while you read it from having watched her stand-up specials multiple times, well, all the more fun.
Border People is a journalistic one-man theater piece by Dan Hoyle that dwells on the broad theme of “borders.” It’s now being performed at A.R.T. / New York Theatres in New York City. Based on in-depth conversations and interviews at places in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, Hoyle enacts first one person, then another person, in a string of edited interview snippets from people whose live have been shaped by one kind of a border or another–from those who have literally tried to cross the border, to those who lives are more metaphorically on a border.
