DANGEROUS WHEN WET Debuts at Frigid Festival Later this Month
By: BWW News Desk Feb. 01, 2017
Sodomite Jamie Brickhouse (two-time Moth SLAM champion) faces his three most defining relationships-booze, sex, and his Texas tornado of a mother Mama Jean-in this darkly comic tour de force. Ripped from the pages of his critically acclaimed memoir that Interview magazine called "as funny as an evening with Carrie Fisher," and Paul Rudnick praised as "witty, blisteringly honest, and wickedly intoxicating," it sparkles under the direction of Obie Award-winning David Drake, who recently directed the The Jamb. Dangerous When Wet is part of the 11th Annual 2017 FRIGID Festival.
With dazzling wit and unflinching honesty set against a multi-media backdrop of evocative photos, home movies, vintage postcards, and music haunted by Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?", Jamie tells the story of wrestling way too close to-and later loose from-booze, sex, and his bombastic, adorable Mama Jean. It's a unique story about alcoholism, illness, death, AIDS, family heartbreak, and the relationship between a gay son and his mother. From the age of five stuck in Beaumont, Texas, all Jamie wanted was to be at a cocktail party with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other. All Mama Jean wanted was to keep him at that age, her Jamie doll forever. A Texan Elizabeth Taylor with the split personality of Auntie Mame and Mama Rose, she never had a thought she didn't speak. Mama Jean cast a long shadow throughout Jamie's life, no matter how deep in booze he swam or how far away from her amid New York's drinking set he strayed. She unwittingly saves him as he discovers the meaning of love-Mama Jean's kind of love.Jamie Brickhouse (Writer and performer) is the author of the critically-acclaimed Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother (St. Martin's Press), which was an Amazon "Best Book of May 2015," "Required Reading" in Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir, and a Book Chase "2015 Top 10 Nonfiction." A two-time Moth StorySLAM winner and Literary Death Match champion, Jamie has recorded voice-overs for Beavis and Butthead, and has performed at storytelling shows throughout New York including Kevin Allison's Risk! He has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Beast, Salon, Huffington Post, Out, and POZ. He is at work on two new books: I Favor My Daddy, a memoir about his father Earl; and Golden Triangle Summer, a gay YA novel. Jamie lives with his common-law husband Michael in Manhattan. Visit him at www.jamiebrickhouse.com, on Facebook, and on Twitter @jamiebrickhouse.
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