Deborah Picker

If she were a Web site, writer-actor-singer-comedian Sandra Bernhard has said, she‘d call herself www.get real.com -- partly misleading, given this uncharacteristically polite interview. If anybody in her HollywoodNYC circles annoys her, she’s certainly not getting real enough to say so. Perhaps she‘s saving it up for her one-woman show,......

The opening sentence of Dan Fante’s debut novel suggests just how thinly disguised his fiction really is. The narrator, a washed-up writer struggling with the imminent death of his novelist father, begins: ”My name is Bruno Dante and what I‘m writing about here is what happened.“ The ”alias“ is almost......

There’s a fair amount of sex in Fred Rochlin‘s autobiographical performance monologue, Old Man in a Baseball Cap -- and even more of it in the fleshed-out print version (published this month by HarperCollins). Among the characters in his military memoir: Maruska, a hot-blooded Yugoslavian woman who “makes fig-fig” with......

ANNA GUNN HAS OBVIOUSLY READ WHATEVER DOG-EARED underground manual on celebrity conduct changes hands in L.A. She chose a trendy Hollywood café for our meeting, ordered a frothy (overpriced) cappuccino and, dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, praised her colleagues on cue. But she's an actor; nailing down the......

Janet Fitch’s thoroughly enjoyable White Oleander seems at first not much more than a guilty pleasure. Ingrid, a charismatic poet with a cult following of young bohos (her beauty, Fitch writes, "was like the edge of a very sharp knife"), poisons her lover in a fit of jealousy and is......

Photo by Paula CourtWHEN SPALDING GRAY WAS A KID, HE'D MASTURBATE in the neighbor's yard. "But there were no witnesses," he laughs during a phone conversation. Gray wove that experience into his first performance monologue, Sex and Death to the Age 14. "Ultimately," he concludes, "the audience is the witness."......

Photo by Oscar Elizondo"The men we love act rather strangely in front of our dead bodies," preaches a young woman dressed, impeccably, as Frida Kahlo. "Diego -- he took a handful of my ashes and put me in his pocket," she continues, emphatically. "It's as if men need to possess......