Iwas on an elevator a few years back, on my way to a theater I’d been booked into, when two women boarded, both middle-aged and smelling of alcohol. It was autumn, and they had new-looking sweatshirts on. I assumed that the letters printed across the fronts of them were the initials of a university, and as the doors closed, I tried to guess which one it was. After deciding that the first letter—N—stood for “Northern,” I lost interest, and tried to recall when I’d last been in Traverse City. It’s a pretty little vacation town on a bay of Lake Michigan, the sort of place where it’s super easy to find fudge.

I started performing—a rather grand word for reading out loud—in the late 1980s, in Chicago. Back then, I was living hand to mouth, but always made it a point to dress for a show. I did

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