How writer Jesse Green worked with Mary Rodgers to make her memoir "Shy" as lively, candid and cutting as she wanted it to be... Read More
From the show: Stagecraft with Gordon Cox
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How writer Jesse Green worked with Mary Rodgers to make her memoir "Shy" as lively, candid and cutting as she wanted it to be.
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This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.
[0:06] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's theater podcast, bringing you backstage and behind the scenes with stars, creators, and industry leaders on Broadway, off Broadway, and beyond.
[0:17] Gordon Cox: I'm Gordon Cox. On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to Jesse Green, the co-author of the new book Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers.
[0:27] Gordon Cox: I recently read Shy, and as someone who usually finds memoirs a bit of a slog, let me tell you, Shy's a hoot. It is funny and candid and cutting and intimate about a life lived alongside so many of the people who have made musical theater what it is today.
[0:43] Gordon Cox: Mary Rodgers was the daughter of composer Richard Rogers and the mother of composer Adam Gettle, and also the composer of musicals herself, including Once Upon a Mattress, as well as the writer of books for kids and young adults, including the enduring Freaky Friday, and a longtime philanthropist.
[1:00] Gordon Cox: Along the way, her life intersected with what feels like all of the greats, starting with Daddy himself, Richard Rogers, and encompassing Stephen Sondheim, Oscar Hammerstein, Hal Prince, Leonard Bernstein, Carol Burnett, and many, many, many more.
[1:14] Gordon Cox: In the years before she died in 2014, Rogers began working on her memoir with the journalist Jesse Green, now the chief theater critic at the New York Times, and previously a critic, writer, and editor at New York magazine.
[1:26] Gordon Cox: The resulting memoir, Shy, was released earlier this month. Now Green is in the virtual studio with me to tell us about getting to know Mary, getting all those juicy anecdotes down on paper, and getting Mary's voice right.
[1:40] Gordon Cox: Hi Jesse, thanks for joining me.
[1:42] Jesse Green: Thanks, Gordon, good to be here.
[1:44] Gordon Cox: Congratulations on the book. You've been working on it for a long time.
[1:48] Jesse Green: I just found recently the calendar entry for my first meeting with Mary Rodgers in her home to actually begin the work on the book, and it was 10 years ago this May.
[1:57] Gordon Cox: Wow.
[1:58] Jesse Green: Yeah.
[1:59] Gordon Cox: And it's not until the end of the book that you give us some of the details about how you came to work on the memoir and what that process was like. But I wonder if you could just talk us through a little bit of that. First of all, how did you meet Mary?
[2:15] Jesse Green: I had been writing a profile of Adam Gettle for the New York Times magazine back when he was working on a light, uh the light in the piazza in Seattle. And as part of that process, I thought, oh well, I might as well meet the parents. I've heard they're fun. I hadn't I had no idea. I mean, I didn't know what fun meant. I showed up at their house, they kindly invited me to come. And uh these were not what you would call reticent people. Mary was not um well shy, even though that was the title I gave to the book. She uh and Hank, her husband, her second husband, basically uh had prepared a dossier of information about Adam called from their files and their history of report cards and letters and things. You should never give a reporter. Uh and Hank provided me with a very lovely manila envelope so I could take it home.
[3:14] Jesse Green: Yeah. And that was my first meeting with them, and I thought, well, these are extraordinary people, not only because of the what I what I called the knee-jerk transparency, but because of their wit and warmth, and of course, I knew all about her career from I like uh possibly half of America had appeared in Once Upon a Mattress uh as a kid, twice in my case. And um, and of course, knowing that she was the daughter of Richard Rogers and Adam Gettle's mother and uh composer in her own right, and uh you know, a writer of uh very popular children's books, young young people's books. So uh I was kind of enamored, as many people are when they come into their orbit, and uh we slowly became friends, and uh at another point I was writing a piece for New York magazine about Arthur Lawrence, and I thought, well, I'll call Mary and see if she wants to make a comment about him because they had been very close friends for many years, but were not any longer. And she made the famous statement, call me back when he's dead.
[4:20] Gordon Cox: Right.
[4:21] Jesse Green: Uh so at some point uh later. At what point can I can I just ask, as someone who also interviews people pretty regularly, I there are plenty of people I interview and then never speak to again, right? Like, what was it about her or your relationship with her that uh kind of prompted the ongoing kind of relationship?
[4:41] Jesse Green: Well, a couple things. One to be honest, around shortly before I met her, my own mother had died, and I can't deny that there was something reminiscent in Mary about my mother, although from very different social strata. Um but also she had a love of supporting young talent, and compared to her, I was young, and she was just very warm and supportive of it and wanted to know everything I was doing, and uh I just fell under that spell. But also, she was very kind to my husband and kids, and I just had a good time. Mostly it, none of this would have happened if it weren't so much fun to be sitting and talking with her, and it wasn't just one-sided fun. She brought out the fun in anyone else she was talking to.
So it was it was kind of a world of uh that one had read about and seen in movies, uh, somewhat, sometimes somewhat bitchy world, you know, like all about Eve, and but with the Addison DeWitt isms and all of that stuff that you dream about growing up as a theater nerd.
[5:53] Gordon Cox: Yeah.
[5:53] Jesse Green: So that was that was a big part of it. Uh, but I also there was, you know, I knew I would never be in a position to have to write criticism about her because she wasn't actively producing new work at the time. So I felt free when she invited us to dinner or out to their house to say yes, and we became closer in that way. When she later was asked to write her memoirs, and she had a contract to do so, and then vacated the contract, and then signed it up again and then vacated again, and it was vacillating for a long time. She finally decided that she did not want to write the book, she wanted to work with someone and have fun. And so she suggested me to the publisher, and that's how it finally happened.
[6:39] Jesse Green: Where she called me and asked me if I would write it with her, or actually, she called me and asked me if I would write it.
[6:44] Gordon Cox: Right. And were you keen to do it?
[6:50] Jesse Green: I was enormously keen to do it for her. I was somewhat keen to do it as a record of a time in our culture and of a woman's remarkable life in it, and as a uh transcript of an incredible voice, the likes of which they don't make much anymore. I was less thrilled about doing it from the point of view of my own work. I knew it would take a long time. I didn't know how long. And I was kind of busy. Soon after I started working with her, I was named the critic for New York magazine. I had never been a critic before, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with work. And uh I just knew that this was going to take a very long time. But but the short answer is I was honored and thrilled to have the opportunity to give her, to try to give her one more big hit in the culture.
[7:50] Gordon Cox: Yeah. It sounds like, based on your description of it, that uh these were conversations that weren't even recording. Did you have a recorder with you? Or it sounds like you were there typing or with a notebook or something, and uh there I I wonder if you could just tell me a little bit about what the actual like uh interview process was, because I it would be my impulse to put a recorder on the table, and it sounds like that is not something that you wanted.
[8:14] Jesse Green: I didn't want that for a million reasons. You will know how just terrifyingly awful the prospect of transcribing interviews is. Nowadays you can put it through machines that that will do a poor job of it, but will at least give you the basis. But first of all, you have to listen to yourself, which is a nightmare. And uh second of all, it takes hours and hours, and I knew I was going to wind up talking to her for hundreds of hours, and I couldn't face the prospect. Luckily, I know myself to be an extremely quick typist, and I have developed over the years of being a journalist, a method of sitting with my laptop, either looking at the person I'm speaking to or giving the illusion that I'm looking at the person I'm speaking to and typing as fast as I can. In this case, not just what she was saying, but often what I was saying, because we fairly quickly came to the idea that uh both our voices would be in the book, and those voices were going to blend in various ways.
[9:16] Jesse Green: So I wanted to get down not just her monologue, but our conversation. But to answer your specific question, I would arrive usually at 9 a.m. at the lovely apartment on Central Park West, uh, come into the yellow living room. Uh somebody would have laid out tea and cookies, and Mary would come in and we I would put the laptop on my lap, and we would just talk and laugh uh for three or four hours, uh, get up and play the piano sometimes. Uh and then we would go and sit and have lunch, often with Hank, and continue. I wouldn't be typing anymore, but continuing to inhale the atmosphere.
[10:02] Gordon Cox: How structured were these conversations? Did you go in with an idea of what you wanted to talk about that day? Or how or was it more free form than that?
[10:14] Jesse Green: I almost always had an agenda. I we didn't always stick to the agenda because as the book shows, Mary's way of connecting stories to other stories was not always apparently logical, although there was a logic to it. She was definitively uninterested in chronology, and she had a dread. She we began by talking about the thing she did not want the book to be.
[10:31] Gordon Cox: Right.
[10:31] Jesse Green: She did not want it to be an as told to. She did not want it to be an as, you know, and then I wrote. She they she didn't want it to be chronological. She didn't want it to be fake, like her parents' memoirs had been, in her opinion. And she wanted it to uh spark with the actual uh sound of people enjoying thinking about their lives, uh, and to include as we got at it our disagreements about her or about that world, or if I said to her something like, Mary, come on, that's that's racist or whatever, and she would say, put that in, put that in. She had no vanity about those things. She wanted all of that present, and and uh that made it a more exciting job for me.
[11:24] Gordon Cox: Yeah. It seems like I feel like sh I spent that book having her talk directly to me, and I feel like I have I know her voice. I never met her, so I do not have any sense of actually how much that resembles her actual voice, but it really summons a really clear personality and a really clear voice. And I wonder if you could just talk us through a little of how you do that. It's a kind of playwriting in a way. You were kind of playing a character or sort of summoning a voice, um, or monologueist anyway.
[11:53] Jesse Green: Uh, and uh how how much of what we see is kind of word for word your transcription, how much of it is your uh embellishment or editing of that? Like just talk talk us through a little of that. When she died, uh I had written the first 10 pages. So that is the only part of the book she ever saw. Wow. Uh I had some 600 pages of my single spaced notes from uh our conversations. A subject would begin in March of one year and continue the eight months later and then 11 months after that. So there was a tremendous amount of potchking about to create these the feeling of the way she to create the feeling of what it was like to hear her tell these stories. In some cases, they are absolutely verbatim, although not in order.
Right. In in other cases, I had pieces of her saying this here and this there and this there, and I had my own research, and I found ways to uh squish that all together and put it through what by then felt to me like a reliable brain filter of Mary voice. Uh and also there were as I say, there would be times when we were talking when I when I would make a joke and she would say, Oh, give me that. So I would give her that. Now you have to understand also that by this point we had begun to formulate these unusual format of the book. Yeah. I I had to convince her of it. The problem with a book like this is that what I wanted to achieve, which is exactly what you said you got, which is a uninterrupted flow of her voice, because that was the pleasure I had when I was with her, and that's what I wanted readers to have.
And to do that, though, required a lot of thought because when she spoke about her father, she did not say Richard Rogers, the great American composer. She didn't introduce him to the reader, yeah. She just said daddy. And and even more obscure figures, from you know, Phyllis Newman to Temple, Texas. Um I had never heard of before, yes. So she would just say who they were, or she might make a joke about them, which I might keep in, or in some cases just say, no, we're not going to do that. Um, or at other times she would say, Well, put if that person's dead when the book comes out, then yes, go ahead with the joke, but if not, don't. Right. Uh mostly I was the censor, not her. Anyway, uh, in order to preserve her voice as it is, as it was, I had to find ways for the reader to understand what was going on without mutilating her delivery.
The first word of the book is daddy. Uh I immediately drop a footnote. They weren't supposed to be footnotes, but they became footnotes, in which I explain who Richard who daddy is. And in that way, I establish, I hope, that you're going to get these two voices, and hers is going to be pure and her, even if I've created a fair amount of it. And the notes are going to be sort of this other voice that you gradually come to understand who it is, and then at the end takes over because I needed a way to tell about her last days, which obviously she could not do in her voice. Right. So uh, and and this was partly based on a book she had written with her mother. Her mother, Dorothy Rogers, and she had written a book that Dick Rogers, Richard Rogers' daddy, uh had given the title to A Word to the Wives, which was kind of so bad, and I love it.
It's it's such a good pun. Well, he that he was very he was very proud of that. And um, as he was of the title of his own fantasy memoir, Musical Stages. But uh in that book, Mary and her mother took turns responding to social questions of the day that supposedly women faced, uh, the the day then being the 70s. And each of them had their different responses based on their different character and their generational positions. And the book was published with Mary's voice in brown and Dorothy's voice in black. And that's what I originally wanted. Uh uh, and failing that, I was thinking of something like a Talmud, you know, with with um, you know, commentary woven physically in and out of the text.
None of this was really uh commercially viable. But but uh I did convince Mary of the value of it, and she came around to it, especially when she read those first ten pages. She she did like the format. She did not think the first ten pages were mean enough or funny enough, as she told me. Uh which was shocking because they were plenty mean and plenty fun. Yeah, yeah. Uh anyway, so that's how the format came about, and that's how I decided to give the reader the experience I wanted the reader to have of a sort of undiluted flow of her wonderful voice, and yet informed by and contradicted by at points the voice uh that I brought to the proceeding.
[17:30] Gordon Cox: I'll have more with Jesse right after the break.
[17:42] Gordon Cox: And now here's more with Jesse Green about the new Mary Rodgers memoir, Shy. You mentioned earlier, uh one of the things that is so compelling about the book is this entree into this world that we imagine existed, and apparently really did. Um, this kind of Addison DeWitt, particularly the bitchiness of it, like the the opening of one of the earliest stories you tell in the book, she tells in the book, is about this game called Hostilities that they used to play. That's like, who's afraid of Virginia Wolf waiting to happen? Like it just sounds terrible. Uh, but like and I, you know, you I regularly laughed out loud during the book, and it was often when she was at her sort of zingiest and sharpest and most cutting. Um, what do you what did you learn about the world over the course of your conversations with her? What surprised you about kind of what it was like to live in that world that we all kind of understand on a kind of fantasy level.
[18:40] Jesse Green: Well, one was that it many of these people knew each other for many, many years, and well before they became the fantasy figures that we grew up admiring. So you get to see Mary meeting Steve Sondheim when Mary was 13 at Oscar Hammerstein's farm. Well, you know, already I'm in heaven. You know, I'm at Oscar Hammerstein's. The she thinks she was there with her family because they were working on carousel or or or one of the early shows. Like, oh my god. So in the other room they're working on that. She's in the salon or whatever room it is, and there's this boy who's, you know, been semi-adopted by the Hammersteins, and he comes over and beats her at chess twice and then goes to the piano and plays Gershwin and then she's in love for the rest of her life with him in in more ways than one.
So one of the things was that that these are uh as as iconic as these figures became, a lot of the relationships began in the same ways that we understand from our own lives. Crushes, uh early experiences of trying to become artists together, the kind of thing that Merrily We Roll Along came out of. But also that a million, you know, a million of our own stories of people who didn't get as far as they did, but who went to a summer camp and did theater like they went to Westport and did, or uh who did their high school shows, all those things. It it's it's not that these people were made that way. They made themselves that way through some of the same opportunities that we had. Now, granted, she had more opportunities than many.
I mean, she was after all the the daughter of the leading composer of the day. Uh and you know, enough money to finance her worst ideas, um, but not enough to be really comfortable with herself because of her how controlling her parents were. Uh, and that's a very familiar part of the book, too. But the other thing I would say about in answer to your question of what I was surprised by, I was quite surprised, although I shouldn't have been, because I've seen enough movies, uh, the degree to which alcohol and drugs played in both the bad behavior, which is a little more familiar, but also in the success of some of these people. And Mary herself talks about her her use of various uh drugs and what they did for her, and uh she doesn't make a moral judgment about them.
She she was never really addicted, so she didn't have that problem. But uh I that I found stunning and not the kind of thing I really wanted to to hear, but it was eye-opening and worth talking about.
[21:38] Gordon Cox: Yeah. There are, as you mentioned, there are a lot of really kind of juicy intimate stories in there. Like there's a story about her relationship with Stephen Sondheim that involves a trial marriage that doesn't work out. And she's very honest and upfront about it. What and there are a number of those kinds of stories. What for you stand out as the anecdotes that are uh kind of the juiciest and the most um kind of revealing?
[22:05] Jesse Green: Well, the clearly the one about the trial marriage with Sondheim is the is the biggest surprise of the book, and it was really knocked me to the floor when she told me about it. I don't think she was exactly withholding it from me, but she did save it for a while. Yes, and she was watching my response. Uh can I ask that uh it was that one of the stories that needed to wait until the other party was had passed away? No. Interesting. No, she she I we talked a lot about when to talk to Sondheim about it. Yeah. And she did not want to. She she was very protective of the truth of the book. Uh this is one reason why she didn't allow her own family to read the book. She she had it in writing. They couldn't read it until it was already in galleys, uh, which was hard because they they might have corrected some things.
And hard on them because they were learning about some things they didn't know about suddenly at that late date. But no, no, the delay had nothing to do with wait waiting. Somebody suggested in a review that we waited for Sondheim to die. That's not true. I was talking to him all along about various things, although I never got to that because she had uh was so uncertain about talking to him about it, but there was no question that it was true. Uh and furthermore, uh 98% of what I checked from her stories, no matter how outre they were, checked out completely. There are different versions of some, and on the margins she might have misremembered a year or this or that, but those were easily fixed.
[23:49] Jesse Green: But anyway, so there was the Sondheim trial marriage, as heartbreaking and awkward as that is, I still find it hard to read. Um but I find more touching the scene and surprising in a way, in the way it combines a lot of what we've just been talking about. There's a scene in which Sondheim basically tells her he's gay for the first time with her kids. Uh and um she's saying, sort of with this blasé in this blasé manner of the time, oh, so and so it turns out maybe gay. And he says something like, Well, you know, I think I may be that way too. And she says, Oh, they can fix that now. And he says, Well, maybe I don't want to be fixed. The key thing about this scene, which all of us, well, many of us who are gay or whatever you are, and you have to reveal to someone, have had an experience like that.
But they had it sitting on the floor underneath Richard Rogers' piano. It's that it's that kind of thing that makes the book feel impossibly rich to me, even though I I put all those words on paper and recorded them in the first place with my fingers, hearing them from her. So uh you wouldn't think I'd be surprised anymore. Another one is uh her first marriage is very complex, and she did eventually come to have a good relationship with her first husband, who turned out was gay, and as surprised me and many others, uh, was physically violent with her. And that was a shock. Uh and I I think the most fun shock for me was the story of her converting to Catholicism in order to marry a young man whom she then did not marry.
[25:36] Gordon Cox: Yeah.
[25:39] Jesse Green: And so she passed away in 2014, and then what was the process then for you over the intervening years? How did how did you go about it? So if you started, if you've been working on this book for 10 years, so you had like two years of those twice-weekly sessions about two years.
[25:56] Jesse Green: Two, two, two and a half.
[25:58] Gordon Cox: Yeah, okay.
[25:59] Jesse Green: Yeah. And uh it was it was more I had more than enough content. Oh, yeah. That was not that was not a problem. Uh what I didn't know was exactly how to proceed without her, because as I say, she had only read the first 10 pages. And I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. Luckily, she had written this document and signed it, explaining what she wanted and and controlling who could be part of it and who couldn't. And after a while, because I was it I was in mourning. I not just for the personal reasons I described earlier, but she had we had become very close. And in a way, you can't be with your own parent. I mean, there was a lot of that wonderful nurturing for me, but I think in what many ways I got more nurturing than an actual child might get because she wasn't responsible for me and therefore was only her best, most warm and supportive part of herself when we were together.
And I I have to admit I went into a kind of a funk about the book for a few years, and then I, you know, was the critic at New York, and then I got the job at the New York Times, and I just didn't have any time. So while the publisher kept saying, it would be nice to get this book out soon, I I would eke out 50 pages. Um, you know, and the I was sort of growing the skeleton of the book as I was filling it. So I didn't have a full outline because I was trying to keep it enough chronological so that you could follow it, but still jump all over the place so you felt the way she talked and thought. Uh and that was rather difficult. I had all kinds of spreadsheets going about that. Uh so I would I would write 50 pages here and there.
After I had a certain uh number of pages, I would submit them and get feedback from the publisher, not from anyone else. And finally, I got to a point where I was like, I have got to finish this. And I took a leave of absence uh at the Times shortly after I joined. I negotiated that as part of my joining the Times. I had that I had to have three months solid without any reviewing work or critic work. And in that time I was basically able to finish the book.
[28:25] Gordon Cox: Yeah.
[28:27] Jesse Green: What you you've just mentioned your, you know, your day job as a as a critic. What do you have a sense of how your interactions with Mary and the work you've done getting to know her and her work and how she thought about her work, how that has influenced the way you think about making theater and how it influences the way you view theater, either as a you know, as a fan or as a critic.
[28:51] Jesse Green: Well, it makes me wish I had been a critic back then. I I love the spontaneity of the work as it was created in those days, which was not workshopped for 10 years, like this book was in a way. I I you know, the story of how Once Upon a Mattress came to be created in basically three weeks at Tamam and Summer Camp, yeah. It's at summer camp, and then it was rewritten in just a few weeks because George Abbott had a schedule that they had to stick to because he wanted to get to his summer home in time, and they had to do the entire rewrite, adding a dozen songs and all of this, and yet it came out the way it did. I mean, there's there is not a strict correlation between the amount of time you put into it and and what comes out of it.
And I I loved the idea of theater as a enough of a going concern that you didn't think very much about trying to make everything permanent and make everything last. Uh something, you know. Well, well, we we can quote Sandheim till the cows come home. But I I I loved that, and she suffered for it though, and and that was interesting to me because she did everything. If if if Mattress was a success, but if if the next thing was a failure, she did the next thing, she did songs for Rint and Tin, for Captain Kangaroo, for Prince Spaghetti, for anything that came along. And as she pointed out to me rather insightfully, well, everything she said was rather insightful. Um as a woman, she was readier to drop it when it didn't work.
When she finally said, This isn't, I'm not making enough money, these things aren't working out, I'll do something else. I have other talents. And she held from having seen plenty of men fall into this trap of you know uh insisting that they keep at something that was not going to work, that uh women, or at least she had the advantage of saying, I can do something else and still feel good about myself. I don't have to be the winner in everything I do. And so she she left something she loved and found something else she loved. And when that petered out, she left that and found another thing she loved. And I found that inspiring and uh and a form of uh model and advice that I could never follow. But I sometimes wish I could.
[31:39] Jesse Green: You know, previous to working to this process of working on it and getting the book out. Well, I do have a growing feeling about certain things, and one is that what I referred to earlier as a corollary. I had a wonderful feeling of uh maternal support from her without her having to be my mother. And that was a wonderful combination. Having finished the book, or as I finished the book, I came to really understand that that was a form of uh Stockholm syndrome or something. I mean, we were locked in that room together for many years, and I was locked in the room of my memory of her and my need to recreate her in words for a very long time, and was completely and a hundred percent on her side. I couldn't write the book otherwise.
Yes, I corrected her, yes, I disagreed with her, but I was there's no question that I'm totally in her corner in the in the book, and that I love her. What I learned or what I be what began to encroach on me as I finished was that that would not really be the same experience that the people who were her actual children or uh her actual collaborators in the rest of her life might have felt. And I feel funny about it because I think they deserve a voice too, but this was not the book for for their voice. They're all incredibly talented, smart, verbal people, and maybe we'll have something to say of their own at some point. And I think that'll be interesting too.
[33:18] Gordon Cox: Yeah.
[33:19] Gordon Cox: Is there another book in you?
[33:22] Jesse Green: About Mary?
[33:24] Gordon Cox: Well, no, or about anything.
[33:25] Jesse Green: About your you've you've got this book out at last, and uh now you have their the season is about to start on Broadway and off Broadway, and so you'll have plenty to plenty to do.
[33:36] Jesse Green: I certainly hope to write another book. I've this was my third book. Uh I don't really have an idea right now. I'm uh enjoying the fact that this one is receiving a lot of uh you know pleasurable response.
[33:52] Gordon Cox: Yeah, and more than that that it's selling, that people are are reading it and sharing it, and and that's thrilling to me.
[33:58] Jesse Green: That's what I wanted for her.
[33:59] Gordon Cox: Yeah.
[34:00] Jesse Green: That was really the main thing I did it for. Obviously, I didn't do I mean I I have a sort of I this is probably the wrong term, a end stage or terminal job. I there's nowhere I I can't use this to step up to anything else.
[34:14] Gordon Cox: Right.
[34:14] Jesse Green: I I have basically the best job you can have if you're in my position.
[34:18] Gordon Cox: Yeah.
[34:19] Jesse Green: Um so I do hope that I will find some time to do something else, but I'll tell you one thing, it won't be a it won't be someone else's memoir.
[34:29] Gordon Cox: Yeah.
[34:30] Gordon Cox: Um, well, we look forward to seeing whatever that book turns out to be, and of course, in the meantime, reading your reviews and your other features uh and pieces in the Times in the coming uh months. Thanks so much, Jesse. It's great to talk to you.
[34:43] Jesse Green: Thank you, Gordon.
[34:49] Gordon Cox: That was Jesse Green, the co-writer of Shy, the alarmingly outspoken memoirs of Mary Rodgers, now in bookstores. If you like what you're hearing on this and other episodes of Stagecraft, I'd really appreciate it if you took the time to rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps us grow our audience of folks who love theater as much as you and I do. Or tell a friend about Stagecraft, or give us a shout-out on social media. Find past episodes and subscribe at all the pod purveyors, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and on the Broadway Podcast Network, which is a great place to find more theater for your ears. Until next episode, find me on Twitter at G Cox Variety. Thanks for listening, and see you at the theater.
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