Nanette Varian

I was utterly unprepared for the heartbreaking but ultimately life-affirming story of Karolyn Grimes, aka Zuzu from It’s a Wonderful Life. I have loved this “intensely soul-shaking film” (as Grimes biographer Clay Eals so aptly puts it) for a very long time. My eyes start to leak during the cemetery scene—“Every man on that transport died. Harry wasn’t there to save them because you weren’t there to save Harry”—and I’m a wreck for the duration. When I heard what Grimes has s

I finally had to face it. Bill Cunningham was never going to take my picture. For the longest time I’d walk to work and as I neared the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th street, I’d smooth my jacket, square my shoulders, tug my pants hem out of the heel of my sneaker and hope that something, anything, in my colors or patterns would catch the eye of the octogenarian New York Times “On the Street” photographer. Yeah … nah. I watch him scan the scrum at the corner

OK, so what does a hit Broadway musical about a lesbian cartoonist have in common with a magazine article about a successful anti-abortion, pro-abstinence activist? Timing. Or, rather, time shifting—a challenge that sometimes arises when writing or editing a magazine story. Among the many glories of Fun Home is the seamless way in which the story shuffles time frames and perspectives among what we could call the Three Ages of Alison—precocious kid, gawky college student and