Get the latest gossip
An Old Wives’ Tale
In comedian Cole Escola’s debut play, Oh, Mary!, Mary Todd Lincoln gets to be an unstoppable diva, and so do they.
They gained attention in 2008 for YouTube videos in which they played characters both based on real people and of their own imagination: a loopy diva like Bernadette Peters, the depressed busybody Joyce Conner, a mom in an orange-juice commercial so dedicated to her children that it drives her to violence. Escola was, in no particular order, “suicidal, bulimic, lonely, and depressed.” They got a job at the Scholastic Bookstore, where they alternately worked as a cashier, hosted birthday parties, and, sometimes for events, dressed up as Clifford the Big Red Dog. After Mary drinks that bucket of vomited-up paint thinner, Escola lays their whole body back in their seat with the self-satisfied smile of someone who just eked out a battle win in the midst of a difficult war.
Or read this on VULTURE