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Prejudice and Polarization
The Sticky-Fingered Foodie is a witty two-play collection featuring Grandma, food-truck thieves, and comic chaos while exploring hunger, generosity, and human assumptions. What first inspired this collection?
My conscious mind would cite the early, short plays of Edward Albee, which I saw and read in my youth over fifty years ago and which have remained odd favorites ever since. My unconscious mind might respond differently, of course. Let’s just say Albee+. Admittedly, there’s a lot of actual life experience stirred in. While dropping off a few spare canned goods at a local food bank recently, I came face-to-face with people who were basically just like me minus a few spare canned goods. That certainly got me a-thinkin‘!
What did you want readers to consider about generosity and judgment?
We’re all in this together. Full stop. I’m a big believer in the concept that when we share with and support each other, we’re all better off. We may not agree with or even particularly like each other, but, spoiler alert, that shouldn’t matter. That may sound woefully simplistic, but it’s the best answer to prejudice and polarization. Only together can we stop the madness.
What does the play suggest about the danger of forgetting?
My own grandma had an expression: “Grow, don’t wither!” Whenever I’d bomb on a test at school or misplace my rain boots or have to pay a 5¢ fine at the library because I’d failed to return books on time, that was her advice. Deal with it, learn something, move on. I no longer have to worry about tests, rain boots, or fines at the library, but I’m still learning what life has to teach me. Unless one is mindful of and honest about the past, present, and future, even the painful stuff, withering happens.
What have you learned from writing short plays that you might carry into future work?
Short plays are both fun and challenging because everybody and everything must be essential and related. That’s good practice for any kind of writing. I’m working on a full-length play now (which will be my first), but I still love the short play form. Incidentally, my new full-length play will feature Mikey and Mags from The Sticky-Fingered Foodie, so I guess I’ll be carrying quite a bit into future work!
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The Sticky-Fingered Foodie
Tom Beattie’s The Sticky-Fingered Foodie is a compact collection of two related one-act plays, The Sticky-Fingered Foodie and Vinyl, linked by the exuberant, sharp-tongued figure of Grandma. The first play operates as a fast-moving comic farce. Mikey and Mags, a young couple who have been robbing food trucks, are hiding out in Grandma’s apartment when her unexplained disappearance brings Officer Kapgun uncomfortably close to their crimes. Beattie builds the comedy through verbal misdirection, food puns, escalating anxiety, and the contrast between Mikey’s nervousness and Mags’s cool sarcasm. The deliberately bare setting keeps the emphasis where it belongs, on dialogue and performance, while Grandma’s return shifts the story toward a larger concern with hunger, generosity, and the assumptions people make about one another.
Beneath its farcical surface, the title play gives Mikey a modest but effective moral arc. Grandma’s decision to donate food to an LGBTQ community program initially draws suspicion and crude remarks from him, but the encounter gradually forces him to see hunger as a real problem. His eventual observation that “being hungry sucks” is plainspoken, almost comically obvious, yet that simplicity makes it persuasive. He arrives at compassion through something he understands intimately: food. The play doesn’t abandon its comic instincts to deliver that point. Mikey and Mags remain flawed, funny, and self-interested, and their decision to find legitimate work grows naturally out of the same appetites and anxieties that got them into trouble.
Vinyl changes the rhythm considerably. Set shortly after the first play, it reduces the cast to Grandma and Miss Erica Teal Dysfunction, a young drag queen, and turns their conversation over a collection of disco records into a reflection on memory, queer history, violence, friendship, and survival. What begins as affectionate banter about Sylvester and other disco performers gradually reveals Grandma’s personal connection to that era and the painful memories she has attached to its music. The strongest passage comes when Miss E.D. tells her, “Life’s a vinyl record, Connie. Scratches and skips can happen, but unless you drop the needle, you’ll never hear the music.” The metaphor neatly expresses the companion play’s central idea: remembrance carries pain, but refusing memory also means surrendering the joy, community, and meaning bound up with it.
The two plays form a comic work with an unusually warm emotional trajectory. Beattie’s humor is broad, bawdy, topical, and frequently built around wordplay, but the recurring jokes also create continuity between the characters’ private appetites and the book’s wider interest in basic human needs. Grandma is the connective force. Her irreverence allows the book to move easily between bawdy jokes and serious subjects, while her generosity gives both stories their ethical center. Beattie explains in his closing comments that the project began as two related short plays centered on Grandma, later shaped by a news story about a food-truck robbery and a broadcast of Sylvester’s music. The finished book reflects that unlikely combination: part farce, part character comedy, part remembrance, and a celebration of fellowship, resilience, and the small acts through which people learn to recognize one another.
Pages: 109 | ISBN : 978-1737981299
Love, Pain, Screwy Family Dynamics
A Woman’s Persuasion follows a young heiress as she breaks away from her father’s expectations, seeking true love and independence amidst the challenges of family dynamics and societal norms. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
This book is a careful chapter-by-chapter modern translation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. I was sitting in a lecture at a conference for the Jane Austen Society of North America, listening to the speaker and audience members talk about adaptions, and how many different adaptations there are for Pride and Prejudice. Someone said that Persuasion doesn’t get adapted much, because it just isn’t as relatable nowadays. I was sitting in the back row, thinking, “Oh yes it is! You just have to have the stakes right.”
I got home, pulled out my Complete Works of Jane Austen, and read through Persuasion. And I was convinced I was right. If Captain Wentworth was another woman, and the year is 2007, the family is going to have objections. A family objecting to the person you fall in love with is a familiar story to many, many people. I did trade racism for classism in the case of Aunt Hayter. And instead of vague observations about Anne’s complexion in the original story, I used weight as a modern-day obsession over appearance.
Can you share insights into your process for developing the complex family dynamics and societal settings in the story?
The complex family dynamics are in Jane Austen’s original. Writing this story was to prove a point: that Persuasion is every bit as timeless as Pride and Prejudice, and to do that I wanted to change as little as possible. At the very beginning, establishing Sir Walter’s vain character, the original talks about a book called The Baronetage. I used Who’s Who in America. It worked exactly the same way.
The process was pretty simple. I had the road map right in front of me: I would read a chapter, think it over, cackle a little, and start typing. Sometimes it came very quickly. The story starts in New York, instead of England. In the original, the family has to “retrench” because of irresponsible spending. In my version, I set it in 2007 during the financial crisis of 2007-2008: a whole lot of financiers went down in flames; same economic crisis where a family has to figure out what they’re going to do.
Sometimes, for the settings, I had to think a little longer about what I was going to use as the modern American substitute. I’ve been to Rhode Island many times, it was easy to use that for Regis-Lyme. It took me a while to realize that, instead of finding an American naval base so that the story continued where it made sense to have a Navy captain, what I needed to do was change military branches. I lived in Dayton for 20 years, home from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Now I can go back to writing about what I know. Always write about what you know.
What challenges did you face in making Anne a relatable character to readers from various backgrounds?
I know not everyone relates to Anne. Heck, the recent TV movie of Persuasion that has gotten a ton of flack for being a poor adaptation – it looks to me like the writers could not relate to Anne, so they tried to turn her into a spunky Elizabeth Bennet kind of character. If you can’t relate to the characters, why are you making an adaptation of that story…?
I use weight as a way to talk about being unhappy – with life, with yourself. When Anne decides she doesn’t like what she sees in the mirror, and decides to start the fight to feel better about herself, it’s a battle everyone, from all sorts of backgrounds, faces. It’s never an easy battle. I’ve had people say the issue was triggering for them, and my book hit way, way too close to home. I was sorry to cause pain, but I am not sorry that I spoke the truth so accurately. And weight is just a metaphor (albeit one that so many of us in the post-Covid years can relate to). There are so many ways we can look in the mirror, and say, “I don’t like what I see. It’s time to change that.”
It’s part of the power of Jane Austen’s writing – she writes about the human condition. All sorts of backgrounds can relate to love, pain, screwy family dynamics, and choices you wish you could unchoose.
What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?
Sadly, at the moment my writing is a bit stalled. I have filed for divorce, I am simultaneously job hunting and getting ready to put a house on the market. I started no fewer than FIVE books in 2022, and did no fiction writing in 2023 (I teach historical dancing – including Regency dances, of course – and I have a 9-volume series on historical dance that is in search of a publisher). But I miss writing terribly, and I need to get back to it when my life settles down! There are characters beating on the inside of my head, demanding to get out.
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Anne Elliot broke off her relationship with Freddie Wentworth when her family didn’t approve. Almost eight years later, Freddie re-materializes in her life. She’s a captain in the Air Force, successful, single, and as beautiful as ever. Mortified that she doesn’t have much to show for the intervening years, Anne tries to avoid her. When contact is inevitable, her life is turned upside down. Self-doubt becomes self-improvement, old wounds are reopened and then allowed to heal, and true friends and true love win in the end.
