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