The comic Jacqueline Novak wears the same outfit each time she performs her solo show, “Get on Your Knees”: a loose gray T-shirt, jeans, and a broken-in pair of white-and-gray sneakers. The clothes allow her a kind of anonymity and neutrality, as well as comfort. “Get on Your Knees” is part standup act, part coming-of-age story, and part philosophy lecture. It is also an athletic feat, so she often wears a sports bra, a practical choice that nonetheless warranted extensive consideration before a performance one evening in the summer of 2021. Novak had dedicated the previous four years to the show, but she was still tinkering, refining, and annotating each creative decision she made, particularly as she anticipated taping the show for a Netflix special. “I love sports bras,” she said in front of a mirror in the greenroom at the Cherry Lane Theatre, in the West Village, where she was doing a ten-week run. “But there’s this belief, inherently, that I’m not supposed to be wearing a sports bra. Do you know what I mean? It’s too athletic.”
Novak, who is prone to self-narration, doubled back: “But then I’m, like, why do I feel the audience is owed a separation of my breasts?” Novak is forty-one, but she has a girlish face and a long-standing interest in elaborate skin-care rituals that, to an audience member, might make her look like the high-school version of herself she explores in the performance.
Denne historien er fra January 22, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra January 22, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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HOLIDAY PUNCH
\"Cult of Love\" on. Broadway and \"No President\" at the Skirball.
THE ARCHIVIST
Belle da Costa Greene's hidden story.
OCCUPY PARADISE
How radical was John Milton?
CHAOS THEORY
What professional organizers know about our lives.
UP FROM URKEL
\"Family Matters\" and Jaleel White's legacy.
OUTSIDE MAN
How Brady Corbet turned artistic frustration into an American epic.
STIRRING STUFF
A secret history of risotto.
NOTE TO SELVES
The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities-roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents make occasional appearances.
THE ORCHESTRA IS THE STAR
The Berlin Philharmonic doesn't need a domineering maestro.
HEAD CASE
Paul Valéry's ascetic modernism.