Alexandra Billings is an actor, singer, author, teacher, and
activist who has appeared on numerous television shows, including
Amazon’s Emmy and Golden Globe Award–winning Transparent. Billings,
who has been acting since 1968, has also performed across the
United States in hundreds of plays and musicals. She made her
Broadway debut in The Nap in 2018 and joined the cast of Wicked as
Madame Morrible the following year. Every role played by Billings
is thought to be a first for an out Transgender human. She is the
recipient of countless awards and holds an MFA in acting. Billings
has lived with AIDS since 1995, and her LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS activism
stretches across the continent and culminated in her moderation of
a panel on Transgender rights in America at the White House during
the Obama administration. She twice married Chrisanne Blankenship,
whom she met in 1976 in high school, where they costarred in
Twelfth Night. Billings has not touched Shakespeare since then—and
vice versa. For more information, visit
www.alexandrabillings.com.
Joanne Gordon is an award-winning director whose accolades include
five Drama-Logue Awards, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award,
the Polly Warfield Award, and a Women in Theatre Red Carpet Award.
Joanne is also an internationally renowned Sondheim scholar who has
directed many Sondheim works worldwide, including the first
Chinese-language production of West Side Story in Beijing. Other
directing highlights include S/he and Me (conceived for Alexandra
Billings); Indecent (named best of the year by both of Saint
Louis’s major newspapers); The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?; Disgraced;
How I Learned to Drive; Evita; and Next to Normal. She is the
author of Art Isn’t Easy: The Theater of Stephen Sondheim and
Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook, and she contributed to The Oxford
Handbook of Sondheim Studies and the Sondheim Review. Gordon is
equally well known for her dramatizations of the work of Charles
Bukowski. She received her PhD from UCLA.
One of Shondaland’s Best Books of April 2022“Moving…not only a reflection on her success, but also on the way she has put her heart into making this world kinder, better, and more accepting than the one she grew up in.” —Shondaland“Straddling eras, Billings toggles between a time when AIDS meant ‘funeral after funeral’ and [T]rans people lived in the shadows, to a new world in which she made her way to the screen as a boundary-breaking actor. What unfolds alongside a narrative marked by adversity and raunchy humor is a poignant portrait of an artist in search of meaning and personal peace. This begs for an encore.” —Publishers Weekly“This Time for Me shines light both on a remarkable personal journey and a painful time in transgender history…blunt truthfulness is a hallmark of her writing…Though she has been mistreated by society over most of her lifetime, her memoir is a model of grace and compassion, showing the world what it means to be misunderstood, and how we can do better to welcome humans of every stripe.” —Washington Post“Equal parts heart-wrenching and resilient…It’s serving drag, a fraught mother-daughter relationship, a beautiful love story, and some advice from her days of waiting tables. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry…and cry, and cry!” —Celebrity Book Club with Chelsea Devantez“Alexandra Billings’s extraordinary memoir moves from nightmarish, traumatic horror to a magical journey toward self-worth and artistic flowering. Alexandra has given us a treasure of a book full of wit, insight, and love.” —Charles Busch, actor, playwright, cabaret entertainer, novelist, and screenwriter“Alexandra’s warmth, humor, perseverance, and compassion shine through on every page of This Time for Me. The arts reflect and shape our world every day, and Alexandra has been at the heart of Hollywood’s long-overdue Trans revolution. Alexandra brings you along for her moving and human journey of hope undeterred by hardship, grace in the face of indignity, and the kind of radical love that fosters real change—both for ourselves and our society.” —Delaware state senator Sarah McBride, author of Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality
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