Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

One of the minor pitfalls of being a parent of young kids is seeing these awesome events and wishing my daughter were older so we could share the experience.

My quest to find strong independent women figures for my daughters (yes, the baby-to-be has been confirmed) is never ending. When my 3-year-old chose to be Mulan, clearly the most badass Disney Princess, for Halloween, I did swell with pride, historical inaccuracies be damned. But the pool of age-appropriate female role models is dwindling, and examples of strong Asian American girls and women have always been especially scarce. (It should be noted that I would have been okay with Katara or Tof from Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon as well, despite the fact that Shyamalan completely ruined the movie.)

The coolest thing we had done so far was Itsy Bitsy Shorts and watching Kristina Wong do a hilarious "Grey Gardens for Kids," and I know there are plenty of Wong performances in our future.

But there's an event going down in the San Francisco Bay area this very October that I truly ache to haul my daughter and my own pregnant ass to, if only we lived up north and my daughter weren't a mere three years old.

Pinays Maintaining Sisterhood Through Art (PMSTA), a theater group I've long admired from afar, is presenting Death of a Player Thursdays through Saturdays through the end of October.

Straight out of the press release, the play is a series of vignettes about:

a mail-order-bride game show that shouldn't be so funny, but is; a murder mystery of a cheating lover, where there is no mystery as to who done it; a look at dying early -- or wishing one could to hear heartfelt eulogies of one's greatness; the undoing of a family when someone discovers a hole and an electronic eye in the bathroom; a woman's search in finding herself, but is sidetracked by an old lover that returns; and finally three different women are trapped in a apocalyptic zombie era, to find out that one holds a deep secret; how will they survive and will they survive?

I know, guns, violence, and zombies -- certainly the things that would give my kid nightmares at such an impressionable age, but really, my first thought was, "I can't wait until Hugga is old enough to hop on a plane and watch stuff like this with me."

I mean, aside from supporting such a fabulous theater group ... three Pinays surviving the zombie apocalypse! That's the kind of girl I can't wait for Hugga to dress up as for Halloween.

Death of a Player is running at Bindlestiff Studio, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8pm, and Saturdays at 2pm until October 29.