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Amanda Playwythe
At an event called “Prom Trash” Amanda was born.
I went to my first Dumpsta Players show in the spring of 2003. My friend was dating someone in the cast. He said it was Prom and to dress up, so I did. I wore a tail coat and a top hat, leftover from my goth days, and threw on a purple marabou boa as a finishing touch. I had no idea what I was about to experience. This was a show unlike anything else I’d seen. Drag Queens, Drag Kings, and a variety of other strange characters, in a semi-scripted show with lip synced musical numbers culminating in the crowning of the Prom Trash Queen. I had dressed up so when they asked who wanted to compete, I lined up to go on stage. I didn’t make it past the first round. My look was outrageous enough and showing up in full drag was a guaranteed pleaser.
Over the next year, I went to every show as I hatched a plan to win. But, first I had to lose. Yup, my first time I lost. I chose to play a Dominatrix with a strap on, my nod to Gen, the lead singer of the Genitorturers, but somehow, I wasn’t trashy enough!
The following year, Amanda Playwythe was born. This year, the look was blonde hair wearing all Pink except for a black pleather mini skirt. I hadn’t even settled on a name when I arrived at the show. I wanted something with a pun and I always appreciated the joke from the Simpsons where Bart calls Moe’s asking for Amanda Hugginkiss. Well, when it was time to actually go on stage at the beginning of the competition, I just blurted out Amanda Playwith, but when I wrote it on my name tag, I was determined to make it different somehow so I adopted the Olde English Spelling that I still use today, Playwythe!
For the rest of the night, I gave way to the character and committed myself to the idea that Amanda would have absolutely no idea what was going on around her and her trashiness overwhelmed the audience. I won the following year as Amanda as well.
When the Dumpsta Players put on “Prom Trash Under the Sea,” I adopted a whole new Character with another pun for a name, MC Urchin, get it Sea Urchin?? But she was a rapper, hence the MC. So, I wrote little rhyming phrases and tried to use them as much as possible. I totally had a folded up piece of paper in my bra cause I did them so last minute I never memorized them. But, I must have been memorable, because I won.
The last time I won was when we did a musical inspired Prom Trash, I came as Drag Ursula from the Little Mermaid. Oh, those poor unfortunate contestants didn’t stand a chance, mwahahahaha!
All in all, I spent 12 years performing with the Dumpsta Players. I learned a ton about queer culture, music, and artists from a time when those ideas were less than main stream. I also learned that there’s a lot to be said about commitment. Commitment to character and being in the moment and how sometimes that’s enough to propel you over the top. I maintained that level of commitment to my work and continue to embrace drag and perform as Amanda Playwythe when possible.
The Dumpsta Players’ live performances sadly came to an end in 2016. However, in addition to performing as Amanda as much as I am able, I started a clothing label using her name. The ads write themselves; get yourself Amanda Playwythe today! I realized there was a serious lack of options for plus size men when it came to underwear and swimwear. I put the very same sewing skill that got me making fun outfits for Amanda, to the test and learned how to design ready to wear clothing.
You can check out my shop here!
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Into the Woods
In summer of 2013 I auditioned for a new community theatre, Avenue Theatre Company, for their production of “Into the Woods” my all time favorite Stephen Sondheim musical. Well, my all time favorite musical, period. This particular staging was designed to be dreamlike and use a child’s bedroom as the set. This way, we relied on the audience to use their childlike imagination to build the complicated sets in the woods, using a ladder and a feather boa to represent Rapunzel in her tower, for example. I was cast as the Wolf in Act I and then double cast as a drag Step-sister. This show is a blast and has many layers to it’s sophisticated story, that’s really for kids at all.
This is one of the three Sondheim shows I have been able to learn and participate in. The first being “Gypsy” where Sondheim is only the lyricist, yet still gives us the some unforgettable ditties. The other show was Villanova Theatre‘s production of “Merrily We Roll Along” which was ultimately cancelled as a result of the pandemic in 2020. We were returning to the theatre the next day to start tech weekend when the lockdown began.
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Sketch and Improv at Upright Citizens Brigade
After being in the audience at Saturday Night Live, I looked into how performers got the opportunity to audition for SNL. It turns out that SNL finds many of there performers by scouting the various comedy schools such as Second City, Improv Olympics, or the Upright Citizens Brigade. You may remember the Upright Citizens Brigade TV show staring Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh who went on to open the UCB Training Center in 1996.
Over the course of 2 years, I commuted to New York City, nearly every Saturday or Sunday during the regular school year, I took the entire Improv and most of the Sketch Writing curriculum. I was lucky enough to have such amazing teachers as Phil Augusta Jackson, Kate Wood Riley, Corey Brown, Geoff Garlock, and Nicole Drespel. Here I learned how to perform long form improv and write sketches while performing many wacky characters and attempting many accents and dialects.
While I was studying, they recommended two books that would help with improv skills. The first is “Truth In Comedy” which describes how the long form Improv Style, “The Harold” came into being. The Second is “Art By Committee” which teaches some more advanced Improv practices and features a DVD with performances by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. By the time I completed my studies in Improv at UCB, they had released their official textbook, “The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual.” I highly recommend all of these books in you are interested in improv, devised theatre, and collaboration. I even used a few of these as resources for my graduate thesis at Villanova.
During the pandemic, the school I attended in New York, closed. However, a new location has opened up as well as new online offerings. Go to UCBComedy.com for more information
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Without A Cue Productions
I was introduced to Without a Cue by a board member at Beacon Theatre Productions where I had performed in Freud’s Last Session. She had needed a last minute replacement for the role of Jacques in a touring production of “Murder at the Moulin Bleu.” It was so much fun that I asked to be included in the next round of auditions.
In the fall of 2018, I was cast in three shows with Without a Cue Productions, their Bewitched, Harry Potter, and Charles Dickens parody murder mystery dinner shows. In the Bewitched show, I played Uncle Arthur, inspired by the performance of Paul Lynde! It turns out I have a wonderful Paul Lynde impression! Next, I played professor “O’Donnegal” in their Harry Potter parody show, “Henry Planter,” names changed for copyright reasons. Lastly, I played Tiny Tim, and Sherlock Holmes in “A Dickens of a Murder.”
Below are just a few pics of my time with Without a Cue! To find out more about Without a Cue check out their website, here! They’ve just recently gotten a new venue and have increased the number of shows available.
Beard Drag! 
Jacques from Murder at the Moulin Bleu! 
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I was a Projectionist
As a teenager, I worked at a movie theater and eventually made my way up to assistant manager. From there, I learned how to thread and operate 35mm projectors and build prints with trailers. This was a tedious process that involved taking actual film, physically cutting off the “heads” and “tails” of each reel, lining them up and splicing them together. Then you have to save all the heads and tails so they can be reattached before the movie can be shipped back to the distributor.
Because of this I worked as a projectionist for the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, abbreviated PIGLFF, later shortened to QFest. A brief history can be found here. For just under 2 weeks each July, I would set myself up in a small projection room first at the Arts Bank, which is now part of University of the Arts, and later, at the Ritz East. This is where I worked on Philadelphia’s only 4K projector in 2009 or so.
Below are some pictures of the new process. Films were now delivered super encrypted via hard drive that was then ingested in to the projector. From a pc interface, the projectionist would be able to build the show, graphically, but dropping and dragging programs into a lineup. For my purposes, this was just a projector with my equipment connected to it where I could play films submitted to the film festival on a variety of formats including BetaCam, DigiBeta, Blu Ray, and many more.
The Projector 
My View 
How Movies Come Now 
Ingested over USB 
The Hard Drive 
More Hard Drive 
Shipped like this 
Fancy Box 
Another Movie 
My Rig interfaced with the 4K machine 
Divine! 
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Designing Collapsible Vases!
Several years ago, I helped the fabulous Sandy O from Creative Juice Group by designing and building these Collapsible Vases for an event! Click here to check out my other post about Creative Juice Group and Sandy’s amazing work!
They were designed to have a person inside dressed as a living flower who would hand out hors d’oeuvres or champagne. This was all Sandy’s idea of course. However, she needed them to be collapsible to fit in her car. So, as you can see from the pictures, the vases were designed in parts that clamped together on the inside using hardware. Sandy, of course, provided the faux stone finish.
