Event

You Better Call Your Mother

When former actor and current chef/restaurateur, Mitchell Anderson, walked off stage after telling the audience he was gay at the 1996 GLAAD Awards in Los Angeles, he was advised to call his mother. At that time, after a decade in show business, Anderson was a little bit famous and playing a gay character on Party of Five. As it turned out, the spontaneous decision to come out at that moment, made after years of trying to figure out how to live sort of in and sort of out of the closet, changed the trajectory of his life forever.
25 years later, Anderson, now 60 years old, spent part of his COVID isolation writing about his life. A somewhat nerdy, over-achieving little boy, who spent his school years trying to get elected class president and not disappointing his parents, came to terms with being gay just as he was becoming an adult. He started his professional career as an actor while the AIDS crisis was raging in a very homophobic and closeted Hollywood. You Better Call Your Mother is a collection of monologues and songs that examines this journey and how, in the end, he discovered the only way to a full, happy, and productive life, was to claim and celebrate all of who he is.