A Journal from Stage & Story
I come from a family of actors.
That's the baseline. My mother could've been Goldie Hawn. My father won an Emmy. I grew up with scripts in the air. The theatre was always teaching me things, even when I was young enough to pretend I hated it.
And yet somehow — impossibly — I made it into adulthood without knowing what sock and buskin meant.
Cut to last week. My mother is driving I-90 West, cutting across that enormous South Dakota horizon, heading from East River back to West River after judging State Oral Interp.
I'm in San Francisco, pacing my apartment, trying to figure out my next move at the edge of a whole new chapter.
We're talking the way we do: quickly, layered, half-memories and plans braided together.
I tell her, "I'm starting a blog, and I need a title. Something sharp. Something that actually means something."
She doesn't even take a beat. "You should call it Sock & Buskin," she says.
I blink. "Why would I name it that?"
She sounds almost offended. "Well… you know. Sock and buskin."
I absolutely do not know.
She tries again: "The masks. Comedy and tragedy." The ones I couldn't stand in high school because they felt corny and weirdly theme-park adjacent. The ones I dismissed because I didn't know the history, the lineage, the actual weight behind the iconography.
And now, while she's rolling past Chamberlain and the Missouri River, she tells me the whole thing:
Sock: the soft shoe worn by comic actors in ancient Greek theatre.
Buskin: the tall, laced boot worn by tragic actors.
Footwear, not face paint.
A physical vocabulary for the emotional spectrum.
I'm on the phone in San Francisco learning this for the first time. She's on I-90 West teaching me, same as she did when I was a kid. Same as she still does, across all these miles and all these pivots I'm making.
And something in me clicks. This new era I'm entering — the instability, the ambition, the grief, the freedom — feels exactly like that pairing: the soft shoe and the tragic boot. Comedy and tragedy in tandem. A life shifting modes, shedding an old chapter, building a new one.
So the blog gets the name my mother picked on a highway in South Dakota.
Sock & Buskin.
A journal for the in-between. A record of reinvention. A reminder that theatre is older, stranger, and more generous than the cheap masks we slap on it.
And here I go — stepping into the next act, still learning from my mother as she flies down I-90, still trusting that the road ahead will reveal itself in time.