NICOLAS BOGGS INTERVIEW BY FRANK J. MILES

Tuesday, February 7, 2012, Brooklyn, NY.
Location: 61 Local Public House, 61 Bergen Street, 7 p.m.
Nicholas Boggs, 38, writer, Williamsburg

FJM:

Will you tell me a bit about your show?

NB:

I am a recovering academic writing a book about my search for the untold story of James Baldwin’s collaboration with French painter, Yoran Cazac, on their out-of-print book, “Little Man Little Man.” It’s a personal account – not a scholarly one, and it bends a bunch of genres. I’m also working on a novel, whose first chapter is about to come out in the literary magazine, “Chelsea Station.”

FJM:

What’s your pre-performance ritual?

NB:

When I was a child, I was an opera singer. (He holds his right hand up, palm out – left hand on stomach.) And my mother made me do, “Woop woop wooooop!” Then my father learned that for my next opera I’d have to dress up in a pink bunny suit to perform. That was the end of all that – and the beginning of a lot of basketball and track practices.

FJM:

What are you obsessed with you haven’t done or tried yet?

NB:

Finishing a book. Writing one, that is. I have tried and will keep trying.

FJM:

What’s the best pick-up line you’ve heard at a literary reading? And
did it work?

NB:

My cousin, or really, my bisexual aunt’s partner’s daughter, went up to James Baldwin in the late 1970s at a reading of “Another Country” and said, “I just want to let you know that your sex scenes do a lot for me.”

FJM:

Who was your first artist crush?

NB:

James Baldwin? (Pauses.) I never had a celebrity crush. (Pauses.) Farrah Fawcett? (Pauses.) My Christian conservative grandmother from Iowa, when I was about 11, she gave me this calendar of baseball players and other male athletes called, “The Boys of Summer,” for Christmas. She said it was “sporty,” like me. I was mortified. My whole family was laughing because they thought it was so absurd. But I definitely kept it in my room.

FJM:

What article of clothing always gets the job done?

NB:

I had a shirt of my gay uncle’s from The Pleasure Chest. (He points to his right pec.) Twelve legs in a circle. I wore it out in my 20s. Dark gray. It was the fit. He was a Studio 54 party boy.

FJM:

Best meal of 2012 so far?

NB:

Camarão na Moranga cooked by my boyfriend’s mother, Zelia, in her apartment in Copacabana.