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<\/a><\/p>\n\nMy great friend Alexandra Billings (notably, the first transgendered person to actually play a transgendered person on network television) has been cast in a recurring role in a new series called Transparent<\/i> – an Amazon original series, with a helluva cast: Jeffrey Tambor, Judith Light, Gaby Hoffman, and others. Alex has been busy getting her Master’s and becoming a tenure-track professor, which basically means I have not spoken to her in months, beyond our agonized “I miss you” texts. Super proud of her. She hasn’t updated her blog in a while, but you can check her stuff out here.<\/a> She wrote a piece for my site a while back about her idol, Lucille Ball.<\/a> Anyone who has read me for a while knows of my adventures with Alex. We get into trouble when we are together. We strolled right through the immediate aftermath of a gangwar murder, for example<\/a>. Totally by an accident of timing. We have tried, on numerous occasions, to get recruited into a certain \u2026 sketchy and notorious organization. We can’t seem to stop. We spent an entire day in Los Angeles visiting with \u2026 “organization” members and lying our way into private tours. <\/p>\n Best moment of lying: Smooth.<\/p>\n Alex’s wife Chrisanne is used to this nonsense, but did say to Alex during our insane “field trip” in Los Angeles, “While Sheila is visiting us \u2026 why don’t you take her to the freakin’ Getty Museum, for God’s sake…” Hilarious. Every time she and I see an opportunity, we leap at it. We got pretty far in at one point, in New York, so far in that we both actually almost joined the \u2026 organization \u2026 in order to get the hell out of there. It was a close call. Our friendship is something I treasure. Her life is exploding with awesome-ness right now. I can’t wait to see Transparent<\/i>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My great friend Alexandra Billings (notably, the first transgendered person to actually play a transgendered person on network television) has been cast in a recurring role in a new series called Transparent – an Amazon original series, with a helluva … Continue reading
\nGatekeeper: “And what do you do?”
\nAlex: “I’m an accountant.”
\nGatekeeper: (interested) “Oh! Who with??”
\nAlex: (after a pause) “A corporation.”<\/p>\n