“The Fall of the Kings.” With a parrot

June 14, 15, 16: Doug Shapiro reads the original novella. With a parrot.

Admit it:

You’ve always wanted to hear someone reading “The Fall of the Kings” with a parrot crapping on their shoulder!

It’s nothing to be ashamed of.

And now, here is our friend, New York’s finest actor, audiobook reader and official mensch Doug Shapiro, to make your dreams come true!

Aren’t Doug & Chico adorable? And Doug dug out the pic of Delia & me from an old FB post! It was taken at the Ball at Versailles, which we attended the year we were living in Paris, in May 2018. It was worth every penny. We were clothed by our Fairy Godmother, Jennifer Gayton, a professional theater costumer with an attic full of goodies, who just happens to be the mother-in-law of my best friend, Terri Windling, in England.

Audiobook narrator and Broadway actor Doug Shapiro reads the works of his author pals…with a red-headed Amazon parrot on his shoulder.

Monday, June 14 at 3:00 pm EST – THE FALL OF THE KINGS, PART 1

Tuesday, June 15 at 3:00 pm EST – THE FALL OF THE KINGS, PART 2

Wednesday, June 16 at 11:00 am EST – THE FALL OF THE KINGS, PART 3

Get back to the parrot

Yes, Doug and his husband Shawn Cowls (who is now my Navigator for the Affordable Health Care Act, and has therefore saved my life almost literally) have two parrots in their New York apartment.

Doug and Coco do their online readings to support the Actors Fund. It’s an organization I’ve fund-raised for before, when Lin-Manuel put Hamilton up on the Disney channel. I wrote:

Enjoying HAMILTON? As people have been pointing out, nearly everyone involved in the production of the stage show as well as the huge crew for the film is currently unemployed, and will be for the foreseeable future. They have families, rent, and basic living costs to cover - most especially, healthcare. Hard times for everyone, I know, so just throw $1 in the kitty if you can, to show support.

“Employment in any division of the performing arts and entertainment industry is unpredictable. Work is erratic, security is fleeting and health insurance is often just a dream. As a national organization with offices in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the Fund directly serves thousands of performing arts and entertainment professionals across the country every year.”

Doug’s final reading for the season is a story very dear to my heart: “The Fall of the Kings,” which I wrote with my now-wife, Delia Sherman, not too long after we’d gotten together in a romance that has stood the test of time (and spawned a novel of the same name).

The Novel (2002)

How the story got written

Delia had read and loved my first novel, Swordspoint - which came out the same year as her first, Through a Brazen Mirror!).

Our friendship blossomed into romance, and as we drove around New England together, we made up more stuff about my world and my characters . . . until, finally, I looked up one day and said:

“You know . . . we’re both writers. If we wrote all this down, people would give us money!”

Word was out that Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel were putting together the world’s first anthology series of queer SF & Fantasy.

If you squint, you can see our names on the cover

We wrote it. It was too long. We cut about 5,000 words of Cool Stuff and submitted “The Fall of the Kings” to Steve and Nicola, and it was accepted and published in Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (White Wolf/Borealis, 1997), Reprinted: The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Eleventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling. St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Awards: Nominated for World Fantasy Award, Best Novella, 1997.

[Er, yes, that was copied and pasted from my Bibliography page. Have mercy: I am in a hurry, here!]

So THEN I said to Delia:

“You know . . . If we just put those 5,000 words back in, and added another 10,000 or so . . . we’d have a novel!”

The Fall of the Kings was published in 2002. It has a lot more words in it than either of us had originally planned. But that’s another story for another day.

Delia & me in 2002. A publicity shot for The Fall of the Kings, from a series by our friend Guy Veryzer

How did I meet Doug?

In 2009 I collaborated with my insanely talented friends Yale Strom and Elizabeth Schwartz on a musical radio drama called The Witches of Lublin (available on CD & downloads!). Part of the process is to hear it read aloud by Real Actors. At the last minute, the guy who was playing the romantic lead got sick, so this guy named Doug Shapiro stepped in.

“You look just like my best friend!” he said.

Who could resist?

Well what about the parrot?

The only thing I hate about calling Doug’s husband Shawn for medical insurance help is that if he’s in the room with the f*cking parrot, it shrieks maliciously the entire time we’re talking. But I think that’s the other one, not Chico. Chico is nice.

I wasn’t kidding about the parrot.

If you watch the 20-minute reading, Doug says you will see his parrot-holding shoulder slowly getting covered with white parrot-squit streaks. . . And yet this great and noble man gives ALL the money to the Actors Fund, and covers the dry-cleaning bills himself!

HOW CAN YOU WATCH THIS HAPPEN?

A benefit for The Actors Fund ( Actors’ & Entertainers’ Benevolent Fund (Qld) Inc.) And feel free to donate right now through this link.

Audiobook narrator and Broadway actor Doug Shapiro reads the works of his author pals…with a red-headed Amazon parrot on his shoulder.

This final week: Doug and Chico Presents:

Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman: A three-part reading of their World Fantasy Award-nominated novella, “The Fall of the Kings.”

Tune in to the Events page here.

Monday, June 14 at 3:00 pm EST – THE FALL OF THE KINGS, PART 1

Tuesday, June 15 at 3:00 pm EST – THE FALL OF THE KINGS, PART 2

Wednesday, June 16 at 11:00 am EST – THE FALL OF THE KINGS, PART 3

I hope you enjoyed reading this rather silly letter. I’ll try to be more serious next time.

What would you like me to write about next?