Preview of 'Rossi, The Punk Rock Queen of the Jews'

Press release

WEST HARTFORD, CT - Get ready to rock, rage and plotz when Charter Oak Cultural Center brings Rossi to Playhouse on Park on Tuesday, October 29th at 7:00pm to discuss, read and sign her acclaimed new memoir, The Punk Rock Queen of the Jews. She will be joined in conversation with local playwright Jacques Lamarre who wrote the stage adaptation of The Raging Skillet, Rossi’s previous memoir chronicling her life as New York’s wildest caterer.

The Punk Rock Queen of the Jews is Rossi’s wild, queer coming-of-age story. She was taught only to aspire to marry a nice Jewish boy and to be a good kosher Jewish girl. At sixteen she flowers into a rebellious punk-rock rule-breaker who runs away to seek adventure. Her freedom is cut short when her parents kidnap her and dump her with a Chasidic rabbi—a “cult buster” known for “reforming” wayward Jewish girls—in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Rossi spends the next couple of years in a repressive, misogynistic culture straight out of the nineteenth century, forced to trade in her pink hair and Sex Pistols T-shirt for maxi skirts and long-sleeved blouses and endure not only bone-crunching boredom but also outright abuse and violence. The Punk Rock Queen of the Jews is filled with wonderfully rich characters, hilarious dialogue, and keen portraits of the secretive hothouse Orthodox world and the struggling New York City of the 1980s: dirty, on the edge, but fully vital and embracing.

Tickets: $10. No one turned away for lack of funds. Copies of The Punk Rock Queen of the Jews will be on sale with Rossi happily signing after the talk. Tickets can be purchased at www.PlayhouseOnPark.org or by calling 860-523-5900 x 10.

Playhouse on Park is located at 244 Park Road, West Hartford, CT 06119. Managed under the direction of Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc., Playhouse on Park is Greater Hartford’s award-winning destination for the performing arts. Playhouse on Park offers a wide range of thought-provoking, inspiring and thoroughly enjoyable professional theatre productions that leave audiences often smiling, sometimes crying, and always talking about what they have just experienced.