cole escola is nonbinary excellence personified.

The Tony-nominated Oh, Mary! star is now a cult icon.

Queering the Burbs is a distillation of pop culture, politics and queerness published twice weekly by Joe Erbentraut. This is hyperfixation, this newsletter’s monthly column for paid Queering the Burbs subscribers exploring something or someone I can’t stop thinking about. Get a taste below and subscribe or upgrade if you’d like to read more.

Photo: Cole Escola/Facebook

As Chappell Roan has been talking a lot about in recent months, fame is a fickle beast and I sometimes think about what the perfect level of fame might be.

If you’re too recognizably famous, you can no longer enjoy many of life’s little pleasures, like silently reading a book alone in a coffee shop or peacefully browsing through the stacks at a hole-in-the-wall record store. But if you’re not well known at all, in many fields, well, don’t quit your day job (if you’re lucky enough to have one in this economy).

But I think the brilliant comedian and writer Cole Escola might be the perfect amount of famous right now. For those who don’t know, Escola has become an overnight sensation in the eyes of many thanks to the success of Oh, Mary!, the absurdist play he wrote and stars in inspired by the life of Mary Todd Lincoln.

The play opened off Broadway last year and quickly became such a sensation with critics and audiences alike that it transferred to Broadway, where it continues its run to this day. The show has since been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist and, as of last week, was nominated for five Tony Awards.

My husband and I were able to witness the show for myself last December and I must say that it surpassed the hype. The show is a tight, non-stop romp that bears almost no resemblance to actual historical events, nor should it. My face hurt from laughing so hard and smiling so widely through the entire thing, especially when my small town neighborhood’s very own Bellevue Institute was name-dropped. I left the Lyceum Theatre with my new prized possession—an embroidered dad hat from the show—in hand and I continue to don it around town despite the vast majority of this town’s residents having no idea who Escola is or what play they wrote.