Love, Garland, Bows and Tinsel- A Radio Romance

I have a great love of Holiday Romance films. The silly, over-the-top, just-because-its-christmas films popular on lifetime, netflix, and hallmark bring me so much joy from November through December every year. As the days grow darker, I find a deep amount of Joy in the light from stories about love and connection.  I had the great pleasure to develop this play with class of 2022 EIU Student Hannah Killough as her Senior Thesis project. 

EIU has done a full foley radio play every other year for the past few years. It's a low budget production, and I was told that the options for scripts were to find something in the public domain or do something new. New Plays are my passion, and many of those old scripts are inherently sexist and racist (And often xenophobic) so it seemed a better bet to just start from scratch. Hannah and I talked about what made a good holiday story and we shared our love of silly holiday romances and decided to take the play in that direction. We listened to old-time radio plays to get a sense of the form and the possibilities for what could be. 

Love, Garland, Bows, and Tinsel is a holiday radio romance with a specifically queer bent. This is not a coming out story, but rather a holiday romance for queer students focused on falling in love and finding light in each other as the days grow dark and finals approach. The play will be recorded live on Dec. 3rd and 4th at the theatre at EIU and then aired on EIU Radio on Dec 12th. It will also be available via youtube.