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Jan 27 2017
Grace & Grace: The Moving Bond Between A Girl & Her Gay That Changed Them Both Comments (0)

49513590.cached(Image via Nora Burns)

Via Kenneth in the (212): Nora Burns is known for her loopy comedy shows, but it's the return of her acclaimed David's Friend that has become a hot ticket in Manhattan.

The show, while considered comic, is tinged with sadness, chronicling her intense friendship with a man who was struck down by AIDS in 1993, just before the rise of life-extending drugs for HIV. 

 

".....David Burns.....He was my best friend. We met dancing on a platform one night at #BostonBoston when we were 17. We spent the rest of the night rolling each other around the Fenway in a shopping cart with a boom box and didn’t leave each others side for the next several years. I moved to #NYC that fall and he came several months later, it was 1979. We had amazing adventures and spoke a language I’ve never had with anyone else. He died in 1993 and I miss him more than I can say, but he left me a wonderful legacy: many of the people I love and admire most I met through David so I would just like to say, Thank you David, I love you" - by Nora Burns #davidsfriend #whatisrememberedlives #theaidsmemorial #aidsmemorial #neverforget #endaids

A photo posted by The AIDS Memorial (@the_aids_memorial) on

Burns was besties with David Burns — they were so close he changed his surname to hers — in the '70s, '80s and '90s, forging a bond that was legendary around town, with David instrumental in the running of Wigstock:

Would she and David have enjoyed a different sort of dynamic in any other sort of time or place? Burns demurred. “When you’re kids, you’re kids, no matter when it is—even now.”

Her tale is not so much about that time as it is about their lives at the time. Even though they ran in admittedly fabulous circles—including the fabled Studio 54 and later populated by colorful characters such as prominent drag artists Joey Arias and Lady Bunny (David helped the latter run the raucous and iconic Wigstock annual festival in the late ’80s)—Burns does not claim that hers is the definitive account of the setting. “I don’t go, ‘So we were at this party with Halston and then Liza showed up!’ It was everyone’s world, a smaller world then. There are far more fabulous people with star-studded stories to tell, and I leave it to them to tell.”

Check out Luis Damian Veron's interview with Nora Burns at The Daily Beast, and get your tickets for David's Friend here.

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