WIN $100 GIFT VOUCHERS: PROMOTIONS
Christine Barker was raised in a military family and spent her childhood moving across Europe and the United States. By the time she started high school, her father had retired from the US Navy and the family returned to Santa Fe, New Mexico, a place they have called home since the 1880s. She devoted herself to the study of dance and at 20 made the brave decision to move to New York City to pursue a career in dance and theater. She appeared in the productions of Promises, Promises, Seesaw, and No, No Nanette before being cast in the London production of the Tony-award-winning A Chorus Line, which opened at the Royal Drury Lane Theater in 1976. She eventually joined the Broadway cast in New York City. Her theatrical life was shaped by Alvin Ailey, Tommy Tune, and finally Michael Bennett. She was working on Broadway when the AIDS epidemic hit and witnessed the tragedy unfold in the theater wings, fashion houses and finally in the hospitals of New York City. In addition to her theater credits, Christine has appeared in numerous national television commercials. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and currently lives in Connecticut.
“A heart-rending debut infuses a graceful personal narrative with cultural history.... Third Girl From The Left is a timely chronicle of vulnerable people who are marginalized by their government, ignored by the media and maligned by a ‘moral majority’ whose echoes reverberate in today’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ era.... Barker’s memoir becomes an elegy—for the third girl on the left, and the men she loved so well.” -- New York Times Book Review “Third Girl from the Left is a beautifully written memoir of life on the Broadway stage at the onset of the 1980s AIDS epidemic. This compelling, and remarkably hopeful story is particularly relevant now. With uncompromising truth, Christine Barker makes tangible the unraveling of dreams, as she dances in A Chorus Line while her older brother, Laughlin, together with his life partner Perry Ellis, builds the designer’s fashion business. Time is an enemy and choices dwindle as the author is an eyewitness to a disaster that shapes her future even as it claims the lives of men she loves.” -- Mara Liasson, National Public Radio Correspondent, NPR “Christine Barker’s Third Girl from the Left is a gorgeous show-biz tapestry from the late golden years of the Broadway musical; it is the story of a dazzled ingénue dancer’s passage through that world; and it is also, at the same time, an intimate, profoundly mature portrait of the loves and dependencies among one American family gripped by the devastating AIDS crisis of the nineteen-eighties. Beautifully written, beautifully choreographed, and heartbreaking.” -- Vijay Seshadri, 2014 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 3 Sections, James Laughlin Award winner for The Long Meadow, and author of Wild Kingdom and The Disappearances
