Collection Scope and Content Note

Typescript fair copy of a play about AIDS and incest in an Italian American family.

This is the unpublished and unperformed original version of Moonlight Serenade as presented by the author at a private writers group in 1986 in Palo Alto, California, where she was living at the time. In the story, three generations of a working-class Italian-American family come together for a holiday reunion. A grandson who lives in San Francisco misses the gathering because he is hospitalized with AIDS. The women in the family discuss his situation and his relationship with his male partner, making the two men unseen but vivid characters in the drama. Also central to the drama is one of the granddaughters revealing that her father had sexually abused her as a child.