Midnight on the back porch of an inn in Virginia, the girl who checked in earlier comes out with a magnum of red wine, sits down next to me, and offers me a glass.
"After a long run of accidentally deflowering virgins, I was sitting on a barstool complaining about it to a drunk guy who ended up being a disbarred judge. He laughed at me. 'Your name's Anna? Ah, Anna Allure and her Academy for Boys!' Which was pretty apt, actually.
"I'm a cabaret singer and dancer, but I used to be Jehovah’s Witness. I grew up with them. My parents never married, and Dad's Jewish, so when I visited him I got Matzo ball soup and Passover with relatives, but no actual religion. My mother, though - Jehovah's Witness. Insular. All about the apocalypse. Follow the rules, and when armageddon comes the earth will be washed clean and the Witnesses left to rule as was intended from Eden. No holidays, no friends outside the church. None at school, none at ballet - and a lot of guilt if you do make friends.
"And then Mom had an affair with a married man. She left the church, but I was hooked. I dropped out of school to witness, was going door to door ninety hours a week. I can’t even think that was me, now, it’s like remembering a sibling or something.
"Mom called Dad, and he grabbed me and took me to New York. Took my license and money, kept me from going to the Kingdom Hall, and enrolled me in college. I was seventeen. And then I met boys, and thought -- huh.
"One boy caught my interest, and I got pregnant. I'd been out of the Witnesses for two years, but I knew I could not get an abortion. And then thought I couldn’t. Then thought I might, but it was too late.
"Then a spinster aunt stepped up, forty years old and after three abortions herself, and said she’d adopt. And so I kept on being pregnant.
"When I had the baby, after never, once, ever having felt a maternal instinct while pregnant, I became an animal. I could not let her go, this baby girl with blonde ringlets - Evie. I told my aunt and my family combusted. My aunt and I didn't speak for three years. But I had Evie.
"I'm classically trained in opera and piano. I can’t notate music, but I want to get this going. This is my thirtieth birthday, my present to myself is coming here, to work on this thing -- a cabaret wrapped in an opera. The story of Anna Allure and her demon cabaret, winning souls until she falls in love with a man she can’t corrupt, and saves him. The 'demon cabaret' thing also gives me an excuse to just have a great time with some old cabaret routines and songs thrown into the mix. I've written a few already."
"I'm not sure what to do with my past. I've been out of the Witnesses for over ten years, but until a couple years ago I still figured it was true, and I was just being bad, had decided to go to hell. Now…I kind of think that what the Witnesses believe probably isn’t real. At least I don't have many nightmares of the apocalypse any more."