Blindsided

A one-woman show about the effects of teen suicide doesn’t sound like a rip-roaring night out by any accounts, but Jeanette Rizzi’s ‘Blindsided’ manages to straddle the line between funny and tragic with a grace unexpected. Beginning with ‘outcast’ Jeanette’s upbringing as a daughter of a monk and a nun (both, she hastens to add, well out of the orders before embarking on the baby-making), and as a full-blooded Italian in the ‘red-neck’ town in Florida where she’s the local ‘milano’ (or machiatto, or marinara, or whatever word the locals confuse for Mulatto), Cher-lover Jeanette knows she’s bound for greater things. Always feeling the odd-one-out, in her family as well as in school, things take a turn for the better when she m... full review