The Queen of Steeplechase Park

David Ciminello

touko 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Lukija: Elisabeth Ashby

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The Queen of Steeplechase Park is the absolutely, positively, practically, almost-true story of infamous burlesque queen and magic meatball maker Belladonna Marie Donato. Pregnant at fifteen after gleefully losing her virginity to pansexual neighborhood strongman Francis Anthony Mozzarelli, she is robbed of her baby by a pack of nefarious nuns and her embittered papa has her sterilized without her consent (legal in 1935). With the help of a besotted Francis and her top-secret meatball recipe, a devastated Bella embarks on a riotous quest through Depression-era Coney Island sideshows, the tawdry world of peek-a-boo striptease routines, a queer mob marriage, and a tasty collection of wisdom-filled recipes to find her lost child, herself, and maybe even true love. It all leads Bella back home, to the scene of her Original Sin, where she boldly faces matters of life and death, questions of forgiveness, and a holy mess only the healing properties of great Italian cooking can fix. Contains mature themes.

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David Ciminello is a Lambda Literary Fellow and the recipient of a Table 4 Writers Foundation Grant. His fiction has appeared in the Lambda Award-winning anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, Nailed magazine, and Stephen O'Donnell's The Untold Gaze. David and his husband reside in Portland, Oregon.

Elisabeth Ashby is a seasoned character actor and singer with over two decades of stage experience. Having loved audiobooks since she was a little girl, she is thrilled to have found a way to combine her love of performing with her lifelong passion for the written word as a narrator.