When Temmie Nora Thames had her picture taken on Saturday afternoon, it was the first time she was photographed as a woman.

Thames, 53, has never had one picture taken of herself, though she has lived most of her life as a transgender woman. So when she saw the flyers about the photo call at New York City's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, she was one of the first people to show up at the small rented space with an expansive Keith Haring mural from mid-wall to ceiling.

Being a trophy wife and called cutesy things like “songbird,” “little lark” and “little squirrel” must be an awful drag.

Ask Nora Helmer (Gretchen Hall). Not only does her husband Torvald (Fred Arsenault) call her silly names like those above, but he doesn’t bother her pretty little head with serious talk of any kind. Consequently, despite eight years of marriage and three children, she really does feel like a doll, an inanimate object kept around the house for looks alone.

It is spring in Fallbrook, Calif., the sweet breeze season. Fruit tree blossoms fill the air with the anticipation of nectarous things to come. Songbirds do violent battle over choice aeries. Scarlet camellias bloom, then drop blood petals to the ground. And into this convergence of life and death and nature’s magic, Fallbrook author T. Jefferson Parker launches his new crime thriller, The Famous and the Dead, the sixth and final novel in his bestselling Charlie Hood series.

“For 16 years I have been the sole keeper of this city of the dead,” Father Damien says in 1889.

That “city” is the Kalaupapa Settlement, a leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, and Father Damien speaks from the grave. He was the settlement’s priest until he contracted leprosy himself and died among his parishioners.