I could write a love letter to Alexis Boozer's interpretation of Estelle in Bekah McNeil's production of No Exit. She walked in and the whole show jumped up a notch- really, the epitome of grace and elegance on stage, her characterization so crisp you could have opened letters with it. Unfortunately for me, at that point my only direct working experience with Alexis Boozer was that she designed and assembled the scenery for my production of Love's Labors Lost. Lucky for me, she really knew what she was doing and it all turned out great, really incorporating the atmosphere of the Exit Theater and turning it into the quintessential faux dive bar. A successful commercial actress and a true southerner, she had enough first hand experience to authenticate the Mardi Gras decorations and thanks to her I'm now the proud owner of several hundred strings of Mardi Gras beads, not to mention a great deal of bar paraphanelia and many bolts of purple fabric. But it was worth it all just to give the folks in the show a great place to act in, and should I ever open up a bar in real life, I know exactly who I'm gonna call to help decorate. Since then, Alexis and I have had the chance to work together as actors, appearing together in No Nude Men's contribution to the 2006 San Francisco Theater Festival: a thirty minute version of Les Miserables in which Alexis played both Fantine and Cosette. Fantine was southern and had electric purple hair; Cosette had blonde braids and a somewhat baffled expression on her face the whole time. Both were screamingly funny, thoroughly realized, and just the tiniest bit elegant in spite of the ludicrousness of the production. It made you want to marry Alexis Boozer, graceful even in her sneakers, under the blazing sun of a San Francisco heat wave. Still, Less Miserable may have doomed her to a life opposite James Tinsley, who played her Marius and later on, in my gender-bending production of Hamlet, Guildenstern to her Rosencrantz. Just similar enough in frame and feature, the pair played Shakespeare's famous duo as a couple (or possibly siblings) on the worst vacation of their life, sent to Elsinore to cheer up a friend only to find the situation far worse than they could imagine. Alexis made her Rosencrantz the more ostensibly feisty of the two, quick to make jokes or reproach Hamlet for her negativity, but when the moody Dane confronts her with her own duplicity Alexis pulled off one of the show's most touching moments, bursting into tears each night at the accusations of her friend- and only once because she'd twisted her ankle five minutes before and the pain was genuine. Always a team player, she limped through her last scenes like nothing was wrong and still managed to run out during the final escape before the Elsinore bloodbath, and in the hall, watching her laugh through her tears, I kept thanking whatever higher power it is that keeps sending me the most beautiful women in the world to cast.