Valentine’s Day encourages a whole season of love, whatever that means in American culture. At least it means that the new year begins with stores overflowing with candy, flowers, cards, stuffed animals, jewelry, and other paraphernalia needed to show how buying proves we’re in love.

Valentine’s Day is a patterned American written and oral exam, testing whether you really do love someone and whether you’re really loved by someone. If they truly love you, they’ll show it through the day’s products.

More than ever before, I find myself more passionate and motivated for this up-coming Events and Weddings Season. For me this is a surprising change, because I was just SO over it right before the Holidays.

This change in passion comes with the addition of two more states proving marriage equality, (Maine and Maryland) and a huge political movement behind us. Well, the Wedding bells are ringing loudly—very loudly!

Kevin Mahler discusses BLUEBARN Theatre and their upcoming expansion in Omaha, Nebraska.
The BLUEBARN Theatre began in the late 1980's with graduates from the Professional Theatre Training Conservatory at the State University of New York at Purchase.
Seeking to continue the deeply shared artistic aesthetic and practice that they had developed over their four years of conservatory training, and also to create theatre outside the constraints of New York City's commercial market, they joined forces with the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and produced their first play: America in Pieces, three one-acts by David Mamet, Spalding Grey, and Sam Shepard. The first production was produced with $75 and two white sheets and performed in the middle of a bitter cold February. The response to the work was overwhelming, and the BLUEBARN was born.

Legend talks screen comeback, being a gay icon and her own guilt trip

Barbra Streisand takes center stage, but she’s not busting out “The Way We Were.” Not today, anyway.

The legend is promoting her first major film in 16 years at the Four Seasons Los Angeles. Her hair is perfectly coiffed and—dressed in her usual all-black attire—she’s got the off-the-shoulder look going on.

Hello, gorgeous, indeed.

Not long into the interview, a makeup artist waiting in the wings pats any remnants of forehead sweat. You don’t let a legend perspire—and Barbra Streisand is the epitome of an American treasure: a consummate singer with a timeless mezzo-soprano; an Emmy, Oscar and Grammy award winner; and the woman who stole hearts in A Star is Born. To us, a gay icon.

After a short stint of recent sold-out shows, Streisand returns to starring-role status in The Guilt Trip alongside goofball Seth Rogen—for real: Babs with the Zack and Miri Make a Porno actor—as a mother-son duo that goes road-tripping together and gets into all sorts of shenanigans. If it weren’t for director Anne Fletcher (The Proposal), who would only do the film with Babs, there’d be no movie—and, worse, no Barbra.

Streisand, along with Rogen and Fletcher, sat down to chat about the reason she finally gave in (thank her own gay son for that), what she thinks of being a gay icon and how she’s managed to stay successful for nearly six decades.

‘Miss M’ talks boys in heels, bullying and ‘bittersweet’ bathhouse days

More than 30 years have passed since Bette Midler made her screen debut as a rocker with a self-destructive drug habit. The film, 1979’s The Rose, turned the Hawaii native’s dreams, and her nights performing for half-naked gay men at a New York City bathhouse, into a legendary and undeniably influential career in music—the title song is one of her biggest hits—and in film.

Later roles would include parts in Beaches, Hocus Pocus and The First Wives Club, all of which go down as gay cult classics. A star of the stage, screen and recording studio, with numerous Grammys, Golden Globes and Emmys to her name—even the moniker “The Divine Miss M” doesn’t quite do her justice.

But now that the curtain’s closed on her two-year Las Vegas spectacle—The Showgirl Must Go On wrapped in 2010—she returns as a leading lady in her first major picture in more than a decade. In Parental Guidance, the 67-year-old plays a grandparent alongside Billy Crystal, who both try to navigate modern-day parenting conundrums when they’re stuck watching their daughter’s three kids.

In this chat with Midler, she talked about Parental Guidance—including the film’s stance on bullying—and the “bittersweet” beginning of her career.