Past Events

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been canceled. Those who purchased tickets will be refunded.

In 1978, Fleetwood Mac tops the charts with Rumours, Starsky fights crime with Hutch, and 13-year-old Lou Cove is uprooted from the Upper West Side to Salem, Massachusetts—a backwater town of witches, Puritans, and sea-captain wannabes. After his eighth move in a dozen years, Lou figures he should just resign himself to a teenage purgatory of tedious paper routes and school bullies.

Then one day Howie Gordon – an old friend of Lou’s father – and his wife arrive on the Cove doorstep looking for a place to crash for a couple weeks while on their cross-country honeymoon. With a VW Bus and a stack of Playgirl magazines featuring Howie, the Coves find their whole world turned upside down overnight.

Keen to become the next Burt Reynolds, Howie enlists Lou to help him become Playgirl’s Man of the Year. As Lou and Howie canvass the uptight and puritanical streets of Salem—petitioning local pubs, school yards, and donut shops to secure the elusive title—Lou discovers there’s a lot more that goes into becoming a man than he ever could have dreamed.

Man of the Year is the improbable true story of a kid discovering himself, his family, and his manhood through one remarkable adventure.

Cove is a senior advisor to CEOs and Boards of Trustees at numerous non-profits. He is the former Executive Director of Reboot, a network of the country’s leading young Jewish creatives. He hasn’t seen a new copy of Playgirl since 1980.

In conversation with Gayle Wald, a professor of English and American studies and chair of American studies at GWU. She is the author of three books, including Shout, Sister, Shout!, a biography of the trailblazing musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe, which was the basis of the PBS documentary Godmother of Rock and is the basis of a musical opening this summer at Pasadena Playhouse. She co-edits Bloomsbury’s popular 33 1/3 series of books about albums. Book signing to follow.