Roxanne Coady: Out of the Bookstore and Onto the Stage

If you started a conversation with Roxanne Coady as strangers, chances are you probably ended it as friends. Coady, a Branford resident and owner of in Madison, is using her skills as a conversationalist to highlight some of the best authors of our day.

Teaming up with Branford’s own Greg Nobile of Greg Nobile Presents, Coady will be offering a to benefit Branford's at The Kate on Monday, July 21 with James B. Stewart, former page-one editor at the Wall Street Journal and author of several books including his latest, Tangled Webs.

Sitting in the café of her now 21-year-old, independently owned bookshop, Coady is invigorated and energized about the interview, which might develop into a monthly series with GNP. “We’re booksellers,” she said, “not producers,” so the partnership is allowing her to bring her intimate conversations with renowned authors and celebrities out of the small space of the bookstore and onto a large stage for many to enjoy.

Though not the first time she’s done a live interview, (Coady has interviewed Rosanne Cash, Norah Ephron and Anna Quindlen), the meeting with Stewart is part of what Coady sees as an addition to economy and the literary community. “It’s good for the vitality of the community, good for economic development and it’s fun,” she said. “Getting these authors is good for everyone. It’s good because more people should read.”

Though a well-read woman, Coady still takes the time to prepare for each interview she hosts and states that she reads the author’s books and Google’s their name until she feels satisfied enough to have a conversation.

Coady said she digs to find tidbits about people and then looks for the right opportunity to ask them questions others might not dare to do.

When interviewing Christopher Plumber, famed actor known best as Captain Von Trapp from The Sound of Music, Coady said she uncovered an audio piece where he performed Hamlet on stage drunk. She asked if he often drank before going on stage. “Some of it,” she said of her interviews, “is a little serendipitous, but I look at everything.”

Not in the business of conducting gotcha-interviews, Coady said, “I am interested in trying to get at who they really are.”

Stewart, who has authored the blockbuster, Den of Thieves and Blood Sport, will be sharing an evening with Coady where she said, she’ll discuss his recent work that is “lose and fast with the truth.”

The first to explore the genre of financial journalism that reads like fiction, Coady said she is anticipating a good interview with Stewart. “He has incredible integrity as a journalist and all his books have that.”

Stewart’s latest work explores casual lying, said Coady.  The book tells the stories of Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff in addition to other modern financial villains and explores, “how false statements are undermining America.”

The timely topic of money, greed and lies is something Coady said she cares deeply about. “I think we’ve grown from a society where we thought about ourselves as citizens first and we’ve gone to a place where we think of ourselves as consumers first.”

Though the venue of the intimate bookshop that many have come to know and love will change as Coady embarks on this new venture of theater-set interviews, she insists that the audience will still feel like the are “eavesdropping on a conversation.”

"To me, she said,” it’s how you have the conversation. The venue is not as mitigating as the conversation.”

Tickets for the show are available at The Kate box office and online at www.thekate.org; $25 for general admission, $75 includes pre-show reception. There will also be a silent auction and all proceeds will benefit .