Molly: I didn’t think we had a hometown

I shut off the lights and closed the wide barn doors.

“Once upon a midnight dreary,” Jenn said softly, “while I pondered weak and weary...”

Guests, ranging in age from 8 months to 89 years, sat in rows on old couches and folding chairs. They leaned in close to hear my best friend recite “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe. She’d memorized all 18 stanzas for her performance in “The Molly Rose Show,” an annual talent show and birthday party that I hosted in the barn behind my mother and stepfather’s house in Englewood, N.J. Over the years, acts have included readings from a childhood diary, hip-hop dancing, and a ventriloquist act with a baby dressed as the dummy. 

“The Molly Rose Show” came to an ...