Playhouse Village Association

Vroman's Bookstore: Jeremy Atherton discusses & signs Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told
2026-06-27 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Gay Bar comes a rule-breaking, sweat-soaked, genre-busting story of outlaw love.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER The New Yorker Best Books of 2025 Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of the Year Time Out 10 Best Books of the Year NPR Books We Love 2025
It’s 1996, and Jeremy Atherton Lin has met the boy of his dreams–a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit–just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights including immigration. The pair steals away to remote forests and vast deserts, London fashion shows and Berlin sex clubs, dinner parties, back alleys, East Village hotel rooms, and San Francisco dives. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in a “city of refuge.”
With Atherton Lin’s inimitable blend of tenderness and wicked humor, Deep House moves through the couple’s string of rented apartments while unlocking doors to a lineage of gay men who have come before–smuggling a foreign partner through national checkpoints or going public to stand up for the right to get down in the privacy of their own homes. They include hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subverted the system, activists who went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the celebrated artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Following Gay Bar–called “a rich tapestry” by Vanity Fair and “an absolute tour de force” by Maggie Nelson– Deep House juxtaposes whispered disclosures of undocumented domesticity with courtroom drama and political stunts to explore myriad forms of intimacy while questioning the mechanisms that legitimize love. Deep House is at once a historical kaleidoscope and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.
A Recommended Book in the Washington Post, the New York Times Style Magazine, Observer, W Magazine, NBC News, E! Online, Queerty, Literary Hub, Stylist, & Dazed

Pasadena Heritage: The Places In Between with Andy Romanoff
2026-06-27 17:00 - 19:00 | Blinn House, 160 N. Oakland Ave., Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
Photographer and Writer, Andy Romanoff presents The Places In Between, an evening exploring travel, memory, landscape, and the strange poetry of the American road. Through short films, readings, photographs, and personal reflections, Romanoff traces the sometimes overlooked spaces between destinations: the faded towns, roadside encounters, desert highways, and fragments of memory that define the experience of travel in the American West.
Using photographs, film, and stories gathered over years on the road, the presentation moves through U.S. Route 66, the Loneliest Road, the Sierra Nevada, Silver City, roadside bars, and countless in between places typically seen through the windshield. Rather than focusing on destinations alone, The Places In Between looks at the landscapes, chance encounters, and fleeting moments that shape how we think about travel and the places we call home.
At its heart, the evening reflects on the idea that no matter how far the road stretches, every journey eventually circles back home to Los Angeles.

Pasadena Museum of History: Exploring Pasadena on Foot | Part 2: Route 66 & Car Culture in the Playhouse Village
2026-07-11 10:00 - 11:00 | Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena , CA, 91101, United States
This walking tour will pick up thematically where the previous tour finished and continue walking east on Colorado Boulevard through the Playhouse Village. Pasadena’s Playhouse Village was developed as a commercial district in the 1920s when automobile ownership was rising rapidly across the country. Many of its buildings represent important milestones in car culture, including the first parking garage in the city and a luxury car dealership catering to the Golden Age of Hollywood.
This tour will start at 585 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91101 (in front of Pasadena Presbyterian Church) and end on Colorado Blvd. & S. Lake Avenue.

Third@First: Piano Extravaganza
2026-10-18 16:00 - 17:00 | First United Methodist Church, 500 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
Acclaimed faculty pianists Bernadene Blaha (USC), Kevin Fitz-Gerald (USC), Sarkis Baltaian (Orange County School of the Arts), and First UMC’s own Junko Ueno Garrett (Occidental College) unite to play with eight hands on two pianos! Come hear music by Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Moscheles, Ravel, and Rossini.
