For this year's queer issue, Blanchard wrote a touching and wickedly funny essay about what happened when her husband of seven years became her wife called "Vi and Me":

After the initial drama, Vi and me are better and closer and happier than we were. The only real crap is other people. Which comes as no surprise, I guess. We've always believed most people are rat-bastards and phonies and the world is circling the drain toward the inevitable terrible end times. We have what marriage counselors call a firm philosophical foundation. Our sense of doom is a bond. But it's one thing to believe that and another thing to have it shoved into your face when you're just trying to buy a bag of kitty litter. People gawk at us, yell at us from cars, ram their strollers into telephone poles. You get tired of it. Okay, you don't get tired of people ramming their strollers into telephone poles. That's funny every time. But, yes: Ignorant people will suck the fun out of a trip to the gun shop, and that's a shame.

Blanchard is also a local playwright her 2010 play Hearts Are Monsters (reviewed here) was also touching and wickedly funny. (That's her specialty.) She has another play coming up, this time at Annex Theater, called Kittens in a Cage, which sounds like a riff on the old B movies about women in prison. (The audition notice and description is here, but they're already in rehearsals.)

It opens in late July. I have high hopes.