A Clip Show Issue! ✂️

Starring: some choice excerpts of reruns from our archives

Greetings, Dames Nation! It’s mid-October! We Northern Hemisphere types are starting to layer for warmth more frequently, the clocks are about to change (plunging us into the depths of Gloomvember, but we persevere), and you know who’s short on original insights but long on high quality archives? This newsletter! Accordingly, we’ve gone spelunking in our archives for some primo October content, shared in the manner of a good old fashioned 20th century sitcom clip show. 

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Dame Sophie Says: Play Ball!

Last year I wrote a longish reverie about the Phillies, and about the game where they ultimately clinched the NLDS championship, sending them to the 2022 World Series. As I reread the issue to choose a bit to share here, this sentence stopped me cold (in a nice way):

Can you imagine the effect this game would have on me if I were watching it for real? I am way too romantic about baseball to withstand a full dose of these emotions in a sold-out crowd.  

Well, this is a real O my prophetic soul situation, because I’ve attended three games in 2023, including an absolute romp of a sold-out NLCS game this very week. I caught a cold, and may not be able to stay up for tonight’s game, but it’s worth it to have made such incredible memories with friends and to have seen these very good, very odd baseball boys do their thing at such a high level in person.  

Speaking of The Atmosphere, a huge part of its fascination for me is rooted in seeing men be very emotional in emotional moments. That’s nothing new in general, of course, but it’s especially intense right now. I’m thinking specifically about the (putatively all very heterosexual) Phillies and their post-win locker room celebrations to the strains of the very very queer GOAT of Crying on the Dancefloor Jams, “Dancing on My Own”. (Their favorite is a cover, which is fine, but I will accept no substitutes; it’s Robyn all the way.)

I often find myself sort of cocking my head to the side and thinking about how sad it is that our culture has such a hard time acknowledging that men experience—but outside of very specific circumstances—aren’t allowed to express a broad range of human feelings. Sometimes those feelings are tender and loving, and don’t fit neatly in boxes marked “Anger” or “Joy”, and so they agree to force too many feelings into these neat little boxes of emotional ticky-tacky, and then they have a tendency to, uh, erupt in many celebratory bottles of champagne. 

The excerpt above is from when Dame Karen interviewed me about my transformation into A Sports Lady (if this were a 2023 interview, I’d say I’m in my sports era), and this bit of back-and-forth about the Phillies 2022 playoffs run and the ways sports provide venues for the expression of male emotions is even more resonant than it was in 2022. 

The degree to which this season’s Phillies team has openly embraced how much fun they have together and how much they love each other has been astonishing, as has their pursuit of increasingly deep necklines on their jerseys. What are they thinking about as they run the bases? Getting back to the dugout as quickly as possible because time spent away from their teammates is not nearly as fun. Where did they get those snazzy, sparkly necklaces shown off to such lovely advantage with all their undone jersey buttons? From ace relief pitcher José Alvarado, who is creative and thoughtful and would really like for his family to get visas so they can come from Venezuela to watch him play. Calum Scott’s cover of “Dancing on My Own” is still their playoffs celebration jam (catapulting the song to 1 billion streams to date on Spotify), Scott has been tweeting about how keen he is to come play the song in Philly, and the atmosphere in the clubhouse has only grown more powerful under the leadership of Chief Vibes Officer and beer transportation disruptor/sustainable millinery innovator and overalls enthusiast Garrett Stubbs. More, more, more of all of this, please!

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We’re Not Heartbreakers, We Just Love Tom Petty

Today is Tom Petty’s birthday! He’d have been 73. And yesterday was the 44th (!) anniversary of the release of the Heartbreakers’ breakthrough album Damn the Torpedoes! Karen once wrote about Tom’s anti-corporate activism in which he refused to let his record company up the price of Damn’s follow-up album Hard Promises by a dollar because, in his words, “A lot of our fans have been with us for a long time, and I think they trust us. MCA has done a great job selling our records, but they couldn't see the reality of what it's like on the street — they couldn't see that raising the album's price wouldn't be fair.”

We’re breaking out a couple of paragraphs from Dame Sophie’s remembrance segment the week he died in October 2017, and an anecdote from Tom’s friend of many decades, Stevie Nicks, about the songwriting advice he gave her in a low period. 

​So the first thing you need to know about Tom Petty is that he wrote perfect first lines to songs. “Baby, don’t it feel like heaven right now?” “Well, she was an American Girl, raised on promises” “You think you’re gonna take her away with your money and your cocaine” “You know, sometimes, I don’t know why, but this whole town just seems so hopeless” “Honey, don’t walk out, I’m too drunk to follow” “Baby, you come knockin’ on my front door, same old line you used to use before” - there’s a zillion of them, all lines Raymond Carver would have given his eye teeth to write.

I hope it does feel like Heaven right now, you deserve that, Tom

I went back to re-listen to all of those first lines today and found myself listening to the entire first verse and chorus of each one. Every one of those songs adheres beautifully to a longtime motto of the Heartbreakers, “don’t bore us, get to the chorus!”, doing just that within the first minute and a quarter. Not just getting to the chorus, getting to the end of it and launching into the second verse. Songwriting! Let’s also take a moment to rewatch one of the best moments in musical history EVER aka the performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” from the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. (Both Prince and George Harrison were inducted that year!) Karen just refers to this performance as “my guys” because she gets too sad trying to describe what’s happening here.

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Britney Spears Revisits Her 2003 Fling With Colin Farrell 🔥🔥🔥— I (Karen) am so entirely ready for The Woman In Me to ruin my life!!!

Naima Cochran on why older rappers are still selling out tours.

How To Fix The Internet by Katie Notopoulos is a good read.

I’ve been getting more into short films and Celia Mattison’s “How To Put On A Shorts Program” from her excellent newsletter Deeper Into Movies is a great primer. Tipper Newton’s gorgeous Wild Card was “inspired by neo-noirs and erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s” [see?!?!] and I still haven’t recovered from Todd Rohal’s Rat Pack Rat.