Coveted Invitations and Crossover Proposals
We're crying on the dancefloor and thinking about 90s media again!
A quick announcement: Dames Nation, in honor of the upcoming holiday weekend, Dames Sophie & Karen will be taking next week off from writing. We’ll be gracing your inboxes again on Friday, April 22!
In the meantime, those of you who are traveling/hosting/cooking/baking for Passover or Easter or Ramadan (featuring daily fast-breaking repasts, which is a level of holiday observance we both admire and find very daunting), we’d love to hear about the delights and agonies of your preparations and celebrations. We also welcome photos or descriptions of any and all holiday finery you and/or the children in your lives may be wearing for the festivities. Dame Sophie is a sucker for some seersucker and smocking, and Dame Karen favors excellent hats and shoes.
Your Invitation To Ecstasy-Weep With Dame Sophie!
After panicking slightly on Monday while thinking “what will I even write about this week??” you know what happened? I immediately found some things to write about. LOLOLOL oh, self. You card.
This week, I learned that Hanif Abdurraqib wrote an essay for the NYT Magazine about my favorite genre of song, Sad Bangers, and I feel…extremely called out? Seen and understood? A marrow-deep kinship? All of the above and then some? This man shreds my heart with a very tiny, sharp feelings fork in every paragraph, and with such exquisite insight that I run straight for it every time. By now, at least, I know well enough to bring with me a little travel pack of Kleenex when diving into something like this:
The magic in this type of song is that it doesn’t ask you to lay your burdens down. Bring the burdens with you, if you can carry them. You don’t have to part with your precious sadness in order to enter the portal of a song that might also entice you to dance, or throw your head back in ecstasy.
If I’m being surveilled by our greatest grief-and-basketball poet during my daily ecstatic and occasionally weepy kitchen dance parties, let’s set aside any pretense at secrecy, and swap in an invitation: Hanif, you’re most welcome any time, and if it’s ok with you, I’ll invite some more members of the International Abdurraqib Admiration Society, who occasionally pause while reading to text me things like “the Whitney Houston portion of A Little Devil In America defies the words to describe how good it is. I feel extremely inferior trying to describe the quality of his writing, especially compared with his ability to describe the seemingly indescribable.” Same, same, same. If you do drop in, I promise not to get too Chris Farley, Interviewer about it.
Speaking of poetry! Especially poetry that makes me think I must have read it before, even though I’m pretty sure I haven’t! Our own darling Dame Margaret recently shared Frank O’Hara’s poem Having a Coke With You, which gave me the most disorienting reading experience. How is a poem I’ve never read, by a poet whose work I know exists but have never read in any great volume, such a strong influence on my writing, without my being aware of it until now? Here’s to being thrown most delightfully off-kilter, to not letting some marvelous experience go wasted on me (which is why I’m telling you about it).
This leads me to my current devotion to/reliance on anthologies as my go-to reading matter lately. My ability to read longform narratives is at a worryingly low ebb, and I know from past experience with reading slumps that the only way out is through, girded with lots of patience and gentleness towards myself, which is itself a challenge. My recent acquaintance with Mr. O’Hara led me to a New Yorker anthology, The 40s: The Story of a Decade, and his own Selected Poems. I’m relishing both, and for now, that’s helping me to feel both an interest in reading and the ability to do so. A poem or two each day, an essay about Iwo Jima over the course of a few days, a chuckle over a review of Casablanca that hasn’t aged super-well, all of these are a pleasure, and it’s such a treat to be able to feel that way again. Anthologies: they’re good!
And finally, please join me in celebrating this week’s most blessed anniversary of a perfect and vitally important Internet video, in which one man has a gloriously indignant, floppy-haired meltdown about Glinda, The Good Witch being a valid option as a not-quite-Disney-but-close-enough Princess. Although I am indeed going to look at him and tell him that he’s wrong on the merits, I salute his total devotion to arguing the point, a quality I certainly do not share — why on Earth would you even suggest such a thing about my yielding & uncompetitive nature? — but do admire from afar. What brio! What verve! What hilarious floppy hair-as-punctuation!
Dame Karen’s Fantasy Television Crossover Events
A few weeks ago I suggested via Twitter that a possible second season of Mare of Easttown should capitalize on the world finally realizing the greatness of Melanie Lynskey via the terrifying and excellently soundtracked Yellowjackets. (It flashes back and forth between the present and 1996, just like my brain on a daily basis, hahahahasob!) Is Lynskey finally getting her own Kathryn Hahn moment?! I continue checking the stock at Super Yaki and hope for a I’ve Always Loved Melanie Lynskey dad hat with baited breath!
My dream television crossover event entails stunt-casting Lynskey opposite Kate Winslet and reuniting the stars of the 1994 gay horror classic and Peter Jackson directorial breakthrough Heavenly Creatures. Heavenly Creatures was the cinematic debut of both Winslet and Lynskey and tells the riveting and creepy story of two New Zealand teens with an extremely intense relationship in which, among other things, they take turns pretending to be their shared object of adoration, opera singer Mario Lanza, and Orson Welles, whom they both fear and refer to as “It.” (This movie was EXTREMELY my shit in 1994 and remains so to this day.)
Anyway, Lynskey’s mother bans the two from hanging out anymore and so they decide to murder her in an attempt to stay together. By the way, it’s based on a true story and predates the true crime mania of today. Since writing that original crossover idea tweet, I’ve started watching Yellowjackets and would like to change my recommendation to Winslet making a guest appearance there…Let Kate And Melanie Murder Together Again in 2023. We the people deserve nothing less.
This led me to think about all sorts of dream stunt casting possibilities that would reunite former young stars in middle age. In all of these cases, the women in question played characters who were either implicitly or explicitly in love with each other. This was rare content in 1990s popular culture and it’s time to honor it and celebrate it with some obvious pandering to Gen X and Millennial nostalgia.
Speaking of Yellowjackets, what about using the second season for another well-deserved reunion? Much has been written about the 1995 classic Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain actually being the romantic story of two girls, played by Christina Ricci and Anna Chlumsky, falling in love and not just two young gal pals who love adventure and idolize a woman who passed as a man during the gold rush. Ricci chews up all of the scenery and is hilarious and terrifying as Misty on Yellowjackets; maybe Chlumsky guest stars and continues her run as a determined investigative journalist, as she played in Inventing Anna, and tries to get to the bottom of just wtf Misty is doing?! I’m just spitballing here and maybe it’s a little too on the nose but don’t all of us living on this completely ridiculous timeline deserve a little spoon-fed “I see what you did there!” joy?!
One more suggestion: Clea DuVall, who as an actual closeted teen played an out and proud teen in love with Natasha Lyonne in But I’m A Cheerleader in 1999, is about to play Eleanor Roosevelt’s assistant (and probably, girlfriend) Malvina “Tommy” Thompson in the upcoming The First Lady. Could she not also appear in an upcoming season of Russian Doll and reunite with Lyonne? They’re still good friends and there’s all sorts of possibilities there--a meta-commentary on being caught in a time loop? Into it! Call me, world of prestige television!
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
The impending glorious return of Derry Girls – lucky ducks in the UK will see it starting next week, and those of us in the US should focus all our energies on bullying Netflix into giving us a release date ASAP, or preferably, earlier
Dame Sophie’s Weepies Playlist – remember, the tears it induces can always be passed off as the result of seasonal allergies!
Saeed Jones on a powerful and WHEW!-provoking line from a 1987 Toni Morrison interview re: Beloved.
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