Greyjoy Lovejoy Almond Joy
Greyjoy Lovejoy Almond Joy
Hello, Residents of the Two Dames Kingdoms!
Game of Thrones addressing the rest of the media landscape.
As you may have guessed from our decision to schedule one of our trademark movie livetweets to conflict with the premiere of its momentous final season, neither of Us Your Dames are dedicated Game of Thrones viewers. So imagine our surprise at finding not one but TWO pieces we really loved in the deluge of anticipatory coverage.
First, from our cherished friend Christina, this piece on the various fan theories for how this final season will work out for Daenerys Targaryen greatly amused Dame Sophie even though she only knows the characters in passing, and was nearly enough to bring Dame Margaret back into the full-time viewing fold despite the fact that she gave up on the show (...[checks Wikipedia]) three full seasons ago. DANY MIGHT HERSELF BE A DRAGON????? THAT SOUNDS REALLY COOL!!
Second, there was this perfectly inspired piece of glorious silliness: Rachel Handler’s list of the 50 Most Game of Thrones-y Names on Game of Thrones, a quality Rachel describes thusly:
[Game of Thrones-y names] usually include one random additional letter, if not more. Vowels and consonants appear either too sparingly, or in confusing abundance. The names attempt but rarely achieve whimsy, instead landing somewhere between nonsensical dullness and chaos. They usually sound sort of Scottish or Irish or Welsh or Russian, or at least like somebody is gargling mouthwash while saying them. Some look like actual, normal names, but spelled by a person who has just tumbled down a hill. And they are truly impossible to recall without at least ten hints.
And then she proceeds to rank them, resulting in entries like the following:
42. Aeron Greyjoy
Name it almost is: There are nearly 30 ways to spell Aaron in our existing English language. None of them is spelled this way.
Sounds kind of: Irish
Level of whimsy: Falling into a well and staying there for a minute, smiling
It is really gloriously funny even if you know absolutely nothing about the show (this is almost the truth— Dame Sophie is a GoT abstainer but has learned a lot about the show via cultural osmosis. Madge, I soaked in it!)
Livetweet Reminder: Join us for West Side Story this Sunday at 7:30!
Who needs dragons when you have dance fights?
Forget Westeros! Come join us in seeing who reigns supreme over the Kingdom of Manhattan’s Lincoln Square: House Sharks, or House Jets! Or at least join us for the first hour and a half of Leonard Bernstein’s masterpiece, West Side Story— hopefully long enough to get you through the company reprise of “Tonight”. Here are the details:
When: Sunday, April 14th, at 7:30 PM ET
How: The movie is presently streaming for free with a Netflix subscription, but is also sure to be widely available on DVD at your local public libraries!
Where: On Twitter with the hashtag #WestSideDames
And Now, A Bossy Business Note
As they say on the infomercials, these prices won’t last forever!
We let our free subscribers know last week, but we wanted to give everyone a quick head’s up: Starting on April 20th, the price of a subscription to Two Bossy Dames is going to increase to $7/a month or $70/a year. If you are already a paying subscriber: congratulations! This doesn’t affect you at all. You and anyone else who subscribes by April 20th will continue to receive the newsletter for $5/month or $50/year for the rest of your life as a Two Bossy Dames Subscriber— only subscriptions started after the 20th will be impacted by the increase. But if you’ve been on the fence about subscribing, or have been toying with the idea of buying a gift subscription for someone in your life, the time to push the appropriate button below is now:
Your investment will see dividends almost immediately: our next paid subscriber exclusive issue goes out on Friday, April 26th, and it will contain Dame Margaret’s annual trademark round-up of cute, cheap sunglasses. (2017 edition here, to whet your appetite)
Dame Margaret’s Fictional Demands, Both Sated and Un-
Just imagine: this kind of fluffy female friendship PLUS local political minutiae! It’s a match made in heaven!
Having read this New York Times article about three progressive freshman state senators sharing a 7-room apartment in Albany, I need a Bold Type-esque television series charmingly dramatizing this scenario as SOON as possible. TRULY IT IS BEGGING TO BE FICTIONALIZED! In the meantime, I will have to do my best to content myself with The Bold Type itself, whose intrepid fashion magazine employees just returned for their third season.
And I’ll just have to IMAGINE the conversations the fictional lawmakers could have about the disappearance of Fan Bingbing, China’s biggest movie star, who vanished for six months after being caught in a tax evasion scheme this summer. Luckily for me, the resulting long read on the scandal from Vanity Fair is extremely fascinating and equally well-suited to being either the perfect reward for successfully filing your taxes OR the ideal tool for further putting that chore off.
On the subject of expensive taste, let me tell you what I would be buying for myself if I had sufficient income to justify elaborate tax evasion schemes: Blue Crow Media’s limited edition, frame-able maps indicating noteworthy Brutalist, Modernist, and Art Deco architecture in various major cities. As a noted fan of Brutalism in general and Boston City Hall in specific, I would get a pair of the maps dedicated its Boston masterpieces, I would custom frame them, and I would be a happy woman.
Speaking of great things that happened in the 1970s, this interview with rock critic Bob Christgau and novelist-journalist Carola Dibbell on their 46-year-marriage is outrageously charming, and peppered with details that render it aggressively of its time.
And finally, if profiles like that leave you longing for more love stories focused on middle-aged couples, I have great news for you!! Thanks to our beloved, New York Times-bestselling friend Jasmine Guillory, the love story demanded in the following tweet by Yours Truly is going to be a novel: Royal Holiday, out in October. So, if you have not yet read the first two books in this series, or pre-ordered the third (due out in July!), you’d better hop to it.
Advice from someone older and wiser: make sure ALL tweets you send likely to inspire future New York Times Bestsellers are completely free of typos, because the alternative is very embarrassing forever.
Dame Sophie’s Knitwear, Fiction, and Culinary Variety Hour
Friends, as you may recall from last week, my long, multifaceted campaign to summon Season 3 of The Crown continues. Doubting the power of commemorative scarves alone to get the job done, I have added knitwear to the mix. Do you remember that time in S2 when Prince Philip delivered a Christmas address— a surprisingly tender one, considering how pissy & resentful he is in nearly every scene— from a ship in Antarctica, wearing a great navy pullover with an allover birds-eye pattern? Let me refresh your memory:
My eyeballs nearly popped out of my head at this point, because my Dad had two pullovers in this style, and I snagged the navy one for myself at some point in high school. Fast forward 25 years and lo! L.L. Bean comes through with a near-perfect replica, which arrived at my house this week.
Ta-daaaaaaah! I don’t know, maybe I’m feeling Good As Hell (But Too Much?) but I’d take quizzical & puckish over pig-headed & sulking any day. I can report that this sweater is a bit scratchy, more Shetland than merino, and toasty as heck. I almost long for one last cold snap before it’s all balmy, all the time so I can wear it out once or twice before storing it for the summer.
A semi-related fact: watching the first episode of the new season of Killing Eve, I noticed that the writing & production credits named Emerald Fennell in both roles. What’s this? Nurse Patsy from Call The Midwife and Camilla Parker-Bowles from The Crown’s soon-to-grace-our-screens third season is also working on Killing Eve? Can it be? Friends, it is. I feel faint considering the scope of the Emmy and Golden Globe and BAFTA categories Fennell will be eligible to be nominated in this year. Brava!
Building on Margaret’s true & correct expression above of our joint delight in the forthcoming Royal Holiday, I need to tell you about Caity Weaver’s informative and deeply, oddly exuberant Royal Baby FAQ for the NYTimes. You’ll learn a lot reading it and may also feel like you’ve been glitter-bombed and tonstant weader-ed by the end, but in a fun way. Follow this up with a decent explainer on the Cambridges & Sussexes establishing separate households. It’s not as dramatic as the tabloids would have us believe (though I do feel in the depths of my heart that Nicole Cliffe is very onto something with this thread).
The rest of this week’s material is a real jumble sale. Strap in. First up: self-care corner! Being a person in this broken world is a lot of hard work. You might even say that making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got. Good thing artist Kate Allan is here illustrating all of the best anxiety-management tips she learns in therapy. Her gentle, relatable comics are like what those saccharine “hang in there!!” motivational posters would be like if they were actually useful. I’m particularly fond of a particular panel from Mindfulness 101, on sitting with one’s negative emotions, and basically all of Mindfulness 102: Handling Negative Emotions. We get plenty of practice with experiencing things like shame and disgust and embarrassment and fury, but precious little practice in metabolizing them healthily. We learn how to shove them away or internalize them or use them to lash out at the people around us, and all of those can be short-term adaptive strategies, but in the long term they don’t serve us well. Yes, I’m lecturing myself with the intent of better internalizing these lessons for myself, and in the hope that maybe they’ll be useful for you, too. Similar tools to keep in your back pocket: the best of The Calming Manatee (sadly, something terrible & bro-y seems to have befallen the original website, so I rely on Pinterest), this interactive self-care guide, and of course, the ultra-supportive shark.
I could attempt to torture my keyboard into yielding something insightful or marginally witty about these two pieces but I think I may just go with my original notes on them and call it a day: chonky boi fonts are making a comeback! Cold cases resolved via UNDERWEAR?!
Beverly Cleary is 103 years old today. If you know a child, or have been a child, you owe it to both them and to yourself to read her masterpieces about Ramona Quimby and her family. The Forsyte Saga? Sure. Wolf Hall? Yeah, ok. The Barchester Chronicles? I mean, I guess. For character development, insight into the complex psychology of younger siblings, the ups & downs of child friendships, the stresses everyone in a family feels due to parental job loss, and much much more, the Quimbys are where it’s at. I loved these books as a child and when I revisited them as an adult during my daughter’s Read Everything Aloud To Me Now, Please years, I gained an even deeper appreciation of Cleary as a genius of empathy. If you want to teach the children in your life to love sly humor and humane social commentary, start them early on Beverly Cleary, long may she live.
And finally, let’s talk about Laurie Colwin.
So, first of all, Rachel is 100% correct, there’s no reason in the world for us to be lavishing Bret Easton Ellis, who has revealed himself to be a wildly unintelligent person, with so much attention when Laurie Colwin & her mostly splendid oeuvre are right there. Except there is, and that is that Bret Easton Ellis is still here to be flayed alive in The New Yorker by Isaac Chotiner. Turns out being alive is a big part of getting to remain zeitgeisty and providing opportunities to relitigate one’s cultural significance, and Colwin died in 1992. I know I’ve written about her before, but I think as a culture we thirst for and benefit from work like hers, so I’ll bang on about her again.
Laurie Colwin’s novels and short stories feature flawed, recognizable protagonists you won’t just root for. You’ll know them in your bones and fret fondly over them, and years later, you’ll think “oh, I should make a lunch date with her, it’s been ages”, even though they’re fictional characters. They’re set in a very specific upper middle class New York milieu full of largely assimilated Jews, WASPs, and various other ethnic whites, all figuring things out, often messing up, and trying to just be people in the world, usually while eating some of the most delicious-sounding food, most of it aggressively homey.
The one time a fancy dish does show up— a croquembouche at a wedding breakfast in Happy All The Time— it strikes you with the force of its lavishness, its scale. This is a life cycle event, so of course it’s capped with an architectural showstopper of choux pastry, creme patissiere and caramel. I can’t tell you what I’d give to read her conversations with Michael Twitty, Nigella Lawson, and Anthony Bourdain (she would give him extremely loving hell over perfectly soft-boiled eggs and coffee so strong it would have to be FDA regulated), or her essay about the foods Carol and Therese order in Carol, or her thoughts about The Great British Bake-Off.
Unsurprisingly, Colwin’s food writing— columns she wrote for Gourmet, of blessed memory, and compiled in Home Cooking and More Home Cooking— is also aces! Her essay on biscuits made me get right up & bake a fairly competent batch the moment I finished reading it. I would not think of letting summer pass by without baking one of her tomato and corn pies (she was right, it is perfect cold with a huge glass of iced tea), and her Wensley cake is the only good dried fruit cake. At a time when I felt very daunted by cooking, she extended an implacably encouraging hand to anyone with a whisper of a thought to try.
I’m convinced that the genius of both her food writing and her fiction is in the small revelations of the intimacy she brings to every page. You clear the dishes from the brunch table, pouring all the leftover coffee into a single cup and drink it down surreptitiously, knowing it’s a little bit disgusting but enjoying it anyway. You’re a distracted mess because you’ve fallen in love with the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time. You sprinkle a little salt on top of the sweet butter you just slathered onto a slice of toast. Your family relationships are in total disarray but you bump into a friend walking down the street and they say something bracing that buoys you up.
All of this may sound very familiar to you. On the food side, this is Samin Nosrat’s whole Salty Fatty Acidic Hot deal. Fictionally, If you’ve enjoyed Nora Ephron’s essays or movies, or a single scene of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, part of that is Colwin’s influence. More contemporarily, Elin Hilderbrand owes her entire Nantucket: It’s Surprisingly Complex Here On This Idyllic Island! career to Colwin, and she knows it. She put a copy of Colwin’s richest novel, Family Happiness in the writing nest of one of her protagonists in The Rumor. I hooted aloud when I spotted it, and will never forget it.
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