Make Every Day a Challah Day
Yes, Dame Sophie may have written about it last week, but we’re not afraid of doubling down: Netflix’s new adaptation of Ann M. Martin’s classic series The Baby-Sitters Club is exquisite.
If all this show offered us was Cladia Kishi’s outfits? Dayenu, honestly.
Much like Dame Sophie, Dame M. did not grow up with The BSC. While she was the perfect age for them, a combination of bad librarianship (the exceptionally mean librarian at her elementary school refused to collect series fiction) and bad personal principles (she did not outgrow the belief that anything popular must be bad until she was at least 24) led to a near-complete ignorance of the books until this very year, when she read her first for the Shit She Reads podcast (Super Special #7: Snowbound). And yet, despite being well outside the target audience of the show (Easter eggs for millennial viewers aside) and lacking any kind of fannish claim to the source material, both Your Dames are completely in love with the TV adaptation. Some bullet points:
The show is perfectly tonally assured— it knows exactly what it wants to be and it is the perfect version of that thing. For more on that theme, you’ll want our dear friend Kathryn’s excellent essay on the subject.
Based on his work as Kevin on Brooklyn 99, we both already knew we’d die for Marc Evan Jackson. But until seeing him as Mary Anne’s anxious widower father, we did NOT know how HARD we’d die for him, and what a song this sacrifice would put in our hearts.
The soundtrack absoLUTEly slaps— the aesthetics of the show across the board are a sheer delight
The child actors are fantastic
The complexity of the subjects the show is willing to take on is impressive— even more remarkable is how nimbly it addresses them and in what completely age-appropriate ways it presents them. It is masterful writing and it’s hard not to appreciate it.
On a completely different subject, we loved this prompt from Soroya McDonald and we’d love to know your answers:
Dame Sophie’s first choice for the full Masterpiece Theatre treatment is Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. Drawing on literary and folklorical influences from Shakespeare (particularly The Tempest and King Lear, but Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet, as well) to Hoodoo/African-American folk magic, Naylor’s moving romantic & family drama is engrossing, exquisite, and so rich with everyday and life-altering magic that it deserves a lavish miniseries adaptation and then some. Give us six episodes by 2022, please!
Meanwhile, what Dame Margaret would like for Their Eyes Were Watching God is what Jane Eyre already has: a new cinematic adaptation for every generation. I would like a starchy one from the 1940s where the story has been warped a little to fit the Big Studio expectations— not right, but so fun in its own right you don’t even mind. I would like a lush, technicolor adaptation from the late 1950s that skirts the edge of being too much but manages to land in just right. I want a sparse, poetic version that focuses on Janie’s interior life and lets plot drift through its fingers. But, most of all, I want this:
Dame Margaret Will Be Peeling Herself Off The Floor Any Minute Now
Mood.
I have entered the rebellious fantasy vacation planning stage of endless quarantine, which means this imaginary itinerary for an ideal road trip to Prince Edward Island is exactly what the doctor ordered.
I am also experiencing extreme public transit nostalgia meaning I’m even more primed than average to receive demands that public buses be made free for all to ride with rapturous applause.
Other predictable quarantimes activities in which I have been indulging: contemplating getting a new hobby. Right now, thanks to hot-as-hell- Sengalese-German roller skater Oumi Janta, roller dancing seems like exactly the thing for me?
But best of all, I have found a new dream and a new podcast with a deep back catalog into which to dive: Blank Check podcast. Contrary to my previously unexamined assumption, this podcast has nothing to do with the (dreadful) 1994 family film Blank Check, about the fun a boy has when Miguel Ferrer hands him a blank check and he uses it to commit financial fraud. No, instead, it’s a podcast that examines the film trajectories of directors who achieve huge success early in their career and what they do with the “blank check” that early success gives them. I started at the beginning of their recent Nora Ephron series and fell so hard and so fast for their episode on When Harry Met Sally that I became determined to someday be a guest. If you, like me, are instinctively leery of 2-hour long podcasts hosted by white male comedians, let me assure you: this is the exception to the rule. It is actually both as smart and as funny as it thinks it is-- maybe even MORE so. I’m deep in their series on Nancy Meyers (“Something’s Podda Cast!”) and loving every minute. Join me and all the other Blankies-- you won’t regret it.
Dame Sophie’s Whatever She Darn Well Pleases, It’s FRIDAY
Whomst can say, but I hear tell they are a necessary treasure
Stone fruit season is here, huzzah!! Surely I’m not the only weirdo who has ranked her favorite produce seasons? Stone fruit season is my #1 with a bullet but I’m also very fond of early asparagus, peak berries, and squash seasons, respectively. Naturally, I’d love to hear about yours! This stone fruit season, thanks to a combination of pandemic staying home boredom and native curiosity, mine own teen child has taken to baking pies— cherry coconut almond pie and lemon chess pie so far, with hopes of more to come— and I’m similarly inspired to try this truly crisp nectarine crumble with today’s haul from the local farmstand. My mom, a summer fruit crumble expert second to none, flagged the NYT Cooking recipe for me, and it’s so scrumptious I wish I could send you each a little bowl of it.
I’m leaving the house more frequently these days and wearing my mask for longer periods when I do so, and my skin hates this development. At least the mask covers the blemishes it fosters, but it’s so frustrating to have finally gotten one’s adult acne under control in one’s 40s, only to see it all go to hell again for reasons one can’t shrink from. What’s a social contract-devoted sufferer to do? I’m relying heavily on products for sensitive skin and gentle acne-treating products. Most of these are ones I’ve used for a while, but I’m being extra-careful with them. As soon as I get home after wearing a mask out & about, I put the day’s mask right in the laundry (no wearing multiple times between washes!) and wash my face with either Avene’s XeraCalm cleanser or Paula’s Choice Pore Normalizing Cleanser, to sweep away the grime & sweat of the day. Current treatment staples include the classic COSRX one-two of their goop-draining acne patches and skin-healing centella cream, and Payot’s only-at-home Pate Grise (which absolutely will get all over your pillowcases but blessedly also washes right out).
As your Internet Mom living in a surprisingly tropical area, I am equally compelled to share two of my most important go-to products that help me survive the hottest, humid-est days of summer: Jockey’s thigh-saving slip-shorts, so essential for the skirt-and-dress-wearers among us, and rehydration powders you can mix with water to prevent heat exhaustion & fainting spells. Pro-tip: keep some Pedialyte pops in your freezer and take one prophylactically each day. Are they as delicious as a Dove bar? No. Will they stop a heat-induced headache in its tracks? You bet! (Also great for recovering from day-drinking!)
Even though I’ve already been slowly rewatching The Americans over the last year, and am about to start rewatching Season 6, the results of a fan poll of the show’s Top 15 Needle Drops have me thinking I should just go back and re-re-watch from the pilot onward. I mean...a murder set to Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love”! Kidnapping someone set to Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain! Hot espionage partners-to-lovers boning to Queen & Bowie’s “Under Pressure”! Sweet slow-dancing in Oklahoma queued to Alabama’s “Old Flame”! Like Elizabeth & Philip themselves, the show is a brilliant marriage of form and function, and I don’t know when we’ll see its like again.
Beloved Friend Of The Newsletter Kathryn VanArendonk has been doing the Lord’s own work bringing more souls to the completely, perfectly ridiculous church of What We Do In The Shadows and this week has yielded her masterpiece on the subject to date, a character study of vampire’s familiar Guillermo de la Cruz and the perfection of Harvey Guillen’s performance in the role. Guillermo forever!!
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
The gentle, meticulous eroticism of Henry Cavill building his custom gaming computer
Happy 10th Anniversary to PCHH, without which it would have taken a while longer for Your Dames to meet and fall in friend-love
Finding the Very Card that marked the beginning of this beautiful friendship!
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