Nothing Wrong With a Good Rerun
"What's a rerun?" - Back To The Future
Friends, we’re fried. We’re all fried, right? For me (Karen), personally, having lots of jobs that all needed a lot from me this week while I try to just keep living in a country that has fully slid into fascism came to a head this week, and I had two breakdowns. The first was over the hideous video of Rumeysa Ozturk getting snatched off a street I lived near for years by the disgusting, cowardly Gestapo that is, was, and always has been ICE. The second was over the song “Move On Up” by Curtis Mayfield coming on the radio as I drove to one of my jobs. [Please enjoy this excellent live performance of “Move On Up” from his 1972 appearance on the German TV show Beat Club.] Curtis Mayfield’s voice always makes me tear up a little, usually out of happiness, and “Move On Up” in particularly is usually a sure bet for making me feel a little better, but this was exhaustion and grief and sadness, and I certainly did not and do not feel capable of moving on up, but what other option do we have? (And yes, it feels absolutely absurd to break down over seeing someone kidnapped by my own government one moment and then over one of my favorite songs the next. Everything feels absurd.)
Some of my fav TBD reruns that I don’t think I mentioned the last time we did a rerun issue:
January 2025: What’s Up, Doc? Lesbians, Mostly - Margaret recommended the sparkling, peerless 1972 rom-com classic What’s Up, Doc? and then I talked about the 1960 lesbian anthology Carol In A Thousand Cities, which, yes, is a reference to THAT Carol and should come back into print with the title Harold, They’re Lesbians!
May 2024: I’ve Fallen But I Did Get Back Up - an ode to, among other things, the accidental late-in-life fame of Edith Fore, a.k.a. the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” lady.
October 2023: Now more than ever, Trying Hard Is Dangerous and Makes You Sick
July 2023: A Monday With, Well, Let’s Say Magical Michael - Holly and I got an extremely half-assed lap dance at the Pulaski Club as well as some shocking normal gossip and lived to tell about it.
September 2022: Stupid, Not Contagious - Sophie and I talked about our ongoing struggles with depression (me) and insomnia (her), and it’s all still incredibly all-too relevant!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Dame Sophie’s Jet Lagged Quality Assortment (Let’s call it short & sweet and yet also good & plenty)
Hi, Friends! I (Dame Sophie) am back from a week in London with my sister & darling child (who took the train up from school to see us & is now, like, an adult? Put that on the list of things I knew yet did not know, and which I probably won’t fully know until they’re 25 or something and honestly maybe not even then! We had a yabba-doo time that was enormously replenishing, and oh boy could I use a nap, which is probably the ideal mix of ways to feel about a week away. While we were there, the UK joined a steadily growing list of countries putting the US on a list of places their residents might rethink visiting, and that is definitely not an ideal thing to have happen pretty much ever.
March 2020: oh, man, do you remember when Dame Margaret & I wrote near-daily COVID Care Packages? Is it possible that that overly optimistic abundant flowering of #content was perhaps a contributing factor to our burnout a year or so later? Who can say???? Anyway, this brief treatise recommending the works of Sir Terry Pratchett and his gutsy tween witch Tiffany Aching, will always be apt. I wish it were not once again more apt than usual.
June 2022: Rereading Dame Karen’s and my piece on the Sex Pistols miniseries Pistol is a fun reminder that while we may find lots of fine and popular art just so-so, very often it makes for four-star springboards to five-star (yes, I said it!) conversations about art. Art’s mere existence is inherently valuable, not least because it prompts these kinds of conversations, which I like to imagine are taking place everywhere, all time, between people leaning over to each other (whether actually or just rhetorically) to say, “Hey, have you seen/read/heard XYZ? What do you think about it?” We always need as many of those conversations as possible, so go forth! Call your friend to yap about whatever The Thing is! Find your way to insights you didn’t know you had in you!
March 2016: This whole exercise in retrospection led me to search out this very badly formatted copy of Dame Margaret’s and my conversation with my Dad about nostalgia and taste formation from very early in this newsletter’s existence. Very predictably, I am nostalgic for Peak Before Times moments such as this.
Margaret has all sorts of things going on right now, including her class Mansfield Park: Adaptation as Empathy! Did you know that if you sign up for her personal newsletter you will get a free recording of the first class session?! What a bargain!
Thank you, as always, for reading and for being here with us, Dames Nation. xoxoxo
You are so good at expressing the outrage and the joy of life! Keep up the good work!