Dames Nationals! Spring Tunez Season is Finally Upon Us!
SHIMMY SZN!!!!
Celebrate by dancing to this custom Spotify playlist We Your Dames put together to entice and celebrate the sunny weather, and convince it to stay. We can think of few things better than strolling down the street on a sunny afternoon with these songs in your ears and your unnecessary coat forgotten at the office.
April Livetweet Announcement: West Side Story! Sunday, April 14th! 7:30 PM ET!
To celebrate the official return of Dance (Fighting) in the Streets Weather to the United States’ Northeast, We Your Dames are hosting a livetweet of one of the greatest stage-to-screen musicals of all time: WEST SIDE STORY! Whether it’s a classic you’ve yet to make time to watch or one you’ve seen a million times before, we’re confident that for Rita Moreno’s Anita alone, it will be an excellent way to spend your Sunday night.
When: Sunday, April 14th, at 7:30 PM ET
How: The movie is presently streaming for free on Netflix, but is also sure to be widely available at your local public libraries!
Where: On Twitter with the hashtag #WestSideDames
So dust off your dancing sneakers, flounce up your sassiest petticoats, and get ready to mambo!
Dame Margaret’s Ten Links She Loves About You
FACT: Heath’s surprise stadium karaoke >>>>> John’s boombox. Don’t @ me.
On Sunday, March 31st the basically perfect teen rom-com 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU turned 20, which is wild given that Dame Margaret has somehow not aged one day since its release. One way to mark this Momentous Occasion: revisit Alanna Bennett’s excellent profile of the screenwriting duo responsible for both IT and Legally Blonde-- Karen McCullah and Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith.
Make yourself a nice drink and settle in to enjoy two truly fantastic longreads-- first, from our eternal #damesfav Rachel Syme on the feminist paradox of Cathy Guisewite, the cartoonist indirectly responsible for introducing “Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate! Aack!” into my everyday lexicon. (A profile that works particularly well in conversation with this interview of Olivia Jaimes, the cartoonist who’s revitalizing comic sheet standard ‘Nancy’.)
And second, this astonishingly nuanced and extremely well-reported piece from The Guardian on the long fight against racism in romance novels.
Now cleanse your palate with this refreshingly direct, surprisingly incisive interview with Abigail Disney (yes, of THOSE Disneys) on what it’s like to grow up with more money than you can ever spend.
Then give yourself some warm fuzzies by reading about the friendship and collaborative working relationship of Chris Cerf and Norm Stiles, the Sesame Street songwriting team behind such classics as “Put Down the Duckie.”
Learn about the magical vagaries of cured sausages with this deep dive into the science behind what makes pepperoni slices curl on pizza.
And spend some time admiring THE INNATE INGENUITY OF TEENS by reading about how they’ve adopted Google Docs as their newest chat platform.
Then, in advance of the release of the (seriously excellent) fourth book in Lucy Parker’s London Celebrities’ romance series, consider treating yourself to a stupidly affordable omnibus of the first three books in the series for just $1.99. Actors in London’s West End falling in love! What more could you want! (Answer: a little more diversity, given that only one of the four couples featured in the books involves *A* non-white character, but hey: pobody’s nerfect).
And while we’re talking about buying things, this yellow gingham dress from Old Navy (available up through a size 4X) is just BEGGING to be worn on an impromptu picnic some surprisingly lovely day in the next month.
And last but not least: enjoy CityLab’s rubric for what constitutes good public transit fabric, a subject I am incapable of mentioning without also calling out Menja Stevenson’s project of making outfits out of German public transportation fabrics.
An outfit designed and photographed by Menja Stevenson that Dame Margaret would be absolutely thrilled to own.
Dame Sophie is Out of Gas, Again!
Unlike poor spew-prone Phil here, I’m not at all partied out, just ground down, but the effect is much the same! What a drag!
Fortunately, though, like sweetly supportive problem-solver Garth, I remain hopeful!
Hi, friends! Thanks to a combo pack of sky-high pollen counts and gestures broadly life stuff, here we are at the end of the week and I am tapped directly out. Running on engine-knocking fumes. Weary. And yet writing this newsletter with one of my best friends, where I get to share wonderful things with you, is a highlight of my week. What’s a Dame to do? I’m going to take my own damn advice and focus on maintenance, by showing up here as regularly as possible, on a smaller scale than usual.
I read a lot of Internet in a normal week, and generally I push myself to do a bit more reading and thinking specifically for the newsletter. Normally, that suits me just fine. For the next while, though, I’m going to be slowing down a bit and will most likely share with you things that are easiest for me to share. I hope the lower-hanging fruit here will still be tasty for you. In the loosely paraphrased words of another Mike Myers protagonist, I hope to have my mojo back soon (baby).
As you may know, I am a very powerful culture witch. This is both a joke and not. Like, I don’t literally believe in magic or miracles or special powers, but a thing that has actually happened is that I read, like, a whopping three middle grade fiction titles in 2016 and wished very very hard that one of them, The Girl Who Drank The Moon by Kelly Barnhill, would win the Newbery Medal, and then it did. Last week, Dame Margaret & I unveiled our Summoning Springtime playlist on Spotify and then on Monday, Carly Rae Jepsen announced the May 17 release of her forthcoming album Dedicated and her summer tour. Coincidence? PROBABLY! But also maybe not? All of which is to say, I am applying my most-likely totally fake but hopefully real powers to the problem of Season Three of The Crown. Friends, I need this. I need to see Olivia Colman & Tobias! Menzies! (respectively, the queen & king of my heart) going toe-to-toe in a huge number of Emmy-and Golden Globe-baiting scenes. I need to see the Many Somewhat Mod Shenanigans of the House of Windsor dramatized for my delectation & discussion. I have already completed my initial summoning rituals, a full rewatch of Seasons One and Two (except for that episode where poor Charles is so miserable at Gordonstoun), and a full reread of Tom & Lorenzo’s costume analyses. And yet I wait. This is rude on the part of Netflix, but I persist.
I have now kicked things up a notch by resorting to careful shopping-as-summoning. Enabled by Dame Margaret herself, I have acquired two modestly priced commemorative silk scarves, one created for ERII’s coronation in 1953, one for Trooping The Colour in 1950, and this pullover that is a dead ringer for the one Prince Philip wears in the episode of S2 where he has to give a Christmas Day speech from Antarctica pullover. Through midnight tonight, everything at L.L. Bean seems to be 25% off on top of sale prices so with the double discount, the sweater is a not-totally-unreasonable-for-a-lifetime-guaranteed-item $108. If we get a final release date for Season 3 in the next 6-8 weeks, we’ll know these enchantments definitely for sure worked. Even if we don’t believe in magic (but kind of do).
Although I’ve been finding most Internet reading too exhausting to contemplate lately, I have been reveling in books, particularly some really dense and sad ones. Brains are weird! Last week, I finished SAY NOTHING, by Patrick Radden Keefe, about a long-unsolved politically motivated disappearance/murder during The Troubles. He weaves together political & social history at this macro level and then zooms really far into the consequences of the murder for the victim's family and her perpetrators (he does figure out who struck the killing blow in the end, in a way that made this research nerd’s heart sing and break simultaneously). It's dazzling and sobering at once.
This has sent me down a whole 20th century Irish history rabbit hole, which I’ll be detailing in a future issue of Premium Yelling. This has led me to, among other things, MILKMAN, by Anna Burns. Set in the 1970s in Belfast, the protagonist is an 18 year-old girl who has to spend all her considerable intellect and energy on avoiding getting entangled with a Provisional IRA soldier while also not telling him to fuck off, lest she further endanger herself, her family, her entire neighborhood. The voice of the nameless bookworm narrator -- sharply observant, wry, furious, resigned, digressive like whoooooa -- sucked me in from page one. It also won the Man Booker Prize this year, which I understand is quite a good thing.
I also loooove an audiobook, and after hearing Beth Macy on the Longform podcast last year, I knew I’d want to read her latest, DOPESICK, which is the most humane and critical reporting on the opioid epidemic I've ever read. Macy reads the audiobook herself & I love her voice. She isn't a performer, just an expert, cogently and warmly connecting the tragic dots for you. Macy couldn’t have known when she published Dopesick that the Sackler family, owners of Oxycontin creators Purdue Pharma, would now be facing (as documented by the NY Times in both of the articles linked here) scorching civil lawsuits, along with crumbling prestige in the arts community now, but I hope that both she and the families she writes about feel some small measure of justice is finally being meted out.
Some things I plan to read (honestly, I might not, as the state of my tabs is absurd, but I find that I do revisit back-issues to read things Margaret has linked to that I haven’t gotten to in a given week, so why not treat my own links the same?) include our beloved Nicole Chung’s essay on being the “right” kind of transracial adoptee, beloved DamesPal Karen Corday’s deep dive into 90s dessert scourge Snackwell’s, super-incisive Emma Fraser’s piece on the parallels between A+ TV husbands Philip Jennings of The Americans and Joel Hammond of Santa Clarita Diet, the GOAT Jia Tolentino’s report from the front lines of the American Copy Editors Society conference, a profile of Pepperidge Farms’ founder Margaret Rudkin, the history and impact of the 1994 film Reality Bites, and Ann Powers’ devastatingly moving reporting and reflection on the death of Kurt Cobain, also from 1994. I did read this one today, and want to note that although Powers published it shortly after Kurt’s death, and it is very emotional, it’s also a carefully measured, room-temperature take, which is one of the highest compliments I can pay from my perch in the weird streets of Hot Takesville. (Something something Alexis de…Takesville? What if 18th century puns, but too much? I dunno, friends, if I don’t have my dumb jokes as a tool to insulate me a teensy bit against 25 year-old grief, what do I have? I know, I should do better but I can’t be earnest 100% of the time. As a small bit of recompense, here’s a great thread of material from Nirvana’s 2014 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame from smarties Joe & Kristen at Who Cares About The Rock Hall? Spoiler: I do.)
And finally, Monday was a very happy day for my inbox, as it marked the glorious return of DamesPal and guest editor emerita Julia Carpenter’s own excellent newsletter, A Woman To Know. Each issue furnishes a brief introduction to the life & accomplishments of a woman you may or may not already be familiar with, concluding with links for further reading if you are so moved. It is an erudite, snack-sized delight, and I’m so glad it's back, so I can once again recommend subscribing (in addition to deep dives into the archives)!
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