Hi! Happy September! How’s your week been? Mine’s been pretty good. I was delighted to get to see David Byrne’s Who is the Sky? tour again, this time at a very different venue (last time it was indoors at the Kodak, this time was at the very-much-outdoors Hollywood Bowl). It’s genuinely one of the most stunning things I’ve ever seen on a stage — to the point that I was getting annoyed with the people dancing around me because they were ignoring the astonishing visuals unfolding in front of us. sigh! I don’t begrudge people their visceral connection to music, of course! I just was sitting there with my raging OCPD going “YOU’RE MISSING HALF OF THE EXPERIENCE YOU ABSOLUTE DINGDONGS”. Oh well. The really great news is that Brady Corbet shot a 70mm film version of the show, so we’ll all get the chance to properly soak in the entire experience in a dark air-conditioned room very soon! I loved The Brutalist, so I can’t wait to see what Corbet brings to the table with this.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

showtunes and the British Invasion

For research purposes (yes, really) I am in the process of slowly working my way through every movie I can get my hands on from the 1960s that featured an act from the British Invasion. I’m not talking the obvious ones — as has been exhaustively documented in this space, A Hard Day’s Night is a forever favorite of mine. No, we’re going deeper than that, baby.

How deep? Well, this week I rented a 1965 movie from Vidiots called When the Boys Meet the Girls, which is a very, very loose adaptation of the Gershwins’ 1930 musical Girl Crazy starring Harve Presnell and Connie Francis and featuring (mostly in musical cameos) Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Louis Armstrong, Liberace and Herman’s Hermits. Reader, this movie is bad. The story is as dull as it is convoluted, Presnell and Francis have zero chemistry, and the musical numbers (such as they are) are mostly a slog. It’s a real Mad Libs of a cinematic experience that can’t decide who its audience is, which is to be expected when half the songs are awkwardly shoehorned Gershwin standards and the other half are awkwardly shoehorned current pop tunes.

While I very much don’t recommend seeking out the entire thing unless you’re bored and morbidly curious and can check it out for free (like I did), there is one moment halfway into this film that lit up the pleasure center of my brain like a Christmas tree: a Herman’s Hermits cover of the Gershwins’ “Bidin’ My Time”:

My kingdom for this track to be streaming anywhere! Yes, sure, Peter Noone biffs the key “time/I’m” rhyme (give him a break, he was like 17 at the time), but the vocal is so sweet and the arrangement is SO GOOD.

Because I’m me, this led me to thinking about the great and grand tradition of British Invasion showtune covers. A common theme that has cropped up in a lot of the interviews I’ve read/listened to with British artists of the time is “we were selling American music back to America”, which is both fascinating and kind of a lot to unpack. While most of the music being sold was decidedly more in the lane of rock ‘n’ roll and R&B, the fact of the matter is that these guys got their feet in the door by specifically winning over American girls, and so sometimes they had to get a bit soppy. (The fact that these groups were good enough to appeal to everybody is why it was ultimately so effective, but make no mistake: there was a target, and boy did they ever hit it.) And at that moment in time, where were all the good soppy love ballads to be mined from American popular music? That’s right: Broadway musicals.

This is cued to arguably the OG in this subgenre — the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with “Till There Was You” from my nerd predecessor Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. The Music Man takes place in 1912, which makes it seem much older than it is, but actually it was still relatively new at the time — the original Broadway production had closed less than three years before this broadcast, and the film version was barely a year and a half old. (Shoutout to my Grandpa Tom, it was his favorite movie.)

There’s another track from the British Invasion showtunes oeuvre that has had a fairly sizable cultural footprint, and hilariously it’s one I don’t like: Gerry and the Pacemakers’ hit version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (a slightly older property than The Music Man, dating back to 1945).

Generally speaking, I love and revere Rodgers and Hammerstein (and have talked about them here several times — both about Oklahoma! and The King and I and South Pacific) but, um, I hate this song??? I think it’s because it doesn’t work on me. Most R&H songs have a sort of ineffable magic to them where Richard Rodgers’s peerless ear for melody elevates the purity of Oscar Hammerstein II’s sentiment, but here it just falls flat for me. It’s like all I’m hearing is the cloying, clanking machinery of manipulation.

ANYWAY. Gerry’s version (which I don’t hate — if I have to hear this song, this is the version I want) was adopted by Liverpool F.C. as their theme song, and so it has deep meaning for football-loving Scousers. I do love this, in spite of hating the underlying material.

This also isn’t to say I hate Carousel — very much the opposite. The bench scene in Carousel is possibly the single best piece of writing in the American musical theatre canon. Here’s Chad and Jeremy’s really lovely take on “If I Loved You” (which includes a slight rewrite of the last A of the song, but we’ll allow it):

It’s not just Rodgers and Hammerstein and Meredith Willson that enjoyed Beat-era makeovers. Here’s your favorites and mine Peter and Gordon singing “Somewhere” from West Side Story (a show from the same Broadway season as The Music Man, incidentally):

For an interesting full-circle moment, there’s a Beatles song that was directly inspired by “Somewhere” — 1963’s “There’s a Place”, which Paul McCartney has admitted used the opening line of “Somewhere” as a jumping off point:

Lastly, as Substack’s foremost Freddie and the Dreamers correspondent, I would be derelict in my duties if I didn’t mention that they recorded an entire album of Disney songs, including several Sherman Brothers songs. Most of the tracks are very faithful to the originals, but there are a few surprises. Like this version of “The Ugly Bug Ball”, which technically is from a movie musical rather than a Broadway show but is too irresistible to pass up:

what I did this week

• I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think my opinion has changed on one of my foundational texts? This past weekend I caught a screening of Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005), and I think in spite of years of believing that the 1995 BBC miniseries was the P&P gold standard, I’ve now been wholly convinced that the 2005 is the true standard? I find myself, as the kids say, shooketh. (Wishbone, meanwhile, remains in his own category of Darcy.)

• We recorded yet another episode for Muppeturgy’s new Bag o’ Coke Season this week, and I’m having a blast with it. (I’m not going to lie, it’s one of my favorite genres of movie.) If you missed it, our first episode about 1980’s The Apple just dropped and is available everywhere you get your pods!

what’s next?

More cleaning (I know it seems like I’m always cleaning, but I’m making major progress, I promise! It’s an ongoing project involving organizing and purging and a bunch of tasks that are unglamorous yet satisfying.) Also, writing is happening, and not just of the Substack variety. (Though I do so enjoy sharing my little pockets of weirdness with you here every week. Thank you for reading, as always!)

Unrelated to anything, should I see Coyote vs. Acme? I think maybe yes???

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hi! I feel like I jinxed myself last week when I said I was still kind of enjoying summer. One double-the-usual-amount electric bill and several triple-digit heat index days later and I have changed my tune. When I opened the Starbucks app this morning, a little fall flavors teaser animation full of pumpkins popped up and I reflexively yelled “NO!!!!” Not because I don’t want fall (I very much do) but because, I’m sorry, this is the kind of heat you can’t pretend your way through. Pumpkin spice is a warming flavor! WE DON’T NEED THAT YET.

Anyway. In spite of the unpleasant weather, there’s been much to enjoy around these parts. (I’ll tell you more about some of those things below.) It’s a great time for activities in spaces with industrial air conditioning, and I am taking advantage of every one I can find. Hope you’re staying cool (literally and figuratively.)

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

The 1970s disco output of Paul Nicholas

When I was in seventh grade in 1997, a year and a half into my newfound obsession with all things musical theatre, a weird store opened in Clarksville, Indiana (20 minutes-ish from where I lived at the time) called Hudson’s Treasure Hunt. It only stuck around for a couple of years, and I cannot find any evidence of its existence on the internet. The best way that I can describe it is like a Big Lots, if Big Lots were both kind of classy and vaguely haunted? It was a closeouts/overstock store full of weird stuff. Because I come from flea market stock, obviously this place became a must-visit for my mom, my brother and me whenever we found ourselves nearby.

The very first time we went to Hudsons, I did what I always did in any store as a kid and made a beeline for the books and music. And I’ll never forget it: in a giant bin of forgotten CDs, I immediately spotted a CD called Paul Nicholas: That’s Entertainment. “Paul Nicholas?” I thought, amazed. “THE Rum Tum Tugger Paul Nicholas???” I couldn’t believe that here, at this weird haunted store in suburban southern Indiana, I’d found anything connected to the world that I loved.

My mom walked over and saw that I’d found something of interest. “Find something good?” she asked. “Yes!” I said, and handed over the CD.

“Paul Nicholas?” she said. “Heaven On The 7th Floor Paul Nicholas???”

…wait, what?

Here’s the thing to know about my mom: in the car, she controlled the music. Full stop. And while as a group we had some overlapping tastes, she very much lived by a “the driver picks the music” rule. Which meant that the music was almost never gonna be what us kids wanted to listen to, which was nonstop cast albums. (Unlike my dad, bless him, who let my brother and me listen to whatever we wanted. I’m not sure if this is just a personality difference or a byproduct of only seeing us on weekends and alternating Wednesdays, but consequently I’m fairly sure my dad could sing you the entire score of Pippin if you had him at gunpoint.)

Finding an album that related to musical theatre that my mom was also excited about was too weird and wonderful for me to comprehend. And as soon as we got in the car, I found out exactly why she was excited.

It turns out that Paul Nicholas — who I knew from the original London cast album of Cats and from Ken Russell’s deranged 1975 film adaptation of The Who’s Tommy (where he played Cousin Kevin, in a sequence that’s borderline unwatchable) — was a purveyor of the highest caliber of quality disco bangers, including one that went to #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977, “Heaven On The 7th Floor”. It’s a problematic ode to annoying people into falling in love with you while stuck in an elevator, but boy howdy does it slap.

Turns out this was the only song of his that my mom knew. This CD also included his version of “Mr. Mistoffelees”, so I sneakily got what I wanted, too, and my mom begrudgingly admitted that it was an excellent song. And then the rest of the album was full of the most singable late ‘70s pop songs any of us had ever heard — irresistible earworms, very British, very goofy, everything we as a collective could have asked for. (I keep saying “we”. I’m pretty sure my brother and I were mostly aligned in our musical tastes at this moment in time, but then again my brother wouldn’t complain if his hair were on fire, so who knows. Case, I know you’re probably reading this, weigh in.)

There was the (slightly problematic and appropriative) “Reggae Like It Used To Be”:

And then there’s the nautical bop “Dancing With The Captain”:

And of course we cannot forget “Grandma’s Party” (as if you’ll be able to forget this after you see the line of dancing grandmas):

I hadn’t thought much about the magical unifying power of that Paul Nicholas CD or the flawless bangers it contained in a long time, but as we prepare over on Muppeturgy to record an episode this week about the misbegotten 1978 flop Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as part of our new Bag o’ Coke Season, the presence of Paul Nicholas (as Billy Shears’s scheming manager brother Dougie Shears, sure) immediately sparked my memory. The whole bowler hat old-timey guy aesthetic was so very much Paul Nicholas’s whole deal that he actually wears a bowler hat in most of Sgt. Pepper, just because. It’s hard for me to not wish that he’d been cast as Billy Shears instead of Peter Frampton, who simply was not an actor, though I rationally understand that one stateside disco hit is not enough to bank an entire film on.

What a cutie. If I’d been a teenager in the late ‘70s, I would’ve eaten up that whole bowler hat/suspenders situation with a spoon.

Alas, there were no wannabe-vaudevillians amongst the teen idols of my day. Though I did just out of morbid curiosity Google image search “backstreet boys bowler hat” and discovered this picture of Kevin Richardson dressed how I assumed I looked whenever I chose “banker” as my profession when I played Oregon Trail. (I almost always picked “banker”, it meant you had more money to shop with in the general store.)

Yeah, that’s just not doing it for me. I’d much rather go to Grandma’s Party. And not just because you know that Grandma’s Party has the best snacks and ends at a sensible hour.

what I did this week

As I’d mentioned last time, I hit up Vidiots twice this week — both for a matinee of A Hard Day’s Night and the L.A. premiere of Programme 4. I’m going to write more in depth about Programme 4 in a future post, but the short version is I LOVED IT SO MUCH. (And I suspect I don’t have to relay my feelings about A Hard Day’s Night.)

I also finally managed to make it downtown to the Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind exhibition at the Broad, which is really incredible. If you can go, you really should. She’s so brilliant and wildly misunderstood.

what’s next?

It’ll be a little while before you hear our discussion of Sgt. Pepper, but the first episode of Muppeturgy’s Bag o’ Coke season (about 1980’s The Apple, a singular cinematic experience) just dropped, featuring very special guest ! Watch the movie on Tubi and then come find us wherever you get your pods.

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

(Look, I don’t know why I went with “it’s summer, fools!”, first thought, best thought is not always correct!)

Anyway, hello. It is in fact summer, fools. Still. The novelty’s worn off a little, but the June baby in me’s still kind of enjoying it. There’s a part of me that is so conditioned by years of being in school to thinking of summer as sacred break time, and though it isn’t really that for me anymore, the muscle memory lingers. Give me enough books and popsicles and midday naps in the A/C and I can at least conjure the feeling of a break.

Do you know about the Weather Channel’s Retro Mode? If you pull up weather.com/retro it will create a ‘90s style Weather Channel Local on the 8s crawl for you — complete with smooth jazz — of the actual current weather in your area. My papaw lived for the Weather Channel the same way some people nowadays live for Bravo, and I cannot tell you how many hours of my summer breaks were spent in my grandparents’ living room reading a book or drawing or napping to the dulcet tones of Local on the 8s. This past Wednesday would’ve been my papaw’s 97th birthday, and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than taking a few minutes to time travel in this way.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

T.A.M.I. Show (1964, dir. Steve Binder)

The last few months I’ve made a concerted effort to take advantage of the incredible fact that I have a 50,000+ title video store within walking distance of me. I’ve been a Vidiots member for a couple of years now, primarily for the discounts in the movie theater and the free popcorn (also it’s tax deductible, a very nice bonus!) But as AI encroaches on everything and streaming becomes more and more volatile, I find myself turning to physical media again. I invested in a 4K Blu-ray player last year, and at the time I wasn’t sure if I’d use it regularly. Well, great news, 2025 Me, I do! A lot!

I’ve written at length about the joy of discovery in video stores, and I’m loving getting to experience that again. Because my membership comes with two free rentals at any given time (and no late fees, bless you Vidiots), every time I go in I try to rent one thing I know something about and one thing that’s totally new to me.

On my most recent trip, my “totally new to me” grab was T.A.M.I. Show, a 1964 concert film with extremely relevant-to-my-interests provenance: a bunch of people who would go on to work on Hullabaloo, including director Steve Binder and choreographer David Winters (and assistant choreographer Toni Basil, yes, THAT Toni Basil), and the sickest concert lineup I think I’ve ever seen assembled: Chuck Berry, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Lesley Gore, Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Supremes, the Barbarians, James Brown and the Rolling Stones, all on one stage for two nights at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in front of an audience of local feral teens who’d been given free tickets. Excuse me, what???

If you’re wondering “what the heck is T.A.M.I.”, the answer is, nobody really knew! The marketing materials inconsistently said that it stood for either Teen Age Music International or Teenage Awards Music International, even though there were no awards involved. On a director’s commentary on the DVD I rented, Steve Binder said that the whole thing was the brainchild of a producer named Lee Savin who had somewhat noble intentions — he intended T.A.M.I. to be an annual thing, with the proceeds going towards music programs for teens, but, according to Binder, Savin’s producing style was not unlike that of Max Bialystock in The Producers (Binder used this exact analogy) and he financed the entire thing in a shady pyramid scheme kind of way that backfired, so sadly T.A.M.I. never became more than a confusing one-time acronym.

That said, the resulting show is astounding. You can watch the entire thing on YouTube, and if nothing else, I highly recommend watching the opening, which is a kind of doofy song sung by Jan and Dean about all of the acts on the show called “Here They Come (From All Over The World)”, which at one point incorrectly cites the Rolling Stones as being from Liverpool. (Dudes, you had two actual Liverpool acts on the bill you could’ve mentioned!)

As ever, the YouTube comments section remains the purest place on the internet:

If you don’t have two hours and three minutes to devote to the T.A.M.I cause, don’t worry, I got you. Here are five moments I loved.

First of all, original recipe Beach Boys is always going to be the dreamiest. Come on. Perfect song, killer performance. As Mike Love said in a blog post on the official Beach Boys site a couple of years ago, “On The T.A.M.I. Show, I think we were all pretty fresh, and pretty new. I personally loved all the Motown stuff, when you’ve got Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye on the same show that’s pretty serious business.”

Speaking of the Motown stuff, Steve Binder went on to work with Diana Ross a whole bunch of times. In the director’s commentary he actually said she’s his favorite person he’s ever worked with, so it was cool to see the beginnings of a great partnership here. Also, those flawless Holland-Dozier-Holland songs cut straight through the screams, it’s so satisfying:

Any time I see a live Lesley Gore performance, I’m always struck by how fully in control she was. There’s such an unshowy confidence. I was happy to see this performance in particular because this song was almost ruined for me a few years ago by a pitchy singer I overheard preparing for an audition at curséd hellmouth Ripley-Grier Studios in NYC who kept modulating and modulating, presumably trying to find the highest possible key to screlt it in without giving herself a hernia. It was excruciating. This? The polar opposite.

The most legendary performance in the whole of T.A.M.I. Show was that of James Brown, who was second to last on the bill. Keith Richards has been quoted as saying that following him in this show was the worst decision the Stones ever made. (Professionally, anyway.) It makes perfect sense — this is truly next level stuff. It’s enough to make you want to yell “James Brown? James Brown!” a la Chris Frantz in Stop Making Sense. (He still is the Godfather of Soul, y’all.) Here’s his entire nearly 18-minute set:

The Stones did manage to put on a pretty good show in spite of the impossible act to follow. I don’t love the setlist, but then again my favorite Stones songs are from much, much later. (Speaking of, have you heard their new album? It’s got a really good cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good”, plus a track called “Covered in You” that I’ve had in heavy rotation lately featuring a guest bass player named… Paul McCartney? Never heard of him.)

Although T.A.M.I. as an institution never went anywhere, there apparently was a sequel of sorts made the following year called The Big T.N.T. Show. This lineup is even more bananatown, and naturally I plan to track it down at my earliest convenience:

(Apparently T.N.T. in this context stands for “Tune ‘n’ Talent”. Sure. Also, unlike T.A.M.I. Show, The Big T.N.T. Show had Phil Spector as its producer and music coordinator, so I’m sure a chill, normal time was had by all.)

A postscript: the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium (the venue of T.A.M.I. Show) has been more or less dormant since 2013, with competing interests (folks who want to preserve it for historical purposes and others who want to raze it and build something else in its place) keeping it in flux. It needs major upgrades — mostly to the sound system and to bring it up to code and compliant with ADA regulations — but my hope is that someone swoops in and saves it soon, because it’s such a stunning piece of architecture and, well, I want to go to there. Someday!

what I did this week

Nothing particularly thrilling to report this week. As I’d correctly predicted, more writing, more tacos. My office is still not quite ready. I’m sure you’re on pins and needles. Or needles and pins. I don’t know your life.

Oh! I lied, there is one thrilling thing I experienced this week, and it’s the new album from the Womack Sisters that just dropped! They’re a retro-soul girl group with truly royal pedigree: their grandfather is Sam Cooke (!!!), their uncle is Bobby Womack, and their parents are Womack and Womack. Unsurprisingly, they’re incredible. If you dig this, the whole album is this freakin’ good:

what’s next?

This week I’m headed to Vidiots twice (well, possibly three times if I also swing by the video store) — they’re showing A Hard Day’s Night, which I haven’t seen on the big screen since 2001 (and I wrote a whole thing about that, remember?), but also, they’re hosting the L.A. stop of the tour of Rachel Lichtman’s Programme 4, a thing that looks like it was plucked from the depths of my very soul. I CANNOT WAIT.

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hello! Is it disgusting where you are? It is here, in (generally already) sunny Los Angeles. I do love summer and all its attendant vibes and activities but when we reach the point where the A/C has to stay on 24-7, let’s just say I don’t care for it!

I’m also in one of those moments — personally, professionally, whatever — where things are about to happen but aren’t happening yet, and so the heat is also inconveniently cranked up internally. My flavor of neurodivergence loves a specific deadline but hates a vague pressure cooker, honey! I can’t handle it! The woo-woo girlies in my Instagram algo were all about the Lion’s Gate Portal this past week (has this always been a thing, or has it conveniently arrived just as the woo-woo girlies have grabbed my attention?) Supposedly 8/8 is the strongest moment for manifestation all year? Who knows. What I do know is that one of them suggested writing a letter to your January 2027 self with a list of everything you’ll have and be by then, and I did it on a whim, if only so my January 2027 self can look back and think, “Well, girl, if nothing else, I’m wearing layers.”

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

“Relight My Fire”, Dan Hartman (1979) and its connection to Guardians of the Galaxy — Mission: BREAKOUT!

When my dad came to visit a few weeks ago, we managed to snag him one of those limited-time discounted evening tickets to Disneyland that were announced at the end of June and then promptly sold out. (I am, as you probably could have guessed, a passholder. Sorry, “Magic Keyholder”.) It was a one-park-only pass, so the option was either to go to Disneyland starting at 7 PM or Disney’s California Adventure starting at 5 PM. We opted for DCA both for the earlier entry and because it’s the home of two of my favorite rides — probably my favorites, full stop — Soarin’1 and Guardians of the Galaxy — Mission: BREAKOUT!.

While we were in the queue for Guardians, I’d lamented to my dad that the last four or five times I’d been on it, I’d gotten the same song — “Free Ride” by the Edgar Winter Group, which is one of six possible options. The others are “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar, “Burning Love” by Elvis Presley, “Born To Be Wild” by Steppenwolf and “Give Up The Funk” by Parliament, each with slightly different scenes/scenarios involving the Guardians as you are supposedly assisting Rocket Raccoon with freeing them from the Tivan Collection. The story within the ride is bizarre and convoluted2 even by Marvel standards: somehow the Collector, Benicio Del Toro’s Taneleer Tivan, has added the Guardians to his collection? And Rocket can get himself out but he can’t get the others out? Sure, why not. But I’m a sucker for these ragtag weirdos (especially Rocket, who’s tied with Tony Stark as my favorite Marvel character) and something about the combination of random free-fall drops, aiding and abetting a mouthy raccoon and ‘70s-’80s bangers activates the pleasure center of my brain like almost nothing else.

Also, I’m sorry, the preshow video is Benicio Del Toro’s finest performance. The spidery way he one-handedly removes his glasses is a thing I could watch on a loop (don’t worry, the video’s cued):

Well, naturally, the second Rocket plugged in the Walkman on this particular trip, my dad and I got “Free Ride”. Which was honestly hilarious and perfect. (We both said “oh noooooo” at the same time, it was beautiful.)

(If I had to pick a favorite of the options, it’s either “Give Up The Funk” or “Born To Be Wild”, though they’re all great.)

I’d mentioned a while back that one of the Duolingo modules I’m working on is Music, in spite of being, ostensibly, a Professional Music Person. I do it for relaxation, not edification! The thing that’s fun about the Music module is that you close out each unit by playing along with a song — sometimes a Duo-specific version of a public domain piece (a folk song, a famous classical piece, etc.), but often a real recording of a pop or country song.

Some truly random songs have cropped up for me so far — several Whitney Houston songs, James Brown’s “Living in America”, a P!nk song I didn’t know. But this week I encountered a bonafide disco song that I’d never heard before. That on its own would be exciting enough, but more to the point: it’s a new-to-me disco song that absolutely slaps.

May I present “Relight My Fire” by Dan Hartman, which topped the dance charts in 1980:

HOW GREAT IS THIS SONG??? It’s a paragon of disco production — not a funky hair out of place —the drive of the piano, the light touch with the strings and horns, the bass and the drums! The drums!!! And the vocal feature from dance legend Loleatta Holloway on the bridge! SHUT UP, IT’S P E R F E C T. (I realize I’m beginning to sound a bit like Owen Cutts on Old Music Friday3, but it’s that good.)

As I’d mentioned back in the spring, I have disco in the blood, so it’s baffling to me that I’d never heard this flawless track before. The name Dan Hartman did ring some bells for me, though I couldn’t immediately remember why. Some light Googling immediately gave me the answer: his song “I Can Dream About You”, a #6 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 released in 1984 (as all good things and people were) that was omnipresent on adult contemporary radio when I was a kid. I suspect you know this song, too.

In 1993, Take That released a pretty good cover of “Relight My Fire”, giving the bridge feature to none other than Lulu. I’m not sure how I missed this either, but somehow I did!

As is the case with so many brilliant artists of his time, Dan Hartman’s life was cut way, way too short by AIDS in 1994. My heart lurches any time I think about the crater left behind where an entire generation’s lives and work should be. But the best tribute I know how to pay is remembering and honoring the work we do have from those who were lost, and Dan Hartman was pretty amazing.

Anyway, the ultimate point is that I kept digging, and before Dan Hartman’s incredible disco era, guess what? My guy was the bass player of the Edgar Winter Group. WHO WROTE AND SANG THE LEAD ON “FREE RIDE”.

I kid. Everything about this is actually great. I live for these moments of full-circle happenstance.

what I did this week

The most exciting things that happened to me this week: I went to a sold-out matinee screening of Phantom of the Paradise at Vidiots, I had spectacularly good gluten free pad thai at Same Same Thai in Silver Lake, and I rescued a perfectly good cabinet and made it my own! Well, to be more specific, I brought in a cabinet that someone down the block from me put out on the curb that only had one flaw (a big stain on the top, as you’ll see in the first picture from when I dragged it into my living room), bought some peel-and-stick wallpaper that matches the colors in my office, and boom! (Everything in my office is currently in flux. My goal is that by September, it will be the coolest writing space in all of Eagle Rock, instead of what it is now, which is The Place Where I Put Junk I’ve Put Off Dealing With. I’ll keep you posted.)

what’s next?

More work on my office, more writing, probably tacos. There’s not a ton on the calendar this week but I’m going to make the most of it!

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hello! I did a thing this week that I recommend to absolutely anyone in need of a boost in this dark and depressing world: I went to see a bunch of teens do a musical.

Specifically, I went to see Golden Performing Arts Center’s Teen and Young Adult Program do A Chorus Line, way, way west into the valley in Woodland Hills. (Many thanks to my friend David Gautschy who directed the show and invited me!) Was it insane of me to trek all the way out there from the northeast corner of the city on one of the hottest days of the year? Probably. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. A Chorus Line is both an odd and a perfect fit for today’s teenagers — in many ways its 1975-ness is so intense that it might as well be in a foreign language, but in others it’s about all of the things that teens of any era understand better than probably anyone: hunger and ambition, the intense pressure to succeed, body image stuff, what growing up does to a person. (Don’t worry, the teen edition takes out all the smoking.)

Come with me on a 58-second trip to the ‘70s, won’t you?

The thing that’s really magical about teenagers is that they don’t realize how powerful they are. In many ways, I’m in the middle of a period in my life that I know I manifested through the sheer nerve that I had at sixteen. Somewhere along the line we learn to be scared of that power, which I think is a fatal mistake. When you openheartedly believe that anything is possible, anything is possible. I actually wrote about this vis-a-vis A Chorus Line right before I went to NYC earlier this spring:

I’m about to spend three weeks in New York — the longest amount of time I’ve spent there since I moved to Los Angeles in 2021. When I moved away, I swore this oath to myself that I deserved to return only on my own terms, as the person I most wanted to be — a working musical theatre writer. Well, that’s what I’m doing. And while I’m thrilled, it also scares the shit out of me sometimes. I’m about to put my whole brain and heart on display for people to judge and potentially consider investing a lot of money into, and when I put it like that, it’s terrifying.

But it’s where I’m supposed to be. And I know in my bones — if not in my genes — that everything I need will be there when I need it most. In the words of a perfect song I wish I’d written, everything was beautiful at the ballet/raise your arms and someone’s always there:

Hearing “At The Ballet” sung by these kiddos made my heart grow three sizes, and seeing this production on the other side of that time in NYC (which went so much better than I could have imagined) just reminded me of how much wild, unfiltered courage is the secret sauce. I can’t believe I’m here. Yes, we live in a fascist dystopia and nothing feels like enough and yes Broadway is dead/dying/whatever but I’m here, and I’m moving forward anyway with as much courage as I can still muster in spite of it all. Where else can I dream myself into being? I can’t wait to find out.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

“Time Won’t Let Me”, The Outsiders (1966) and other songs I only know from commercials

Have you noticed that the songs used in pharmaceutical commercials are laser-targeted at specific generations? If you haven’t, you’ll start to. Why else use Roxette’s “Listen To Your Heart” for a cholesterol-lowering medicine if you’re not trying to reach Gen X? Or “All Right Now” by Free in a COPD medication ad if Boomers aren’t the main demo for the drug?

Setting aside how grim it is that a significant portion of the advertising anyone sees nowadays is for pharmaceuticals, this got me to thinking about pre-existing pop songs that I first heard in advertising as a kid that didn’t realize were real songs until much, much later.

The first one I remembered still weirds me out. When I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Dairy Mart convenience stores were ubiquitous. And for a time in the ‘90s, they had a really catchy — if specific — jingle that went like this:

Dairy Mart won’t let me…
Dairy Mart won’t let me…
Dairy Mart won’t let meeeeeee… wait in line!

Because it was a radio jingle, I can’t find any evidence of it on the internet. (I did find a couple of great TV ads for Dairy Mart, though. They were bought out by Circle K in 2002, and the handful that still exist are weird independently operated locations so there’s no more advertising, sadly.)

What does exist is the song that the jingle was parodying, 1966’s “Time Won’t Let Me” by the Outsiders. And I’m just going to tell you that the first time I heard this out in the wild, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. “What do you mean, ‘Dairy Mart won’t let me’ is a real song???”

Given how deeply I was an Oldies Station Kid, I’m a little surprised that I didn’t already know the original? But that’s the magic of pop culture sometimes. I’m a firm believer in there being no shame in being late to the party. Discovery’s half the joy of art!

Another song I learned as a jingle first was “Shakin’ All Over”, a song that was recorded by a bunch of different acts in the ‘60s — including the Guess Who (the version best known in the States), Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, the Swinging Blue Jeans, and the Who (who did it at Woodstock). I learned this song because of a 1984 British ad for Rowntree’s Jelly that appeared on a VHS tape I discussed at length in this space a while back called Commercials From Around The World:

Again, hearing the real song in the wild was trippy because I didn’t just know it from a commercial, I knew it from a British commercial! For British knock-off Jello, at that!

The latest example I can think of this is from 1995, so I was 11 — Cole Porter’s “I Get A Kick Out Of You”, as rendered by Mel Tormé in service of doing the ‘Dew:

(A few years later as I started to dive deep into the Great American Songbook, I was horrified that this was my first point of reference for this song. Nowadays, though, I’m actually delighted by everything about this.)

Do you have any songs that you learned this way (and later discovered were real)? I’d love to know what they are.

what I did this week

I finally saw Disclosure Day! I’m still unpacking it. I especially appreciated it in conversation with E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — I love it when brilliant artists grapple with the same ideas in different ways over the course of their careers. I found the last act in particular really moving. I’m looking forward to seeing this one again after I’ve spent some time digesting it.

what’s next?

This week I’m closing out one academic year planner and starting a new six-month undated one. I actually did the ceremonial Decorating of the Planner a couple of weeks ago. I may not have all of the wild fearlessness of my teenage self anymore, but I also haven’t lost touch with her completely. I hope I never do. I’m sure a lot of people find this all very cringe, but the really great thing about being 42 and not 16 is that I could not give any less of a fuck if I actively tried. Hate on, haters.

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hello! It’s late July, which means one thing: I have ventured yet again to the OC Fair. Last year my mom and I spent a delightful day there that was capped off by a Herman’s Hermits concert (the dream), so of course when they announced that this year’s concert lineup included the Happy Together Tour, obviously we had to go back.

The experience was quite similar to last year — which was actually a good thing. For starters, I was so pleased that the Orange County Beekeepers’ Association were back. Last year I bought a couple li’l bottles of orange blossom honey from them out of pure curiosity and it flat-out transformed my life. I used to be very “meh” on honey but now I am a full-blown Honey Guy. I dropped $66 on enough to hopefully get me through the next year. You better believe that this week I am making a batch of Ina Garten’s Orange Yogurt, baby. I can’t be stopped!!!

Fairs are not quite as fun from a culinary standpoint when you have celiac (to be fair, what is), but I more than made do this year — the real highlight being an enormous loaded baked potato from a vendor named (sigh) Corn Star and Hot Potato Club:

(Listen, my two favorite foods are tacos and baked potatoes. When I got diagnosed with celiac three years ago, it was truly the best case scenario of potential diagnoses. I can live without bread with structural integrity. Potatoes? Cheese? I’d fall apart.)

The concert was, unsurprisingly, a great time. First of all, as I’d predicted, my Oneders shirt was very popular with this particular crowd (shoutout to the woman there with a tiny child who pointed at her and yelled “I NAMED HER FAYE AFTER THE MOVIE!”, you made my night). Secondly, what a lineup: this year’s Happy Together Tour includes the Cowsills (who opened and were amazing??), the Vogues, Ron Dante (the voice behind the Archies), the Troggs, Jason Scheff (Chicago’s lead singer from 1985-2016), Gary Puckett, the Fortunes and the Association.

The legacy act concert circuit is so interesting because you’re dealing with a mix of original folks, folks who are not original but in some cases have been in the group for decades longer than the original folks were, and brand-new folks carrying the banner. Naturally, when you’re talking about bands whose heyday was sixty-ish years ago, that’s to be expected. The really beautiful thing that happens at these concerts, though, is that you realize that the songs are what matter most, and that they’ll live forever because they belong to everyone there. Gary Puckett’s 83 years old, and of course he doesn’t sound like he did in his twenties — but when he asks the audience to wail the chorus of “Young Girl” for him (eternally problematic, but what a banger), they do, and he smiles and gets to feel the love that’s baked into that. It’s awfully sweet. Almost as sweet as orange blossom honey from the Orange County Beekeepers’ Association. (Almost.)

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

“Soul Bossa Nova”, Quincy Jones (1962) and (for better or worse) Austin Powers

We just recorded our first episode for our new season of Muppeturgy in which we are discussing a microgenre of films we lovingly refer to as Bag o’ Coke Movies — movies from the ‘70s and early ‘80s that intrinsically feel like they were greenlit by a bag of cocaine. (If you don’t understand this concept, don’t worry — we explain it in depth on the show.) The first Bag o’ Coke Movie we tackled was the 1980 glam rock dystopian musical The Apple (featuring special guest ), which features a score by George S. Clinton (not the George Clinton you’re possibly thinking of, sadly; someone less funky), whose later credits include, I learned, the Austin Powers movies.

Of course, I couldn’t actually remember what the score of the Austin Powers movies was like because the thing I think of as “the Austin Powers theme” is actually a pre-existing piece of music — “Soul Bossa Nova”, a 1962 song written by Quincy Jones:

(To George S. Clinton’s credit, the scores of the movies are really excellent — they wink at John Barry’s iconic James Bond scores without going overboard, which is maybe the only element of these films you can say that about.)

Because I’m me and this is how my flavor of neurodivergence works, my thought patterns spun out laterally: this week I both spent time with Big Band Bossa Nova, the original album that contains “Soul Bossa Nova”, and I revisited the Austin Powers movies for the first time in many, many years.

I’m pleased to report that Big Band Bossa Nova is an absolutely killer album. Bookmark it for your next party, seriously — it’s effervescent and kicky in a sophisticated midcentury kind of way.

Among the highlights for me was this version of “On the Street Where You Live” that goes so much harder than any Lerner and Loewe song has ever gone before or since:

Or if you need a more chill, lights-dimming situation at your shindig, might I recommend “Serenata”? (Even with the sultrier, slowed down tempo, just listen to these percussionists getting their entire lives. There’s a murderer’s row of a band on this record, including Lalo Schifrin on piano???)

Heck, you don’t need a party to dive into this one. Put it on when you’re cleaning! It’s never a bad time to take a bossa nova break. Trust me.

Meanwhile… Austin Powers. Oh, Austin Powers. These movies basically bookended my teenage years, with the first coming out when I was 13 and the third (Austin Powers in Goldmember) released a month after I graduated from high school. I had warm, fond memories of them that I’d left squarely in the past, with my only moments of even really thinking about them happening every time this particular episode of Frasier turns up on Pluto TV:

Here’s the thing: revisiting this particular cinematic universe was both more and less pleasant than I was expecting. To rip off the bandaid, here’s what I hated:

• The first thing’s going to seem pretty obvious, but: In the second movie (The Spy Who Shagged Me, which I’d erroneously remembered as the best one), things take a turn for the disgusting. I did not remember just how much gross-out humor is in these movies, and it just escalates from the second to the third. The first film stays almost exclusively in goofy sex jokes land, which is fine! The fact that Austin Powers is a horny creep is the whole point! It’s all the other stuff — particularly everything to do with Fat Bastard and Goldmember, the less said, the better — that is pretty awful. And there’s a very real chasm between the awfulness and the cheeky and transgressive tone that works when these movies fire on all cylinders. I also concede that I’m probably not the intended audience (especially now), but still. I know Wayne’s World is a different animal, but those movies are juvenile (in a good way) without ever having a character, I dunno, eat flakes of his own skin. (Just typing it made me nauseous.)

• There are of course other elements that have also aged very, very poorly: a smattering of casual racism, some really not-great gender stuff (beyond the fish-out-of-water sexism baked into the premise which doesn’t bother me so much because we’re meant to be laughing/cringing at Austin), the Mini-Me of it all which I’m not about to attempt to unpack, plus a Kevin Spacey jumpscare in Goldmember that I was very much not prepared for!

That said, there’s still a lot to love in these extraordinarily doofy movies, and while my stomach for the scatological has basically evaporated in the last thirty years, here’s what’s still worthwhile for me:

• The costumes and the production design in these movies are legitimately wonderful — color-saturated in such delicious way. (The production design was done by Cynthia Charette for the first film and Rusty Smith for the second and third, while the costumes on all three were the work of Deena Appel.) Part of why I wanted to revisit them is because there’s a shared thematic thread with something I’m currently working on, and from that perspective, I was not disappointed. I mean, this sequence alone is so delightful:

• All three of the female leads in these movies (Elizabeth Hurley, Heather Graham and Beyoncé) are so great. Beyoncé in particular is criminally underutilized, but the screen time she gets as Foxxy Cleopatra is delightful. I would absolutely buy a ticket for a spin-off.

• Rob Lowe’s Robert Wagner impression is a masterclass. And remains so, if this recent Verizon commercial is anything to go by:

• I had zero memory of Michael Caine playing Austin’s father in the third movie (in fact, I think it’s possible that unlike the first two which I’d seen many, many times, I hadn’t seen Goldmember since I saw it once in the theater in 2002?) Michael Caine’s presence improves literally any movie, it’s scientific fact.

• MING TEA. This was the real discovery for me: I fully did not know that the character of Austin Powers was created by Mike Myers for a faux mod band he was in called Ming Tea in the early ‘90s that he formed with incredible musicians like Susanna Hoffs1 and Matthew Sweet (whose alter egos were named Gillian Shagwell and Sid Belvedere, no notes whatsoever), and the band appears in the movies. How did I not remember this? It’s the most me thing about these movies!
  
  Here they are on the 1997 MTV Music Awards doing their song “BBC”:

And here’s the official video for “Daddy Wasn’t There”, their song in Goldmember:

Mike Myers has been aggressively teasing for weeks that a fourth Austin Powers movie is coming. I have no idea what that even will look like in the Year of Our Lord 2026 — the last one involved a jaunt to 1975, so where (or when) could it possibly go? Can it manage to be cheeky and transgressive in a good way when everything is so fraught nowadays? At the end of the day, I have enough love for (most of) these characters and enough faith that Mike Myers knows what he’s doing that I’ll be there if (when?) it happens.

what I did this week

I dropped by ’s podcast Scene to Song for the first time in eight years (!!!) to talk about suspensions as a musical storytelling tool, a very dorky thing I love to talk about! The episode just came out — listen here or wherever you listen to yer pods!

Because Austin Powers wasn’t nearly enough 1967 for me, I also made a trip this weekend to Taco Lita, an old-school fast food taco joint that opened in Arcadia in ‘67 that’s the last remaining location of a long-gone local chain. This place is everything I wanted it to be — the tacos were the same kind of school cafeteria American crunchy tacos that I grew up loving, and the inside of the building is frozen in time. Will I be going back? Oh yes. If it were any closer to home, I’d make it my Cheers. It’s pretty magical. (And one of several old-timey taco spots in the San Gabriel Valley. I think a taco crawl is in my future.)

what’s next?

More writing, more podcasting, probably more tacos. Anything could happen!

(I will have real news soon, I promise!)

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hello! As I’d mentioned in my last post, my dad came to visit last weekend, and we did in fact make it to Jaws: The Exhibition at the Academy Museum. It’s really incredible, and if by some chance you can make the trip before it closes this weekend it’s absolutely worth the trip. Naturally, my favorite parts were everything to do with my all-time-fave-of-all-time-faves John Williams and his indelible contribution.

I particularly enjoyed the “play the Jaws theme yourself!” portion of the exhibit.

I was also a fan of this Czech poster that really makes it look like Bob Fosse’s Jaws, a film I would pay many real American dollars to see:

We rewatched Jaws in preparation the night before we went to the museum, and something about seeing it so soon on the heels of All That Jazz just reinforced for me an unnerving truth: Roy Scheider could get it.

(Listen, when I set up this Substack a couple years ago my intention was to create a Very Professional Newsletter For My Very Professional Writing, and somewhere along the line it turned into Christie’s Old Timey Thirst Corner. The best laid plans, the soft animal of my body, blah blah blah.)

(I would apologize to Jeff Goldblum and the ghosts of Roy Scheider, Richard Dawson (and Edward Herrmann), and Art Carney and probably several others I’m forgetting but I have a feeling they’d all be fine with it. If you’re still here and reading, bless you. I know I’m not for all audiences but wow do I appreciate the one I have!)

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

Hullabaloo (NBC, 1965-66)

In addition to our Jaws rewatch, my dad and I also went to Vidiots and rented a DVD compilation of episodes of Hullabaloo, a musical variety show that ran for two seasons in 1965-66 on NBC. This was an excellent decision on our part — while this particular DVD only had seven episodes on it, it was a goldmine of entertaining weirdness that was squarely in my wheelhouse.

Hullabaloo was one of a handful of similar midcentury music shows that featured current pop acts and people dancing — American Bandstand and Soul Train of course being the most revered and remembered examples — but what made Hullabaloo (and its counterpart on ABC, Shindig!) stand apart was that unlike those longer-running examples, it was not syndicated but in fact a prime time show. (It aired on Tuesday nights during its first season and Mondays during the second, eventually being replaced by The Monkees.)

If you’re a particular kind of movie nerd, it’s possible that Hullabaloo is a visual reference that registers for you without ever having seen it — there’s a throwaway clip in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood where Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is seen halfheartedly singing “Green Door”1 on Hullabaloo:

Hullabaloo and Shindig! are cultural artifacts that were a direct response to the British Invasion, and Hullabaloo in particular is an interesting one because it was created in collaboration with Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles. Hullabaloo had a different celebrity guest host each week, and in its earliest episodes it also featured a segment from “Hullabaloo London” where Brian Epstein introduced a segment taped in the U.K. featuring primarily (but not exclusively) other groups he represented, like Gerry and the Pacemakers. It’s fascinating to see Epstein in such a public-facing capacity — he studied for a time at RADA as an actor but dropped out halfway through, and while he doesn’t seem particularly nervous, he also doesn’t look particularly comfortable, either. The Hullabaloo London segments were phased out halfway through the first season, but they all can be seen on YouTube:

The good stuff on Hullabaloo wasn’t limited to its London remote segments, though — in fact, quite the opposite. The primary segments produced stateside had a pretty impressive pedigree — they were directed by Steve Binder, who later directed Elvis’s ‘68 Comeback Special and THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL, choreographed by David Winters (the original Baby John in West Side Story and Yonkers in Gypsy), music directed by Peter Matz (later the music director of, among other things, The Carol Burnett Show), and they featured an ensemble of loose-limbed young dancers in sweaters that included Michael Bennett2 and Donna McKechnie.

The vibe of Hullabaloo is “weird party with surprisingly good music”, as evidenced by the bizarre medley of 1965’s Best Song Oscar nominees performed in this episode by my faves Peter and Gordon, Lesley Gore, The Cyrkle and Paul Anka. I do wish the songs had been assigned differently — my kingdom to hear Peter and Gordon sing “I Will Wait For You” from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg3! — but the sheer randomness of this can’t be beat. (This video is actually the entire episode — one of the only three that survived in full color because of a really unfortunate archive purge that happened at NBC in 1970 — but it’s cued to the right spot.)

Can’t get enough of this weirdness? Here, have Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Heatherton doing a West Side Story medley!

Hullabaloo wasn’t all randomness — there were definitely plenty of straightforward performances, like this one from the Lovin’ Spoonful. I recently got to talk at length with John Sebastian, who was extraordinarily kind enough to let me ask a bunch of random research questions for a project I’m working on, and he pointed out to me that these shows were so important to the recording artists of the time because they were by far the biggest audience they would ever reach (more so The Ed Sullivan Show, of course, but in an era of only three or four channels, even the lesser-performing shows reached millions upon millions of people).

Anyway. Hullabaloo isn’t exactly the highest of art but the vast majority of it is on YouTube is some form or another (and also on DVD if you want to go even deeper). And I think it’s worth a look. This is a thing that I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating and talking about (especially over on Muppeturgy) but the grab bag quality of midcentury variety shows is a thing that we as a culture could benefit from more of, I think. It’s a horizons-broadening compact with the audience — show up to the weird party for some music you know, and leave having experienced something new, too. Like, I dunno, a song from a French throughsung movie musical about gas stations and teenage pregnancy. You never know what you’re going to get. That’s the fun of it!

what I did this week

This past Friday I finally got to see the extraordinary Mexodus at Pasadena Playhouse. I was so sad that I’d missed it my last couple of times in NYC and so having it turn up in my backyard was such a gift. Whatever Nygel D. Robinson and Brian Quijada create next, I am first in line for a ticket. If you’re in L.A. and can get over to Pasadena before they close on August 2nd, YOU MUST.

what’s next?

This week we’re recording the first episode of the new season of Muppeturgy which I am super stoked about (there’s a theme and it’s near and dear to my heart…!)

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Well, friends, we survived America’s first quarter-millennium. My entire feelings on the matter are pretty well summed up by this picture of the cast of 1776 with Richard Nixon after a performance of the show at the White House in 1970:

Well, specifically everything in William Daniels’s expression in this picture:

The layers and layers of irony were not lost on him, clearly. A few years after this, Nixon would personally direct Jack Warner to have “Cool, Cool Considerate Men” cut from the film of 1776. I can’t imagine anything more punk rock than a song from a musical stuck in the craw of the leader of the free world. Musicals are the most American art form there is, and I’m proud to be a small part of its future. The America that I know can and should exist — and hopefully will, someday, if we can claw our way through this nightmare of a moment — depends on the survival of the kind of art that comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Or, at the very least, embodies the spirit of rebellious debate.

Anyway, let’s pull up our breeches and stick it to Nixon one last time:

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

The Gap ads of my teenage years, All That Jazz and nostalgia folding in on itself

This week at my beloved Vidiots I saw a screening of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, a movie I love deeply and yet must admit am mildly baffled by. I’m baffled in the sense that it shouldn’t work: it’s semi-autobiographical but it’s honest (or at least gives off the appearance of honesty), it’s self-indulgent but also self-aware, lacerating and bleak but also shockingly beautiful? The idea of writing from this direct of an autobiographical place makes me want to throw up on my shoes, so I have nothing but admiration for anyone who attempts to do it, much less does it this well.

(The thing about writing is that it’s actually all autobiography whether you want it to be or not. I didn’t realize what Fitzgeralds was really about for me until I saw it on its feet for the first time, and I’m not going to tell you what that is because it’s something that belongs to only me. But turns out I was working out my own shit without trying. That’s art, baby.)

One of my favorite sequences in All That Jazz is arguably its sweetest: Ann Reinking (Fosse’s actual girlfriend, playing the fictionalized version of Fosse’s girlfriend; again, the mind boggles and the stomach churns) and Erzsebet Foldi (as a fictionalized version of Fosse’s daughter) doing a choreographed routine to Peter Allen’s “Everything Old is New Again”.

In my last dispatch, I talked about how I got caught in the crosshairs of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s nostalgia industry and how that turned me into a midcentury pop culture-obsessed monster. In thinking further about nostalgia as a cultural force, I’ve been contemplating other moments in time when nostalgia permeated pop culture in some way. One obvious one to me is the whole swath of songs in the ‘60s and ‘70s that were steeped in turn-of-the-century styles (ragtime, Dixieland, etc.) Think of the massive success of Hello, Dolly! and Louis Armstrong’s cover of its title song in 1964 topping the charts in the midst of Beatlemania — that’s the essence of the thing I’m talking about. Naturally, I’ve got a playlist of examples:

(There’s a lot of Jacques Brel. This was his wheelhouse.)

“Everything Old is New Again” is very much in this microgenre, and I love it popping up in a seemingly innocuous moment in All That Jazz because absolutely nothing in All That Jazz is innocuous. All of Joe Gideon’s metaphorical chickens are coming home to roost because he’s dying, so everything old is new again. The nostalgia’s the point.

I was trying to think if anything similar to this old-timey pop moment had happened in my actual lifetime, and the only thing I could really come up with was the swing/big band revival in the ‘90s when suddenly the sounds of fifty years earlier were cool again. I was not immune, of course. I definitely owned a CD of the Brian Setzer Orchestra’s 1998 album The Dirty Boogie, mostly for their version of Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive an’ Wail”:

And of course, this is where the nostalgia machine just starts to fold in on itself for me because that same year, the Louis Prima version of “Jump, Jive an’ Wail” was used by the Gap to somehow, inexplicably, make a room full of people wearing khakis look aspirationally cool and not like, you know, a room full of people all wearing khakis:

I don’t feel much warm fuzziness when I think back on being a teenager, beyond missing not having to pay rent or taxes. I mostly hated high school, and all the people I loved and the things I loved doing during that time are still a fundamental part of my life so there’s not much to miss. But there’s something about these Gap ads that awakens something dormant in me. I cannot tell you the last time I willingly wore a pair of khakis — it probably was not long after this ad was in rotation. But seeing it again right now almost makes me want another pair. Almost. (I look bad in khakis.)

I also feel that pang of almost-longing when I see another ad from this same campaign that pulls off a similarly impressive feat of brainwashing. Remember that minute in 1999 when we all thought vests were cool? I still can’t believe that happened. (I had one. Well, one of the Old Navy ones. It was maroon with charcoal gray piping. I looked terrible in it. We all looked terrible in them.)

This ad is mesmerizing, though. The spatial effect of the voices coming in and out, the very sparse and kicky synths (kickier than Madonna’s original, somehow?), the preponderance of orange… again, it’s making me want a big puffy vest in spite of the lived experience screaming at me that I do not need a big puffy vest!

Old Navy’s ads were so much kookier than Gap’s. Jerry Hall! RuPaul! A dog DJ!

I don’t miss tech vests and khakis, really. What I miss is when it felt fun to be sold things, which is probably a sinister statement if I really sit and unpack it. For contrast: I discovered this week that the company that I’ve bought planners from for the last five years has probably discontinued their academic year planner. (I’ve used an August-July planner every year since I was in high school, for continuity’s sake, rather than a calendar year planner.) Ever since I made the discovery — and bemoaned this to friends — my internet has been all “hiya kid! You’re lookin’ for a planner! Here’s five kinds of planners! PLANNERS PLANNERS PLANNERS” and it’s been enough to make me want to throw my phone into the ocean.

(The solution, I’ve discovered, is an undated planner. The brand I’ve been using makes a six-month one that other than the lack of dates is basically identical to what I’ve been using, so I just ordered one of those.)

I don’t want the internet aggressively trying to figure out and then selling me the exact thing I actually want. I want the monoculture telling me I’ll look cool if I dress like an employee at Home Depot.

Anyway, to make a long story short (too late), there was one more Gap khakis ad in 1999 that made the beige look inexplicably cool. How? By presenting an homage to “The Rich Man’s Frug” from Sweet Charity, a masterpiece of a number staged by none other than Bob Fosse. See? Everything old is new again.

what I did this week

All That Jazz was one of three Vidiots trips for me this week. I also went to their first-ever screening of Cats (2019), and of the ~150 movies I’ve seen since they opened three years ago, that screening may have been the best night I’ve ever spent there (which is saying something, considering one of those nights was seeing Stop Making Sense with Talking Heads in attendance…) To the guy who yelled out “hey, maybe she’s also a railway cat” when everyone groaned at the second appearance of Grizabella… sir, I salute you.

The other movie I saw there this week was, appropriately, Independence Day, a movie I’m not sure I’ve seen since Old Navy tech vests were in vogue. There was a lot about it that I did not remember, but in particular I was not prepared for Jeff Goldblum at his all-time hottest. Goodness gracious. Those glasses are VERY CORRECT.

what’s next?

This coming weekend my dad is coming to visit! Which means my weekdays are going to be spent doing a lot of cleaning. (It’s fine, I actually kind of enjoy cleaning?) We’re talking about checking out the Jaws exhibition at the Academy Museum, which I’ve heard is outstanding. I will of course report back if this happens.

Over in Muppeturgy land, our latest episode about a bunch of weird bicentennial media we watched in anticipation of the semiquincentennial just dropped, and it’s a fun one. If you want a taste, the first 30 seconds of this 16mm PSA we watched is aesthetically my happiest place (even though this thing overall is v. dry and boring):

(And, of course, I’m duty-bound to mention that good things are happening in my creative world, I just can’t tell you about any of them quite yet. Soon!)

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hello! This is a picture from the bathroom at the Ripped Bodice, a very cool romance-themed bookstore in Culver City, which I visited for the first time this week. The part of Culver City that it’s in was mostly new to me. (Not to brag, but I’ve really only spent time in the part where they tape Jeopardy!…)

The thing I really liked about this bathroom (which is, admittedly, a selfie trap) was taking in the wide range of thoughts that people decided to commit to Post-It. A lot of them were related to books and reading (the one cut off at the top right corner said “HOT GIRLS READ”, which is true!), some of them were topical and political, many were downright weird (I’m not one to kinkshame but you romantasy people sure are something), but I particularly appreciated the people who paid it forward with advice or something motivational.

There was something about “you will survive and then you will thrive” that particularly resonated with me in the moment. I’m staring down a year which increasingly looks to me like the personal and professional equivalent of being shot out of a cannon, and I’m trying to prepare myself inasmuch as I can prepare myself. A common theme for me in 2026 that has recurred in such disparate places as my cognitive processing therapy and the “manifestation” content that’s hijacked my Instagram algorithm has been “the thing you have to do to change and evolve is to make sure that you intrinsically know that you’re going to be safe”. It seems simple enough — fear is paralyzing, of course; courage is doing the thing anyway. But sometimes the thing we think of as true safety is paralysis. How do we trust that on the other side of the scary thing we’ll be all right?

Like everyone else, I don’t have much by way of wisdom and I’m figuring it all out as I go. But I’m actively fighting the paralysis, and there’s something about the two-step process this Post-It laid out that feels like a good mantra. First, you will survive. Trust that. And then? You will thrive.

It’s as good as anything else in this upside-down world right now. Let’s see what happens.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

‘50s diners, Shell’s Cruisin’ Classics and the nostalgia industry

A lady on the street in Culver City struck up a conversation about my Mary Tyler Moore sweatshirt in the middle of a crosswalk, which happens a LOT. (Well, not always in the middle of a crosswalk.) It’s almost always one of two things: “OMG I NEED THAT WHERE DID YOU GET IT” (Etsy) or “How do you know what that is, you’re not old enough to know what that is” (Nick at Nite in the early ‘90s, is how). There’s something about the specific visual that is so striking and iconic that I think it just jolts people. I mean, come on:

(Fun fact: “Love is All Around” was written and sung by Sonny Curtis, who was one of Buddy Holly’s Crickets. He also wrote the Everly Brothers’ “Walk Right Back”, maybe the best strophic pop song ever written? Hit me with others in the comments if you’ve got ‘em.)

I digress.

Thinking about just how often I get “you’re too young to know about that” lobbed at me got me to thinking this week about all of the hyperspecific forces that saturated me with pop culture older than me as a kid. Some of those things I’ve talked about a lot in this space — Nick at Nite and oldies stations being probably the biggest ones. But the thing is, the footprint of the nostalgia industry — which really hit its stride in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, right as I was at probably my most impressionable — is even wider than that.

Take, for example, the rise of the ‘50s café. In 1990, my family lived in Lexington, Kentucky, where my absolute favorite place to eat was a local chain called Rock-a-Billy Café. I probably don’t have to drop a picture in here for you to know exactly what this place looked like on the inside, but I’m doin’ it anyway:

I know it just looks like a Johnny Rockets or a Mel’s Drive-In (shoutout to my Californians), but it was so much cooler than that. It was the first place I ever experienced a photo booth, and I’m pretty sure also the first place I saw a real Wurlitzer Bubbler jukebox in person! But also, it was An Experience. The food and the music and the way the staff was dressed all took you to a place that didn’t look or sound or taste like 1990. I couldn’t get enough of it. (Sadly, Rock-a-Billy Café has been gone for many, many years. Mel’s is the closest I’ve come to replicating the experience, but they’re a little too lackadaisical about their jukebox curation for my taste. Props to them for their gluten-free grilled cheese though, it slaps.)

It wasn’t just TV, radio and restaurants that cashed in on boomer nostalgia during that time. Gas stations wanted a slice of the oldies pie, too, and in 1989-90, Shell put out a series of cassettes called Cruisin’ Classics. Over the course of that year-ish, I’m fairly certain my mom managed to pick up all six of them, as well as a Christmas-themed one called Holiday Classics that honestly was maybe the best Christmas playlist ever made. (They were a heck of a deal — if you bought at least 8 gallons of gas, you could get a tape for $1.99.)

Cruisin’ Classics wasn’t the only cassette range that Shell offered — there was also a series called Farther Down The Road that was all country — but they were definitely the best ones. Check out this sampling of tracklists (courtesy of Discogs):

Getting any one of these for $1.99 was an absolute steal. (I just ran it through the Inflation Calculator — that would be equivalent to $5.23 today, which is still amazing for what you got.)

Once I had a radio of my own that I could control (a few years after this), it was almost always tuned to the oldies station (pour one out for the dearly departed 103.1 WRKA), but I think the reason for that largely had to do with Cruisin’ Classics. While we had all of them, I particularly remember us wearing out the ‘50s-’60s and ‘60s-’70s volumes in the car.

The great thing about living in the future (one of the few) is that you can recreate these guys whenever you want. And I have! Go forth and cruise, mah babies.

what I did this week

Our latest episode of Muppeturgy is one of our weirdest yet and also maybe one of my all-time favorites. When we covered the Star Wars Holiday Special back in December, we lamented that the copy we watched didn’t have any of the commercials in it. Well, a couple of our listeners helped us locate just the commercials that aired during the Star Wars Holiday Special in 1978, so we did a whole other episode just on them! It’s weird and wild and funny, and we had a blast. If that sounds like your kind of weirdness, watch the commercials here and then come join us:

what’s next?

Among many things on my agenda this week: finally seeing Disclosure Day. I will report back once I do. (New Spielberg + new John Williams = always a major event in my book, as my previous posts about E.T. and Jurassic Park certainly attest…)

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hi! It’s been a minute. Well, a fortnight. So, technically, 20,160 minutes. (Sing it with me: “How do you measure, measure two weeks?” Just doesn’t have the same flow, sadly.) How’s your June going? Mine, so far, has been mostly excellent. June is my favorite month, for a multitude of reasons. First of all, it’s my birthday month, self-explanatory. But also I am one of those freaks who genuinely loves summer (I know, we’re monsters) and everything associated with it — being out of school (though I’ve been out of every kind of school I’ve attended for almost fifteen years now), vacations, outdoor concerts, cookouts, flip flops, popsicles, anything that smells or tastes of coconut… I am here for all of it.

Speaking of outdoor concerts, I’ve been to two outstanding ones since my last dispatch. Firstly, Paul Simon at the Hollywood Bowl! This was my first time seeing him, and I’m so glad I got the opportunity. The first third of the show was the entirety of his 2023 song cycle Seven Psalms, which I’d never heard before, and honestly, as much as it was a thrill to hear “Graceland” and “The Boxer” live, I think I’ll probably treasure the experience of hearing this particular set of songs the most. As a society we put so much of a premium on youth, or the illusion of youth, that we miss the beauty of the hard-won lived experience that comes with age. These songs are really beautiful because of all of that, and much as I’m loving Paul McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane (as I’ve discussed), I’m loving these songs, too. This is probably my favorite in the bunch:

What a lyric:

I lived a life of pleasant sorrows
Until the real deal came
Broke me like a twig in a winter gale
Called me by my name

And in that time of prayer and waiting
Where doubt and reason dwell
A jury sat deliberating
All is lost or all is well

Paul Simon nowadays has almost total hearing loss in his left ear, so it’s a wonder and a gift that he’s still making music at all. I’m very grateful.

Concert number two was Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band at the Greek! I saw them by myself last fall at Yaamava’ (a surprisingly nice casino kinda halfway between L.A. and Palm Springs) and honestly it was one of the most fun shows I’d ever been to, so when they announced they were coming closer to home I immediately snagged tickets for me, my mom, my friend and her mom. We were not disappointed. The All-Starr Band lineup currently includes Steve Lukather of Toto, Hamish Stuart of the Average White Band and Colin Hay of Men At Work, so in addition to all of Ringo’s bangers you get all of the greatest hits from those bands too. It’s just a blast. Ringo looks and sounds pretty incredible for a dude about to turn 86.

I’ve got a few more concerts on the horizon before the end of summer, and then the fall promises to be more theatre-heavy for me (both in the making and the seeing). But we’ll get there when we get there. For now, I’m just going to take it easy. There might even be a popsicle involved. As always, stay tuned.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

Boss Radio 66, things that aren’t on streaming and my favorite playlist (that I’ve made)

It’s going to seem weird to some of you who’ve been around for a minute that my favorite playlist that I’ve ever made doesn’t live on Spotify. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a Spotify user and an Apple Music user, for a simple reason: because of the volatile nature of streaming, there are songs and albums that can only be found on one or the other at any given time, and I’m such a voracious listener that having access to both libraries is of critical importance to me.

And of course there are things I love that aren’t on either service, or on YouTube for that matter, which is why physical media is still important. There’s a bonus track on Billy Bragg’s compilation Must I Paint You a Picture? of a honky-tonk reworking of his song “Rule Nor Reason” that is one of my favorite recordings of anything ever. What a perfect lyric, my God. This song crystallized a moment in time for me — somehow perfectly describing an impossible-to-explain emotional connection I made with someone in my early twenties that I still cherish in spite of it being, well, impossible. (It was a real “Killing Me Softly With His Song” moment to find it rendered so plainly.) It is literally nowhere to be found on the internet, so you’ll have to either take my word for it that it’s superior or go track down the CD. (I ripped it years ago.) Or you can listen to the original, which is lovely but lacks the suspension-heavy twang of the version that I love:

But I digress. I’m on both Spotify and Apple Music, and my all-time favorite playlist lives on Apple Music. It’s a 150-track (and growing) playlist called Boss Radio 66 Winners,1 initially started as a repository for songs I discovered while listening to the internet radio station Boss Radio 66.

Boss Radio 66 is the coolest. It’s tricky to pin down what it is — it’s a home for the rare and retro, generally focused on the 1950s to early ‘70s. I discovered them five years ago when Tom Hanks started doing DJ spots on there called Songs From The Back Of The Station Wagon (yes, shocking that the guy who brought us That Thing You Do! is a nerd for midcentury pop music…) and was delighted by the treasure trove of unknown-to-me cool old music.

Anyway, I started saving new-to-me songs from Boss Radio 66 that I enjoyed on an Apple Music playlist because, weirdly, it’s the only place I could find some of them. And then as I started listening to what I’d saved, a vibe of sorts emerged, and I started adding things that I felt maintained the vibe. There aren’t really hard and fast rules to this playlist — it’s like 98% ‘50s and ‘60s, but genre? There are no limits. Rockabilly, doo wop, surf guitar instrumentals, my beloved Merseybeat, weird folk songs… it’s all over the place, in the best way. Familiar and unfamiliar, songs in English and songs in other languages (in at least one case, the same song in multiple languages) — over time, it has become the perfect driving playlist and I’m pretty proud of it.

Here are five random songs from Boss Radio 66 Winners, to give you a taste:

“It’s a Happening World”, The Tokens (1967) — This is the most distilled version of The Vibe I can think of. This was my most-played track on Apple Music last year. Make of that what you will. (If this sounds familiar and you’ve been around for a while, it’s because it came up last year during my discussion of Scopitones.)

“So Che Mi Vuoi”, Mina (1965) — this is an Italian cover of “It’s For You”, the “I’m gonna out-Bacharach Burt Bacharach” song that Paul McCartney wrote for Cilla Black. (He sure does love a character writing exercise, our Macca. Whatever souls are made of, etc etc…) As I mentioned when I discussed this song in a previous post, this cover goes so much harder than it needs to (complimentary).

“Night Life”, Ray Price (1963) — I discovered this one when I watched Ken Burns’s Country Music on PBS years ago. (So worth your time if you haven’t seen it. I think you can still stream it on PBS Passport.) Willie Nelson wrote it, which gives the whole thing an extra layer of grit and poetry when you know. I would crawl into this song like a pile of blankets and roll around in it if I could.

“Freight Train”, Peter and Gordon (1964) — I love this track because it feels like something the Folksmen from A Mighty Wind would have covered. Also, it’s Peter and Gordon! We love Peter and Gordon around these parts.

“Easier Said Than Done”, The Essex (1963) — This is, in my estimation, a perfect pop song, and the story behind it is fascinating (and tragic). The Essex was a group of active-duty Marines who got together and made music in their downtime and scored a recording contract after cutting a demo in 1963. This song — which was originally the B-side of their debut single — was a huge, huge hit, but by the time it had gone to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, one of the members had shipped off to Okinawa and they never got to fully capitalize on their initial success. A couple years later, another one of the members was killed in an attempted mugging. As sad as I am that we never got to see them evolve, much like the boys in That Thing You Do!, there’s something miraculous — dare I say wondrous — about being a one-hit wonder.

what I did this week

I did also finally get to see The Mandalorian and Grogu and it was exactly what I needed it to be. More low-angst, high-cuteness Star Wars, please and thank you.

what’s next?

There are all manner of wild things on the horizon for me, none of which I can discuss publicly yet. (I know, I know.) In the meantime, I plan to make the most of my summer. I hope you are, too.

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

It’s only been a week since my last post, but it feels like I’ve lived a couple of lifetimes since then. It turns out that during my weekend in the Hudson Valley, I didn’t eat enough or drink enough water (a direct side effect of some meds I’m on), and consequently I kind of collapsed on Tuesday morning. I woke up weak and vaguely nauseous and after taking the dog out I was so dizzy that I couldn’t stand up. Sufficiently freaked out, my mom called 911, and I was taken by ambulance (a first for me!) to the ER where for a moment they thought I might be having a stroke. Very cool, very normal stuff. (Have you ever had a CT scan done on your brain? It’s terrifying. They shot this hot contrast solution through my veins and for a second I thought I was being turned into the next Captain America.)

Alas, I am not the next Captain America.

The good news? I am also fine. All my tests were negative, everything was clear, even my blood sugar was fine. I was just dehydrated and exhausted. (Also, I was still in my pajamas when the paramedics came, threw up all over myself in the ambulance, and then when I was released had to wear my same disgusting pajamas home. Dignity, always dignity.)

I take reasonably good care of myself — I get plenty of sleep and I eat vegetables and drink water, etc etc — and yet this was my body’s way of telling me: slow the hell down. The last few months I’ve felt so energized (in a good way!), like I’m taking a turbocharged leap forward in so many aspects of my life that have been for a long time stagnant. But also I am a human being who still needs sleep and water and food and vitamins, a thing my annoying supercomputer of a brain conveniently forgets sometimes.

Well, message received. All it takes is one ride of shame in the back of an Uber in your barfy pajamas to realize how fragile you are. That’s what that Sting song is about, right?

Anyway, this is going out a little later than usual because, well, I’m taking better care of myself. Or something. I’m sure you don’t mind.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme/Talking Heads, 1984)

Do you have a piece of art you feel a mystical connection to? I’m not necessarily talking about a piece that has profoundly moved you so much as a piece that you feel intrinsically connected to on a spooky, almost unexplainable level. There are multiple things I’d classify this way, but the biggest thing in this category for me is Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s film drawn from the four concerts Talking Heads did at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood in December 1983.

I was born in June of 1984, so I was in utero when the film was shot and four months old when it was released in theaters. (As has been previously discussed in this space, I was released the same day as Ghostbusters and Gremlins. Yes, I said released.) I’m not saying that there’s a direct correlation between my existence and this movie, an objectively insane thing to put in print. But if someone asked me to describe what a ritual that summoned me into existence would look like, it would look like this film.

Talking Heads was always a part of the aural landscape when I was kid — they were a band my mom enjoyed, and they got a lot of airplay on the rock stations we listened to. But I wouldn’t have called myself a huge fan until September of 2023, when by a stroke of pure timing I managed to snag a couple of tickets to see the first screening of A24’s gorgeous restoration of Stop Making Sense at Vidiots, my beloved neighborhood movie theater. This screening has gone down into legend because it was the first time in decades that the band — David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison — as well as the surviving members of the auxiliary band that joins them in the film (Steve Scales, Alex Weir, Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt) were all in the same place at the same time.

Much has been made about the acrimonious split of the band (and I’m not going to lie, I’ve eaten up every bit of gossip and lore with a spoon — remember if you will that I’m a Beatles girlie, complicated band drama is a thing I positively live for), so there was something really extraordinary about seeing all of them standing together, collectively acknowledging the power of the thing they made.

A thing I saw for the first time that night. I think it found me when it was supposed to — at the moment at which I would most understand and benefit from it. While I’m sure I would have been dazzled by it at any age, finding it as I was turning 40 alongside it gave it so much more resonance. I’m not sure I would’ve connected the dots between our respective geneses otherwise.

Stop Making Sense is often referred to as the greatest concert film ever made, and with good reason. It’s unbelievable. For one thing, until the lights rise on the audience at the very end of the film, it looks like it could have been made yesterday. The artistry of it has an unnerving timelessness to it. But more than that, it’s a document of a live experience that has a clear narrative viewpoint and a unity of visual and sonic storytelling that rivals most musical theatre I’ve seen in my lifetime (and, uh, I’ve seen a bit).

It charts — through escalation of sound and production — a journey from alienation and isolation to joy and purpose through connection and collaboration. This is where it starts:

And with each progressive element that is added — each voice, each instrument, each presence — the event coalesces into something ecstatic, bordering the religious. It is a thing meant to be felt rather than explained (and far be it from me to explain it), and all I will simply say is that when the guitar starts to echo against the walls of the Pantages like a prayer chanted in an ancient cathedral at 4:18 here, it’s the closest thing to the truth that I’ve ever experienced. As David, Lynn and Ednah roll up into the light from the ground and those chords reverberate and rattle (that plagal IV-I, called the ‘amen’ cadence for a reason), there’s a holy mystery to the proceedings that I understand on a cellular level:

Anyway. Be careful what you create — you never know what kind of wild creature you’re summoning into existence in the process. And if Stop Making Sense pops up at a movie house near you, go. It’s meant to be experienced with others.

what I did this week

While I’m still not over the fact that I could have been there for the now-legendary L.A. listening party because I had my own show to do (I may never be, if I’m honest), I gotta say, I really love The Boys of Dungeon Lane, Paul McCartney’s new album. It’s so rich and surprising — which is so characteristically Paul. While the more uptempo rockers are a delight, my favorite track for the moment is “Momma Gets By”, the very last song on the album. Paul himself has mentioned it was his attempt at writing something in the emotional vein of Porgy and Bess, so no wonder I love it. The first time I heard the strings swell at that refrain (the bit around 1:50, the “she loves him, she loves him, with all her heart and soul, all her heart and soul”), well, I choked up. I hope against hope that we finally get to see and hear his It’s a Wonderful Life musical someday. He’s got musical theatre in the blood.

Also, if you need a little serotonin boost, I highly recommend checking out his episode of Chicken Shop Date, it’s the absolute cutest:

what’s next?

Well, this weekend I have plans to both finally see The Mandalorian and Grogu and some young upstart in concert named (checks notes) PAUL SIMON. I can’t imagine my 41st year ending in more spectacular fashion.

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hello from the air! I’m currently writing this on a JetBlue flight from JFK to Burbank. Call me old-fashioned, but it’s still wild to me that I can use the internet on an airplane. My feelings about technology are so complicated — I’m still deeply skeptical that I’ll ever be able to establish a fully healthy relationship with social media, and I still think AI should cure cancer and solve world hunger before it should be allowed to write any more screenplays. But every so often there’s a moment like this one where I go, “Huh. It’s not all bad.”

(But, like, it’s mostly bad. Right?)

(Also, shoutout to JetBlue; they have the best snacks. Please let them give me an endorsement deal and enable my dreams of being a bicoastal nightmare.)

(…am I already becoming a bicoastal nightmare?)

As I’d alluded to last week, I spent Memorial Day weekend in the Hudson Valley at the wedding of a couple of my dearest friends. If you’re on tenterhooks, here’s the honest truth: I crushed it on the castanets.

Great weddings — in my experience as an attendee — are celebrations of community as the galvanizing force behind the people making the commitment, and this particular wedding was the most thoughtful and joyful celebration of community I’ve ever experienced. This was unsurprising, given that the couple in question are two of the most generous and community-minded people I know, but still — when the event is a celebration of love and that love is extended to everyone in the room? Well, it’s really something special. More of that, please.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

“Passionate Kisses”, Lucinda Williams (1988)/Mary Chapin Carpenter (1992), “Short Skirt/Long Jacket”, Cake (2001), and manifestation, whatever the hell that is

I’ve been consciously using Instagram more lately. Social media was an anxiety trigger for me for a really long time, so I used it as little as possible. (And I still barely use Facebook for that reason.) But I’ve started to make peace with the fact that my work being out in the world requires me to be out in the world to a certain extent (so that you can go on exhibition—so that your work can go on exhibition), so I’ve been making a point of posting at least something to my Stories once a day. The idea of having a persona or a brand makes my teeth itch, but nobody asked for my input when the business model was being built, so here I am.

(What I’m learning in the process of posting every day is just how much real estate Frasier occupies in my subconscious. It’s, uh, a lot. Which is not a surprise to anyone who’s known me for any length of time.)

Lately there’s been a real shift in what the Instagram algorithm has been sending my way. For the longest time, it was just recipes and things to do with the Beatles, which was honestly great, but in the last month or so, it’s gotten weirdly woo-woo out of nowhere. Lots of astrology, the occasional tarot reader, motivational/self-help kinds of things. And manifestation. Lots and lots of talk of manifestation.

Here are the facts: I am a Gemini with Leo rising and a Libra moon. (I suspect the Leo rising is why I went into show business.) Apparently Uranus began transiting through Gemini this past week for the first time since 1942, a thing that astrologers are claiming is super powerful if you have Gemini placements in your chart. Do I actually believe in this stuff? I don’t know, really. I would call myself more curious and entertained than fully on board.

Anyway, the Uranus in Gemini thing is supposed to be kicking off a years-long cycle of change, and we (the suddenly empowered?) are supposed to harness the power of that change. Sure.

What I know for sure is that regardless of what power we do or don’t have, mindset shifts are everything. I had a bit of a light meltdown in advance of our industry presentations of Fitzgeralds last month, and a mentor of mine (someone I respect tremendously in the industry) talked me down from the ledge of “but what if nobody likes it and we never get to do it again and I’ve just put a decade plus of hard work and my whole freaking heart on display for people and it doesn’t matter” by telling me to focus my energies on being of service to everyone in the room. “Take five minutes every day and imagine each person who’s going to be there, and ask who or whatever it is you believe in to allow the work to improve their lives or their day in some way,” she said. “It’s a gift that you’re giving them. And know it’s not going to be for everyone, and that’s okay too. Wish them well too, and move on.”

That shift unlocked something pretty profound for me, so it’s curious (in a good way) that suddenly Making Things Happen is what the internet is now trying to get me to do. At the wedding I just attended, I spent a good chunk of time talking to a couple of writers in my industry that I greatly admire about the last few weeks/last few years/general arc of my career so far, and I found myself realizing as I relayed to them all the forces that took the wind out of my sails and drove me out of New York that I have systematically over the last few years conditioned myself not to want. Rejection in all its forms broke me in half, and I retreated into a sort of cozy, static hibernation. I stopped writing. I stopped putting myself in any kind of position — professional, personal, you name it — where I could be rejected.

But I’m sitting here now on the other side of presenting my show to a lot of important people and I was very much not rejected. Things are in motion for a next step (or several!), which is thrilling. And suddenly I find myself wanting things again. Wanting a life in which getting to do this work is my actual full time job and not a thing I eke out in the margins. Wanting a life full of meaningful connection in every conceivable form.

From what the algorithm is telling me, manifestation is rooted in a sort of ecstatic delusion — the story you tell yourself is the one you ultimately end up living out. So I’m testing this out. In thinking about the things I actually want in my life, I keep thinking about a pair of songs that on their face seem wildly unrelated but I actually think are in conversation with each other.

I started making this playlist many years ago of songs that I felt like “talked” to each other both musically and thematically that you could mash up and tell some kind of story. My logic was that maybe there was an interesting cabaret/conceptual concert lurking in it, if there were enough of these song pairings that made sense. I’ve honestly only hit upon two perfect pairs since I started thinking about this, though. The first pair was ABBA’s “When All Is Said And Done”, which is a really magnanimous song about a breakup in which everyone is being very publicly an adult (standing calmly at the crossroads, no desire to run/there’s no hurry anymore when all is said and done), contrasted with the Mountain Goats’ “No Children”, which is probably the most perfect song about an ugly breakup ever written. I mean, this opening lyric, my God:

I hope that our few remaining friends
Give up on trying to save us
I hope we come up with a fail-safe plot
To piss off the dumb few that forgave us

I hope the fences we mended
Fall down beneath their own weight
And I hope we hang on past the last exit
I hope it’s already too late

And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here
Someday burns down
And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away
And I never come back to this town again

In my life, I hope I lie
And tell everyone you were a good wife
And I hope you die
I hope we both die

What does it say about me that whenever anyone asks me what songs I wish I’d written, the first three songs I always think of are “No Children”, “It Would Have Been Wonderful” from A Little Night Music, and “I’ll Follow the Sun”? Let’s not dwell.

Anyway, manifesting. The other pair of songs I found that perfectly complement each other are Lucinda Williams’s “Passionate Kisses” (which I honestly think of as Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Passionate Kisses”, as her cover is the one that imprinted on me) and Cake’s “Short Skirt/Long Jacket”. Both of these songs are about putting your wants out into the universe. The older I get, the more “Passionate Kisses” feels a little too close to the bone for me. There’s a surprisingly adult humility in what Lucinda Williams is writing about here — she’s not asking for fame and fortune, she’s asking for pens that don’t run out of ink, and cool quiet, and time to think. Damn, kill me softly with your song, Lucinda, why don’t you? Woof.

So in one corner you have “Passionate Kisses”, in which the singer is basically like, I want a grown-up existence in which I get to make art and somebody loves me. Great. Meanwhile in the other corner, you have Cake’s “Short Skirt/Long Jacket”, in which the singer is essentially saying, I want a girl who sounds an awful lot like the one who sings “Passionate Kisses”:

I want a girl with a mind like a diamond
I want a girl who knows what's best
I want a girl with shoes that cut
And eyes that burn like cigarettes
I want a girl with the right allocations
Who is fast and thorough and sharp as a tack
She is playing with her jewelry, she is putting up her hair
She is touring the facility and picking up slack

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket

There’s an interestingly gendered thing happening in these songs when you put them side by side. The singer of “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” isn’t asking for permission, or wondering if it’s out of bounds to want a girl who’s “trading her MG for a white Chrysler LeBaron”. He just says what he wants very clearly. (Testosterone is a hell of a drug, I’m told.) But in “Passionate Kisses”, the singer is troubled by wanting. She starts the first verse by asking, “Is it too much to ask…?” And then she gets bolder in the second verse, wondering, “Is it too much to demand I have a full house and a rock ‘n’ roll band?” And by the bridge, she’s staring the whole thing in the face:

Do I want too much?
Am I going overboard to want that touch?
I shout it out to the night
Give me what I deserve 'cause it's my right
Shouldn't I have this?
Shouldn't I have this?
Shouldn't I have all of this, and passionate kisses from you?

The musical theatre songwriter in me loves the character detail of what the last line unlocks in this: that the implied listener is someone it’s vulnerable to want in front of, because they’re included in that want. Storytelling! Song structure! This is the epicenter of my wheelhouse.

All of which is to say, I have none of this figured out but I’m not phrasing my wants in the form of a question anymore. We’ll see if I delude myself into making my wildest dreams come true.

In the meantime, it is Gemini season, my birthday is June 8th, and I will gladly accept any and all pens you may have that won’t run out of ink.

what I did this week

Really the only thing of note I did this week was go to the wedding. I have yet to see The Mandalorian and Grogu, which kills me — hoping that I’ll have rectified that by my next post.

what’s next?

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

When I moved to California (five years ago next month, how is that possible), I did a thing I cannot recommend highly enough to anyone who moves here: I watched Huell Howser every weeknight. If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, here’s the short version: Huell Howser (1945-2013) was a TV journalist from Tennessee who moved to California in the ‘80s and became a beloved staple of California public television through his shows Visiting… and California’s Gold, which showcased the wild, weird and beautiful things to be found throughout the Golden State. He approached everything he covered — from the natural wonders of Yosemite to the lunchtime clientele at Musso and Frank’s — with the same level of open-hearted curiosity and aw-shucks friendliness. He reminds me of my papaw (my mom’s dad), if he’d had his own TV show. Big-hearted country weirdos are my people.

The thing that’s so infectious if you watch Huell’s shows with regularity (and they still air every weeknight on KCET here in L.A.) is the deep love he had for his adopted home state. He never ran out of places to explore and people to talk to, and the cumulative effect of his exploration is something akin to a spiritual practice. I think this approach could be directed at any place, really, but California is so beautifully rich for exploration.

The reason I’m thinking about Huell this week is because it’s jacaranda season in California right now and one of my all-time favorite episodes of California’s Gold is all about jacarandas. Jacarandas are these big, obscenely beautiful purple trees that all start to bloom around the same time, and they’re everywhere. The petals that fall off of jacaranda trees secrete a sticky substance that can damage the paint on your car, apparently, so (understandably) not everyone loves them. Huell interviewed people across the spectrum of appreciation — people who were new to them, people who hated them because of the damage they do, and, finally, a blind woman named Allie Tegner. (The whole episode is worth your time, but jump to to the 19:40 mark for this.)

HUELL: Now you used to be an artist.
ALLIE: I used to paint.
HUELL: Before you…
ALLIE: Lost my eyesight. And jacarandas are the most wonderful thing in the world to paint.
HUELL: They’re beautiful.
ALLIE: They’re beautiful. The colors are just… I can see them now.
HUELL: Well, you can’t—
ALLIE: I can’t see them. But I can feel them.
HUELL: But you can see them in your mind. What do you mean, you can feel them?
ALLIE: I can feel them. The lovely blues and lavenders, and a little bit of pink in there.
HUELL: Can you smell them?
ALLIE: I can smell them.
HUELL: Lots of people say they smell terrible!
ALLIE: I think they’re wonderful. I think they’re wonderful.

Whenever the jacarandas start to bloom, I think of Allie Tegner, and Huell Howser, and the gift of getting to see them in their purple magnificence. As the world gets stranger and darker, being able to just take a breath and enjoy the sudden burst of color is really special. (I also make sure to not park my car underneath them.) Wherever you are this week, I hope there’s something blooming that is good for your soul, even if just in metaphor.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

James Taylor and the music we turn to in hard times

If somebody were to ask me out of nowhere to make a list of artists whose music I loved — with no other qualifications — off the top of my head, I think I’d possibly be into triple-digits before I thought of James Taylor. And yet it occurred to me this week that in some of the lowest and darkest moments of my life, the first place I’ve gone for comfort is his music.

It happened by accident the first time.

I don’t talk about it much, but I went to NYU for a semester straight out of high school. It was a huge mistake. I just barely squeaked into Tisch’s undergrad dramatic writing program off of the waitlist, and I simply did not have the money to go, and due to the vagaries of federal student aid at that moment in time (fall of 2002), I couldn’t get loans to go, either. I managed to scrape together enough money to cover a semester thinking that if I showed up and worked my ass off, somebody would notice and a door would open.

So I showed up, worked my ass off… and nobody cared. I went to the head of financial aid for Tisch at the time and pleaded with her to help me. She merely shrugged. “If you were a junior or a senior, I could pull some strings. But since you’re a freshman, there’s literally nothing I can do for you.” I’d been living in a dorm room all semester with two roommates who didn’t like me, trying just to stay afloat, feeling like the dream that had supposedly come true was dying. I had no idea where I was going to go at the end of the semester, and I was numb with grief.

I remember sneaking off to the common room in the dorm in the middle of the night and flipping on the TV just so I’d have some company. And when I did, James Taylor was on Last Call With Carson Daly. I can’t find this performance online, but I weirdly can pinpoint the date thanks to James Taylor’s surprisingly thorough website — October 9, 2002. The reason I remember it was specifically Carson Daly’s show was that it was a show without a live audience — just James Taylor and his guitar, looking straight into the camera as he sang “Sweet Baby James”, a song I’d never paid much mind to.

In this moment, I felt like James Taylor was reaching out to me directly. It was eerie, but beautiful. Somehow the words of his sweet cowboy waltz were the most comforting thing I’d ever heard, eighteen years old, so far from home, feeling every bit of the weight of ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go:

There’s a song that they sing when they take to the highway
A song that they sing when they take to the sea
A song that they sing of their home in the sky
Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep
But singing works just fine for me

And so James Taylor’s always been someone I go to when the world feels too heavy. I think of another sleepless night over a decade later, a traumatic phone call I got from my mom that started “the important thing to know is that I’m okay” that ended with me finding out that my stepdad had tried to kill her. I wrote a full account of that moment in our lives on my old Tumblr when it happened, because a truly shockingly awful thing happened in the aftermath of all of that which is that no one believed us when we told them what we’d been living with for the last twenty years. I needed it in print, somewhere I could point people to it. (It’s why I never deleted my Tumblr.) I’d watched as my mom — in simply surviving — was judged by people who’d claimed to be her friends for walking away from decades of psychological abuse that culminated in her almost dying. My rage kept me awake for long stretches at a time, and the only thing that got me back to sleep… was James Taylor’s song “You Can Close Your Eyes”:

In my soul-deep exhaustion in that moment, all I can remember is hearing I don’t know no love songs and I can’t sing the blues anymore, but I can sing this song, and you can sing this song when I’m gone, and thinking it was the only real thing I’d ever heard committed to tape.

Both of these songs are lullabies, in their way. A thing that I learned when I went through cognitive processing therapy earlier this year is that on the other side of every moment of deeply embedded trauma I’ve excavated is a memory of someone who cared about me very much or someone who helped me. Our brains are great at leapfrogging past the good in our memories to the awful, and part of healing is taking a step back and reconciling the good with the bad. And in both of these moments, funnily enough, there was James Taylor and his guitar, ready to remind me that songs were the thing that could save me.

what I did this week

I went to see the world premiere of Nico Juber’s deliriously funny Millennials Are Killing Musicals this week at the Colony Theatre in Burbank. (Let me tell you, more shows should happen at this place. It’s attached to the mall’s parking garage, it’s glorious.) I’ve already gushed on main about how much this piece delighted me, but I’ll say it again: Nico’s voice is so smart and sharp and singular, and I cannot wait for this show to find its audience. Sadly it will have closed by the time you read this, but I have a feeling you will get another chance to see it very soon.

what’s next?

I’m headed back east this weekend for a wedding in which I have been conscripted to play the castanets, a thing I have never done in my life. I will of course report back on how I do with this.

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

I’ve been back in Los Angeles for a week now and I still can’t stop thinking about the time I just spent in NYC. I’m hoping that by the time you read this that I will have unpacked my suitcase, at least. (I better have, anyway. The laundry, it needs doing.)

I had a real flashback this week to high school math class. (Stick with me.) I’ve never been any good at math in the traditional sense — likely because the way my brain is partitioned, that space is taken up by useful data like the libretto of Miss Saigon instead — and at a certain point around trig or pre-calc, I gave up the pretense of ever trying to catch up. (It was the only subject I ever took where that happened. I was otherwise a great student.)

The problem was that for those classes I had to get a TI-86 graphing calculator, and I discovered early on that it had a hidden notes function, similar to the Notes app on an iPhone. Of course, as soon as I found it, I started using it rather than paying attention. And over the course of my junior year of high school (2000-01), I spent most of my math class writing a serialized novel on my calculator called Broadway Nights. (Hold for the laugh.)

I don’t remember a ton of what happened in Broadway Nights other than that I thought at the time that it was extremely glamorous and torridly romantic, though knowing how I thought at sixteen it was probably a very, very slow burn and not torrid in the slightest. I have a vague memory of the protagonist (a Broadway star named Francesca, the most glamorous name I could think of at the time) running into her crush (David, I think his name was? Another star of a different show, who I think had a girlfriend who was a real soap opera villain? All I remember is that in my head he was played by Douglas Sills, to whom I had a shrine on my bedroom wall during this period made up of pictures I’d printed off of Playbill.com and stuff I’d clipped out of InTheater magazine, remember that?) in the old breezeway that used to run along the ground level of the front of the Marriott Marquis as they both headed to some swanky event in the rotating bar upstairs.

At some point, I even remember writing a theme for Broadway Nights on my keyboard. It was, naturally, a tango.

The reason I remembered Broadway Nights out of the blue this week is that, in a weird way, life just imitated calculator art for me. No, nothing sexy happened in or adjacent to the rotating bar at the Marriott Marquis (alas), but for the first time since I was sixteen, I felt like New York was the exact place I always wanted it to be, a place where anything can happen. I credit the shift to three things:

1. Making work that people are genuinely excited about;

2. Not feeling invisible, finally; and (relatedly)

3. Therapy. (Have you heard of it? It’s great. Literally everyone should do it.)

Somehow I’ve Jedi mind-tricked myself into feeling like I belong. How did I do that? I’m still not quite sure. I know part of it has been intentionally shedding layer upon layer of protective armor, which is an ongoing process. My last therapist actively encouraged me to do things that elicited compliments and see how it made me feel (Still weird, I’m not going to lie! Every time I was pointed out or mentioned by name during our presentations I wanted to crawl under the table! Again, I’M WORKING ON IT.) But the internal shift is what’s really surprising me. I can do this. I’m already doing it. To quote one of the great philosophers, hold your head even higher and into the fire we go.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

Passion (Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine, 1994)

Thinking about my sixteen-year-old self and her outsized emotions has led me back to one of my teenage core texts, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Passion. I discovered Passion not long after the extraordinary pro-shot video (in my estimation, the best pro-shot of a live musical ever made) was released on VHS.

Shockingly, it was my very first Sondheim show. (Important to my lore as it is, I don’t think Dick Tracy counts.) I bought the tape at a Suncoast Motion Picture Company at the Green Tree Mall in Clarksville, Indiana, in spite of not knowing much about the show (though I do remember seeing a review of the video from when it aired on PBS in USA Today and it being my first exposure to the word “mellifluous”). The reason I bought it was because there was a sticker on the shrink wrap that said “Comes with a playbill!” and in spite of rationally knowing that Playbills are larger than VHS tapes and therefore it was impossible that one was hiding inside the sleeve, I assumed it meant an actual Playbill. What it was instead was a nice piece of cardstock with the cast list on it. I was underwhelmed. That is, until I popped the tape into the VCR.

My friend has (lovingly) called Passion “fanfiction for sad indoor girls”, and while I think it’s an extraordinary masterwork that you shouldn’t have to have lived experience to enjoy, man oh man did it help. Finding Passion at the age of 14 was like finding the Rosetta Stone of my own confusing emotions. I’d read about how people (grown men, I’m assuming) were getting into fistfights over it in the lobby during previews and was absolutely baffled. What was so impossible for these people to understand about this? Hasn’t everyone felt so raw with emotion that they feel ugly with it? Like it could literally kill them?

There’s a lot of cultural misogyny baked into people’s reactions to this show. The story of Passion — that of the sickly Fosca, who falls in obsessive love with the (conventionally attractive) soldier Giorgio, who is entangled with a (conventionally attractive) married woman named Clara — is at its core a story that’s been told musically several times. It’s The Phantom of the Opera, it’s Beauty and the Beast. But because the genders are flipped — and the “beast” in this telling is a vulnerable, conventionally unattractive woman overwhelmed by want who ultimately gets what she wants — well, people (again, mostly cis men) couldn’t handle it.

Also, if you really get in under the hood of Passion, the writing is possibly Sondheim’s most layered and interesting (which is SAYING SOMETHING). The way Fosca’s and Clara’s journeys (and Giorgio’s in suspension against them) are moving in opposite directions towards light and dark is built into the writing in an astonishing way.

The way the word “love” shimmers with light at the phrase “for now I’m seeing love like none I’ve ever known” in “I Wish I Could Forget You” (my favorite song in the score) is one of my favorite things in the world. Let Judy Kuhn show you how it’s done (cued for maximum impact, but start around 1:30 if it isn’t):

When I was a sophomore and became close to my dear friend and collaborator Danny Mefford, we passed that VHS tape back and forth between us in the halls like it was contraband. (We were so cool, you guys.) Passion actually came up a couple of times during rehearsals for the most recent presentations of our show (The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul, another show about big messy feelings) and it occurred to me that it is in some weird way indebted to Passion. It is emotionally big.

The kind of musicals I love most have caused fistfights in the lobby. They’re big swings. To quote this show especially, this is how I feel about them — and life in general, come to think of it:

Not pretty, or safe, or easy
But more than I ever knew
Love within reason, that isn’t love
And I learned that from you

what I did this week

Not laundry, I can tell you that much!

(It’s been a quiet week, though, which I think I needed. They can’t all be Broadway Nights.)

what’s next?

Laundry, obviously.

Also, some writing? Maybe?? I’ll keep you posted.

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hi! When this drops, I will be (I’m guessing) somewhere over Kansas, likely snoring against the window of a 747. To say I am exhausted is putting it very mildly. The last three weeks have been a revelation, in many, many ways. But oof, baby, life-changing weeks take it out of you, especially if you’re a soft introverted little Muppet like me.

I really thought New York and I were done. I’d convinced myself that the establishment would never make space for me, that it didn’t matter that the show I wrote was good, because I am nothing like who and what gets produced in this day and age. I’d done all the things I caution other people against — made myself smaller in the hopes of avoiding the pain I assumed was inevitable, ran away from my fears, tried to deny my heart the thing it wanted most.

Turns out that, like the most irresistible of ex-boyfriends, New York had other plans.

And it turns out that it doesn’t matter if the establishment wants to make space for you or not. You make your own. And this week, for the first time, with the help of an army of brilliant co-conspirators, I feel like I actually managed to do exactly that.

That said, I’m not leaving Los Angeles just yet. My nervous system is no longer accustomed to the sensory overload of the city in a way that I was not prepared for. (I have a feeling I will spend a not-insignificant part of the next week asleep.) But a page turned for me this week, in so many ways, and I can’t wait to learn what the next chapter holds.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

This week’s presentations of The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul

As I’ve been hyping extensively over the last couple months, this week we put my musical The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul in front of three invite-only industry audiences in NYC in anticipation of a commercial off-Broadway production, hopefully in the next year. I’m still riding out the seismic aftershocks of this process, which was, from my perspective, electric.

I started writing this show in the fall of 2014, at a moment when I felt like I had nothing left to lose, and we have put so much work into it in the eleven and a half years since that I didn’t think the show had the capacity to surprise me anymore. (See, e.g., everything I said above about New York and my own self-protective and self-sabotaging cynicism.) But a thing happened this time around where I felt like I saw the show it’s supposed to be clearly for the first time.

I have to give a tremendous amount of credit to Julie Benko and Bobby Conte, who are the kinds of performers a writer dreams of collaborating with: fearlessly vulnerable, sharp and unpredictable, with the kinds of voices that knock you sideways with their idiosyncratic beauty. They came in with such thoughtful questions and willingness to experiment that we excavated a layer of the show that I didn’t realize existed.

The show is, in essence, a purgatorial loop: Zelda Fitzgerald, from the confines of institutionalization at the end of her life, reliving and trying to make sense of her memories. I talked a little about my thinking about this in my author’s note when we did our preview production at Irish Classical in Buffalo in 2024:

In my experience, time is linear — but life isn’t. Our memories zig zag and loop around themselves as we reflect and try to make sense of our experiences. For those of us who are neurodivergent in some way, navigating the spirals and refractions of memory can be a particularly intense experience, in both good ways and bad.

Those of us who tell stories also see those pathways as an invitation to explore. But what if your desire to make sense of your own story is at odds with your ability to do so? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with in the ten years that I’ve been working on The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul. Zelda Fitzgerald once famously said, “I hate a room without an open suitcase in it — it seems so permanent.” What better place to explore the depths of a fractured memory than a room full of them?

The story we as a culture are now told about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald is complicated by almost a century of other people’s ideas about them — ideas about mental health, addiction, celebrity, wealth and class, gender politics in relationships, professional jealousy, plagiarism, and what it means to be both a success and a failure in the shadow of the American Dream. The Fitzgeralds were in many ways the first “influencers” — by being wildly, unapologetically themselves in a very public way, they became famous for a kind of aspirational excess that was ultimately their undoing.

These two people both died tragically young — Scott from a heart attack induced by his alcohol abuse at the age of 44 in 1940, and Zelda in a hospital fire in 1948 at the age of 47. They didn’t live to see or understand the bigger picture of their lives — how complicated and beautiful they truly were, or the impact both their love story and their art would have on future generations. My hope is that you as an audience walk away from this show with this: none of us have access to or control over the bigger picture of our lives, but we do have control over the stories we tell ourselves. Be kind to yourself. You did your best. We all did. To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, “You mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat…”

The question that we asked in our rehearsal process this time around that was so clarifying was: what is different about this iteration of the loop? What is Zelda learning or experiencing that is new? And without even having to think about it, the words came out of my mouth: This is the time around when she finally forgives him, and forgives herself. And just like that, the entire thing unlocked with such rich clarity.

I believe my job as an artist is inextricably bound with the work of healing. Sometimes healing is making someone laugh and sometimes it’s lancing a wound, but the intention of the work is the same. And in finally being able to articulate what I think the forward motion of the show is, in a single word — grace — I saw so much of what has been healing about it for me personally embedded in every pore of it. I laugh a little sometimes that I zeroed in on this particular story to tell when I can only relate to it from the sides — yes, I’m a female artist who’s struggled with mental health and with being taken seriously, who’s dealt with professional jealousy in personal relationships, who’s at various points been both artist and muse and known the ugly parts of both sides of that coin. But I don’t drink and I’ve never been married, much less ever actually been in love if I’m honest, at least not in the way I wish to someday be.

And yet, at the core of what I saw this week was something almost blindingly true: the kind of love I believe in spite of everything exists in the world, because it exists in me. There it is, in Tin Pan Alley sentiment and Technicolor melodrama. It’s a blueprint. It’s an exhortation. It’s a manifesto. When I first started writing the show ten years ago and sent the first batch of songs to my beloved director collaborator Danny Mefford, he sent me this text:

So here we are, at last, at the start of the revolution. I cannot wait to find out where it’s going to take us. Hopefully somewhere new.

what I did this week

My brain is soup at the moment but it’s a good moment to mention that I saw both Chess and Cats: The Jellicle Ball. I had a great time at both — especially The Jellicle Ball, which is maybe the most joyful thing I’ve ever experienced in a theatre. As far as Chess goes, it was wild to walk from a performance of a show I wrote to go see the show that first made me want to be a writer. MUSICALS RULE.

what’s next?

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Welp, we’ve arrived. This week we will put The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul in front of three audiences comprised of friends, colleagues, industry folk and potential co-producers/investors. As we get closer to doing it, I somehow get more zen about it, largely because as soon as we got into rehearsals I realized what a gift the whole experience is. Even if it leads to nothing — and my gut says it won’t — every time we work on the show, it gets better. For weeks I shrugged off my nerves and said “it’s out of my hands” but the fact of the matter is that I’ve done some substantial book rewrites over the weekend based on really rich conversations we’ve had in rehearsal. (I haven’t written any new songs. Don’t get too excited.)

Ultimately, it’s been a really affirming thing. When I moved to Los Angeles in 2021, it wasn’t because I’d fallen out of love with New York. It was because (at that moment in time) I felt like New York didn’t have a place for me in it. Being in the epicenter of an industry where you’re not getting anywhere can bring out a real hypercompetitive ugliness in a person, and I didn’t like who I was becoming, so I walked away. Not from the work — from all the forces that I felt like were hardening me. I am by nature pretty soft and vulnerable, and I’m thankful to the me of five years ago who fought to preserve that.

Being here now and knowing that I can show up and just be myself — and my work can be itself — and only good can come from that? Well, it’s a powerful feeling. I like it.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

The programming on American Movie Classics in the summer of 1996

This year marks thirty years of me wanting to do the very thing I’m doing right now. I discovered musical theatre for myself at the beginning of sixth grade (fall of 1995), through a slippery slope of happenstance. I spent the summer of 1995 at the movie theater seeing Disney’s Pocahontas ten times, and over the course of that summer I realized that it was the songs (Alan Menken’s music and Stephen Schwartz’s lyrics1 and the singular, glorious voice of Judy Kuhn) that I was drawn to. (I may go down the Pocahontas rabbit hole in a future dispatch.)

And then I started sixth grade at a new school where I knew nobody, and when we were asked in music class to do a research paper on a composer (I did mine, naturally, on Alan Menken), a girl in my class named Meredith that I’d somehow decided was cool announced that she was going to do her paper on Andrew Lloyd Webber. My mind went into overdrive: “If Meredith is cool, and she likes Andrew Lloyd Webber, then this must mean that Andrew Lloyd Webber is cool.” So I set out to acquire coolness for myself… and within a week I’d forgotten all about Meredith. (I wonder where she is now, and if she ended up pursuing marine biology after all. We’ll never know.)

A few months into my new obsession I suddenly knew that I’d discovered the thing that I didn’t realize I’d been looking for. I’d taken a bunch of books and CDs out of the library and I remember out of nowhere thinking, “This is what I’m supposed to do for the rest of my life.” And I couldn’t immerse myself in it all fast enough.

When I look back on that year, I’m really struck by all of the forces that came together to help me acquire a foundation in the art form that is musical theatre. Most remarkable to me is how American Movie Classics (yes, that’s what AMC used to stand for) ran nothing but classic movie musicals all that summer. Within the space of a few weeks, I saw Oklahoma!, The King and I, South Pacific and Hello, Dolly! multiple times. (I think there were others, but those were the ones that really imprinted on me.)

My brain is still in rehearsal mode so I don’t have anything particularly deep or interesting to say about these musicals at the moment. All I know is that getting this bird’s-eye view of the canon made me want more than anything to contribute to it somehow. I hope someday that someone is as thrilled by something I wrote as li’l me was by these moments.

what I did this week

I’ve seen two shows since I’ve been in NYC, and both were terrific. The first I admit I’m more than a little biased about — The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at New World Stages, directed by Hal-to-my-Steve Danny Mefford — but I swear it’s as great as everyone has said! So funny, so much heart, run don’t walk.

The other show I saw this week was the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone starring Cedric the Entertainer, Taraji P. Henson and Ruben Santiago-Hudson, directed by Debbie Allen. I did not know this play at all, and it’s made me want to fill in all the gaps in my August Wilson knowledge. It’s really exceptional stuff. Supposedly this is a precursor to a film version, and I really hope that happens.

what’s next?

TWO DAYS UNTIL THE SHOW TWO DAYS UNTIL THE SHOW TWO DAYS UNTIL THE SHOWWWWWWWWW

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hello! I’m almost a week into my time in NYC (well, mostly NJ at this point) and it’s been absolutely delightful! We start rehearsals later this week. I am trying to be cool about it, but man, it’s just hard. I’m too excited.

In the continuing saga of “an old British man is actively ruining my life”, yet another “almost” happened for me this week that I haven’t quite gotten over. A couple weeks ago I received this mysterious email:

Because I was set to arrive in NYC the day before, I had to decline this1, which killed me regardless, but then on Friday details about the event started trickling out. Thirty-ish (!!!) people met at Capitol Records, where they were taken by bus to producer Andrew Watt’s studio, where they got to listen to and get track-by-track commentary on Paul’s new album The Boys of Dungeon Lane from Watt and PAUL MCCARTNEY HIMSELF.

I AM A FOOL.

To say I am kicking myself is putting it extremely mildly. I’m devastated I missed this. But I’m comforted by the thought that the almosts in my life are getting progressively more thrilling, and hey, I am in NYC because my beautiful musical that I wrote is about to be presented to rooms full of people who could potentially change my life (no pressure or anything). It’s all going to be amazing.

By which I mean because he was kind enough to invite me to his fancy party, I worked some connections, got ahold of Sir Paul’s publicist’s email and invited him to mine.

(I’m not actually a fool.)

(A weirdo, sure, but not a fool.)

The thing is, I know in my bones he’d love my songs, and not just because he’s in my soup of influences. We’re cut from the same Tin Pan Alley cloth, you see…

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

What are the odds that he’ll (a) actually see the invitation, (b) be in NYC on April 30th and/or May 1st, and (c) be available? About as high as me getting the chance to be one of the thirty people who got to hear his album for the first time. Fortune favors the bold, and from now on, I’m embracing it because that’s exactly who I am. Bold like that set of Crayola markers from the ‘90s that was secretly the best set of colors.

When I was 17, I was in a summer program at NYU (at my eventual grad program) and we went to a talkback with Stephen Schwartz. (I don’t remember the specifics of why the talkback happened. This was a couple of years before Wicked.) On the way out, I remember lamenting to one of our TAs that I didn’t get Schwartz’s autograph, and he said, very kindly, “You’re a great writer. You don’t need anyone’s autograph ever again.”

I love my show. I’m proud of my show. I’m grateful to get to put it in front of an audience again. Let’s do this.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

The Cabbage Patch Kids craze of 1983-84 and its aftermath

A short one this week because my mind is, obviously, elsewhere: When I think of things that truly live rent-free in my head, this news report about the insanity around Cabbage Patch dolls is high on the list:

So much about this video is incredible — the inflation calculator tells me that $50 in 1983 is equivalent to $162 today! — but in particular, I cannot get enough of this lady here:

“I don’t like them! I don’t like them! I don’t like their faces! But I want one.” AN ICON. (This is how I felt purchasing a Labubu.)

Cabbage Patch Mania hit fever pitch around Christmas of 1983, when I was in utero, and my dad managed to snag me one before I was even born. Since I’m a person who’s owned a Cabbage Patch doll my entire life, the idea of people getting into fistfights over them is utterly baffling to me.

There have been plenty of other similar toy crazes in my lifetime — Tickle Me Elmo, Furby, Beanie Babies — but this was the OG toy craze. There’s even a Wikipedia entry for “Cabbage Patch riots”!

I still have my Cabbage Patch doll — in fact, I’m pretty sure she’s the only physical object that’s belonged to me since day one. Her name is Wilma. She’s a preemie, so she’s bald and kind of shrimpy. She’s still in her same weird pale salmon jumper and weird plastic shoes. (They’re sticky and impossible to wash. I don’t understand it.) And she’s in impeccable condition for a doll who was once yeeted out of a moving vehicle by yours truly. (It’s true. I yelled, “Wilma! Fly!” Luckily we were only a few blocks from home and she was easily retrievable.)

My oldest (and dearest) possession may have been part of a short-lived craze, but that craze has a more interesting footprint than you’d guess. For one thing, Babyland General Hospital is still up and running in Cleveland, Georgia (and, I’m not going to lie, I want to go sometime). Also, there was an entire album of Cabbage Patch-inspired songs written by none other than the Sherman Brothers??? This is the stand-out banger, because yes I’ve spent time with the entire album:

Tickle Me Elmo could never.

what I did this week

Gosh, Project Hail Mary is really special. I’d resisted seeing it because I thought based on the trailers I knew what it had to offer, and as ever, I’m so happy to be wrong. If you’re on the fence, it’s absolutely worth your time — beautifully made in all respects, and a testament to how human performers and practical effects can make all the difference in whether or not a megabudget studio film will actually move an audience.

what’s next?

T-minus two days until rehearsals begin…

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Hi! It’s Friday and I’m in New York! (Well, technically at the moment I’m in New Jersey. Look, I’m in the tri-state area, it counts.) I’m here to make theatre, can you believe it? I sure can’t. But it’s real, it’s happening, and I’m thrilled.

We were in Playbill! (My teenage self would’ve fainted. And I’m quoted with an exclamation point, which makes me sound vaguely deranged, it’s fine, it’s fine…) I’m bouncing off the walls excited to get into a room with this group of humans and make something special. I hope people love it. One of my strongest beliefs as a maker of things is there’s nothing more sacred than other people’s time and attention, so I just hope that everyone who sees it walks away feeling big things. Or anything, really! And I believe they will, truly. Like it or not, it’s out of my hands at this point! (Unless I make radical changes in rehearsal, and, uh, I won’t. This thing’s a well-oiled machine at this point. Obama still had two years left in his second term when I started writing.)

I’m planning to see some stuff while I’m in town, too (#1 with a bullet on my list being CATS: The Jellicle Ball, I have inhaled every single promo video I can get my paws on):

I love New York, and I’ve missed New York. (Not enough to move back. I don’t miss the New York I can afford to live in.) There’s something about moving through the city with special guest star energy that suits me.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

“Under African Skies” (Paul Simon, 1986), “I Think Ur A Contra” (Vampire Weekend, 2009) and the live versions that transformed them both

I’m in the middle of a project at the moment that has me thinking a lot about the amount of context that music carries — the time and place it was created, the people making it, and the things that influenced those people in the making of it.

Is this a thing I already think about a lot? Well, sure. I read a great piece on here this week about how The Pitt is basically two different shows depending on how much you engage with the paratext around the show, and I think that can be said of a lot of art, really. You can love a thing at face value, and many (most?) people do, and of course the expectation shouldn’t be that you need to do any kind of homework to enjoy a thing. But when you have the kind of spiraling, synesthetic trivia brain that I do, you crave paratext; you live for the stories hiding in the negative space. Hell, it’s why I enjoy writing about real people so much.

For this thing I’m working on now, I was specifically engaging in the thought experiment of, “What would a Vampire Weekend song sound like to a person who’s not only never heard Vampire Weekend, but has never heard all the things that obviously influenced their sound like Paul Simon’s Graceland period?”

Graceland is a real Desert Island Discs album for me, but I know the history around it is complicated. Paul Simon defied an anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa in order to make the thing, which in retrospect seems bonkers because the thing is at its heart a showcase for South African musicians. Modern day conversations around this album tend throw around the phrase “cultural appropriation”, but that to me implies a lack of consent, much less collaboration. This quote from Paul Simon in an August 1986 article about Graceland in the New York Times says a lot, I think:

That’s not to say that simply sharing his platform with black South African musicians absolves Simon from criticism. Arguably the most controversial track on Graceland is his duet with my doppelgänger Linda Ronstadt, “Under African Skies”. Paul Simon might have said no to playing Sun City, but Linda didn’t, playing there for quite a lot of money in 1983. Many felt her inclusion on the album negated any anti-apartheid message Paul Simon might have intended. It’s thorny, and again, good intentions alone don’t make a thing right.

That said, the resulting song was really beautiful, with a verse directly about Linda herself:

In early memory
Mission music
Was ringing 'round my nursery door
I said take this child, Lord
From Tucson Arizona
Give her the wings to fly through harmony
And she won't bother you no more

There are no videos of the two of them singing it live1, though, because Paul Simon took the criticism to heart. There is this, at least, which is delightful:

Instead, more often than not, Simon has chosen to sing it live with an African singer. And while I am on record as being very pro-Linda Ronstadt (and not just because we look like each other), this resulted in an all-timer of a performance that I return to again and again, between Paul and Mama Africa herself, the majestic Miriam Makeba:

If you don’t know Miriam Makeba, you should really do something about that. Start here and thank me later:

One of the many reasons I love this performance so much is because of how reverent Paul Simon looks throughout. He knows that it’s an honor for a legend of Miriam Makeba’s stature to be singing his song. He knows he is experiencing something transcendent — that this experiment of musical exploration has yielded something more beautiful than he’d possibly dreamed of. Graceland the album is undergirded by a deep desire to experience wonder, magic, dare I say grace, through climbing out of your comfort zone. By humbling yourself in the search for something bigger than you. As my favorite lyric on the album puts it:

And I may be obliged to defend every love, every ending
Or maybe there's no obligations now
Maybe I've a reason to believe
We all will be received in Graceland

I’m not the only millennial Graceland imprinted upon, as a lot of Vampire Weekend’s songs attest. Their 2010 album Contra (another Desert Island Disc for me, and the last CD I bought at my hometown indie record store ear X-tacy, RIP) is in some ways Son of Graceland, except it synthesizes the Soweto sound with pop-punk without the benefit of direct collaboration with South African artists. Is it appropriation if the direct influence is actually noted white guy Paul Simon? I’m honestly not sure. I don’t mean this as criticism, necessarily — again, this is where context gives art weight and depth. I live for how complicated it is.

Because of all of this rich complexity, I love that there was a mirror moment for Contra to Paul Simon’s duet with Miriam Makeba. The luminous Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo did a live cover of “I Think Ur a Contra” and asked Vampire Weekend’s lead singer Ezra Koenig to duet with her, and the results are astonishing.

I can’t put it any better than this commenter on YouTube did:

As a postscript, please enjoy the only truly great thing that ever happened to me on Twitter:

what I did this week

Y’all, I think I loved The Drama?? I was spoiled (somewhat) for the twist, and I sort of wish I hadn’t been, but overall it didn’t really derail my experience. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie that had something this incendiary and valuable to say that I also thought stuck the landing, and I genuinely think this movie does. It’s definitely not for everybody, but it was very much for me. If you see it, come find me, there’s so much to talk about!

what’s next?

Listen, we weren’t just in Playbill, we were also in BroadwayWorld…

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

After last week’s tragic Paul McCartney tickets saga, I’m pleased to report that my luck has improved. I got an early-ish locals ticket slot for the 2028 L.A. Olympics, and I was successful!

While I wasn’t able to get tickets to my #1 choice — the Opening Ceremonies, which by the time my timeslot rolled around only had tickets available in the $5K range (!!!!!) — I was able to snag tickets for the preliminaries in baseball, table tennis and equestrian events, all of which I think are going to be pretty fun.

A lot of my local friends are rightfully dreading the absolute traffic nightmare the Olympics are going to bring upon our already traffic-beleaguered city, but I’ve adopted a real “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude about it. Going to the Olympics is a real bucket list item for my dad, so I’m really excited that we were able to make this happen. (Also, LA28 is using AXS’s ticketing system and I deserve a medal for pushing through the trauma.1)

To keep things easy, we limited ourselves to events that were (a) still available at the cheapest price point ($28) and (b) close to home, as there are events happening practically in every corner of the city. I took a screenshot of the LA28 map and added a helpful visual guide to help us narrow it down (“The closer to Elvira, the closer to home”):

I don’t think I’ve ever bought tickets for anything this far in advance. In some ways, it feels like a wild gamble. But it’s inherently hopeful, and hope’s in short supply nowadays. We’ll take the wins where we can get ‘em.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

Jesus Christ Superstar (dir. Norman Jewison, 1973) and my experience of faith

This is the second year in a row that my beloved neighborhood institution/best movie theater in The Elvira Zone Vidiots has hosted a rowdy-ish screening of Norman Jewison’s 1973 film of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar over Easter weekend. Naturally I’ve been there both times, and both times it’s been introduced by someone who is determined to make the thing interactive in the style of Rocky Horror. “We’re going to dance! We’re going to wear leper shrouds! We’re going to wave palm fronds!” SIGH.

While I admire both her intentions and her persistence, both times it just hasn’t worked, which I’ve found fascinating. My theory as to why is pretty simple: it’s not a campy movie. Sure, it’s weird — deeply, idiosyncratically weird, full of capital-C Choices 2— but not in a way that compromises your investment in the story being told. (Whereas Rocky Horror is less a feat of storytelling than a vibe. A vibe can be enhanced by interaction. A story you’re locked into? That’s different. Have you ever sat through any iteration of Rocky Horror and thought, “Gee, I can’t wait to see if Brad and Janet’s tire gets changed”? My guess is absolutely not.) At the end of the day, Jesus Christ Superstar is a solidly crafted musical, and if you get out of its way, it will pull you in and move you. And I firmly believe Norman Jewison’s weird-ass 1973 movie does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Why I think Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) is so effective is because it does such a good job of visualizing not only the core story but also all of the baggage that story contains. It’s saying, Here are all the layers of this experience: we are storytellers telling a story you probably know, in the place where these people literally lived. We are humans in the year 1973, a time when the place where this story happened is rife with conflict and violence. The world we live in is one ravaged by war, and at this moment, it is plunged into a curdling cynicism that is the result of assassinations and foundering political movements. This is a questioning howl. Why do so many people hold to this story for their hope, in spite of it all? And why does this story continue to be used for both good and evil across the centuries?

The emptiness of the Israeli desert perfectly complements the grandiosity of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score, too. It’s a pressure cooker ready to boil over.

I love both this score and this film very deeply, not just as a lover and practitioner of the form, but also as a person of faith. I grew up in an evangelical tradition in which I felt the opposite of faith — the first place I felt the presence of God was in a theatre, not in church. I remember as a child wanting so badly to feel like the people around me in church did and not understanding why I didn’t. It wasn’t until later that I realized that it was not the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ in which we weren’t aligned. I couldn’t reconcile the radical force of unconditional love that was Jesus Christ with the way in which the people at my church talked — with judgement, with conditions, with cruelty.

It wasn’t until I saw the film of Jesus Christ Superstar at age 13 or so that I figured it out. Seeing the figure of Judas treated with humanity and compassion — honestly, not just Judas, but Pilate, Mary Magdalene, practically everyone in the story — that I separated the signal from the noise and found what I actually believed in. (Where am I now with it? Well. I’m an Episcopalian, which means I’m Catholic in style and Quaker in substance, surrounded by folks who aren’t afraid to voice their fears and their doubts while still engaging with holy mystery.)

There’s a gorgeous shot at the end of Jesus Christ Superstar of the cross shadowed against the desert sunset, and I remember the first time I noticed the tiny silhouettes of a shepherd followed by a flock of sheep in the bottom left of the frame. I honestly thought I’d hallucinated it, and remember rewinding the tape as a kid to make sure that it was real. Well, tonight I watched Superstars, a recent-ish documentary about the making of Jesus Christ Superstar from the perspective of its cast when they reunited 40ish years on (currently streaming for free on Prime), and in it, the late Norman Jewison tells a story at a reunion Q&A about how he’d gone out of his way to set up security on all sides ensure that nobody was around when he went to get that last shot of the cross — and somehow, that shepherd and the flock of sheep appeared out of nowhere, and disappeared. Nobody knows who it was, or where they came from.

Hearing the story reminded me not only of my childhood but also Hidden In This Picture, a one-act play Aaron Sorkin wrote in 1988 about a film shoot where an outdoor shot gets ruined by the unexpected arrival of a herd of cows. This exchange occurs:

ROBERT: Gimme some Yale Drama crap.

JEFF: What?

ROBERT: I need an explanation. I need an explanation for the cows.

JEFF: An explanation.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JEFF: Why?

ROBERT: Why?

JEFF: Yes.

ROBERT: Why do I need an explanation?

JEFF: Yeah.

ROBERT: Because I asked God for a favor and he wasn’t listening. Now I’m asking you. I’m asking you for an explanation for the cows. Something good. Something real.

JEFF: Something real. Like actors playing trained Marines making sure their hair is in place before the cameras roll. Like war and death and killing being reduced to a series of wacky, zany scenes so that it’ll be somehow palatable to the 16 to 21 audience. You know, Bobby, after a year of this, I think it takes a certain amount of arrogance to assume that when three cows walk half a mile into the last scene of the movie, God wasn’t listening.

ROBERT: You don’t believe in God.

JEFF: No, I don’t. And I don’t believe in movies. I believe in cows. There’s some Yale Drama crap for you.

I’m not saying that me seeing this shot in this movie at age 13 and feeling God in it and me hearing Norman Jewison say the shot was a miraculous accident should mean anything to anyone but me, or that it’s anything other than beautiful coincidence that I happened to start a rewatch of Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night this week which reminded me of this one-act that I hadn’t read in at least 15 years about basically exactly this scenario. But what I’m saying is that when you take your rage and your despair and your passion and your hope and your tambourines out into the cavernous unknown, you never know who or what’s going to meet you there. And that’s why it’s worth doing.

what I did this week

In addition to Jesus Christ Superstar, I also caught screenings of Quiz Show and Pretty Woman, two films that could not be tonally more different and yet in some ways are about the same thing (the uneasiness of class in American society)?? Each starring a brilliant actor at the height of their talents and beauty???

Movies are great, y’all.

what’s next?

I’m a week out from my time in NYC and bouncing off the walls with excitement. I will of course keep you posted on everything.

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

Y’all, this week was a ride. A goofy ride, but a ride.

As you probably have seen, my all-time favorite of all-time favorites Paul McCartney announced two last-minute shows at the Fonda, a venue in Hollywood with a capacity around 1,100. (To give you a sense of what’s a normal act that books this place, I saw the New Pornographers there once. A great band that I love dearly, but.) Tickets were handled through a Hunger Games-esque online system meant to circumvent scalpers and bots wherein you had to register for a chance to even be able to buy tickets at all, with slight priority going to folks residing in local zip codes. Of course I registered, and I had my mom register too to boost my chances. I assumed it was hopeless, as I’d read about the madness around the similar pop-up shows Paul did at Bowery Ballroom last year.

On Tuesday afternoon, I got this email:

In with a chance! Naturally, I took this Very Seriously. I was in the waiting room thirty minutes before tickets went on sale, and as soon as my number came up in the queue, I was ready. I added two tickets to my cart, went to check out…

…and the payment system glitched. It said my credit card information was wrong. I double-checked, and sure enough, when my saved info autofilled, the wrong three-digit verification code was entered? (I have no idea how.) I corrected the code, and... nothing. Same error. I switched to a different card, and got the same error message. Nothing I did would take. PayPal? Nope. The time ran out, and I lost the tickets. By the time I re-entered the queue and tried again, it was sold out.

“THE TICKETS WERE IN MY CART,” I kept wailing to anyone who would listen.

(It later occurred to me that when I registered days earlier it asked for a credit card number, and the one I quickly entered was possibly the one card I didn’t try… and I think — even though this was not mentioned in any of the materials I saw before I registered — this was a last line of defense AXS put in against scalpers and bots. I really, really wish this had been made clear from the jump.)

I then spent 45 minutes on hold with AXS’s customer service people, who basically shrugged when they picked up and said, “Looks like your IP address got flagged as a bot. Not sure why, but there’s not really anything we can do since it’s sold out. Sorry.”

Cool. Cool cool cool.

And then, of course, the round of emails for the Saturday shows went out letting us know that we weren’t selected. Done and dusted, I assumed.

NOPE.

Friday morning, my mom (who was NOT selected when I was for the initial round of Friday tickets) got an email that said, “We are releasing additional tickets throughout the day today leading up to the show, and you’ve been selected — keep checking back throughout the day as we release inventory!” And I did. Every five minutes from 10:15 AM to 7 PM. THREE TIMES I had tickets in my cart, only to have them vanish as soon as I tried to check out.

Here’s the thing: I got to see Paul McCartney in Vegas last October, and it was magical. (Granted it was at a giant NFL stadium and not an indie club, but who cares.) Also, I already had plans on both Friday and Saturday nights, and I got spend time with friends and see Bob Baker Marionette Theater’s gem of a show Hooray L.A., which was as marvelous as ever. And it turns out these pop-up shows were just a kick-off for something far more exciting: the announcement of Paul’s new album The Boys of Dungeon Lane, which is coming in May. The single that dropped is devastatingly gorgeous, and I can’t wait for the rest of it:

Would I have lost my mind with joy if I’d gotten to hear “Coming Up” and “Let Me Roll It” in a space that small? Of course. But for whatever reason, I wasn’t supposed to be there, and that’s okay. My Friday and Saturday nights were really lovely anyway.

I spent a long time on the phone yesterday with a mentor I deeply respect and admire who was responding to a bit of an anxiety spiral on my part about upcoming career-related stuff, and she gave me a piece of professional advice that I think actually applies to anything in life, really: success isn’t winning, it’s keeping on no matter what. And so I’m keeping on.

But really, AXS? Next time just make me click on pictures of stoplights to prove I’m a human. I’m really good at that.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

“My Time to Fly”, Harriet Goldberg feat. Billy Novick (2011)

This afternoon I did a thing I’d been putting off for weeks and called the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation to schedule a bulky item pickup. When my mom moved here in late 2024, we’d ordered a recliner for her from Wayfair to use at my apartment, and it turned out to be the jankiest of the jank — you had to kick this thing to get it to open or close — so we finally replaced it with something really shockingly nice from Bob’s Discount Furniture. (Shout out to Bob’s. My mom LOVES Bob’s.)

Anyway, when I finally dismantled Jank Chair 3000, I managed to get all of the pieces into our dumpster except the base, which weighs conservatively eleven billion pounds. Hence the bulky item pickup.

I mention this terribly thrilling part of my day because when I called the Department of Sanitation, I was on hold for about 15 minutes… and their hold music slapped.

I’m not overstating this. It gave me the option to get a call back rather than wait, and I opted to stay on hold because of the music. I was so into it that I recorded it on QuickTime on my computer so that I could Shazam it after the call. (Yep. I’m that person.) And I’m so glad I did, because what I discovered was not just a killer tune, but a terrific story.

A New York Times piece from 2023 explains:

Harriet Goldberg is the composer of what may be one of the most heard songs in the world today.

This 74-year-old New Jersey native is, in her own words, a “late blooming, part-time musician,” who has never played a live gig and is unknown to the music industry at large.

But every day since 2017, Goldberg’s jazzy instrumental, “My Time to Fly,” has been served up to countless callers who are put on hold by the customer service lines of businesses large and small. These include Capital One, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue, Costco, Nasdaq, the Kansas Unemployment Office, Sagami Railway in Japan, Dartmoor Prison in England, scores of hotels and restaurants and, yes, The New York Times.

I LOVE THIS SO MUCH.

Harriet Goldberg is a Boston-based MAC Award-winning songwriter who didn’t even start seriously pursuing music until her late 40s. She sought out help from a mentor — saxophonist Billy Novick — who helped her refine her songwriting skills, which led to several albums of material. Albums which led to licensing via catalog services to an Amazon company that manages tens of thousands of call centers worldwide. Call centers that apparently include the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation.

In that conversation I mentioned earlier, my mentor also said that our job as artists isn’t to know or understand the effect our work is going to have, it’s just to do the work. And the story of Harriet Goldberg and this track is that very idea in action. My day was made beautiful in the middle of the most mundane of tasks because she decided to follow her heart and start making music. And for the track that found me in this moment — and that has brought her so much well-deserved attention — to be called “My Time to Fly”? You couldn’t make up anything better than that.

what I did this week

This week I went to Disneyland with my mom. When we’d made the reservations we hadn’t considered that it was in the middle of spring break season, so it was bonkers crowded. We made the most of it, though, and did a lot of exploring in lieu of waiting in 90 minutes-to-two hours queues. I try to do something I’ve never done before every time I go, and this time I managed to do that by accident. I didn’t realize that there was a pathway to Radiator Springs/Cars Land tucked into San Fransokyo Square, much less one with this view (this is Disney’s picture, not my own):

Also, seriously, Bob Baker Marionette Theater’s Hooray L.A. is playing through May 3rd, and if you can go, go. I guarantee you’ll love it. The experience at Bob Baker is basically unchanged from this 40-second video from 1974, in the best possible way:

what’s next?

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

It’s official — we’re doing industry presentations of The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul on 4/30 and 5/1 in NYC with this magical team ahead of a commercial off-Broadway production. I am beside myself with excitement and gratitude! If you’re interested in being there (or know someone who should be there), gimme a yell, I know a guy. (It’s me. I’m the guy.)

Also, this week we’re recording an episode of Muppeturgy. which is a good excuse for me to point you in the direction of our most recent episodes about such far-ranging topics as the 1997 Walter Matthau/Jack Lemmon cinematic situation Out to Sea and the 1981 special Dick Cavett Meets ABBA. Phase Two of Muppeturgy (in which we’ve branched out post-Muppet Show into things that are Muppet Show-adjacent) has been a blast, and we’re just getting started. If you’re not already, please subscribe in your podcast app o’ choice! We’re a good time, I promise!

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog