I’ve been sitting on some of the ideas in this post for more than a couple of weeks now, and subconsciously probably for much longer, because a lot of what I’m trying to communicate is delicate, in a world that is already in a very delicate place.

I’m also writing and sharing this now — very intentionally over six months later — because of how fast the news cycle moves now. We barely slow down enough to process anything.

I think it’s hurting us in ways we won’t be able to understand for a really long time.

But for now, I wanted to attempt to address one of the deepest traumas our industry has experienced in this modern era: the death of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Reiner. Beyond the attention grabbing headlines, and at times painfully awkward public displays of acknowledgement (see: Oscars tribute),1 I wanted to discuss the way in which I believe it has marked time.

But I’m also writing about it now because I think it speaks to a larger domino effect that we are still just in the early stages of, and that may end up being remembered in the breadth of time as a harbinger of this great collapse.

Which is to say, a lot of the vague and generally ill-defined feeling that we’re all having of institutions crumbling — in every industry, and certainly in ours — will involve all of us processing some version of, “How could this possibly have happened to these people in particular?”

Even if some of us feel that eating the rich is fair and karmic, it is a shock to see symbols that you are accustomed to begin to falter. Especially the ones you may have felt were the exception to the rule, who really were remarkably decent in spite of all of their privileges.

In other words, that in this great collapse, there are no exceptions.

The chaos comes for everyone, and we need to start talking more honestly about how many of us in the industry are deeply, and profoundly hurting.

For a bit of additional context before proceeding: I wrote in my last post about Nepo Babies as a placeholder for the Monarchy (royal class) in Hollywood, but I wanted to dive a bit deeper now into how they are not immune from this moment of collapse.

I hope to do so with as much compassion as humanly possible.

THE TIPPING POINT

Rob and Michele Reiner were human beings, but they also represented one of the most beloved couples in the industry. An industry that is now, undisputably, dissipating before our very eyes.

Rob was himself a nepo baby, having grown up as the son of legendary Carl Reiner who created and wrote for The Dick Van Dyke Show. He became a prolific (to put it mildly) Director in the 80’s and 90’s, with hits that included Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and A Few Good Men. The range in topics that he covered was remarkable, but the through-line seemed to be that his vision always included so much humanity. His films were often funny, warm, and instantly classic.

He and his wife, who he met on the set of When Harry Met Sally, went on to have three children: two boys, and the youngest, a girl. They became very active in various political causes, including gay marriage. By all accounts, they seemed to be incredibly attentive and thoughtful parents. Their oldest, Jake, and their youngest Romy, appeared surprisingly well adjusted for industry kids. They posted often on social media about how much they loved their parents. To put it simply, they felt to me like two people who had been loved unconditionally, and who in many ways had been protected from the very transactional nature of much of Hollywood.

Their middle child, Nick Reiner, had a much harder time. It was well known that he struggled for years with substance abuse, despite many attempts to stay sober (and about twenty stints in rehab, beginning at age 15). It was a heartache that seemed to never end. His parents refused to give up on him, and Rob even went on to make a movie with Nick that was loosely based on their experience, which they called Being Charlie. At the time, it appeared that it had brought more mutual understanding to their relationship.

Even so, his coinciding struggles with mental health continued, and even led to a conservatorship in 2020. I don’t want to get into too many of the details on that front, as I know it can be very triggering for some people, but a couple of outlets like this and this discuss more of the specifics related to his schizophrenia diagnosis.

On December 14, 2025, after coming home from Conan O’Brien’s holiday party, Rob and Michele were stabbed to death by their son Nick, who had been living in their guest house. It quickly became the kind of tragedy that is so devastating, so piercing, it becomes almost unspeakable. All of Hollywood entered into a dissociative state that week leading into Christmas.

I’m not sure we’ve left it since.

JOAN DIDION & THE MANSON MURDERS

Joan Didion really cooked when she called her essay collection documenting this very similar transition out of the 60’s, The White Album. The disjointed nature of both her writing in it, and the namesake album, helped us feel what that era was like, which is that none of it makes any sense when you’re in it.

There was peace and love, and there was also an exhaustive amount of violence that nobody knew exactly how to name (though not for lack of trying). The Vietnam War was rupturing our ideas about ourselves as a fundamentally decent country, and we were also mobilizing several other movements (civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights) that became the bedrock of institutional rebuilding that came afterwards.

It was disorienting because there was the more literal violence, and then there was the ontological and existential violence of not knowing how to stop all the violence.

In a way, Didion herself did not survive the latter kind of violence; her writing may have brought us a lot of clarity and catharsis, but famously and by her own admission it never did the same for her.

But for the rest of us, many years later, it helped us to see that revolution in practice feels like extreme discomfort, with no end in sight, and nobody is immune from it.2

No wonder she had so many migraines.

What she observed in her more lucid moments ten years later when she published the essay collection is that all of the discomfort has a breaking point, and when you reach it, you will feel as though the outside world finally matches what has been boiling over on the inside — in one way or another — of every single member of society.

You’ve collectively moved on from “I’m so scared that something really bad is going to happen” to “the very bad thing has now definitely happened.” It is the very sobering moment that makes everyone sit up and pay attention, whether they want to or not.

In the 60’s, she argued, that breaking point was the Manson Murders.

The Reiner murders, in this era, will likely serve a similar purpose.

And by extension, an even more important take away from her writing remains timely.

She pointed out that the very, very painful lesson in change is that — even if it is broadly speaking moving us in the right direction (let’s be optimistic for a moment) — it has a cost. And that cost is always measured in human lives.

Sometimes it is the group of people that are already having the hardest time: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor.

But inevitably it always hits the class of people who are supposed to be untouchable: JFK, the victims of the Manson Murders, CEO’s, and now the much beloved Rob and Michele Reiner.

MENTAL DECLINE IS MAXXING

The Manson Murders represented just how delusional and dissociative everyone was in the 60s, fueled mostly by drugs. Today we are perhaps just as delusional and dissociative, except that it is being fueled by AI.

We can’t tell what is real anymore.

Simultaneously, as we all know by now, we’ve been living through the absolute madness of institutions crumbling for a nice chunk of time now.

I’ve read many, many incredible pieces about the ways in which the decline in mental health surrounding the overall collapse of institutions worldwide can be tied to factors like late stage capitalism and the rise in AI, and many about how it can be observed in the beauty space (for the boys and the girls), grifting as a career, white collar work, and taste/aesthetics in general.

Some creators put it more bluntly: “Genuinely, is anyone ok right now?”

What I haven’t been able to find is many pieces that address how this is specifically playing out in Hollywood (or what is left of it).

To that end, I don’t want to speculate too much on the nature of Nick Reiner’s mental health at the moment of his parents’ deaths, because that would be wildly inappropriate. I don’t know him, or their family; nor is it what they need in this still relatively immediate period of indescribable grief. But I do think that, despite what may have been there for quite some time, it is significant that this awful tragedy happened in this particular historical moment.

I say this, gently, because:

The level of dissociative distress that is occurring in Hollywood is now at a fever pitch. Everyone I know agrees that it has never been this bad. Not even close. People are coping as best they can, but the darkness of this moment is unavoidable. It lies just beneath the surface of every event, every conversation, every interaction.

Many people are dealing with it by focusing on what they can control: their body. The rise of glp-1’s that brought back heroin chic in much of celebrity culture, alongside all kinds of maxxing kicked off by looksmaxxing, followed by lobotomy chic, is not a coincidence.

The culture of Hollywood, I would argue, has spun into an alarmingly dangerous tailspin by the rise of AI. For a while before this, it had managed to transmute its core values (wealth, power, beauty) into the meta-reality of social media. The idea was to control the narrative, digitally. But it still retained full control of its own identity in the storytelling ecosystem. It understood why it mattered.

Now the tech bros have moved in, and aren’t leaving. The war between studios and creatives got especially gnarly during the strikes of 2023 when the topic of AI came up. The issue is nowhere near resolved, but now it has expanded into much more dangerous territory in that we can’t even tell what an ad is anymore, because it is so deeply and psychologically woven into every attempt we try to make at real human connection (via our screens).

It has led to an overall inability to trust anyone or anything, even when we’re not scrolling on an app. The lack of trust has eroded and distorted everything we used to know. People are getting objectively meaner. This distortion of reality is happening not just to the general public, but also to the people who still work in the industry.

It was always a tough town, but this is different. The madness is ubiquitous, no longer reserved just for people who had fame and lost it or people who would do anything to have it. All the people you never see on a screen are barely hanging on.

Anyone entering this moment already on shakier mental health grounds was bound to have a much, much harder time. Which is to say, there is a breaking point, and I think we’ve reached it.

The party has ended, and a new reality is now unavoidable.

WHAT AREN’T WE FACING? (AKA GENERATIONAL TRAUMA)

Dissociation is a psychological term that expresses the body’s defense mechanism against realities that it deems too overwhelming to process. It is a way that our bodies can manage to sleep walk through trauma, because of how destabilizing the burden and responsibility of facing it can be. Your body is not sure that you will make it to the other side.

Our country has always been exceptionally good at creating an origin myth that is based, mostly, and similarly, in delusion. Our unwillingness to really reckon with, and then enact structural accountability for the horrors we were founded on, is the wound we refuse to look at — a fire as hot as the sun that we keep avoiding, thinking that it will save us from blindness.

Unfortunately, every person, and every empire, has a breaking point.

Nothing shines a mirror up more closely to this than the fact that the “dream factory” of Hollywood, which helped create and regularly update the American Dream, is now in full scale collapse.

The United States still does not want to face its history of slavery and genocide of its indigenous populations, in ways that are so profound, they are literally reshaping the climate of the earth. The reluctance to connect any of the dots has reached sociopathic levels.

We are unwilling to consider in any sort of mainstream discourse, for instance, that the Palisades and Eaton fires can be directly linked to the mentality of extraction3, which we’ve applied to labor (as in, slavery) as well as now to the earth (as in, re-directing natural waterways throughout all of California4 so that we can extract the most ‘value’ from large scale farming, building on incredibly fire prone and dangerously sloped parcels of land to extract the highest real estate ‘values’ — all of which indigenous people did not do, and managed to survive for thousands of years).

The wealth that sustained European monarchies were built off of the backs of colonized bodies, and the same can more or less be said of the way that Hollywood has extracted value from its non-royal class. Despite our many attempts at Democracy, this organizing structure as the only way to build (and then hoard) wealth, is one of our deepest generational traumas.

Sometimes we call this ‘cultural appropriation,’ or simply hiring an assistant class that you intentionally underpay and overwork so that they will burn out and leave on their own, but my point is that it is deeply embedded structurally, with or without appropriate language.

People of color have almost always been the drivers of culture, and almost never been able to access corresponding levels of wealth accumulation.5 The wealth is extracted, and then we are discarded. The occasional Oprah or Jay-Z does not disrupt the model of extraction because it is precisely and only through those means that anyone, of any background, can reach that level of wealth.

To that end, Hollywood not wanting to face its “diversity problem” is really a generational trauma problem. And as I described in my previous post, it is a trauma that affects both the royal class and the ousted workers. Colonialism dehumanizes the colonizer as much as it does the colonized.6

And just to bring it all full circle, no human invention has ever more perfectly encapsulated the model of extraction than AI.

We would rather be numb than face the pain of what we’ve done and what we continue to do, and nowhere is this more visible than in the current overall vibe of the entertainment industry, and the corresponding digital spaces that are slowly replacing it.

WHAT ELSE HAS HAPPENED SINCE THE REINER MURDERS?

Jake Reiner, in one of the most heart breaking essays I’ve ever read, shared with the world some of what he was feeling in the months following the death of his parents here on Substack. Nick was arrested almost immediately, and the trial is ongoing.

But we’ve also started to read more stories about the iron-clad class of Hollywood appearing to be in free fall, in one way or another. Chris Bess, a 31 year veteran publicist, posted a startlingly humble message and admission about what it has been like for him to lose the job that gave him so much of his identity. This is someone who no doubt had many relationships to royal families, and even he could not save himself.

Additionally, Lena Dunham released Famesick, a memoir where she elucidates several of her personal and professional relationship breakups, among them from her producing partner Jenni Konner (a nepo baby).

Full disclosure: I have not read it because tbh I feel like it might be too triggering, but the reviews that I’ve read seem to infer the particular brand of meanness that anyone who has worked in Hollywood can attest to — which is, emboldened nepo-babies who do not have to answer to the public because their parents were the kind of gatekeepers that were relatively invisible.

That is, until now. I would imagine the visibility is making her very uncomfortable.

Both of her parents were successful screenwriters, in particular her father (see above). She also grew up in LA and went to Crossroads, one of the most well known private schools on the west side for industry kids.7

What made Lena sick is that her producing partner did what she needed to do to extract capital from her, and then moved on. The fact that Lena’s parents are staples in the fine art world got her in the door (because, relationships), but it couldn’t protect her from what was behind the door. She was always going to be way in over her head. She’s lucky she made it.

On an even more serious note, Sam Masaru Sekoff, a much beloved and very young manager at Entertainment 360 — one of the most powerful representation firms in town — did not make it. He recently took his own life. It happened on the eve of his 33rd birthday, and came as an immense shock to all who knew him. The comment section on the announcement is flooded with an outpouring of love, which is unusual for an article in the trades (it is more common on social media posts).

When I brought it up in a group chat with some of my former colleagues, the response was chilling: “I’ve heard of two other suicide attempts in the past week. Sam was the only one who succeeded.”

I’m devastated that this is where we are.

But what concerns me even more is that the less we acknowledge the level of dehumanization that we’re all experiencing, in one way or another, the more people we’re going to lose.

In Hollywood, and beyond.

THE LIMINAL SPACE OF COLLAPSE & REBUILDING

I wrote a note in June about how it’s seems clear to me that some of the rebuilding that happens after the broader collapse has begun. It’s faint, but there are glimmers.

Mamdani’s democratic socialist policies in NYC, for instance, and a lot of the conversations we’re having now around sports (the Knicks winning the NBA championship without a hint of toxic masculinity, the equally endearing virality of Norway’s Erling Haaland and Cabo Verde’s ‘Vozinha’ in the World Cup, etc).

What feels weird, though, is that it is happening at the same time that so many other things are getting so much worse. On this front, there are too many crimes to name them all. (And again, I’m trying to be mindful of all the triggers in this post).

But my overall point is that eras don’t end with clean edges like a TS album cycle, and they certainly don’t start with them. In practice, revolution is when collapse and rebuilding happen at the same time. It feels excruciating because you’re being pulled so forcefully in opposite directions simultaneously.

In that vein, I would argue that Rob Reiner’s death marked the beginning of the end, and the timeline jump this month marked the beginning of the New Beginning. I don’t have any “evidence” for the latter part of this argument, other than to say that I believe in what all the astro girlies are saying about this 4th of July — America’s 250th birthday — marking transits that combine just about every revolutionary moment in history that has ever existed.

But in order to enter new eras with some bit of clarity and growth, there needs to be meaningful reflection on how and why we got here. We need to look at the thing we don’t want to look at. To heal whatever microcosm of all of this is manifesting in our own lives. And then, finally, to let it rest.

The liminal space is an invitation, a plea, a cry — for us to pause.

If we skip this step, we won’t grow in the ways that we’re meant to. But if we do, I’m certain it will fuel the next creative renaissance.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

Hollywood is already re-building, except that most of it is happening on the edges of what used to be the center.

Indie film8 is having a bit of a moment, with the success of Obsession and Backrooms.

But really what is shifting is the official acknowledgement that digital and social platforms are the new center of entertainment. Studio execs and reps, desperate to keep their jobs, are scouring youtube to try and predict the ‘next’ Curry Barker or Kane Parsons. And even more prominently, micro-dramas on TikTok and Scripted TV on IG are hoarding large swaths of our collective attention, alongside the catastrophic drop-off in attention to Netflix shows once they get to season 2.9

I’m not trying to suggest that Hollywood, as a central figure in storytelling that is exported throughout the world, is “over.” What I am saying is that I think we’ve reached the end of an era, in terms of the way that the industry understands itself, and that whatever is on the horizon is not yet visible, but it is imminent.

Maybe fifty years from now, we’ll have more perspective.

My bet is on a re-make of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

So happy to have you here, and if you made it this far, THANK YOU! In my next post, I’m going to be exploring how I’m seeing the brand space re-define Hollywood. Not only with ad dollars, but also in the way its reshaping narrative structures.

Hope to see ya there.

xx, Vickie

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I read an article recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

It’s part of a new series that the Hollywood Reporter is doing where they interview real people who used to work in the industry, and now (as it is all collapsing) are pivoting into other careers. It is charmingly called, “Life After Hollywood.”

From what I can tell, the only other article in the series thus far is about an actress, Eliza Dushku, who you may or may not remember from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, depending on your age. The gist of it is that she was over it (including some really hard #metoo stuff), and has since become a therapist that uses psychedelics to help veterans work through their trauma.

Fair enough.

What struck me about the second outing in the series is that it is now beginning to document the existentially difficult transition that many in the industry — whose faces you don’t know — have been facing for the better part of at least three years (since the WGA strike), or if we’re really being honest, all the way back to 2020 (for obvious reasons).

The Hero’s Journey

The protagonist of this profile, Nick Morton, is a white guy who was an industry veteran (Emmy nominated!), who has now had to transition to working in construction. He is mostly indignant about it:

One afternoon — after my team has left the site — the guy who runs the club’s VIP room tells me there’s stucco on his staircase. “Get a mop and clean it up.” He tells me. “Now! Tobey and Leo are coming.”

I don’t have a mop, so I find myself at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday on my hands and knees in the blistering L.A. sun using my own T-shirt to scrape stucco from the club’s decrepit steps.

“I met Leo, once,” I think to myself, “at Edward Norton’s birthday party at the Wattles Mansion. Courtney Love invited me. And look at me, now!”

He goes on to reveal that he’s actually quite bad at this job. As it turns out, he was hired by his brother-in-law (the contractor) because the mostly Mexican crew of workers were refusing to do Home Depot runs now that ICE is running rampant in Los Angeles.

After every run, Ramon — my construction foreman — would ream me out in broken English for buying the wrong shit. Even when he sent me pictures of exactly what he wanted, I somehow always still got it wrong.

Despite being woefully unprepared for said job, he manages to fail upwards. He quite literally gets promoted.

Even so, he is deeply embarrassed when he runs into a former colleague in Home Depot, as he is very poorly picking up supplies. He doesn’t explicitly say that this colleague is another white guy, but he does say that earning this person’s respect was important to him. Nonetheless, he initially assumes the person approaching him is a Mexican day laborer, and refuses to even make eye contact.

After I finish shopping, I’m loading my supplies into my trunk when I hear a plaintive voice offering help. I assume it’s one of the many day laborers looking for work, and I say, “No, thanks,” without looking up. But then I feel a hand smack my back and when I turn around I’m greeted not a laborer but the toothy grin of an old TV writer friend.

The irony of all ironies that then arises should not really be surprising. He wraps up the piece by essentially positing that being forced to work amidst said Mexican laborers has actually given him a new perspective.

Perhaps, even in the act of running around this wild city, working on a team of guys from all walks of life and meeting the kinds of people you tend to ignore when ensconced in your Hollywood bubble, I am becoming something more.

The people he’s talking about, unfortunately, most likely goes way beyond the invisible day laborers. It probably, to be frank, indirectly includes people that should have been his peers in Hollywood . Meaning, other writers and execs in town who weren’t white guys. Not because he is especially prejudiced, but because that is just the widespread reality of how the industry currently functions. There is a bubble within the Hollywood bubble, as it were.

Never mind the fact that he unwittingly evokes the “magical negro” trope, having just swapped in some Mexican guys to play the role. We learn nothing about them other than that they gave his life meaning. It’s very possible, for instance, that those people who have never had the opportunity to be anything other than day laborers are themselves seeing their work impacted by the collapsing of Hollywood.

And, yet. And, yet.

I couldn’t help feeling an inordinate amount of empathy for this man who I don’t know, because even he couldn’t crack the Hollywood code.

In a surprisingly vulnerable moment, he shares this:

What’s more, the town had made it clear to me that I didn’t have the right stuff. As a studio chief once told me in a job interview, “Affability counts for nothing in this town, Nick.”

But more specifically, it was this one sentence at the end of a very frustrated paragraph that gave me pause:

Did I not sleep around enough?

Honestly, yes. Probably.

And this is really at the heart of why I sat down to write this essay.

Breaking Down the Structure of Monarchy

The industry functions like a monarchy, except that we call the princes and princesses “nepo babies.” This went pretty viral a couple of years ago, but there is much more to it than has been discussed, and which now feels like old news (even though it isn’t).

A bit more context: I’m writing all of this, despite my better judgement, as someone who has worked in the industry for a little over a decade. I went to film school, worked at major festivals, did the agency mailroom thing, leaned into the rep side (talent agency/management), and then did a final pivot as a development exec. I’ve worked above and below the line, on the indie side and in Hollywood proper, before and after the pandemic.

What I’ve noticed across the board is this:

The effects of this infrastructure in Hollywood are profound. The kings and queens, for instance, are pretty much invisible; they have enough sense to avoid getting their heads chopped off. Famous actors, the ones we can see, are sort of like the jesters of the court; invited to every party to entertain, not ever to be understood or even meaningfully considered.

Everyone on the outside looking in (by which I mean, anyone just trying to work in Hollywood), if they have enough sense and pattern recognition, is trying to marry into a royal family, or at the very least be a well taken care of mistress. That’s usually possible even if you don’t come from money but are “pure blooded” enough, meaning if you’re mostly white or white adjacent.

There are exceptions of course, including nepo-babies who themselves are not white, but my point is more that structurally we keep repeating the same patterns in every space that we deem “exclusive.” In Hollywood, and beyond.

And in that regard, nothing can ever really trump “blood.”

Having money, unless it is truly an ungodly amount (as the tech bros have now proven) will not get you very far in Hollywood. Not for very long anyway.

What matters is relationships.

And that just means, your proximity to the royal families. Sometimes we call them “gatekeepers.”

This is even more true in times of chaos. When there are fewer and fewer jobs being created, in every industry but certainly in ours, who get to be the chosen few?

I’m sure you can do the math.

Nick seems to have chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to marry a regular person with no royal blood (Emmy-winning costume designer, Marie Schley). Someone who ostensibly he loves very much. He did not marry a princess, which might have been possible had he been in said frame of mind and acted accordingly. If he had been able to forgo all of his previous life experiences, and been willing to perform a specific brand of charm on behalf of the crown.

And that is the cost of entry. Materially in terms of your wardrobe, and spiritually in terms of how much you are willing to compromise.

The people who never even had the opportunity to fake it are not written about at all. Those casualties of war are just sort of … expected.

The logic goes something like this:

Yes, we know diversity in Hollywood is terrible, but what can you do? It’s natural that people shift more towards conservatism (fear of risk) during an economic downturn.

Except that according to all statistical markers the economy is still doing “fine.” There is no lack of money, but for reasons that no one can really pin down, it is being hoarded by fewer and fewer people.

And some people just can’t seem to get out of that “risk” category.

It is a risk not to be a hoarder, and therefore it is a risk not to be a royal (or to be in some way at least aligned).

The concept of monarchy in itself is the blueprint for hoarding. It is the oldest of all money. The pinnacle of class you can’t buy. And in a community like Hollywood where the main economy is a dream factory — about as elusive as it gets — this kind of framework is comforting.

The west coast will never have an old moneyed class like that of the east coast. It’s identity as the last frontier, as the chasing of new land and new money, is too steeped into its DNA. It still dreams about undiscovered gold in river beds1 (now we call it “talent”), and businesses that don’t have to jump through hoops set by east coast banking infrastructure. It remains mostly in denial about the present day frontier: the tech model that discards relationships altogether as a meaningful currency.2

But it can certainly try. And try, it has.

In many ways, it mirrors the insecurity that all Americans still feel in relation to Europe, no matter how much money and power we seem to amass. We will always be “new money” in comparison to Europe. No matter how much we try to reiterate the value of the American Dream™.

Who Aren’t We Writing About?

Meanwhile, anecdotally and personally I know about a gazillion non-royals who were in the executive class, and have now been relieved of their duties (myself included). Most of them are not white and they’re not men. This number is obviously an exaggeration, because there were never that many of us to begin with, but my point really is just to say that whatever gains may have been made were always on shaky ground. The royals have always been the steady ground that evades everyone else.

Will we ever be reading profiles in Hollywood’s most venerated trade magazines that humanize our expulsion? Will it ever learn to love us back? (she says rhetorically)

I’m not even sure we would know how to do this without slipping into a lens that reinforces the place we return to — that is, the place we belong (according to royals).

In that sense, we do have common ground with Nick Morton:

Hollywood was telling me where I belong. And where I belong, it turns out, is where I began this story — in Aisle 18 at Home Depot on Sunset at 5:45 in the morning.

And so for now, according to the trades, royals seem to be the only ones not drowning. They had life boats to ensure a means of getting off the Titanic. The ones who thought Hollywood would never sink, but were prepared enough to escape it even if it did. To float around, waiting until the next large boat of progress and of a Hollywood re-born comes back to save them.

What do royals really want?

The saddest part, in my humble opinion, is this:

If only these royals knew that being loved for who they are, not just what they can offer in the way of relationships, is actually possible.

Even in this economy.

I know because I’ve met a couple. Or as much as they would let me, anyway.

What I’ve noticed in just about all of them is that they want one thing, and one thing only: unconditional love.

By which I mean: for someone to notice things about them that don’t include their parents or their bank account. For anyone to consider how they feel, not how they pretend to feel. To feel safe enough with someone to begin to discover who the hell they actually are outside of the circus that surrounds them. That there really are some people out there who want to allow them to be human, and not simply exist on a pedestal waiting to be knocked off.

Some of them do have solid family bonds in place that are rooted in real love. The rarest of birds, but they do exist. It is almost impossible to tell though from the outside which ones are that and which ones are performance. And even when they are real, it doesn’t change the fact that the currency of the town remains the same: relationships (that have nothing to do with love).

But for most nepo babies: to be truly seen and still loved is the only thing that has any value. It’s the only thing they can’t buy. The only thing that makes life worth living. The one thing that needs to be earned through hard won vulnerability. Not a thing actually at all, but a living energy that can’t be taken or mined or coerced. The world’s most valuable resource, measured in how much one is willing and able to give, is rarely accessible to them, because every bit of their pre-ordained status as royals requires a hefty level of gatekeeping.

But love requires trust, and trust cannot be formed with gates in place.

They are taught in overt and subtle ways that to love would mean to lose everything3.

No one learned that lesson more cruelly than Princess Diana, and by extension her offspring. Prince Harry is still in the throes of it. Prince William decided to play ball.

Royals and nepo babies are therefore, for the most part, lonely and numb in ways that are unimaginable. Who wouldn’t act out if placed in that kind of cage? What amount of grace are we willing to give them? What is more human than just wanting to be loved?

It’s no wonder Sam Levinson wrote a whole series about the endless chase for a drug-induced euphoria. Sex, of course, being one of those drugs. How else is he supposed to feel anything? Love is to drugs what exercise is to caffeine;4 energy that is real and that you earn, as opposed to energy that you fake. We all get what we should be doing, but it doesn’t make “healthy” lifestyle choices any easier to achieve.

This is also, one could argue, why most of what is being made right now (by the remaining royals) feels so empty and hollow. And why surprise break-outs like Heated Rivalry (notably produced in Canada) have done so well. The nostalgia trend meanwhile is an attempt to remind us that love was once possible. Even gen z is tired of empty sex scenes and are craving anything that feels like intimacy (aka when love is actually reciprocated). Social media is not real love, but it “feels” more like it via para-social relationships5.

People everywhere are desperate for love in any place they can find it.

And who wouldn’t want that? How can we ask anyone to deprive themselves of that? Is a love-less throne really worth it?

Icarus is Already Falling

I think what we’ll find in retrospect is that this era of massive transformation and change will spare no one. Our monuments are already beginning to resemble the crumbling artifacts of Rome. If not in our conscious minds, than in our cellular make-up, and certainly that it will appear in the art that is produced when we finally begin to rise from the ashes of all of this.

The Greek’s at least had some understanding of this (think: Icarus); they understood that the human condition is fragile, because we are not gods. Royals are not gods, but we treat them this way. As a portal to godliness more powerful than even a priest, rabbi or imam. With no room for any human imperfection.

For royals, the sun might as well be heaven. The chasing of it is unquestionable. Their mandate is to gatekeep it for only the most deserving.

As repulsive as the scenes that Levinson has dreamed up for Euphoria have been, the latest season does offer insight into just what it feels like to have your wings clipped by the sun. A recent New Yorker article was more blunt: “Euphoria’s Descent Into Hell.”

This is devastating in ways that are hard to even put into words. But what I would like to suggest is what on some level we all already know: that the only real antidote to our collective demise, no matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, is to relinquish the royal impulse to chase what the sun actually represents — limitless wealth and power. And more importantly, that what we are all really seeking — to experience some slice of heaven on earth — will never be achieved by touching and then gatekeeping the sun.

I understand that the more likely outcome will be that we are forced to learn this lesson in the hardest of ways. Rock bottom has it’s purpose.

But for the royals: it might be wise to remember that Icarus’ entire body fell, not just the limbs he was willing to cut off, and not in a way that spared his ego.

Is Love really the answer?

In the meantime, I firmly believe that this moment does still allow a modicum of agency. We are deciding in real-time who we choose to remember and memorialize, in print but mostly in our digital memories. In this one aspect of the whole mess, we do have a choice.

Who will history remember from this period in history? Who are we choosing to document right now? Who are we choosing to love? Not just worshiping or ignoring, but really choosing to see?

I hope, however naively, that we choose everyone. I hope that you write about yourself — whoever you are — and that you document your very existence, here on Substack and wherever the hell else you can. Whether you are experiencing this great collapse as a former member of Hollywood, or another industry that is also collapsing onto itself.

But I also will insist that everyone has to including the royals and the guy who wrote this Hollywood Reporter piece. That there is a way to humanize them without letting them off the hook. Even when there is no guarantee that it will be reciprocated.

Because dehumanizing anyone saves no one.

And that perhaps in this process, we all begin to see what everyone actually means.

I’m choosing to approach this moment in this way because it is the only way that I can figure might allow us to endure and emerge on the other side of this crumbling with our humanity in tact, even if it has taken away from us everything else.6

Which is another way of saying that we are still able to love.

Not in a cringe way, and not in some dumb passive way,7 and not even necessarily in a romantic way. As a form of alchemy that turns all of these ashes into something more alive.

What more true definition of heaven can there be?

I’ll be getting into a bit more specificity on the ways in which this collapse is already affecting the Nepo Baby / Royal Class in my next post. But for now, thank you so much for being here.

xx, Vickie

p.s. If you wanna get a notification in your inbox once it’s live, you know what to do :)

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For a brief period in college, and just before the onset of my quarter life crisis, I went through a smoking phase. Of many things, but primarily cigarettes. I would stand in front of the library, minutes before it was set to close, commiserating with a peer about how I was almost certainly going to have to pull an all-nighter.

It has been almost two decades since those years, with a couple of chronic illnesses to show for it, and yet I still have not fully kicked the remembrance of a nice drag. It looked cool, so that was part of it. But more than that — and maybe this is fairly obvious — I still miss the community building aspect of it.

Smoking a cigarette was when people, including myself, let their guard down and just talked. Especially in the self-righteous politicking ambiance of my alma mater (Wesleyan), practically the Jerusalem of identity politics. Somewhere along the way, the language that we used on campus — “problematic” and “they/them” pronouns and Bell Hooks — spread to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, and now here we are.

Anyway, I suppose one time an addict, always an addict.

Fast forward to: When I was laid off from my development gig, right around Valentine’s day in 2024 (charming), I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands. But more than that, what I finally had was room in my brain to re-enter the zeitgeist.

Having a day job, but I would argue especially (ironically?) one in Hollywood, does not necessarily afford you the bandwidth to engage in every online trend. That’s what assistants are for — their youth and enthusiasm is, theoretically, meant to rub off on you. They can just give you the summary, in a carefully timed moment when you can actually absorb it. Either that, or I guess you have kids and they tell you.1

This was also right around the time when I was admitting to myself, finally, that being a writer was as unavoidable for me as it was being gay. If I didn’t start writing down what was in my head, I was going to explode.

So, I did what any self-respecting person with a dream in Los Angeles does:

I joined TikTok. I knew I was late, but better late than never. And as it turned out, was not at all just for the kids and their dance routines. It blew my mind. I instantly became chronically online.

Instagram was already starting to feel like it was lagging, with reels that just blasted what everyone on TikTok already knew. It was, and remains, polished and performative. TikTok was where you could be a hot mess, or the cutting edge of beauty, and you could still find your people. Which is to say: it was a place where you could discover likeminded people, rather than staying trapped in some former version of yourself that you had curated on Instagram (or god forbid, Facebook).

More than anything, it was just fun.

I think that when people refer to the zeitgeist, really all they mean is a thing that people have congregated around in such a way that we feel a sense of community.

What can be more human than that?

And I say this as someone who never even posted on TikTok. I once posted a weird screengrab of Lorde with some caption about it being a masc summer (in addition to Brat), but I don’t think that really counts. I definitely never posted my face. But the comment sections were everything. The most brilliant comedians of our time. Developing new language in real time. Articulating our pain and our highs with such nuance and pithy sarcasm. Sometimes even with remarkable kindness and insight.

I loved falling into the latter category. I would like comments that were more the former, but I didn’t necessarily want to contribute to the (sometimes) cesspool of it all.

Having a comment go viral (which happened to me a lot) weirdly felt like you were making an impact in the world. I tried to post more thoughtful comments than I knew you were supposed to on that platform, because why not? I might as well do that instead of fighting with the bots.

The comment sections of TikTok felt like smoking a cigarette. It was a little performative, but it also felt like one of the rare corners of the universe where people let their mask slip for five seconds and just decided to be honest. The anonymity of it of course helps, for the millions out there who also had accounts where they never posted, but it was still a degree of vulnerability that we rarely encounter these days.

Even most (I would argue, all) of our film and TV content now has become just that: content. It used to be art, at least on some level, where characters would show you what they felt instead of telling you. Now we’ve migrated to a dystopia in which characters must tell you verbatim that they are “sad” et al, per Netflix’s business model, that exclusively prioritizes second screen viewing.

As if that is what we need — more screens.

I should probably also mention that I have not had very much luck finding and/or building community in the post-collegiate years of adulthood.

Intersectionality is hard.2

I also just miss the old TikTok. By which I guess I mean, the algorithm developed by the previous Chinese ownership. Larry Ellison came in like a wrecking ball, as per Elon Musk and Twitter (I refuse to indulge in the re-brand). And what they both understand, very clearly, is the power of distorting thought and meaning. Which is to say: when the masses can think collectively, it becomes a community. And when that happens, they have a problem.

TikTok used to provide this, and now you can’t find it, even if you give it all your might and attention. The algorithm feeds you what it wants you to see, not what you want to see (based on your previous scrolling and engagement history). It now forces you to actively search — like in the search bar — anything that feels slightly less AI slop.

Community is as elusive as it has ever been.

What used to feel addicting about TikTok was that it gave you the illusion, and sometimes I would argue genuine, community. What makes the new algorithm inhumane is that it microdoses you the real drug laced with AI (fentanyl?), to get you even more addicted, knowing that you’ll do anything to get another bump or drag.

Then, like a power-hungry drug dealer, it ghosts you at any moment by switching up it’s formula, just to prove that it can. It is no wonder that we have the most massive mental crisis in human history on our hands.

It just feels like another layer of grief, on top of the pile that already existed. A form of nostalgia, for a thing that is barely in the past.

And I can’t even have a cigarette to help me cope.

I blame much of this feeling on my Aquarius moon. That’s probably part of the formula for having an “addictive personality.” This obsessive need to analyze everything, lest is make sense to me emotionally all on its own. But also, this exceedingly persistent drive to know what is happening. The good, and the bad.

In sum: the FOMO is driving me mad.

It makes me viscerally upset when other millennials my age (or sometimes younger) have no concept of even the most basic and mainstream trends. How do you not know this? What happened to you? You’re not a boomer! (Although no shade, my mother is and she delights in hearing about all of this stuff)

I’m horrified to admit, for instance, that I only just found out who Clavicular is. As in, quite literally I found out about him yesterday morning. And how did I do so? By reading this NYT’s article.

E-mail alerts are the only form of media I am allowing myself while I plow through the most treacherous part of the querying journey. It is the only way I can hear myself think. This one was trapped in a folder.

But in an effort to pace myself in the writing process, and frankly to just leave the house and step away from my laptop, I decided to go to a birthday party for a close family friend who was turning 80 years old. It was delightful, and also very inter-generational. I chatted with a couple of her grandkids, and we ended up circling the topic social media a bit.

One of them, a teen about to enter high school, said something that I will never forget:

“I can’t imagine that kind of freedom.”

She was describing, broadly, the childhood that me and the other adults at the party had casually been discussing.

Then she elaborated: “We know that we are being surveilled. Ring cameras, street cameras, everyone’s phone and social media. We can’t do anything without being watched.”

The way she said it made me think that what she really meant to say was that it is impossible to just be anymore without the fear of being taunted. It reminded me of a NYT’s Oped I had just read about a modern-day twelve year old’s response to “Stand By Me.” It made me so profoundly sad for her and every kid that has had to come of age in this nightmare, and a pandemic to boot.

“I’m so sorry that we did this to you,” I said to her. She laughed a little uncomfortably, which was understandable.

I just didn’t know if any adult in her life had truly acknowledged this reality, and then apologized for it. All they have ever known are adults running around acting like toddlers, especially and most notably those with incredible political power, who have chosen not to protect them.

It reminded me of why I left TikTok to begin with.

Working for people that are famous, as in my previous employment, brings with it a sort of vicarious trauma. You’ve never been famous yourself, but you’ve been close enough to it to see how it operates. We build people up to then tear them down. Even the good ones — the artists who became famous by default — are forced to navigate terrain that was always meant to be dehumanizing.

Social media fame is no different. It may even be worse.

How is it the choices have become to be famous and get published, or languish into complete obscurity and not be given any opportunity to tell the truth on the page?

I hope I’m wrong, and that this binary turns out to be a magic trick as flimsy as the Wizard of Oz and his curtain.

I wish that for you, too, whoever you are.

And if you made it this far — thank you for reading! I mean it! My goal for this page moving forward is to be posting essays that explore some part of my journey writing a memoir, including the process of publishing and what I’m reading along the way.

But as much as possible, I’m also going to try and do it in such a way that ties into something that is happening in real time, so the whole thing doesn’t feel so navel-gazey.

I’ll be posting as often as I can, but do appreciate your patience as I get into the flow of this app, and also just life happening while you’re trying to vomit your life onto the page of a book that real people are going to read one day … you know? xx, vickie

The TL:DR on this piece is that Hollywood can often, and very unfortunately, feel like the Jim Crow that James Baldwin famously described in his essay, “Notes of a Native Son.” Then how gender and queerness and class complicates all of that stuff even further. It is more personal essay than think piece. At the end, I offer some sobering thoughts on Ryan Coogler and the Sinner’s Oscar campaign this year.

The lesson: they both figured out a way to tell their own stories. So should you.

xx, Vickie

I’ve been writing this memoir mostly (hiding) in the woods. It’s been nice. No one at my very local grocery store or pharmacy cares what I look like, and I’m grateful for it.

I’ve started calling it my “Thoreau Era.”

But I know that I’ll need to crawl out of this womb sooner or later, even if it’s just onto a zoom. Meetings will need to happen, and I will need to “turn (back) on.” Social media — beyond this platform — will probably need to resume.

I wouldn’t say that I have totally “let myself go,” but there has certainly emerged a kind of pandemic-esque regression of my regular grooming schedule. Because, well, writing is messy.

So in preparation for the next chapter, I finally booked a hair appointment — for a cut and color.

I should probably add that my “brand” in Hollywood, through no real choice of my own, has become that of a “Puerto Rican Ellen.” When I was in the mailroom of a talent agency in LA many moons ago, an agent gave me the moniker, and it stuck.

Anyway, I am not a natural blonde. But expectations must be maintained, as they say.

I started bleaching my hair regularly on or around 2015, because as my hair stylist at the time insisted: “Blondes have more fun.”

But I had been having trouble finding a new place that I liked since moving back to the east coast from LA. There are a few notable queer owned barber shops in NYC now (thank god), which I’ve frequented for years, but I wanted to veer a bit more into salon territory. I like the softer look of scissors over comb, more than clippers.

On some level, probably, my standards had changed. Even so, I just could not justify the cost if no one was going to see me.

Add it to the list of things I cannot afford, but alas.

Then this past summer, I got caught in the rain while I was doing a sort of power-walk through Williamsburg (getting your steps in helps with writer brain), and as I passed by what looked like a small salon on the north side just shy of McCarren Park, I suddenly got this feeling that I needed to go in.

When I walked in, I met the owner — and just based on a thirty second or so interaction, I felt like I’d be safe in her chair. That was enough for me.

My family, god bless them, gifted me a gift card for my November birthday this year for this exact place, as requested by me. I had run out of excuses.

When I arrived finally for my appointment, I learned that there were two stylists that were going to be working on me concurrently: the owner (who would do my cut), and her associate (who would do my color). I showed them many pictures of what I wanted. Almost all of them were former pictures of myself. They looked at them, nodding as though they really were trying to see my vision.

Finally, I just said: “I want, like, a classy Ellen look.”

Unfortunately I’m aware of how classist the word “classy” is, but in this particular moment I needed to communicate as clearly and as simply as possible.

“Say no more” they both motioned with their arms and their head shakes.

I guess this is a nice tangible example of why representation matters, and I’m often sad that Ellen — setting aside her more recent fall from grace — is still pretty much all we’ve got. (Unless you’re still on TikTok, you’re a soccer fan and you know who Megan Rapinoe is, or you happened to see Feel Good on Netflix with Mae Martin).

Needless to say, I can’t think of a single visible Latinx person who comes even close.

Maybe Sara Ramirez, post-grey’s anatomy.

We did color first, and I learned that she was originally from just outside of Detroit, and then had spent a bit of time in Nashville before settling in Brooklyn. She was thinking of soon re-locating again to upstate NY. She seemed to be looking for something akin to what I was currently living.

I listened, and since it just so happened that I had recently been reading a lot of James Baldwin, I started to tell her about it. I don’t know why I do this now, but every time I climb out of the woods for a brief respite, I seem to end up processing out loud whatever the last thing I read happens to be.

I found myself telling her specifically about one passage, from Notes of a Native Son, that had been haunting me. This one in particular had really gotten under my skin, because as I began explaining to her, it was the first time I had ever considered what Jim Crow racism actually felt like.

He said, in part:

I had been living in New Jersey, working in defense plants, working and living among southerners, white and black. I knew about the south, of course, and about how southerners treated Negroes and how they expected them to behave, but it had never entered my mind that anyone would look at me and expect me to behave that way.

I acted in New Jersey as I had always acted, that is as though I thought a great deal of myself — I had to act that way — with results that were, simply, unbelievable.

I went to the same self-service restaurant three times and stood with all the Princeton boys before the counter, waiting for a hamburger and coffee; it was always an extraordinarily long time before anything was set before me; but it was not until the fourth visit that I learned that, in fact, nothing had ever been set before me; I had simply picked something up.

Negroes were not served there, I was told, and they had been waiting for me to realize that I was always the only Negro present.

It somehow had never occurred to me that people who were not allowed to eat at certain restaurants or use certain bathrooms would have had the same level of disbelief, or frankly indignation, that I would have if someone said that to me today.

The way this period in history had always been presented to me had been almost anti-septic. Scientific in its record of findings. This happened, and then we passed a law to make it illegal, and that was that.

I didn’t realize that people, even then, did not just accept and assume it was “normal,” just because it was a different time. Anyone from any period of time could have been me, could have been you, in this time.

And it wasn’t until that exact moment, sitting in that chair, that it crossed my mind how difficult it must have been for him to name the giant elephant in the room in the moment when it was happening. (He wrote this in 1955). Artists are often praised after-the-fact, exalted for their “bravery,” but that actually they are all just regular people who decided to say the unspeakable out loud before anyone else could muster it.

I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for me to be broaching these subjects in a hair salon (of course it wasn’t), and so to pivot and try and get a bit of consent I suppose, I took a pause.

“Do people still read books?” I asked her. “Yes!” she very much exclaimed. It was such an earnest admission, like she was so happy that someone had finally asked. She seemed, almost relieved I think, to be having an actual conversation and not just the usual small talk.

As I told her all of this — we were deep into the bleaching process by now — it suddenly dawned on me that we were living through circumstances, right now, in this period of history, that people might read about in the same scientific method a hundred years from now.

And that, if they did, there would be no way for them to know — even if they wanted to — the real truth of what this time felt like. The internet is forever, or so we think, but we’ve also seen how quickly and ruthlessly algorithms can alter any clear sense of reality.

That is, of course, undoubtedly going to be one of the most defining aspects of this time. Just the sheer volume of confusion and overwhelm.

But the specifics, like how I carry around my passport everywhere I go now, just in case I were to get stopped by ICE. Even though I was born in Boston, and all Puerto Ricans are United States citizens by birth. That I am unfortunately very aware that my last name alone is enough, in this era, to question my right to be here, and more critically, of my having any humanity at all.

I can’t believe I have to do this, to be perfectly honest. It feels surreal, and it also feels like an invitation to feel humiliated. I’m not taking the bait, thus far anyway, but I see the parameters clearly for what they are. We don’t need history to tell us or for time to pass for us to understand the indignity of this present.

But then, what if an ICE officer just decided to take my passport from me, out of my hands, the moment I brought it out to prove my humanity to him? My mother actually said this to me not too long ago.

I should probably get a passport card, but alas once again — it just feels like another fee.

My point is: How would anyone ever know that that happened to me? Or that that was how I was dealing with the current circumstances? If I didn’t tell you, whoever you are, and whoever there may be in the future?

As I was telling her, about the real emotional experience of Jim Crow — I also realized how much Jimmy’s indignation reminded me of my former hair stylist. He had been a good friend — his name was Angelo — and he felt at the time very much like my guardian angel.

He was also, as it just so happens, Puerto Rican. Albeit a much darker shade than I was; a topic that he discussed openly and frequently. And he was very, very gay.

He was a bit older, and he taught me, when I needed it, desperately, what it was to be an artist. The art of entertaining, of carrying yourself with dignity in every room, of living. The blonde, the fact that it made me look “different,” made me feel like I could be one too, as embarrassing as that sounds.

It was right around my Saturn’s return, and I badly needed to feel re-born. This was right before mustering the courage to apply to film school, and I’m fairly certain the hair transformation played a big role in it.

He brought me into a world of artists in Williamsburg, from every part of the country and the world, that made me feel seen. Meaning, they could see that I was still in the process of being born, and they were willing to be there to witness it.

The other thing, was: the blonde hair softened my butchness in a way.

As much as I wanted to feel unique, being so visible as a masc lesbian is exhausting. Especially in the beginning, as you’re getting your sea legs. You just don’t always want to be stared at with overwhelming curiosity, or god knows what else.

I just wanted to be palatable. Somewhere, anywhere.

Because there is also, since we’re talking about it, a particular kind of aggressiveness that creeps into the way you are perceived when you start to present more masculinely, that is rarely talked about out loud; probably because no one wants to admit that it’s true, and because no one wants to accept that they are a victim of it. It is as surprising and frustrating as much of what I have already described above.

Even among the gen z crowd, the conversations on TikTok are just barely scraping the surface of it. And I’m referring to even before the newly altered algorithm.

To make matters even more confusing, women are generally taught to be submissive and demure. To attract male attention, but also as a form of social currency. When you transition to a more masculine appearance, this just doesn’t work anymore. People can’t understand why you aren’t more “confident” and “assertive,” and so forth.

You may look different on the outside now, but you were still socialized for much of your life into those behaviors. You are so deeply aware of how you felt when some man asserted his “confidence,” that you are constantly trying to work out in your own head how to do it differently. Even if you wanted to try and do it, to emulate the entitlement that most men don’t even realize they have, you know that you could never get away with what they often do. Short hair doesn’t change everything.

Men don’t really like it when we, as in lesbians, step on their toes.

It’s even more troubling when you realize that a large part of why you were socialized that way is because women have been taught to protect themselves from an enraged man who might want to physically hurt them by playing dumb and playing soft. Like an evolutionary measure.

Dark hair, mixed into this short haircut transition, makes for an even more stark shift in reality. Aggressiveness is exponentially built into how you are perceived when you have darker features. How should you protect yourself now? Where and how do you find this imaginary line that will keep you safe, and ideally, employed?

I didn’t understand it at the time, that this is what it was, but Angelo seemed to understand and to be teaching me that lessening at least the sting of racism, however fabricated and intermittently, can offer some relief. A salve, like having a drink or a cigarette.

As it turns out, for some of us — the “fun” that comes with going blonde really just means … a little less racism.

Just about every writer that made it into the canon, that you or I can think of —Didion and Baldwin, but also Hemingway, Mankiewicz, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Faulkner, Bukowski, Capote, Tennessee Williams — were infamously heavy drinkers and smokers. They needed something to manage the pain of looking reality straight in the face.

And only one of them was seriously looking at what it is to exist within the confines of American racism. Even Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston were known to be smokers.

Baldwin’s salve was both of those things, as well as to run away to Paris.

Obviously, not everyone has the privilege of “passing,” just because they bleach their hair. Jimmy must have been acutely aware of this. I was acutely aware of this. But it is the position I was finding myself in, at least some of the time, and most of the time it just felt a lot like being back in the closet. There was no real relief in it.

I’m also a lot older now than I was when I got that very first bleach, and as I sat there while she, very patiently, put all sorts of now toner and then conditioner onto my scalp, I began thinking about why I was in this chair to begin with.

Who exactly was I performing for? Was any of this really worth it?

The unfortunate answer to that question is that blondes (still) have way more fun in Hollywood.

They stay employed.

It has, quite literally, gotten me work. More specifically, it got me out of the mailroom and onto a desk. It might also, for instance, invite an ICE agent to be less inclined to pull me over and ask for identification, or worse.

But regarding my professional life, my overall assessment was as follows:

In New York, being white is helpful.

In Hollywood, being blonde is a requirement.

I’m being a little bit hyperbolic, but honestly — not much. They do not mess around about their requirements. Gentlemen very much prefer blondes.

Another way of looking at it is: blonde hair is armor. And you’re going to need a hell of a lot of that if you choose to march into that town (even on zoom). I hesitate to believe that much of this has changed, even amidst its more recent — arguably, in process — downfall from the cultural arbiter of our society, and of the world.

It is probably even more pronounced if you are an influencer, aspiring or otherwise (see: Alix Earle, Becca Moore, and every other look alike whose name you can’t quite remember). The digital migration has made very little difference on this front.

All of this was news to me when I first moved out to the west coast. On the east coast, this preference is nowhere near as pronounced. It has shifted a bit with the West Village Girl, but every generation has a version of that girl. We used to call her a Carrie Bradshaw. That scene was pretty avoidable, and also there is the simple fact that New York has never been as much of a “one industry town” as Los Angeles.

Even someone like Beyoncé understands this phenomenon. She picked her battles very well. And so, in some cases, maybe a Trojan horse is fine? We did get, after all, a literal renaissance in music, and in visibility for many black women’s true and lived experiences. The negatives and the positives.

I think every woman working in Hollywood, or trying to work in it, understands how true this is. It matters very little whether you are in front of the camera, or behind it.

But it goes far deeper than that.

During my last gig in Hollywood, I found myself working for a start-up company specializing in narrative podcasts for Latin American and Latinx audiences as the head of their newly minted Film and Television department. In other words, the only company who would hire me. (And even this did not last, but that is a story for another day)

This meant that we were more or less industry adjacent, but we were very much selling to mainstream buyers in Hollywood. I had been on that side of the aisle as an assistant, and I understood the assignment.

Dying my hair blonde wasn’t a job requirement, but it kind of was. How else was I going to sell a show?

I once, off the cuff, and surprising even myself, called this my “code-switching look.” It was in response to a new co-worker seeing the transformation, having just moved back to LA from Puerto Rico, where I had been sporting a top knot in my natural shade of dark brown. This was still in the more immediate post-pandemic era.

When I read this passage recently that Jimmy wrote, it stopped me in my tracks:

[The waitress] did not ask me what I wanted, but repeated, as though she had learned it somewhere, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” She did not say it with the blunt, derisive hostility to which I had grown accustomed, but, rather, with a note of apology in her voice.

The way she said very quietly and apologetically: “I’m so sorry, but we don’t serve negroes.” I know that woman, that voice, that softening of the same door slamming in your face.

I had heard it on every other zoom call: “This sounds great, but we’re just not looking at Latin American territories right now.” Or, “We love it, but who can we attach as meaningful talent?” Or any number of iterations of simply: “We just don’t get it.”

There is always some “reason” why that burger is just out of reach.

It is, unfortunately, that bad in Hollywood. There are separate quarters for us everywhere you look. Everything is hyphenated. Separate and unequal awards categories. Every idea, every pitch, must fit into said quarters, or it won’t see the light of day (and even then, any greenlight is basically a fluke).

Being white doesn’t guarantee you can afford a burger, but it does mean you won’t be denied entry. You can come from anywhere — the Midwest, Texas, abroad — and you’ll at least be let in the door and seated. You get a shot.

If you aren’t, the barrier to entry is in every laundry list of reasons why your movie didn’t go, why you didn’t get the part, why you’re not “ready,” why you’re not the “right fit,” and on and on and on. The list of reasons never ends, and the result is the same: they refuse to serve us a burger.

And when someone tries to open their own diner (see: Sinners), all hell breaks loose.

I don’t know that Jimmy necessarily would have endorsed the revenge aspect of the Sinners narrative, but I would imagine he would have at least appreciated that someone had a strong vision and was able to see it through. I think that he would have understood certainly the impulse to have this kind of fantasy.

Regardless, the fact that it is set in the Jim Crow era south, but with a potent role reversal, is quite literally Hollywood’s worst nightmare, apparently.

It’s absurd. All of this is absurd.

The most devastating part for me, and what I found the most shocking — the most breathtaking — is in how much I identified with Jimmy’s naïveté about Jim Crow racism. How unaware he was of its true implications until it was thrown in his face, and then how indignant he was. When it is just not rationalizable anymore. When it is very, very clear why you are being denied service, because they are saying it to your face.

Hollywood is saying it to our face.

We don’t even need to talk about how terrible the numbers are. We all know that they’re abysmal. They reflect the exact reality of this historical moment.

And I say all of this as someone who went through thirteen years of NYC private school, and then to an east coast liberal arts college. I have never, and I mean never, experienced the sort of crude prejudice that I have felt in Hollywood.

The fact that I have managed to feel all of this, even as a blonde, is … really something.

It should go without saying that a latinx masc lesbian on the business side of Hollywood, with any amount of reasonable visibility, is completely unheard of. And no amount of code-switching seems to be helping. There are maybe two or three of us on the creative side.

My point in all of this, is to say: Hollywood still won’t serve us.

That is, as Jimmy would probably say, the truth of it.

And all of this, the calamity of it all, just because I really want to make a movie.

So anyway, one of the great things about reading him is that after a while, he starts to feel like permission to vomit up every micro-aggression you’ve ever swallowed. A reminder that he chose to insist upon his own humanity, in a time that hasn’t really ended.

I hadn’t realized that some of us have to write ourselves into existence.

And I just think, that if we can have para-social relationships with influencers, why not have para-normal ones with writers?

In that relationship, I would hope that he would understand that I refer to him mostly as ‘Jimmy’ throughout here as the deepest form of affection, and of respect. I remember reading, I think it was in his other essay about Norman Mailer, that that is how those closest to him, his contemporaries, referred to him.

And in the meantime, I got my hair done.

As we were wrapping up the hair appointment, my colorist started telling me about how all of the finance bros are moving to Miami now. Who knew? (a lot of people, apparently)

The cut afterwards went well, and when she finished, I found myself instinctively grabbing her hand:

“This was exactly what I wanted.”

She grinned, it was nice, and I went on my way.

So yea, I probably won’t have this hair forever, but what artist doesn’t embrace change?

Epiloge:

A quick note about the Oscars last night:

It seems to me that Ryan Coogler wrote himself into existence, and took a burger off the counter. In that sense, it truly was an Original Screenplay. He may have been a lot less naive about where he was than Jimmy, but it was bold nonetheless.

Did you know that no black person has ever been served a Best Directing burger? How insane it is to even type that?

The thing about Directing is that it is, at the end of the day, a leadership role; the commander of the ship, as it were. And it is the person and position that we most regard as having the vision that drives a film. A screenwriter is the first, very important step, but it is done privately and quietly, for the most part. The script will always serve the Director’s vision.

So why did he ultimately get one of the Screenwriting awards, but not the Directing award? And how did PTA manage to get both, plus Best Picture?

No shade to PTA.

It’s just that there is always a “reason.”

This metaphor is probably getting a little out of hand by now, but I do think it is worth noting that a “burger” represents institutional influence, not money. There was probably not enough money in the world that Sinners could have earned at the box office for it to win Best Picture. If it had underperformed, then that would have also been reason enough.

Oscars are won because of campaigns, not merit. We see this every four years when there is a Presidential election. Narrative restitution, at the end of the day, is too important when there’s the threat of change. Crumbs, after all, stave off enough hunger to avoid a full blown revolution. Best Actor and Best Cinematography for Sinners were really genuinely nice to see, and also just enough.

And so the results felt — well, let’s call it clever. As though order had been restored.

The blunt irony of the revolutionary themes in PTA’s vision that did get their gourmet burgers very much served will probably turn out to be one of the defining motifs of our time. If OBAA really was about revolution, perhaps it would have been mentioned in any of the three acceptance speeches, even in passing?

There is no question that Sinners captured and represented the zeitgeist this year. I don’t think anyone would contest this, even if they didn’t necessarily think it was the “best” film of the year or the one that most resonated for them, myself included.

Shouldn’t that be the purpose of award ceremonies?

To record history?

The Grammy’s seem to finally have learned this lesson, myself being among the most surprised. The changes in voting helped, of course. The base became younger, and therefore more tapped into the cultural vein of the collective; they are less jaded, and less defensive about maintaining any self-perceived high level positions. Which is a long way of saying, many of them probably just voted with their hearts.

The results were an acknowledgement of Bad Bunny’s historical significance (especially through Best Album win), but not a full sweep; the winners across the board were balanced, in just about every way. But more than that, they just felt right.

These people really did represent what this moment actually felt like.

The other irony, the one that will stand in the breadth of history, is that Sinners will likely be most remembered for its cultural influence, even and especially amidst the institutions around it that were dying.

That’s got to be worth more than a couple extra trophies.

I told my sister all of this on the phone earlier today, as if to suggest how inane the whole thing is. I could feel more than a bit of indignation starting to bubble.

She turned to me, without a hint of naiveté, and said:

“They don’t care that you know.”

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The other day, before I deleted my TikTok, I remember one of my favorite influencers asking her audience, “What is everyone doing to stay sane?”

I was always more of a creeper on there — some safe distance is better for my mental health — but I do love the comment sections. Or, I used to anyhow. I actually think I’m still in mourning, mostly for that one particular part of the community.

In any case, I posted a comment about how I was getting through the “madness” by watching documentaries about famous artists, like Frida Kahlo, Billy Joel, and so forth.

That was true at the time, but more recently I’ve been craving something that feels more active. Less passive consumption. A way to feel more alive.

I’m embarrassed at how obvious this is, but I’ve since rediscovered: books.

Not audiobooks (no shame), but a physical object that I can hold in my hands, that I can highlight, that I can pause and come back to even if the wifi is acting up. Even if censorship is flourishing on anything that requires the internet to communicate.

Additional update: I’ve decided, or gradually realized, that what I was attempting to write in my last two entries on here is actually a book. A memoir, told through a series of personal essays, with a clear arc that requires a beginning, middle and end. This format is better for an ongoing dialogue, I think.

Anyway, it occurred to me that if I was going to do this, I better get to reading again. Which, if I’m being painfully honest, I don’t feel I’ve done much of in earnest since — college? I’ve mentioned to a couple of people that I used to inhale books as a child, and I mean really long and dense ones, but trying to find an ounce of focused energy as an adult feels like a herculean task.

It dawned on me that it may be just as simple as: when you’re a child (if you’re lucky), you’re not burdened, which is to say distracted, by adult responsibilities. You can detach from earth, happily and comfortably, into another land or another universe or another time. Someone will come get you when you need to come back to earth.

As it turns out, taking a “social media break” helps tremendously with my ability to focus on words that are on a page. It is such a relief, to know that I’m still capable of that; that I haven’t lost that ability to engage and to keep learning.

My first stop in the personal essay journey was, of course, James Baldwin (our founding father). I’ll come back to him, probably in several posts, but on this night in particular I’ve moved on to Joan Didion (our founding mother).

I know, I’m so late. I’ve read or encountered lots of her quotes here and there — the one about “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” and the longer passage about the Santa Ana winds making everyone paranoid. Mostly through memes, or some quippy reference in a think piece.

But this is the first time that I’ve decided to really sit down and have a chat with her. To hear all of what she has to say, and see where it takes me from there.

One of the most shocking things that I noticed, immediately, is that she had written about so many of the themes that I was exploring in my own writing, albeit from a different vantage point. That, of course, I am hardly the first person to have these thoughts, nor will I be the last. But it was so comforting, in a way that genuinely took me by surprise.

I have been in the midst of writing an essay for the memoir that I’m calling Defying Gravity in Hollywood, and in it I’m writing mostly about my relationship with someone that I refer to as “my Glinda.” There is a passage where I’m trying to describe the bubble she’s in — that there really is a script that needs to be followed in Hollywood. The game has rules, and you better play by them, or else.

In my mind, the metaphor made perfect sense, because I am quite literally describing the town where scripts are written (or used to be, sigh). But then, as I dove into the “White Album,” the first essay in Joan’s book of the same title, I read this:

The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production [life] was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script and had mislaid it.

I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.

I’ve never read a more beautifully articulated description of privilege.

I’m not sure that she was aware that that was what she was doing; I think, in her privilege, she assumed it to be universal. As one does. But still, it was remarkably observant for someone who had very little distance from which to observe it and herself.

A lack of privilege is difficult in ways that can be indescribable, but some amount of it, I think, is necessary for your life to have any “meaning.” It gives you perspective. It allows you to be grateful for the things you do have. It is, ironically, liberating.

Joan was, acutely and unfortunately, aware of how much of her own life had a script — which she was fighting tooth and nail not to follow. Actually, I don’t think she really had a choice in the matter (no artist does), but the point is that she was so aware of it, in ways that the average citizen probably was not.

I’m going to keep reading, but it does already make me wonder if she ever found any peace. If her fatalism ever waned, even just marginally. I think that, probably, it did not. From what I’ve gathered, anyway, from some of her other essays that I’ve now read from Slouching towards Bethlehem. And that makes me really, genuinely sad for her.

I have also been struck by how much of the way she describes the chaos of the 60s could have been written today. Of just how disorienting “change” feels in the moment, even if we end up on the right side of it on the other end.

She says of the Manson Family murders:

On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive.

The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed.

I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.

She may as well have been describing the present day landscape on social media. Does anything surprise us anymore?

My sister called as I was in the middle of reading, and so we ended up chatting about Joan, and then a bit about Jimmy. She said to me, “You’re going to have so many friends waiting for you when you pass.”

This sounds morbid, but it was in the context of an almost-grandmother of ours whose funeral it happened to be today, and also because death is a frequent theme in the memoir that I’m writing (slash excavating). In some cases literal, but mostly in a metaphorical way — in the sense that everything in nature is a cycle, and that death is a necessary part of it.

She added: “You’re writing for so many friends you will never get to meet (in life).”

I appreciated it deeply. I couldn’t believe that Jimmy, and maybe even Joan, had the foresight to do that.

I told her I had only just realized that, subconsciously, I associated reading (for leisure) with the parents of my childhood peers. They were the only adults I remember seeing reading a book in bed before going to sleep. They could afford to leave earth for a bit, as part of their daily routine. My parents would pass out right away.

For further context: I went to a Harry Potter-like NYC private school, where many parents had 99 problems, but money was not one of them.

Then she said to me:

“Victoria, this is a book club. What we’re doing right now. You should do a post on Substack right now, and call it: ‘Friday Nights with Joan.’ ”

And so here we are.

I hope that whatever you’re doing to stay sane is working.

xx

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The last 24 hours of officially living in Los Angeles were as memorable as they were a complete haze. But even for me, things got especially ridiculous.

Allow me to elaborate:

PART 1: Saying Goodbye

Saying goodbye to LA was surreal.

This was the second time I had moved there, with nothing but a couple suitcases and a dream, but all signs were pointing to: Ok, it’s time to take a break.

So much of the energy now felt … unsettled.

For context: the first time I moved there, the pandemic sent me back home. This time it was the wildfires (plus unemployment). Biblical events somehow kept getting in the way of my plans.

But this time felt different.

Like there was something in the air we could all feel (besides the wildfire residue), but we couldn’t quite name it.

I was trying not to dwell on it too much though, and was delighted when a college friend who used to live in LA mentioned that she was going to be in town. One of my situationships had left me on read, and grabbing dinner with an old friend seemed like the perfect antidote.

We had a great time, but on the way home we noticed that yellow police tape seemed to be encircling my entire block.

I didn’t think much of it because, honestly, I was a little distracted. Packing was not going especially well, and I was pretty sure I was going to have to pull an all-nighter. Plus weird stuff happens in Hollywood (the neighborhood) all the time.

A police officer was standing on the corner, and after I somewhat hastily showed him my California State ID to confirm that I lived there, he let me pass.

I did ask him, though, why exactly there was so much commotion. “There is an active shooter that we’re looking for,” he said very matter-of-factly. Helicopters were everywhere, using spotlights to support their manhunt.

It seemed like this might actually be something serious.

I began walking more quickly towards my building, and noticed a guy walking directly towards me who was yelling something I couldn’t quite make out. He didn’t seem like a crazy homeless guy, but I’m still a New Yorker at heart — I know when to mind my own business.

As he got closer, I could see that he was tall, dark and handsome.

And then, could finally decipher what he was saying: “I need a white person!” Followed by, more emphatically, “I need a white person!”

I quite literally did the thing where I looked behind me to see who he was talking to. Like, how rude of them to not respond.

He made direct, intense eye contact, and it clicked.

I blurted out something about being Puerto Rican, to which he very quickly elevator grilled me, and said “close enough!”

Suddenly we were walking together, linking arms.

He looked like an influencer, maybe. Wearing at least one or two designer pieces, sunglasses (at night), great skin, at the very least bisexual — but he was dead serious about needing an escort. I obliged, and by the time we got to his floor in the elevator we were besties.

I realized later that that was almost certainly true because my building was known as the“influencer” building in the neighborhood (unbeknownst to me when I moved in).

He explained to me, as he smiled from ear-to-ear just in case anyone was looking, that he had tried showing his ID to three different police officers to prove that he lived in the same building as me, and only on the third try did they let him pass.

I hadn’t even processed how easily the police officer had let me pass.

In LA, being pretty will get you through almost any door. But on that night, it was clear to me that being pretty will not save you from the LAPD. At least, not if you’re not the right kind of pretty.

When I texted my friend about all of this later, she quipped: “Remember this next time you start to get nostalgic about LA!”

PART 2: The Airport(s)

Ever since my scoliosis diagnosis (two years ago), I decided that any flight over three hours I would only fly business or first class. Longer flights in coach were so painful, it just didn’t feel doable. The way the brace digs into my hips and underarms when I can’t move around in my seat is unbearable.

And since I was flying back to NYC, that’s exactly what I did.

Could I afford it? Absolutely not. Did I do it anyway? Hell yes.

Even though I’m swimming in medical debt as it is (even with insurance! cobra!), I figured what the hell. Like many millennials, I have accepted that debt is a part of life.

This often also means that getting through security is a bit of an event. I take my brace on and off now like clockwork. But because the brace that I wear covers my entire torso, people tend to be a little bit alarmed when they see it.

On this day, I had a particularly curious onlooker. She clearly very much wanted to chat. I was exhausted, but she seemed sweet. She reminded me a little of the nice older lady who loses her house in the original Twister movie.

It turned out that her daughter also had scoliosis, and she recognized the type of brace that I was wearing immediately. She asked me what degree my cobb angle was, and told me that since her daughter was younger when she got diagnosed it had been really effective.

We parted ways, and I headed off to the first leg of my flight.

Once we got to our layover in Minnesota, we had a bit of time and I decided to use the restroom.

As you can probably imagine, using public restrooms can also very quickly become somewhat of an event for me. I’ve become pretty immune to the gender-related stares, and to be frank, they happen much less often now that the topic has become so mainstream.

But I was in the midwest now.

There was a line, and as I waited patiently, another woman exited her stall. Instead of heading straight to the sink or to the paper towels, she just stood there … staring at me.

Several other people were trying to walk around her, but it was like she was stuck. Frozen at the sight of me. Like she was undressing me with her eyes.

I asked if she wanted to get around me to exit the bathroom, but she was, unfortunately, still mute.

We stood there together, silently, for a couple more seconds until her motor skills came back, and a stall opened up for me.

But there was a quiet understanding that something had just happened.

Whenever this happens, it always feels like 50% I’m flattered, and 50% ugh. The rub is that you know they most likely only have the capacity to desire you privately. The shock means that you represent something new, which means they probably don’t want their friends and family finding out about what just happened.

Which is nothing really, but also potentially everything.

It’s weird, not knowing how or when you’re going to be pulled into being the object of someone’s deepest desire. It’s like a vortex, pulling you both in quickly and forcefully.

Then a wave rushes over you, carrying the weight of their fears, regrets, longing — for some sort of life that they had only ever imagined in their head, until suddenly you appeared right before them.

The responsibility feels profound, even when it’s a stranger.

Sometimes, the fact that you’ll never see each other again is the key that unlocks the safe they never open. The floodgates are open, and they look at you as though they’re drowning, but at least they know it’s fleeting.

So I stay with them, in that liminal space, because I like the kind of magic that happens there.

On a lighter note though, she was super hot.

Think: Alo gear underneath a peacoat, baseball cap, and long hair vibes. If I had to guess, her husband and kid(s) were probably sitting right outside at their gate.

Sometimes little moments of indiscretion can be fun.

PART 3: The Flight

As we finally started to board the second leg of my flight, I saw out of the corner of my eye that someone was waving at me.

It was the Twister lady! From the very beginning of my journey! I couldn’t believe it. She had reappeared, and was sitting diagonally from me in the last row of first class. Still friendly as ever.

I realized quickly that I was sitting in a window seat, and that the person who had the aisle seat was already situated. I was still smiling from the reunion with my new friend as I said hello to my new seatmate, and politely asked if I could cross over to my seat.

She looked 45ish. And, deeply unhappy.

At first it seemed like she didn’t hear me, because not only did she not get up, but she didn’t even acknowledge that there was someone speaking to her.

Awkwardly, I asked again.

After several more very uncomfortable beats, she rolled her eyes and got up from her seat. It was a shocking amount of attitude for a pretty basic request.

One of the more annoying things about wearing a brace that covers your entire torso is that it’s often very hard to maintain your balance. Since you can’t bend over to pick something up by naturally curving your back, you sort of end up falling forward like the leaning tower of pisa.

It’s very sexy.

It also means that I have to travel with a set of accessories. Like foam rolls, and a travel pillow.

As I started to head towards my seat, I first threw my pillow onto the seat. Before I could adjust it, she rolled her eyes again: “Are you going to make sure that stays on your side?”

Clearly this woman was in a mood, but I was already more focused on the fact that she had a cup of coffee on the divider between our seats. I was nervous about how I was going to cross over without it spilling.

But I was a little more vulnerable to her energy than I usually would be because I was so tired, and I could feel myself getting disoriented … as I started to, regretfully, fall forward.

The only way that I can describe the way I grabbed that cup of coffee is that I did it like a lesbian. If you don’t know what lesbian hands are, allow me to introduce you to this brilliant take.

I realized, obviously, that it was not ideal for my hand to be touching where she was going to be putting her mouth. But the alternative — of her liquid gold spilling onto her seat — seemed far worse.

I mean, can you imagine?

So, I made a decision.

And boy, did I pay for it.

I should also mention that flying first isn’t something that I did growing up. There were other more pressing needs. So I knew that there might be some etiquette stuff I wasn’t aware of, but I just didn’t really care that much. Kind of like how going to a Broadway show used to be a glamorized event, but now people show up wearing pretty much whatever.

I was dressed like Justin Bieber (oversized everything) because it fits better over the brace, and disguises it a bit more. I’m not always going for the quarterback look.

So she couldn’t even see why I was making this choice.

But my outfit, I realized, probably wasn’t gaining me any respectability points.

The real drag with the brace, if I’m being honest, is that it has come as a tremendous blow to my ego — that loss of a prior sense of being a very agile and athletic person.

The irony is that when you’re just standing and wearing it, it forces you to look confident. My posture is necessarily perfection. I carry myself now the way most men do without even thinking about it, regardless of what I’m wearing, because the damn brace won’t give me any other choice.

But alas, I felt no confidence in that moment, as I sank into my seat. (“The Sunken Place” in Get Out was feeling very literal)

It was like she was hazing me into the first class club.

It was so obvious, in fact, that for the rest of the flight all of first class was on pins and needles.

Regina George had entered the chat.

Additionally … I can’t prove that she was a pr girlie, but I can tell you she worked in entertainment (I know my people). And, that she was stressed.

Publicists are known to be like the “mean girls” of the entertainment world. Her accent made me think: possible New Yorker who relocated, but fully acclimated to the west coast nonetheless. The main tell was in her tone — that particular brand of meanness that the west side baddies love to flaunt.

Their ability to bully their peers is their strongest currency.

I was swiftly reminded that Los Angeles, or at least the part of it that I existed in, feels a whole lot like high school.

Typing away on her laptop the entire flight, stopping only to ask for an uninterrupted flow of coffee refills, I guesstimated that she was on track to consuming a minimum of five large cups of black coffee by the time we landed.

At one point, to try and diffuse the tension, I noticed that she was having trouble finding the button on her seat to recline. I showed her where it was, but that seemed to only make her more annoyed, because it meant that she then had to say “thank you.”

But also, I figured — surely it was impossible that she didn’t have a UTI by now. So, I waited patiently for her to get up to pee so that I could do the same. I didn’t feel like poking the bear by asking her to get up.

By now, her coffee cup had somehow become a main character in our story.

When she finally got up, I practically leapt out of my seat.

Then as I walked back from the bathroom, Twister lady gave me the most empathetic “I’m so sorry” expression. She knew I was wearing that brace, and she could see how mean my seatmate was being, for no apparent reason.

Twister lady was much more modest seeming, like she was there because the seats were more comfortable, not because it was a statement about who she was as a human being.

Never mind the fact that most commercial airplanes are so small now, even in first class, that I usually have to put my brace back on in the literal aisle or by the stewardesses corner after using the restroom, fully flashing everyone.

Etiquette, literally, could not apply to me.

When we landed, finally, pr girlie once again made every effort to impede anything I was trying to do. As everyone was beginning to de-plane, she took it upon herself to put her designer carry-on onto her seat in such a way that it was blocking me from the aisle. I realized it was now impossible for me to get off of this plane without literally stepping over her bag.

I was trapped, again.

She had a larger suitcase in the overhead compartment though, and as she looked in the direction of where she had stowed it, caught the eye of a slightly older and well dressed conservative looking guy, who graciously offered to retrieve her bag.

A flip switched, and her voice became angelic: “Oh my goodness, thank you so much. You have no idea how tired I am, I actually didn’t even sleep last night!”

Coincidentally, neither had I.

I decided in that moment to do exactly what she didn’t want me to do: I stepped right over her seat, bags and all. She gave me the dirtiest look I have ever received in my entire life.

But then, as she was heading off, a flip switched in my brain, too.

I turned back, and within earshot of the entire cabin, said to my Twister friend: “I wish you had been my seat mate.”

She smiled so hard her face got red and her eyes started to water.

It wasn’t quite as satisfying as dumping a can of white paint onto a bully’s head, but it was alright, alright, alright!

EPILOGUE:

When I talked to my therapist about that flight, I asked her whether she thought it was a racism thing, a homophobia thing, or a class thing. Or if maybe this lady was just having a bad day?

I forgot to even mention a disability thing.

She looked at me for a long beat, before very gently admitted: “I think it was a class thing.”

It also just so happened that my therapist at the time was a slightly older white lady who went to USC. I remember choosing her for exactly these sorts of moments. I wanted someone who was fluent in the language of LA. “Please just tell me the truth,” I begged her in our initial appointment. Thankfully, she obliged.

The thing about having intersecting identity “stuff” is that you can never really tell what part of you someone is reacting to. It’s weirdly a lot like trying to diagnose a complex food allergy, constantly having to think through all the possible things that could have triggered a reaction.

Like if I had been a straight white guy, but still only middle class-ish, would she really have still been so mean to me? If I wasn’t white-ish passing, would the Twister lady have been so nice to me?

It’s crazy to even have to think through all of these “options,” and even then to never really be sure.

I always have an EpiPen on me (I have actual real allergies), but on some level I think that I’ve also developed an anti-histamine-like personality that I keep with me in my back pocket if ever I need it. You just never know when it might save your life.

Luckily I’ve never truly had a life threatening allergy attack — literally, or figuratively — but the fact that not everyone has to think through this level of precaution is wild to me. An abstract concept, as much as perhaps I seem to be an abstract concept to so many of the people that I encounter along the way in this thing called “life.”

What would I even do with the extra energy that goes towards this kind of thought processing, if I had the opportunity? I think to myself, multiple times a day, in even the most mundane of tasks.

All in all, the silver lining I’ve come up with is this:

Diffusing situations (awkward, or dangerous) has basically become my super power.

Hi, there 😎 If you’re new here (as am I), I thought I would include a bit of context on what this is, and why I posted it. I am currently in the process of drafting a memoir, which I wasn’t sure how I planned to share with the world initially, and thus decided to just throw up onto Substack, as you can see below. I’ve since realized that this platform works much better as an ongoing conversation, and also that probably this memoir would work better as a traditionally published book. That said, I’m thrilled that you’re here, and would love to hear about how your own life may be full of tricky contradictions. xx, vickie

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I’m not really a virgin.

But during my last year in Los Angeles, I was finding the dating scene to be abysmal.

At the time, my 40th birthday was looming. I was looking for my wife, or at least someone who would want to marry a girl at some point. The bi-curious girlies were becoming exhausting. But for years now I’d had this nagging feeling that maybe I would want to be with a cis guy again before meeting my wife.

And by again, I actually meant … for the first time.

You see, when I was in high school, me and a close guy friend decided we were going to try it. Why not? A drunken night led to a valiant attempt, but did not quite lead to passing “Go.”

The moment that I stepped onto my college campus, it was all rainbows for me. A grand time was had. Years later, the poor guy confessed that he thought he made me gay (he did not).

But somewhere along the way, it just started to feel like there was this giant thing that nearly all of humanity has experienced, dating back to Adam and Eve, that I simply could not wrap my head around. Why does it feel different without a condom? Is it really possible for that to feel good? What on earth do I need to think about in terms of contraception, even just for a single encounter?

There was just so much I didn’t understand.

But where to find such a man? Hinge … or, god forbid, a bar? I basically, and de-facto, decided to put it in the hands of the gods.

According to another friend, I was “stuck in time.” Specifically, high school adolescence. The irony is not lost on me that I look essentially like a teenage boy (I moisturize). My sister in passing, but affectionately, referred to my resurfacing desire for said escapades as “AP level gay.”

But as the big birthday got closer and closer, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was this still going to be possible? Why did I even want it?

Swimming is my happy place, but on one particular Saturday I was a little grumpy because another person in my building was taking a while to finish his laps in our rooftop pool. I felt awkward doing laps next to a neighbor that I didn’t know, and in a pool that honestly wasn’t even really meant for exercise.

He finished finally, and began walking towards my poolside chair, only to strike up conversation. Doesn’t he know you’re not supposed to talk to your neighbors? I thought to myself, but he kind of just kept going, and as I was half listening I couldn’t not notice how much he really looked like Prince Harry.

This detail is important. I am not exaggerating. He swiftly confirmed that he actually used to work as an impersonator for still photographs with tourists, but eventually quit because it was inconsistent work and the money was terrible. He still has an agent representing him in said field.

Finally, in my attempt to be polite (and get to my laps), I asked if he had an Instagram. Shockingly, he said he did not. And then, very boldly, he asked for my phone number.

I was so impressed by the audacity, that I decided to give it to him.

I didn’t think much of it, until a couple days later … when he began texting me. And that didn’t seem to stop either. I assumed that he must be hitting on me, because isn’t that what all men want? But of course he knew, right? As I casually mentioned the situation to my mother on the phone, who happens to be a psychologist, she very astutely told me: “Victoria, he would have to be blind.”

But the whole thing was intriguing, and he seemed genuinely nice. So when we finally agreed to do a “netflix and chill,” I couldn’t help thinking about how maybe I had manifested this?

As in, my literal Prince Charming had arrived. The universe had listened. It was surreal!

I prepared. Everything was shaved.

He seemed nervous. I decided to help him a bit, because as a masc lesbian, I now understand how difficult it is to always be expected to make the “first move.”

I should also say: we could not be more different. I’m mostly gay, and he’s straight but was seemingly open. I’m an artist, he’s now a lawyer. He’s jewish, and I’m catholic by way of Puerto Rico. But somehow there was an ease in our dynamic from our very first conversation. He was curious, and he listened. I wanted to understand him, too. It felt safe.

As the evening continued, I realized that pushing for it to happen on our first “date” didn’t feel right. We were present, and the things we did end up doing felt natural. It turned out to be one of the most healing sexual experiences of my life.

Afterwards, we agreed to be friends “with benefits” because it felt like the most honest description of this experiment we were trying. We both were relieved to not be adding any more pressure.

And then somehow, before we knew it, it seemed like we were becoming actual friends. I would run into him in the hallway of our building all the time, and it wasn’t awkward. When I came home from sinus surgery, all bandaged up but clearly bloody, we literally bumped into each other getting into / out of the elevator. I was briefly mortified — until the next time I saw him, when he candidly told me: “Seeing you in any condition is always a pleasure.” It was so unusually kind.

By November, my birthday came and went, and I celebrated with friends and family. I invited Harry, but he was under the weather. I started to realize the joke I had been telling myself about losing my pseudo-virginity before this arbitrary date was starting to feel more and more irrelevant.

We were both really busy with work, but before the year ended we finally decided to go to a bar in the neighborhood. We jumped the velvet ropes because there was no one on the line, until a security guard came over and started yelling at me, specifically. Harry explained that we were simply going to the entrance, and he backed off.

But it was so shocking and obvious that as we walked away Harry quietly said to me, “whoa, that was aggressive.” It was hostile in a way that I’ve never experienced, and took me a minute to shake.

Once we were inside, we realized that it was the kind of place where everyone is pretending not to see one another. Too much rizz to dance, or take your sunglasses off. But he didn’t seem to care, and neither did I. Before I knew it he grabbed me by the hand and twirled me on the dance floor, as though no one was watching. It was brief and it was probably cringe, but it was freeing.

As we left, he led me through and out of the chaos the way that I imagine Taylor feels with Travis, or Tom with Zendaya. He may as well have been the Fiyero to my Elphaba. In the elevator, he confessed that he loved being a lawyer because “nobody can tell me shit!” It was so endearing and playful.

He held my hand all the way home, as we walked through the not-so-safe streets of Hollywood at night. We realized we were too tired to hang out any longer, and both went to sleep (in our respective apartments).

Since then, the wildfires have ravaged Los Angeles, and seemingly all our lives, in one way or another. I ended up relocating to the east coast, at least temporarily, and he likely won’t be renewing his lease. The small window of time where we may have gone “all the way” is far behind us now.

The lesson perhaps is that there is never really a perfect moment to lose your virginity, or to do anything for that matter. We decide to do things when we have the chance, however imperfectly, or we don’t.

But I will say this:

He never once used the word “ally” to describe himself — I’m not even sure it’s part of his vocabulary, to be honest — but everything about the way he treated me made me feel like he was one.

So I guess you could say he rescued me in a different way. In a way I didn’t even fully realize that I needed. In a city famous for its loneliness.

And for that, I will always be grateful.

Hey internet stranger 😎 Since you have absolutely no context for what this is or why I posted it, I’ve decided to add this note (after initially publishing), to explain that this is the first chapter of a memoir that I am currently in the throes of writing.

It might also be useful to know that each essay / chapter will reference some piece of pop culture.

That said, this little slice of my life I think is a pretty good introduction to who I am and how I move through the world. I very much would like to hear from you and how it is that you move through yours. xx, vickie

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