Of course I watched Suffs on public television (PBS’ “Great Performances”) last night. I’ve had it on my calendar for months, and I saw about 25 ads for it on social media yesterday, and a friend called to remind me about it.
Created by Tony Award winner Shaina Taub, this musical recorded from Broadway tells the story of the American suffragist movement and the remarkable friendships, heartbreak, and action that brought women together—or, in some cases, tore them apart.
It’s going to air again tonight at 8pm on PBS. Watch it or record it, if you can.
I will never again call them Suffragettes. They were suffragists.
Hopefully all the Tradwife influencers will decide to take a break from serving their husbands and tune in.
What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
Given the success and inspirational nature of the Artemis 2 mission, I’d have to go Astronaut.
I wouldn’t want to do any of the preparation or training (I’m prone to vertigo) but just beam me up, Scotty, to a window seat, for one day so I can see the coolest views ever.
It would have to be a day when very little is required of the crew, because I’m not good at incapable of running science experiments or flying aircraft. I could probably handle photography duty for one day and also I’d be good at the PR stuff. I could call Houston and talk to the media from space with great enthusiasm.
Photo of the lunar flyby captured by the Artemis 2 astronauts
Can you imagine how mind blowing it would be to see that for real?
One thing about being older is that you have so very many snippets of songs, poems, sayings and jingles floating around in your head. Literally decades worth of popular culture is lodged in the ole memory. Half the time, you can’t remember why or from where you know something.
Apparently “April Showers Bring May Flowers” is a saying from England that dates back to at least the 1550s. Imagine. That saying has been kicking around the English-speaking world for over 450 years.
The flowers that bloom in the spring,
tra-la.
OK, just Googled and that’s from The Mikado, which makes sense. I was in that show in high school (embarrassingly, in full yellowface). Gilbert & Sullivan are responsible for a great deal of brain clutter in older people who like musical theater.
Springtime for Hitler and GER-MA-NY
I wish that one from The Producers would leave me, but it just won’t. Must be lodged too deep in the grey matter.
Spring in general has more songs, poems, and sayings than all the other seasons combined. Don’t you think?
What pops into your head when you experience the miracle of spring where you are?
I was planning to watch the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night. I watched a lot of the pre-game, red carpet stuff on C-SPAN. The reporter kept asking people who they were wearing and it became so awkward that the anchor finally told him to stop. “This is Washington. Nobody has any idea who they’re wearing.”
I was wondering if maybe Trump was going to somehow manage to be charming in his speech. Highly unlikely, but still. And if he was going to be vile and awful to the press (as usual), I wanted to see him embarrass himself until I couldn’t stand it anymore and then go to bed.
After the chaos was unleashed, my first thought was that they’d obviously cancel the event. People in the room (including multiple pregnant women) had plunged to the floor and everyone was shaken. The fact that Trump wanted to carry on (“the show must go on”) seemed to be just another example of his complete disregard for others.
When he then held a press conference at 10:30pm and all the reporters showed up in their formalwear, I felt badly for them. If you had had a night like that, wouldn’t you want to just go home and go to bed? But no…they had to go back to the White House and listen to Dear Leader blather on about his ballroom and lie about all “the love” in the room. (Quiet, Piggy!)
Reporters are people too and I feel badly for them, especially the female ones. Trump treats them like shit. I felt especially bad for the WHCA President & Host Weijia Jiang who tearfully announced that Trump was insisting she reschedule the event within 30 days. (The Commander Commands and the People—especially the Women—Must Obey.)
And then, I just had to go online and see what people were saying. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the entire country thought the event was staged. That was all I saw in the comments.
I’ve never been prone to conspiracy theories. (Typically, I mentally dismiss people who raise them.) But…maybe.
Could the whole thing have been staged? And if it was, why?
Our government is flailing, people. I grew up in this country and I’ve never felt like this about it before. The on again off again trip to Pakistan is just the latest example. What the hell are they doing? Do they even know??
We have now entered the Twilight Zone. That’s how I feel. Cue the music.
Honestly, the TV show Twilight Zone was a bit before my time. It’s more of a Boomer thing. I never actually watched it. But culturally, it has been referred to so often that I have a sense of it.
My family of origin has been upsetting me a lot since January. (I believe it’s unintentional, but still—not fun.) Thankfully, my own family are all doing well, except that my husband has been significantly challenged by his recoveries from two total knee replacements.
On top of that, I am personally upset by the shitshow in Washington. The absolute incompetence of the people running our country right now is downright frightening, as are the real impacts on all of our lives. My son inherited my mother’s gas guzzler SUV a few years ago when she upgraded and recently paid $75 to fill his tank. These prices are not sustainable for young people just starting out. And he and his roommates all sat down together to watch one of Trump’s incoherent updates on the war with Iran because they are worried about getting drafted.
Long way of saying, I could use a laugh. Maybe you could too.
Here are three stand-up comedy specials I’ve watched recently and truly enjoyed. I laughed out loud many, many times.
Marcello Hernández: American Boy (Netflix)
Julio Torres: Color Theories (HBO Max)
Ramy Youssef: In Love (HBO Max)
They happen to all be young men, but all grew up outside mainstream, straight, white American male culture. Their perspectives are unique and in many cases, hysterical. 🤣
I attended the local NoKings3 protest yesterday and it was very cold. I helped lead the singing, but took no photos. I feel like there were not as many people as there were at NoKings2 in October and the energy was not as good. There were very few young people. Honestly, I’m feeling like it’s a very dark time for the country (and by extension, the world), even though my family and I are in no physical danger. I hope that others found yesterday energizing. From the innocent children currently being held in ICE detention centers, to the working people who can’t afford healthcare AND food, to the families of the marines currently being sent to the Middle East, there is so much anxiety, suffering, and uncertainty right now.
In other news…(lame transition!)
I feel like I would be a remiss GenXer, if I did not comment on a certain TV show that demanded watching.
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, created by Ryan Murphy, premiered in February on FX and Hulu became a streaming hit immediately. The nine-episode series stars two unknowns (Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly) as Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and JFK, Jr.
If she was alive today, Carolyn would be my age exactly: 60.
I’m not going to re-tell the whole story, but I’ll just say that Ryan Murphy had to make up a LOT of stuff to create this series. All of the private moments and conversations depicted in the series are obviously unknown. But he linked in enough of the public moments and iconic photos I remember that it all seemed rather believable to me.
In my twenties, nobody was more “hunkified” by People and other magazines than JFK, Jr. And living in Massachusetts (Kennedy country), we’d have the occasional sighting or close encounter. My father (a pilot) once saw him come into the hangar after landing his plane at a small airport. My friend Katherine was at a wedding with him once. (Her sister-in-law was a classmate of his at Brown.)
So naturally, the woman he chose to marry at long last was of tremendous interest! And she was soooo cool and pretty—NYC hipness just emanated from her. Her sleek, shift wedding dress was so iconic that it’s still influencing bridal fashions to this day.
THE iconic wedding photo that all of us GenX women studied with great interest.
My nephew and his bride in 2022. She said Carolyn Bessette’s wedding look was her inspiration.
With Love Story, I came to understand the horribly sad side of her loss of anonymity. She was too famous to do literally anything. One scene I found very moving is when Carolyn learns that Princess Diana has died following a high speed car crash caused by paparazzi. The parallels to her own life were obvious and she goes into a deep depression. JFK, Jr had been living under a microscope his whole life, so he remains relatively unaffected, making Carolyn feel even more alone.
Now, who knows if that actually happened or not, but if I was upset for days about Princess Diana, it seems very likely that Carolyn would have been too.
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (President Kennedy’s only other child) who tragically just lost her own adult daughter to cancer, is capably played by Grace Gummer. Unfortunately, I didn’t think the actress looked enough like Caroline. (Grace Gummer is the daughter of Meryl Streep, so I kept thinking about how much she looks like her mother and didn’t totally buy her as Caroline.)
Being from Massachusetts, I know a lot about the Kennedy clan and all their many tragedies. I even read the memoir “What Remains” by Carole Radziwill—the widow of JFK Jr’s best friend and cousin Anthony Radziwill. My husband, on the other hand, can’t keep all the Carols straight and doesn’t really care about the Kennedys.
So there you have it. I think Love Story is more of a woman thing. The mysterious, chic, tragic Carolyn Bessette made real, human.
Do I feel guilty about all the living people who are portrayed without their permission? A little. The actress Daryl Hannah (JFK Jr’s last girlfriend before Carolyn) is pissed over her rather unflattering portrayal in the series. And of course, I wonder how Caroline feels about the portrayal. Did she even watch it? We will probably never know because Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is a private, stoic, non-whiny person. A class act. The best kind of Kennedy.
Fortunately, Carolyn Bessette’s mother (who lost not one but TWO daughters in the tragic plane crash) is already dead, so this portrayal can’t hurt her further. But still, there’s one living Bessette sister still out there somewhere. You wonder how she feels.
Sadly, Carolyn Bessette gave herself over to the public domain the minute she married the American Prince, much like Princess Diana. Maybe our GenX “Princess Bride” fantasy should finally just be put to rest.
End of Week One of knee replacement #2 (my husband’s not mine) and I’m pleased to report I have achieved “angel of mercy” status. Oh the power of being in charge of the pain meds!
I did slip into “Annie Wilkes mode” once, when I told my husband I had unexpectedly closed the Activity Ring on my AppleWatch “waiting on his ass.” That was mean, admittedly, but at least I was putting my service in a positive light. Turns out that running up and down the stairs to get things, lugging bags of ice, filling and lugging the “polar cube,” and doing all the daily chores myself (loading/unloading dishwasher, cooking, trash and recycling, etc) burns up a decent amount of calories. I can’t be sedentary for too long.
He’s been trying his best to be a good patient, which I appreciate, but knee replacement is really pretty gruesome. The extreme pain, the swelling, the bruising, the leg full of staples…fortunately not too much bleeding from the incision (and the in-home physical therapist deals with bandage changes—phew)
I think things will start feeling better when the staples come out next week.
In the meantime, we are bingeing The Traitors with Alan Cumming on Peacock, which our daughter got us into. It’s pretty entertaining, for a reality competition show. Who doesn’t love a Scottish castle? And Alan’s outfits are over-the-top in the best way.
A lovely bouquet from our very thoughtful daughter and her husband
It’s lasted all week—and now the tulips are opening.
I might try to paint this one very beautiful rose.
Oh and with this knee, we’ve added cannabis to the pain regime. He’s finding that a strategically timed gummy can enhance and lengthen the effect of the prescribed pharmaceuticals.
Aaah, I finally turned my husband into a stoner like me. It only took 33 years.
In case you didn’t hear (because you were at work or something), those of us in the U.S. without jobs were faced with an Olympic dilemma this afternoon. We had to choose between watching the US v Canada women’s ice hockey Gold Medal game OR the women’s figure skating long program finals. They occurred simultaneously. So, if you wanted to watch them live, you had to choose.
Truth be told, it was not a hard decision for me. There is no world in which I would choose to watch a hockey game over figure skating—even a women’s hockey game. I mean, go hockey girls, but I’ll take spins and jumps and rhinestone-covered costumes over slashing, bashing, and hitting the boards any day of the week.
Even so, I was reluctant to get too invested in the women’s figure skating finals after the gut punch of the men’s. I was able to watch the first group of skaters live at my daughter’s house and was heartened that my favorite American skater, Amber Glenn, redeemed herself after a bad short program. (Still, it was highly unlikely she’d get a medal.) After Amber, I had to drive home and was on the road during several of the top skaters performances, including Alysa Liu. But by the time I got home and turned on the TV, Alysa was in first place with only two Japanese skaters left to go. The Japanese skaters weren’t perfect and Alysa held on to the top spot and won the GOLD! The free spirit from Oakland with face piercings and crazy Zebra-striped hair came out on top. SO COOL.
I later watched her performance on the primetime version of the Games and it was awesome. She skates with such wild joy and abandon, crazy hair flying. She’s really the opposite of a traditional ice princess. (It almost made up for the Quad God fiasco.)
Definitely look up Alysa’s Gold Medal skate, if you didn’t see it yet. And her backstory is just as good as her skating. Check out the piece 60 Minutes did on her here.
I have a confession to make. We didn’t have a lot going on yesterday. We met with our financial advisor in the morning. (He annoyed me by referring to Kamala Harris as Ka-MA-la—mispronouncing her name in that dismissive, racist, sexist way that Republican men do.) Once we got rid of his bald ass, I decided to settle in and watch TV for hours. I really wanted to enjoy my favorite Winter Olympics event—figure skating. Live.
The men’s finals long program was starting at 12:30 and I was psyched. My husband, who is still strapped to a chair with a polar ice machine on his knee a lot of the day, watched with me. We really got into it. Yes, there were a lot of falls, but there was a lot of gorgeous artistry and crazy athleticism too. I cried when Max Naumov, the skater from Massachusetts who lost both his parents in the DC plane crash last year, went out and skated poorly, but made it through. For him, just being there at all was Gold. It was so, so poignant.
The entire afternoon was leading up to the “Quad God” Ilia Malinin who was definitely, positively going to win the Gold Medal. There was no way he wouldn’t, especially since the other skaters had fallen so many times and he is a once-in-a-generation talent. Even my childhood idol Dorothy Hamill was there to watch.
It was approaching 5pm, so I went ahead and had a gummy, just to enhance the experience of watching this young man WOW us—LIVE. I even texted my son at work to let him know that Quad God was about to skate. Ilia looked great—so relaxed—as he skated out to win his gold.
Oh my GOD.
I have never seen such an epic sports FAIL on a bigger stage in my life. (Granted, I’m not much of a sports fan, but still.)
Just Google it.
The Olympics can break your heart, if you let them.
I’m sorry that Savannah Guthrie’s mother has gone missing, but GOOD GOD. The media coverage is ridiculous. They actually broke into primetime Olympics coverage of the men’s figure skating—with “Quad God” Ilia Malinin on deck—to tell us that absolutely nothing had changed.
How many Native American women go missing every single year and we never hear a peep from the media about them?
While Nancy Guthrie has been receiving 24/7 coverage, it sounds like things are still really bad in Minneapolis.
Copied and pasted from “The Other 98%” Facebook page:
Minnesota is still very much under assault by Trump’s private ICE army, even after the headline friendly withdrawal of 700 agents. You would not know it scrolling through your feed, where posts from Minneapolis residents about raids, beatings and shootings keep getting flagged or buried while the national press treats the state like a backdrop instead of a crime scene. And now there are early reports that ICE agents may have killed yet another person, adding to the sense that this crackdown is only getting deadlier, not winding down…On the ground this does not feel like “enforcement,” it feels like an occupation that has simply swapped helmets. The numbers have not really drawn down, they have just changed tactics, leaning harder on pre-dawn home raids, unmarked vans, so called “collateral” arrests of bystanders and courthouse stakeouts meant to snatch people when they show up to comply with the law.
Last weekend my church raised over $2,500 for a local non-profit social service organization that supports refugees and immigrants with a fantastic concert by Emma’s Revolution. We also raised $4,500 to buy a used car for a hardworking immigrant family from Afghanistan that several church members know.
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