Sansa is wandering around our post-blizzard backyard like, I know I had a pee spot but now I can’t find it.
Nichole Perkins’ conversation with her mother about their mutual depression and anxiety issues was incredible:
My mother punctuated my childhood with phrases about her nerves: “Don’t start getting on my nerves,” when we made too much noise; “Oooh, my nerves are bad,” any time she had an upset stomach. My older sister, younger brother, and I assumed this was just a part of the vocabulary of black motherhood. Mama is old-school — a working-class woman who believes nothing should stop you from providing for your family — so, to her, depression was a luxury. When I started having depressive episodes of my own, I didn’t feel like I could talk to her about them in detail. She didn’t know the thoughts that left me stuck in bed or zoned out in front of the television. All she knew was something was wrong.
By the time my mother was 60, her nervous stomach was causing significant, unexplained weight loss and bouts of vomiting. She turned to her doctor for help, and began taking medication for anxiety and depression. Now a year later, I thought it was time to sit down and finally talk about this open secret between us.
Josh Groban is going to be in Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 on Broadway! I saw it when Phillipa Soo was still Natasha down in the meatpacking district and they served you booze and pierogi, and it was so much fun, and Sonya Alone is a really beautiful song. A college friend produced it at Ars Nova, and I had dragged my feet a little about going bc of the constant ads in the back of NYC cabs, assuming it would be too cornball, but it really was a great time, and I hope it translates well to Broadway.
INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE, HOLY SHIT
son, you may think you are a dark-arts wizard, but there is only ONE true dark-arts wizard, and it ain’t some broseph trying to foist Republicans onto America:
Or look at the network being built by Elliott Management founder Paul Singer. In 2014, Singer created the American Opportunity Alliance, a group of roughly 40 Republican financiers who gather regularly for secret meetings with candidates. This fall, Singer threw his weight behind Marco Rubio and urged his members to do the same. In the general election, Singer will be a player with America Rising, the opposition-research firm headed by Romney’s dark-arts wizard Matt Rhoades. Instead of funding TV ads, Rhoades’s group offers Singer more predictable returns: It is narrowly focused on digging up dirt on Democrats, for example by sending video trackers to events in order to build a library of unflattering material.
Sam Taylor-Johnson, who directed Fifty Shades of Grey, is in talks to direct Apex Entertainment’s feature Chappaquiddick.
Mark Ciardi is producing the project, with its script just named to the 2015 Blacklist. Campbell McInnes of Apex Entertainment and Chris Cowles of DMG Entertainment are also producing.
“I’ve done a lot of true life stories, many sports stories, but this one had a deep impact on this country,” said Ciardi. “Everyone has an idea of what happened on Chappaquiddick and this strings together the events in a compelling and emotional way. You’ll see what he had to go through.”
he killed that poor young woman and didn’t report it to the cops, they called HIM after he went back to his hotel room to sleep it off IF YOU THINK HE WAS SOBER I WOULD LIKE TO SELL YOU A BRIDGE THAT TED KENNEDY DIDN’T DRIVE OFF DRUNK AS A SKUNK that’s what he WENT THROUGH oh oh he didn’t get to be president wahhh wahh wahhh he got to die a billion years later, rich and a senior senator and with people jizzing all over him like they did his WHOLE MEDIOCRE NEPOTISTIC LIFE, like EDUCATE YOURSELF, PEOPLE, his OWN STATEMENTS ARE RIDICULOUS
I MEAN, SO MUCH FOR THE FUCKING KENNEDY CURSE, he got his DRIVER’S LICENSE suspended for six months:
(nicole trails off into gagging noises AND JOE SENIOR WAS A LITERAL MONSTER WHO LOBOTOMIZED HIS OWN DAUGHTER LEST SHE EMBARRASS THE FAMILY)
Cool interview with Fargo‘s Zahn McClarnon on his character and what it’s like to be a Native American actor:
Hanzee’s Native American heritage has become a large part of who he is and what he stands for, whereas earlier in the season, his background was more of a mystery. Did you create your own story for this shift in his character?
I did. Like you said, there wasn’t a lot written on the page about him, other than he was adopted at nine years old by the Gerhardt family, which was actually going on a lot in the ’60s and ’70s — a lot of kids being adopted out of their families into other families and relocated into other environments. So I know he went through that. And then being in the war, you know, that would have a big impression on anybody. He was this tunnel rat in Vietnam, sending the Indian down into the tunnels. I also drew from my own experience growing up in the ’70s as a Native American, being on the reservation and also living on the border of a reservation, and experiences I had with racism, on both sides. Being a mixed Native American, because my father was an Irishman, I saw both sides of it.So that racism is vivid in your own memory?
It’s very vivid. Not being served in restaurants in the early ’70s. I remember it vividly. They didn’t come up and say, “We’re not going to serve you,” they just left us sitting at the table and then didn’t ask for our order for 45 minutes.
My emails lit up like a Christmas tree because the LA Times asked (“I’m just asking questions!” – Cartman voice) if Serena Williams or American Phoenix was the REAL SPORTSPERSON OF THE YEAR:
Now, y’all know I love horses! And I would stump happily for SECRETARIAT IS A BETTER ATHLETE THAN LANCE ARMSTRONG, sure, but I MEAN, comparing a BLACK WOMAN to a FUCKIN’ HORSE like that isn’t FUCKED UP?
they can do this, yes, it’s fine:
I have a question regarding privacy at work. Recently, while I was out of the office, my boss switched out a two-drawer lateral filing cabinet that I was using. The documents in it were work-related. He asked another coworker to witness him exchange this out. He replaced it because he wanted all the cabinets in the office to be black, and mine was tan. I did not find out about this until the next day when I returned to work. Was this a violation of my privacy at work? He didn’t discuss this with me at all. The worst part was that the cabinet he switched it for was a broken one, although he did put in a request to fix it.
Artistic process, yo (music seems kind of hard):
“The ending [time signature] was in nine. That came about because we didn’t have an official ending. It was probably going to end up that we just fade it out which can be boring. Sometimes it’s exactly the right thing but often it feels like you’re giving up. And so I think we were working with John McEntire [of Tortoise] and he said, ‘So how’s it going to end?’ And we ended up trying a fade out where we go to a different time signature or different number of measures. We tried it at six, then seven. Eight is normal. And then we tried it at nine and he liked the nine.”
This Vows column is absurdly sweet:
The comeback of Iran Barkley began five years ago at a nightclub in the South Bronx, a short jog from the gang-infested neighborhood where he first learned to use his fists. It was a skill that would eventually help him earn three world boxing titles and what he estimated to be more than $5 million.
Seated across the bar that February evening in 2010 was Pamela Graham, a widow from Brooklyn with five children whose interests did not include sports.
“A friend of mine said, ‘Hey, the champ is staring at you,’” Ms. Graham, 47, said of the incident. “I was like, ‘The champ? The champ of what? Who’s the champ?’”
She looked up and made brief eye contact with Mr. Barkley.
“On Asian Women, Feminism, and My Grandmother”:
Whenever someone mentions the stereotype of the acquiescent, Asian woman, I think to myself that they should have met my grandmother. My grandmother was no stereotype. She was outgoing, generous, creative, ambitious, and open-minded. She learned to travel through all of New York and Northern New Jersey without ever learning to drive. She constantly made new friends with strangers on the street (to my great embarrassment when I was a kid). At seventy, she decided to go to a community wine tasting event and got drunk with (mostly white) people two to three decades younger than her — she giggled when she told me about it the next day, about how she couldn’t stop her drunken laughter. When, as a teenager, my brother visited her with bleached-red hair, my grandmother stared at it before breaking into a grin. “I like it,” she said. “I don’t understand it, but I like it.”
Friend of The Toast John Leavitt sent me this disgusting and fascinating Ask MeFi post about infections pre-Germ Theory:
A rule of thumb about illnesses such as infections is that eighty percent of them get better on their own. The remaining twenty percent don’t always kill; they often become chronic. There were a lot of our ancestors who picked up something like a UTI when they were fifteen and had it right up until they died in their fifties, the itching, the burning, the pain, the infertility, the difficulty peeing… Never got better but it never killed them either.
It’s a lot more dramatic to talk about how somebody got this wee little puncture wound… and they were dead in three days! Than it is to talk about how somebody got this wee little puncture wound and it turned into a nasty disfiguring scar and six months later they lost their sight in one eye because the infection got into the wound and it was four years before the wound was finally scar tissue and not oozing any more.
Yesterday was my sixth wedding anniversary. It was also Alexander and Eliza Hamilton’s wedding anniversary. This is so meaningful to me, minus the cheating.
