One of our Toasties has a neurological condition and is training this sweet pup, Belle Starr, to be her service animal! She has already learned to carefully remove her owner’s shoes! Blow her kisses, please.
Friend of The Toast Morgan Jerkins made her New Yorker debut:
Growing up, I was close to all the women in my family, particularly my mother. But our closeness depended on an unspoken understanding that we each, from time to time, needed to be left alone to deal with our own selves. My room was the sanctuary where, away from the cacophony of life and the loud-talking relatives downstairs, I could learn how to define myself before the world did it for me. My mother and I both kept stacks of journals, but we neither meddled in each other’s diaries nor expressed the desire to do so. I wrote in them only when I was infatuated or heartbroken, and, for years, I thought my mother kept her journals to remember relatives’ telephone numbers, mailing addresses, and birthdays. It never occurred to me that she, too, was building and protecting a sense of self, until I asked her about it, just recently, after reading a short story. “It was a way to get my feelings out,” she told me, without feeling vulnerable to someone else. Diary writing for her was “like having a conversation,” she said, but with herself.
I am not smart enough to understand bridge, but this was legit fascinating:
Last summer, at an international event in Chicago, Boye Brogeland, a Norwegian player, became convinced that Fisher and Schwartz had made prescient bids and plays that they couldn’t have found with skillful sleuthing alone. “Bridge is such a logical game,” he told me. “When you do a lot of strange things in a very short period of time, and those strange things are successful—it just doesn’t happen.” He spent hours studying records of hands that he and his partner had played against Fisher and Schwartz, and concluded that they had been cheating. “I just didn’t know how they were doing it,” he said. (Fisher and Schwartz have denied all the allegations.)
You’ve probably seen the NY Times column on harassment in academia, which is great. If you have NOT seen the comments, save yourself, but they do completely back up the jist of the piece in every single way: men are awful.
In the wake of Nancy Reagan’s death, there’s obviously a lot of talk about the final days of Rock Hudson, which reminded me of this sweet and genuine tribute to him that Doris Day did:
< https://youtu.be/z21shqPRTP8 >
Anne Helen Petersen really nailed the issues with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot:
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a Tina Fey movie, which is a way of saying that it’s witty, self-effacing, and blind to its own faults. It suffers from the same problems that afflict most films with female protagonists and/or “foil” characters of different ethnicities: It barely passes the Bechdel test and turns a story about a woman struggling to make sense of an alienating job and country into a romantic comedy, suggesting, in a not-so-vaguely insulting way, that the only way to make people interested in a serious subject is if there’s a love story mapped on top of it. The film also casts white actors in the two major Afghan roles, turning one into an exoticized sage and the other into a blundering buffoon.
I’ve been becoming more and more turned off by Tina Fey these last few years, and feel guilty that I’d ignored some stuff (the way she talked about sex workers in 30 Rock, the “bitch is the new black” thing, etc.) because of how much I enjoy her work. 30 Rock is still, in my opinion, one of the greatest comedies in the history of television, but she DOES have issues, and I feel like sex workers and writers of color have been talking about it for ages and a lot of us have been slow to catch up. It doesn’t mean she isn’t wildly talented or that her work is bad, but it means….something.
Remembering Brenda, the mother of Pride:
Howard was arrested in Chicago in 1988, while demonstrating for national health care and the fair treatment of women, people of color, and those living with HIV and AIDS. She was arrested in Georgia in 1991 for protesting the firing of a lesbian from the state attorney general’s office due to Georgia’s anti-sodomy law. She was arrested multiple times for social justice causes, but she always kept fighting.
While she was undoubtedly an accomplished activist, some of the work closest to her heart was in the bisexual community. Howard cofounded the New York Area Bisexual Network in 1988, an organization that, to this day, serves as a central communication hub for bisexual and bi-friendly groups in New York City and the tri-state area. She successfully lobbied for the inclusion of bisexuality in the 1993 March on Washington, at a time when the movement was focused primarily on gay men and lesbians.
Oral history of The Golden Girls (yesssss):
Stan Zimmerman: Casting those four—it was just magic in bottle. I remember back then, we didn’t have computers to look up the ratings. Remember, we didn’t know if it was going to be a hit. We knew it was funny, but you never know. And we wouldn’t know until we got in Monday what the ratings were. And they would say, “We’re No. 15 this week.” And we’d all go crazy. And next week they’d say, “We’re No. 8.” And then it was, “We’re No. 1.” And then it was “We’re No. 1” again.
Nathan: The ladies were happy to be at the top of their craft for a second time. Bea, Betty and Rue McClanahan were all big stars before, but work had gotten sporadic. ButGolden Girls made them stars again, and they loved it—not because of their egos but because of the work. Sometimes the shows were three, four, five minutes too long just because the live audience’s laughs were so huge. Those people had such a great time, which means the ladies had such a great time.
My friend Alyssa came out to visit this weekend, and she and Sansa became…very close:
Siblings Jack Gore, 10, and Phoebe Gore, 7, founders of the Gore & Gore Detective Agency, already have three solved cases under their belt. They’re organized, quick and know what it takes to build a solid reputation solving mysteries.
With only a few weeks in business — and using nothing more than a whiteboard, notepad, handmade fliers and a customized badge their grandfather, a retired lieutenant of the NYPD, gave them — the brother-and-sister duo have helped their neighbors find everything from a lost dog tag to an earring to a wad of cash.
The red-headed pair have only one demand from their would-be clients: “We don’t want them to waste our time,” Jack said. “We tell them, ‘no dishonesty.’ “
The man behind the monstrous Doug Stamper speaks:
“I remember the first time we went” to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Kelly told me earlier in the day, when we met for lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill, an oyster bar, established in 1856, across the street from the White House. “Someone said it was like being a member of the Rolling Stones almost. People went nuts. Chris Matthews called across the room: ‘Michael Kelly! Aaaaaaaa!’ That famous noise he makes.”
Later, “I got to meet Obama,” Kelly says. “Which was amazing. We’re in the receiving line [at the dinner], and the president says”—and here Kelly does his Obama voice—“Don’t worry, Michelle, I heard he’s not nearly as diabolical in real life.” Kelly laughs with un-Stamper-ish delight. “He gets the show before everybody. Well, he did this year. I don’t know if you remember this — last season, he tweeted, ‘Tomorrow: @HouseofCards. No spoilers, please.’ So this year, they sent it to him early.”
ICYMI, the first installment of “A Month of Blind Women”:
People often tell me that I’m tall, as if I might be in some doubt about the fact. But people never tell me that I’m blind. Blindness is assumed to be such an unmitigated tragedy that presumably I might burst into tears if reminded of it. Rather they tell me, usually in somewhat hushed and reverent tones, about cures. They’ve read something somewhere or seen something on TV about some doctor who has invented a cure for blindness. The public imagination translates a news item about some promising preliminary finding in lab rats into an announcement of a readily available cure for blindness of every kind.
oh okay and then we gave Sansa a bath:
