Preparation Is Great

if I hadn't opened and saved a bunch of tabs yesterday, today's newsletter would just be crying

But I DID set aside a bunch of great content, happily, and now I can share it with you before I have to go off-line and watch a bunch of bad slasher films to cheer myself up. Could you do me a little favor, like I do my affirmations for you, and say some nice things to Grandma Peggy in the comments? She reads every newsletter, and she is the salt of this earth and has a real challenging life and is still just a beacon of love and generosity and is at the core of my heart and I bet she would love some kind words in this, the week she lost her most important singer/songwriter and can’t even go see my mom to share their grief, because of the GLOBAL PANDEMIC. What the fuck is this shit???

I love you, Grandma (to my kids, aunt and godmother to me) Peggy. Light of my life. A tough broad. A sweet soul. A heart like an ocean. Her weed is usually too strong for me, but that’s not really a criticism.

---

Oh, thank God, a Featured Pet. This Featured Pet is from my dear friend Nichole Perkins, a perfect human being who is now a brand-new cat adopter. Y’all, let’s meet Calliope JamieStarr Feline, but you can call her Calliope:

Nichole, tell us about Calliope:

“Calliope is my best ever birthday present to myself. Her first name is Calliope because I hope she can be a muse for my creative process somehow, and her middle name is an alias Prince used for various album credits.”

“Calliope is about a year old. She’s still getting acclimated to her new home, but she’s already super affectionate and sweet and looks at me incredulously if I eat without offering her a snack as well.”

“I live alone and have been wanting to adopt a cat for a while, but I had a work-travel streak and didn’t want to bring home some furry sweetness and have to leave soon after. Self-isolation finally gave me the steam to cat-proof my home and submit an adoption request. I’m so glad Calliope is here with me to make my life a little better. She’s already in love with my Michael B. Jordan cutout, so it’s clearly a match made in Heaven.”

Nichole, we can never thank you enough for this. Calliope is our new best friend. I’m so glad you found each other at the best and right time. I cannot wait to go to NYC again so I can smoosh her.

---

This was created in a lab to delight and please me:

Anne of Green Gables is a gay icon.

You may not know that about the star of the hallowed Lucy Maud Montgomery novels, who was famous for her charming misadventures in small-town Canada. Anne went on to be depicted in a number of movie and television adaptations that are treasured by young people of all stripes. Adopted by a gruff, aging brother-and-sister pair on Prince Edward Island, Canada, the poor young girl was always out of place in the quiet town of Avonlea. She was too flamboyant, too curious, her flaming red hair and personal theatrics always getting her in trouble.

To me, a shy, freckled preteen boy in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, she was my queer hero before I knew I was queer: a person who wanted life to be bigger and more romantic than it could ever be in a little town in the woods. Anne couldn’t hide who she was and didn’t want to. She was smart, inquisitive, and full of emotions, and she expected everyone else to be, too. From her, gay kids learned it wasn’t just OK to be different—it was something you could be proud of.

Plus, she had a love-interest-slash-worst-enemy in the figure of the dreamy, curly-haired Gilbert Blythe. Having a painful crush on a hot guy you hate is just about the gayest thing I can think of.

---

An Absolute Unit:

---

In other extremely beautiful gay icon writing, I adored this:

It’s one of my favorite origin stories: In the 1950s a young Dolly Parton comes down from the mountain at Locust Ridge with her family—to get groceries or maybe to attend church in the small community of Sevierville, Tennessee—and she sees, on the street or in the store, what she later describes as the town whore. The woman’s hair is big and her clothes are tight and she wears what must have been an uncommon amount of makeup for the conservative, poor people who lived in this modest mountain town. Dolly’s immediate, innocent impression of this lurid presentation of femininity: she has just encountered the most beautiful creature on earth. Dolly’s mother says to her, “That woman ain’t nothing but trash.” And young Dolly thinks to herself, “That’s what I want to be when I grow up. Trash.”

A decade later this instance—like a fingerprint pressed into wet concrete, even with thousands of other days on top of it—will still be visible, despite Dolly having seen, by this point, the many other obvious ways for a woman to be in the world. This was the interaction that left the deepest mark, the one that she felt most alive in, the one that mattered more than all the others. She fashioned an entire identity around it, and made it her own.

---

Wow, important Karen MEETS Endgame content:

---

Danny with the truth:

Q. My roommate won’t stop socializing: I’m having issues with my roommate “Anya,” who in turn is having a hard time with social distancing. Last weekend, she spent time with two different groups of friends and a couple of people individually. One of these occasions was after our third roommate, “Priya,” told us she had a fever, although thankfully it didn’t turn out to be COVID-19. I texted Anya after that, telling her that she can’t keep going out with people, and she got defensive at first but I thought the message sunk in. Then yesterday she went for a walk with a friend. I know it’s OK if you’re 6 feet apart, and I know that you can still go on walks under my state’s stay-at-home order. But she didn’t tell Priya or me that she and her friend were going out—I found out from a picture her friend put on Instagram. It feels like she didn’t tell me because she knew I wouldn’t like it, and I’m really frustrated with her. Short of liking a lot of tweets about not associating with people outside your house so that she sees them on her feed, how can I bring this up with her again? We’ve had a lot of issues and I don’t particularly like her anymore, but our relationship has been OK lately and I’d like to keep the peace between us as much as possible.

A: I agree that “liking a lot of tweets indirectly aimed at one’s roommate’s behavior” is not an effective strategy for getting what you want. 

---

John Robert Allman @Johnny_Allman

Me when someone asks what day it is

---

oh I am for sure streaming one-woman Fleabag on Friday

---

This piece on the creation of Dodger Stadium and the community it uprooted is really special:

Finally the word came in the summer of 1950, when Beto was 19. Ironically, it came via the postal service. One day the residents opened their mailboxes to find letters from the Housing Authority informing them that soon their homes would be purchased by the government and then demolished to make way for a brand new public housing project. None of the residents—not even those who resisted selling their land—could have known yet what a dramatic story was about to unfold. They could not have known that the housing project, Elysian Park Heights, would never exist beyond the blueprints and renderings drawn up by architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. The Elias family certainly had no idea.

"They came knocking on the door and offering ridiculous prices. My dad sold the first offer. Which was 9,650 dollars. And my dad signed the papers without talking to me or my mom or to Willie. I got mad at my dad. So he got mad at me for getting mad at him. So I kept quiet."

---

I am not too cool to enjoy this (Lin is a sweetheart):

---

oh my sainted mother, don’t vape on Zoom calls:

1. Is it weird to vape on a Zoom call?

I am one of the many students whose classes have all been moved online for the remainder of the semester, but I am in grad school, so many of my colleagues (including me) worked for a time before coming back to school. One of my colleagues regularly vapes on camera during our Zoom classes! I feel like this is really weird and distracting and am hoping for your take.

---

Matías @maticaps

Celebrities when people are d*ing all over the world

---

Music:

“Move On”:

Because I am not, personally, ready to move on, here are a few perfect John Prine songs (he’s smoking a cigarette nine miles long right now):

All-timer:

You already know this is my favourite song:

“Sam Stone” meant a lot to a lot of people:

He cared about so many different kinds of people, and he made them real:

This is a radical goddamn song:

I think about this advice all the time:

This one he wrote with his dear friend, the late Steve Goodman, truly has stood the test of time:

Here’s Steve’s solo take:

He was so generous to every performer who sang his songs. I think he genuinely just wanted to share stories with the world. I hope a whole new generation finds him due to the tributes. He would love that.

This is something I believe, the words of this song, and it gets me through, my belief that the circle will be, one day, one way, unbroken:

---

Yesterday was hard. I hope today will be better. I love you very much. You have a shimmering soul, anyone can see that. In the words of the two geniuses who wrote “Rocky Top”, you are wild as a mink but sweet as soda pop, and I still dream about that. I have less to offer you today emotionally than I would like, but what I have is yours.

I love you very much,

nicky