Wow hi hi I missed you OMG hi!!
New York was great, mostly because it might just be great, but it was so great to be IN NEW YORK CITY! For the first time! For a week! With my husband who for some reason treats me like someone who has lived a life that precipitates extravagant birthday trips like going to New York City for a week! It has sort of sent me into a spiral of impostor syndrome but it’s fine because MY THERAPIST IS BACK FROM HER EUROPEAN VACATION TYVM and we are reunited today!!
Speaking of needing therapy
Here’s a text I sent Courtney on Sunday morning (spoilers for uhh season 5 of Mad Men??):
For me all of the richness is in the THEMES bc mad men loves a theme. And thematically allll of season 5 is about people seemingly having everything and yet not being fulfilled. Think of that jaguar campaign!!!, think of that idiot being married to fucking JOAN and choosing to go away to war, think of Roger having sex with Jane in her new apartment and what she said to him after, think of Wayne (sic) trying to kill himself in his beautiful new car, think of Pete having the affair and telling Gilmore girl that it was a temporary solution to a permanent problem. I could connect so much more to this too but I’m limiting myself. But IMO that shot of Don walking away from Megan at the commercial shoot is EVEEEERYTHING. She’s in the light glowing and beautiful made up and he walks into the darkness. He gives her that chance and IMO that shot alone tells US that her success will mean that she won’t be his anymore, and he knows that (from, again IMO, the shots of him watching her reel and realizing she’s gonna actually be good), aka she isn’t “a beautiful thing he can truly own” a la Jaguar. And then when he goes to the bar the woman there doesn’t ask if he’s married, she says ARE YOU ALONE which... he always is, which is the “permanent problem” for Don IMO.
I’M FINE!!!
Speaking of Megan Draper (URGENT)!!!
This behind-the-scenes story of the I C O N I C “Zou Bisou Bisou” scene is the absolute tits I LOVE JESSICA PARE:
PARE: I’ll be perfectly honest with you, the next day [following the premiere] when I was walking down the street, I thought I was going to be f—king famous. [Laughs] I popped in the grocery store and was like, “Hey guys, ‘Zou Bisou,’ anybody? No? Really? No one? Okay.” But after a few weeks, you could tell that people were catching up [with their DVRs], and then I went to New York, and that was a whole different story. I definitely was getting recognized. Occasionally, I’ll get into an elevator and people will be quiet — like they’ll be talking, and then I’ll get in and everyone shuts up. And I have this little fantasy that maybe I’ll indulge one day where I’ll let the moment of silence sit for a second, and then just be like, “Zou bisou bisou…”
AND omg:
PARE: I don’t know if I’ll get in trouble for telling you this, but, my mom loves it so much that she’s actually performed it at parties. It’s so sweet. She really loves it, and I did tell her that I really took a lot of inspiration from her, so I think that kind of inspired her to try it out.
Extremely cool q: what are we doing for photo storage/organization right now
I have NO SOLUTION to this and it’s taking over my subconscious mind right next to unrealistic home invasion fears. I have thousands of photos (digital OBVIOUSLY) organized by year in Dropbox but with no other metadata attached and like… I need a tagging system but Flickr is BAD NOW. Does everyone else just live like this too? Please share if you have a good system.
One-syllable words about our wedding eight years ago
(hyphenated adjectives are allowed, ok)
June. Sun and green and blue sky post-rain, just a small bit of rain mid-day, so they said it would bring good luck. We said our vows on a stage my Dad made with his two hands. It was warm and we drank beer. We filled glass mugs with beer and friends sang to us from the same stage, read verse as their hands shook. Then looked up at us and smiled. It was a good day in June. I wore orange-red shoes. My mom wore her shades and sobbed. Not a rich thing in sight, no first dance, no cut cakes. The day passed to night, where the now-small crowd passed hooch and a joint as we danced and boys sang and swayed with their arms up. Joy. We did not know we'd done the right thing, but we had. We crawled in the tent to find our bed wet and we slept there still.
Hmm fine maybe traumatic things ARE traumatic
The generous benefactors who pay for this newsletter got an email on July 4 with an essay I wrote about being in the Irish play The Night Alive just a couple months after Brandon died and the ways it helped me limp along. The director, Kay (in white here) asked me to be in the play as we sat in my parents’ garage after his funeral.
This is a picture of one of our sessions with the dialect coach:
But the stuff of The Night Alive was the familiar stuff of life: I woke up from a nightmare in my underwear. We ate salty french fries onstage from a paper bag, shuttled in every night from a nearby bar, still warm. I sat cross-legged on a low cot piled with blankets in Tommy’s flat, a cozy set insulated with stacks of faded paperbacks and crinkled take-out bags, teacups towering in open cupboards. I brushed my teeth into a sink rigged with a faucet that spat water from a little hidden tank. We talked in Dublin dialects; a coach sat with us at rehearsals, asking us to repeat words like “countryside” and “longer,” our syllables a playground of slides and swings. In one scene, we sloshed a rum bottle full of dark tea into coffee mugs and got up and danced and sang with abandon, in our hopping-bunny dialects, to a Marvin Gaye tune piped through a prop radio. No choreography, moving however we damn well pleased, joyful and unsophisticated.
I’ve always liked the picture a) because it was taken in a place I have ultimate fondness for and also b) because I think my hair and clothes and tattoos look cool.
I love you,
Lindsey