Pollentime
I am not a theater critic, but I do occasionally write about it and thus I get to see a lot of theater, and this week was — thanks to general calendars colliding and some shows getting delayed by a week due to cast & crew covid cases — a very busy week for those of us who are lucky enough to see stuff in previews. (And lucky we are; sauntering over to the Golden to meet Tom for Hangmen this week, I passed all those lines for the more touristy shows, like Wicked and Chicago and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and, at this point, Hamilton, and thought, this is probably the most privileged thing I get to do regularly.)
Anyhow, my point is, my brain is wrung out with late nights and early mornings and end-of-semester tasks and planning for the class that Tom and I are teaching in Paris in June. Plus I can feel allergies coming on, as they always do, at this heavily busy point in the year.
So I almost skipped sending this today, but I had a few fun things I wanted to share. I hope you have a wonderful week, and that a not-too-stuffy spring is headed your way.
First things first
Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women got a really lovely and glowing review in Publishers Weekly this week! (You can pre-order the book if you like.)
Been writing
Good news for those who miss my old (but perhaps some day resurrected) Attention to Onions newsletter: I wrote about the glories of garlic this week for Vox!
This week was the 23rd anniversary of the shootings at Columbine. I have been noticing that movies about school shootings (most notably The Fallout and Mass) have really been changing their focus since the first bunch of them came out nearly 20 years ago. I wrote about that, and what they teach us.
I interviewed Ali Klayman, the director of the new Netflix doc White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, about our mutual fear of that store when we were teens and how the brand tried to tell a generation what it was.
And I adapted and expanded an old post on this here newsletter to write about something I took for granted, until I couldn’t: Conversations with strangers. (Also, Pawel Lozinski’s wonderful Balcony Movie.)
Been watching and reading
Mostly theater, but also the upcoming Paramount+ show The Offer, a ten-episode scripted show about the making of The Godfather. It’s not great, exactly, but it’s better than that premise suggests, in large part due to a virtuosic performance by Matthew Goode as Paramount production head Robert Evans. More to come this week.
And I read Didion’s Blue Nights this week, which was even more devastating than I remembered.
Odds and Ends
Martin Scorsese’s wonderful Film Foundation, which focuses in part on preserving and restoring movies that studios otherwise neglect and will be lost to history, is launching a free online screening room! Starting on May 9 with 24 hours of the 1945 Powell & Pressburger I Know Where I’m Going. More here.
I have found myself talking about this article, about how martinis are the drink of the summer this year in New York, with several different friends over the past few days. We all feel a little … uncomfortably … seen …
Enjoyed this? If you’re feeling it, I won’t object if you buy me a cup of coffee. Writers need fuel.