#High Bid | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lopez-richter-fangirl · 1 month ago

Text

Possessed by the spirit of Lauren in terms of how many times I had Nando’s this weekend but not in terms of how early I will get to the airport so here’s a long VHS post while I wait for my flight! (with spoilers if you don’t want to know any differences for this year’s show)

I know I already talked about this but where else do I start but with their parents 😭 I know his parents do travel for shows (waited right behind them in line for Spies 54 Below) but when they weren’t at TCBoB I figured it was so unlikely they’d be at VHS, and I honestly hadn’t even considered her parents even though it’s not as far for them to travel. But I look up and there they all are talking in the lobby (his dad also went and talked to her parents the entire intermission the first night and then of course they were all talking when they were sitting together and we won’t examine how deep my parasocial relationship goes that that makes me so soft). Also, their moms were just chatting away to each other when they came into the bathroom while I was drying my hands and I’m so grateful I was done so I could get the fuck out of there before I could say something embarrassing like “I love your kids”).

As much as it was a huge distraction (for the second time!! I was already watching his parents more than I should have been at VHS 21) it was so fucking cute that they were there and made for some cute moments. Lauren smiled at his parents when they were facing them at the top of the show. Her dad was smiling so much when she was onstage. I had to watch Joey’s mom cry at Priceless for a second time but that was made up for by the look she gave his dad when Lauren hit her high note (truly as proud as if she’s their own kid!!! 😭😭) (Lauren’s dad may also have cried). Those first two shows were extra surreal because of that. And I have to say, you see the way Joey’s parents are and it truly explains so much about who Joey is as a person and in his relationship (marriage 🥺).

But my god were the shows themselves so joyous. I will never hear any criticism of them doing this show every year because it couldn’t be more obvious how much they all love it. And I didn’t think it could be any better than last year’s but it was! (and not just because I only had to see Joey’s ring in the second act where it makes sense instead of the entire fucking show).

The new VHSmas choreo is so cute and fun and I love any extra Bred Gruelle and Spektr moment we can get. They all committed harder than ever to Whaddya Do I LOVED it. Cold cold streets is even cuntier than last year which shouldn’t have been possible but here we are. It really does give Lauren and Joey an excuse to be touchy in Act 1 as well as Act 2. There’s a moment they hold a pose and they definitely didn’t have a set one because Lauren was laughing the first night (she had her hand draped up on Joey’s head and he was holding her stomach and Brian was 100% third wheeling). They were slightly tamer other shows but she was holding his face and was holding her arm (and Brian was 100% third wheeling) and he did briefly put his hand on her stomach again in one of them).

This year made me realise how much the show goes to pieces during Priceless but in the best way possible. There was not one single show where Lauren wasn’t giggling during that song, usually because of Jamie followed by Brian followed by Joey even though they’re all doing the same thing they do every time. Joey said “shpeech” every damn show, Lauren was staring Jamie down when she broke, the disgust Emily has for her son never gets old and Brian continues to commit harder to the bit. “Call 911” was funnier than it had any right to be (and I don’t think they knew he was going to say it the first night) and it was sad that the applause started so early he couldn’t say it one show even though of course I love Priceless getting the appreciation it deserves. If the spin is cut from the digital ticket again (it will be) I’ll be devastated. They’re so so touchy during this song, of course (but the hand on the ass really was too much Ms Lopez even if it was for half a second). And it’s so clear to see what a special song it still is for Joey and Lauren to sing together. Best part of the show couldn’t love it more and I’m definitely feeling so normal about the possibility of never hearing it live again.

But them as the Cratchits in general is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given and as phenomenal actors as they are it is really sweet and special to watch them doing something that’s so natural to them they’re not even acting at points. When they walk together during Christmas Day almost every show they would look at each other and the pure genuine love in that look was honestly fucked up. He’d also be stroking her arm back when they were standing together in that song but then in the final show they were holding hands and it made me want to cry! (like I wasn’t already crying at the show).

It simply would not be a SK show without some goofs. Lauren’s giggles were not limited to Priceless, there was the Grandmaland goof that was fucking adorable, as was the look between her and Joey after it happened. She was also laughing during one of the Final Ghosts like babe your son is dead pull it together. There was the show AJ almost fell off the block which happened to be right after I said “this has been really solid for a filmed show”. There was also a show where Ali’s mic wasn’t working for Cold Cold Streets but they were SO on it getting it switched out for Buy a Match that it was almost seamless which really does show how much, while we love the goofs and the charm that comes from knowing these are friends doing what they love together, they are PROS and they’ve been doing this for a long time and are very good at what they do.

I’m also so grateful we saw it as many times as they did because truly not a bad seat in the house. Front row for closing night was insane but sitting on the sides meant I saw a lottt going on backstage. Multiple times Joey putting his hand on Lauren’s back. Her touching his back passing him offstage. Him making her laugh and hyping her up before her entrance in Something Perfect. There was also the time I thought he might have been handing her her mask (which he did have) as they went offstage until I realised, no, they’re just…holding…hands. :) (as Bred and Gruelle mind you)

There’s so much more I could say about how special this show is and how incredible everyone is in it but the fact that I’ve seen it as many times as I have (and all under pretty insane circumstances) speaks for itself. I laughed, I cried, I had the best time, and I really hope they do it every year forever.

#also shoutout to lauren’s increasing concern at how high the bids for the chicken went #may she never change

11 notes · View notes

coochiequeens · 11 months ago

Text

“So women with access to emergency care are the ones that live,” she said. “Women that don’t, die.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/21/gaza-childbirth/

JERUSALEM — Walaa didn’t expect the birth of her fourth child to spark abject fear. But by the time her contractions started, the whole family was frantic.

There were no ambulances to be seen in the streets of Gaza’s Rafah City, she said, now so crammed with displaced families that there was barely any food left available for the 27-year-old.

When her uncle Wissam, a doctor, reached the tent where she had lived for weeks in the cold, he said, he could see they had run out of time. “I’m having the baby now,” she kept telling him. It was dark, and she was scared.

His cellphone flashlight was all they had to see by.

The humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s three-month military campaign against Hamas in Gaza counts some 52,000 pregnant women among its greatest victims. As airstrikes push 1.9 million people into an ever-smaller corner of the besieged enclave, disease is spreading, famine is looming and levels of anemia are so high that the risk of postpartum hemorrhage has soared and breastfeeding is often impossible. Forty percent of pregnancies are high-risk, CARE international estimates.

Prenatal care is almost nonexistent — what remains of Gaza’s hospital network is on its knees, at 250 percent capacity and consumed with treating mass casualties from Israeli bombing. Far more women are giving birth outside of medical facilities — in displacement camps, even in the street — than inside them.

Damage to facilities and communications blackouts — the strip lost cellphone service for a week this month — have left Gaza’s health ministry unable to compilereliable data for infant or maternal mortality during the conflict. But doctors and aid groups say miscarriage and stillbirths have spiked.

“What we know about pregnancy-related complications is that it’s hard to prevent them in any setting, but the way that we save a woman and newborn’s life is we treat the complication quickly,” said Rondi Anderson, a midwifery specialist for the Project HOPE aid group.

“So women with access to emergency care are the ones that live,” she said. “Women that don’t, die.”

The only place that Wissam could find to deliver his terrified niece’s baby was a spot of cold earth between the tents. Aid workers hung bedsheets to give the woman a modicum of privacy. No one had been able to contact Walaa’s husband, and her mother was so scared that at times she had to look away. They cut the boy’s umbilical cord with an unsterilized scalpel and they filled tin cans with hot water to keep him warm. He weighed 7 pounds and Walaa named him Ramzy.

The family spoke on the condition that only their first names be used because they feared for their safety in the event that Israeli troops entered the town.

Baby Ramzy is 5 days old. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

They fled their home in northern Gaza so abruptly that no one thought to grab clothes for the baby. This week, Ramzy was swaddled in a onesie outgrown by another child in the camp. He wailed as Walaa, still in pain from tearing during the birth, gingerly pulled herself upright.

The 16-year blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt after Hamas won control of Gaza had already made pregnancy and childbirth more difficult for expecting mothers. Before the current conflict, hospitals often lacked adequate equipment and training for neonatal staff, according to Medical Aid for Palestinians, and more than half of pregnant women were anemic.

Hamas fighters streamed out of the enclave on Oct. 7 to kill around 1,200 people in Israel and take another 240 hostage. Israel responded with a bombing campaign and ground war to eradicate Hamas, killing almost 25,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, to date.

The South African legal team that accused Israel before the International Court of Justice this month of committing genocide during the conflict argued that the obstruction of lifesaving treatment since Oct. 7 amounts to preventing births.

A lawyer for Israel called allegations that it is obstructing the delivery of food, water, fuel and other supplies critical for Gaza “tendentious and partial,” and said it was working “around-the-clock” to help scale up the volume of aid making it into the enclave.

Hanaa al-Shawa, 23, gave birth to her first child, Ayla, during the coronavirus pandemic, and the little girl, she said, brought her family a “glimmer of hope.” Shawa and her husband Mustafa, 25, were ecstatic when they learned in July that another child was on the way. The war began in October, and the future they dreamed of fell apart. “I had felt overwhelming joy,” Shawa recalled. “I did not realize that this joy would turn into great suffering.”

Nearly 20,000 babies were born in Gaza during the first 105 days of the war, UNICEF reported Friday. Delays in the delivery of lifesaving supplies, the U.N. children’s agency said, have left some hospitals performing Caesarean sections without anesthetic. Spokeswoman Tess Ingram said she met a nurse at Gaza’s Emirati maternity hospital who had helped with postmortem caesarians on six dead women.

“Seeing newborn babies suffer while some mothers bleed to death should keep us all awake at night,” Ingram told reporters Friday. “In the time it has taken to present this to you, another baby was likely born, but into what?”

“Becoming a mother should be a time of celebration,” she said. “But in Gaza it’s another child delivered into hell.”

For the five pregnant women interviewed by Washington Post reporters, fear that mother or baby might not survive suffused their waking thoughts — and made appearances in nightmares, too.

Shawa and Mustafa left their home in Gaza City’s Yarmouk Street in the second week of October. The Israel Defense Forces had ordered 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to move south for what it described as their own safety.

“I was afraid that I would miscarry because of the power of the rockets,” she said.

Displaced Palestinian families from the northern and central Gaza Strip evacuate toward southern Gaza on Oct. 13. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

Many pregnant women made the 20-mile journey from north to south on foot, their legs swollen and joints heavy as they carried their luggage, three women who made the journey told The Post.

When Ayla was born, her family had a room full of toys ready for her. The room in which Shawa’s second child, a girl, will spend her first weeks, in a friend’s home in the Tel al-Sultan area, is tainted with asbestos, she said.

“We carried Ayla here in just the clothes she was wearing, and we don’t even have anything warm for her,” Shawa said. “If I’m unable to provide for her, what will I do for my next child?”

Rising food scarcity and malnutrition can cause potentially life-threatening complications during childbirth and lead to low birth weight, wasting, failure to thrive and developmental delays.

Shawa said she had only eaten tinned food, with no access to fruit or vegetables, since she left her home three months ago. Doctors have said her iron levels are low and her blood pressure is high. Mustafa searches daily but has found no suitable medication to control it.

Saja Al-Shaer, 19, started to feel like she was too young to become a mother. Her weight had dropped below 110 pounds, she was anemic, and her husband had not managed to get her medication, either. “He spent three days knocking on the doors of pharmacies,” she said. “I do not know if I will see this child or not.”

In late December, doctors at the al-Aqsa Hospital, 11 miles to the north, received a pregnant woman whose high blood pressure caused eclampsia and bleeding to her brain, according to Deborah Harrington, a British obstetrician who volunteered at the hospital with a Medical Aid for Palestinians team.

The baby was delivered by a C-section, Harrington said. The mother was still on life support when the physician left two weeks later.

“These women are presenting it in much more extreme condition,” Harrington said. “They’re just not getting hypertensive treatment. They’re not being screened for diabetes. If they’re diabetic, they’re not getting treatment for their diabetes.

“They know that actually accessing care, as it often is for women in conflict, is really difficult and fraught with danger. At night, there is often no light, so moving around is really difficult. You can’t call an ambulance because there’s no signal. The women I saw were really frightened.”

Walaa with her uncle Wissam, who helped deliver her newborn son. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

From the corner of the damp room where Walaa was tending to Ramzy on Friday, she worried about where they would find clean water or baby formula. Her family had looked everywhere for diapers, but come up empty. In Tel al-Sultan, Shawa was fixating on rumors that Israel’s army would direct them to evacuate again. The walking, the carrying, the sense that nothing around her was hygienic — it all frightened her.

But she had made one decision that no shortage or military orders could change. She would name her daughter after her sister-in-law, killed in an Israeli airstrike weeks earlier while trying to find shelter for her own children.

The girl, she said, would be called Heba. In Arabic, it means blessing from God.

Mahfouz reported from Cairo and Harb reported from London. Loay Ayyoub in Rafah contributed to this report.

#Gaza #Maternal and infant care in gaza #Delivering babies with the light from cellphones #52000 pregnant women #40% of pregnancies in gaza are high risk #Hospitals in gaza are at 250% capacity #Medical Aid for Palestinians #Caesarean sections without anesthetic #postmortem caesarians in a desperate bid to save the baby

14 notes · View notes