#our son oscar indiana.

[fuerimmer-andeiner-backe]

@lookingforlibertalia Juniorbär hat dieselbe wie Papabär Jacke in klein Erdbeeren für Mammam ernten und die größte ist für Mammambär! 🍓😍♥️💓♥️💓♥️💓♥️💓♥️💓♥️

[mattnben-bennmatt]

Matt Damon and Casey Affleck's interview with Parade (2 August 2024)

Matt Damon and Casey Affleck Reflect on Life Before Fame: 'We Had Mattresses On the Floor'

The Academy Award-winning duo talks first roles, finding success and 'The Instigators,' their hilarious new heist movie.

By Mara Reinstein | Photography by Alexia Barroso [Matt's eldest daughter]

-

Any story about Matt Damon and Casey Affleck must start with Boston. It’s their home, where they met, became friends and started their acting careers. The city also serves as the backdrop for soooo many of their charming anecdotes.

Here’s one: Growing up in the 1980s, the two of them—along with Affleck’s older brother, Ben—found work as extras by hitting up a family friend who happened to be a local casting agent. They had slightly different approaches to the work, Damon recalls.

“Ben and I were in high school and took it very seriously,” Damon says. “But Casey had it figured out. He’d show up with a basketball because if you came with a prop, you’d get an extra $5.”

Casey chimes in, “They did crowd work. I liked to stand out, so I’d do individual street crossing!”

Fast forward almost 40 years, and Damon, 53, and Affleck, 48, both are instantly recognizable movie stars with seven Oscar nominations and two trophies between them. (Damon won in 1998 for writing Good Will Hunting with Ben; Casey nabbed Best Actor for 2016’s Manchester by the Sea.) They’ve acted together in projects like the Ocean’s trilogy and in last year’s smash Oppenheimer (albeit without any shared scenes.) Now they’re the leads in a scrappy and smart comedy-thriller heist movie. Guess where it takes place?

In The Instigators (in select theaters on Aug. 2; streaming on Apple TV+ on Aug. 9), they play Boston-area dads from different backgrounds brought together to rob the city’s corrupt mayor. After the heist goes awry, the pair go on the run even as they’re pursued by criminals and various law enforcements. (Hong Chau, Jack Harlow, Ron Perlman, Ving Rhames and Michael Stuhlbarg round out the ensemble.)

“Our primary goal was that it would be fun and the audience was going to have fun and we wouldn’t overstay our welcome,” Damon explains.

No doubt “fun” is the operative word for these two judging by their dynamic during a joint interview recently with Parade. At the outset, Damon—Zooming from his home in Brooklyn Heights—cheerfully offers this about the slightly tardy Affleck: “I’ll give him s–t when he comes on … I’ve been doing it for 40-something years!”

After the L.A.-based Affleck pops onscreen, Damon fulfills his promise.

Affleck replies, “Hey, it’s a little earlier out here!”

Their relationship is akin to a brotherhood. They like to talk shop and cheer on their Boston sports teams. Their kids are all friends. Damon and his wife, Luciana Barroso, have daughters, Isabella, 18, Gia, 15, and Stella, 13, and stepdaughter, Alexia, 26. Affleck and his ex Summer Phoenix share two sons, Indiana, 20, and Atticus, 16.

“Casey’s kids are older and cooler,” Damon says. “And Indie is a handsome young gentleman. When he comes to dinner at our house, it causes quite a stir!”

Three days after their Parade interview, Damon and Affleck were set to throw out the first pitch in Fenway Park as their beloved Boston Red Sox played the New York Yankees. (FYI, one key scene in The Instigators is set inside the historic baseball stadium.) While they were excited about it, Damon joked, “If we embarrass ourselves, don’t put it in the story!”

OK, deal. But everything else is fair game for this week’s Parade cover story.

Mara Reinstein: So, no nerves about the first pitch?

Matt Damon: We’ve played a lot of games of catch in our lives, so it’s not going to be an issue. I mean, if we have to throw a strike from the mound, that’s a little harder.

Casey Affleck: I had surgery on my elbow and haven’t thrown a baseball in a couple of years, so this will be my first time!

Damon: He has a really good arm. I’m only worried if Casey’s elbow falls off. 

[UPDATE: They handled it beautifully.]

Matt, didn’t you and Ben sit in Fenway Park as extras during that famous Moonlight Graham scene in Field of Dreams?

Damon: Yeah, we were two of 3,000 extras for a few days. And Casey used to sell sausages outside the park on Yawkey Way.

Affleck: It was illegal! But I did it in eighth grade, ninth grade and tenth grade.

Was The Instigators always going to be set in Boston?

Affleck: It’s possible we would have re-set it there if it wasn’t. It’s just easier to make a movie where you know the place inside and out.

Casey also co-wrote the screenplay. Did you always have Matt in mind to play your partner in crime?

Damon: Absolutely not!

Affleck: I send Matt everything, and it’s usually “No.” So now it’s just an exercise in rejection.

Damon: I think it's because he hadn’t written this for me that I really wanted to do it. But Casey showed it to me, and I started talking to him about it. Midnight Run [from 1988] is one of our favorite movies, and it's kind of the North Star if you're going to try to do a movie like this. Hopefully our movie is like that. You care about the characters and it leaves you with something.

Do you think about your friendship when you film a movie together?

Damon: You can’t not think about it. I don't think we think about it in the terms that people on the outside do. I mean, Casey drives me absolutely crazy, and I say this in a loving way, like the way your brother [Ben] can drive me crazy. But I love working with him because he pushes me and I push him. And there's something very, very nice about it. We tend to spend a lot of time in this business on diplomacy. People's egos are involved, and you don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. But with Casey or with Ben, the dance is just entirely dispensed with, and we just are very blunt with each other. It really helps to have people that you've known for a long time because it's never in doubt that there's an underlying love and respect and loyalty to each other.

Casey, what’s your take on it?

Affleck: He said it perfectly. But coincidentally I just had this experience last night: So I smashed my toe really bad, and I had to go out with my girlfriend [actress Caylee Cowan] to Rite Aid late at night. We hobbled up to the door just as the store was locking up. So we turned around in this empty parking lot and I’m hopping on one foot. I looked up, and there was this Instigators poster all lit up with our dumb faces on it. I just laughed aloud. It was funny after all these years that the two of us are up there on this huge billboard. Times like that I think it’s really funny, and I think about our friendship. But not when we’re filming the movie.

You two lived together in L.A. with Ben in the mid-‘90s before hitting it big with Good Will Hunting. Do you miss that time in your life or are you relieved that you’re no longer struggling?

Damon: When I say Casey drives me crazy, it's rooted in experience like that. Like Casey graduated high school, and he and his close friend who had also graduated high school moved in with Ben and me. So we’re in our early 20s, and these two 18-year-olds wreaked havoc on our living situation for a year. But we had a great time and those were actually really wonderful years. I do look back now on those years really fondly. But it wasn't easy—we were all worried and it was a very insecure time. We all had mattresses on the floor. The house was a mess. We were young and full of ideas and nervous about what our lives would bring, and I don't miss that feeling.

Affleck: I’m nostalgic for any period other than the last 10 years. Like anything before I turned 30 was really the best. I was, like, sleeping on the floor and had really difficult and challenging things going on in my life but I still love that period because it was so fun. In some ways, it was really fun to not think about a career at all and not have any personal expenses and responsibilities, and to just take jobs that you liked that were exciting and just a little bit beyond your grasp. Matt and I did a play together in London [This Is Our Youth in 2002], and I thought it was so new and exciting.

Did you honestly foresee each other’s wild success?

Affleck: Well, Matt was older than me—I was in high school when he started to work. Also, I always assume that it's easy to see the talent and intelligence in others, and feel like, Jeez, I hope nobody notices that I don't have any of that. Everyone feels like a fraud a little bit. So I was never surprised that Ben and Matt succeeded because I was around for them for years and watched them write their own success.

And Matt gave Casey his Oscar-winning role as a grieving father in Manchester by the Sea. Could you ever imagine the day?

Damon: That was the best role that I'd seen in maybe 20 years. But I couldn’t do it because I had The Martian and a big spate of work lined up. I told Kenny [writer-director Kenneth Lonergan], “The only person in the world that I will give this role to is Casey” because he was the only person who could do it the way it deserved to be done. I'm not surprised at all by any of Casey’s success. He's one of the best actors in the world, and he has been for a very long time.

Matt, your daughter took the Parade cover photo. That must have been quite the proud dad moment!

Damon: That’s Alexia. She’s 26 now and has always had an incredible eye. She's always wanted to be a photographer and cinematographer. That's the part of the business that always appealed to her. Now she took these shots of us that are on a cover! There was a moment when she was like, “OK, sit back-to-back on the floor.” And Casey turns to me and goes, “There is no one else in the world I would do this for.” She’s like a secret weapon.

Do you think your other daughters will be artists, too?

Damon: You know they're not quite all adults yet. Our second-oldest is on her way to college, and then we've got a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old. But I want them to do whatever they want. We don’t put any pressure on them. I think oftentimes, it seems to be generational—you grow up in the circus, and so the circus seems like kind of a normal way of life. But I don't know that any of my other kids will go into it. I can see the younger three all doing various different jobs and doing them really well.

Casey, are your sons interested in the Hollywood thing?

Affleck: I hope they don’t do the Hollywood thing. Also, it's just hard to know what you want to do with your time. They’ve both done plays and theater programs and have made little films at home. That's what we were doing at that age, so if that's any indication, then maybe they will. But I don't think the movie business has quite the same allure that it did when I was their age, because so many other things scratch that itch. So they don't go to movies as much, they don't watch movies quite as much as we did. I think they love expressing themselves dramatically for sure. But I'm not sure if they're dying to go be in a movie.

When was the last time you went to the movies?

Affleck: I just took my son to see Lawrence of Arabia, the new 70-millimeter print, at The Egyptian. And it was unbelievably beautiful and this overwhelming cinematic experience that I hadn’t had in years. It was in this beautifully renovated movie theater, and the movie really casts a spell. Movies now just don’t do that. It’s a bummer that people don't often go out of their house and show up to see something like that.

Is that why both of you also write and produce? You have to stay fulfilled, no?

Affleck: I think so. You have to do that to stay creatively satisfied between new things and take on new challenges. At a certain point, you feel like you have your own stories you want to tell, now that you start to feel like you understand how movies are made and that you can be the person who's in charge for once.

A very important last question: What’s your Dunkin’ order?

Damon: Large regular coffee. I try to cut down on the sugar now, but that's my coffee order. And then, and then, it just depends on … you know, I love a chocolate doughnut.

Affleck: Chocolate glazed and a large black coffee for me.

Damon: Yeah, but his coffee has cream and sugar in it!

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

[heavenboy09]

Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 To You

1 Of The Most Humorous & Loveable Canadian - American 🇨🇦🇺🇸 Action Packed 🎬 Stars Of The Early 90's & 2000's Before Going Into a Long Hiatus

Then Made A Major Comeback In Acting & Now Is A Oscar 🏆 Winning Actor In The Academy

Fraser was born on December 3, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Canadian parents Carol Mary (née Généreux) and Peter Fraser. He is the youngest of their four sons.

He is a Canadian-American🇨🇦🇺🇸 actor. Fraser had his breakthrough in 1992 with the comedy Encino Man and the drama School Ties. He gained further prominence for his starring roles in the comedies With Honors (1994) and George of the Jungle (1997) and emerged as a star playing Rick O'Connell in The Mummy trilogy (1999–2008). He took on dramatic roles in Gods and Monsters (1998), The Quiet American (2002), and Crash (2004), and further fantasy roles in Bedazzled (2000) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008).

Fraser's film work slowed from the late 2000s to mid-2010s due to the poor box office performances of many of his films, and various health and personal problems, including the fallout from a sexual assault committed against him in 2003 by Philip Berk, the then-president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Fraser branched into television with roles in the Showtime drama The Affair (2016–2017), the FX series Trust (2018), and the Max series Doom Patrol (2019–2023). His film career was revitalized by roles in Steven Soderbergh's No Sudden Move (2021) and Darren Aronofsky's The Whale (2022). Fraser's starring role as a morbidly obese gay man in the latter earned him critical acclaim and numerous accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first Canadian to win this category.

Please Wish This Iconic & Loveable Canadian-American 🇨🇦🇺🇸 Actor That We All Know & Love & Care For.

He Has Been In Our Lifes On The Big Screen Since 1992

The 1 & Only

MR. BRENDAN JAMES FRASER🇨🇦🇺🇸 AKA ENCINO MAN 👨,  GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE 🌴, & RICK O' CONNELL OF THE MUMMY TRILOGY 🇪🇬👹

HAPPY 55TH BIRTHDAY 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 TO YOU MR. FRASER & HERE'S TO MANY MORE YEARS TO COME

#BrendanFraser #EncinoMan #GeorgeOfTheJungle #TheMummy #RickOConnell

[greensparty]

2023: The Year in Green's Party

This was a historic year for my blog as it turned 10! In Jan. 2013 I began this blog as a way to share my thoughts on pop culture and since then I've gotten to do things I never even imagined would be possible: interviewing filmmakers, actors, musicians, authors and more; reviewing movies, music, concerts, books, and theater; covering conventions and film festivals; and connecting with fans who also have their hands on the pulse of pop culture at the moment and it's history. This was hands down one of my best years yet! Here are just a few of the highlights:

the many faces of Green's Party

Retweets and social media: Tom Petty's website included a pull quote from my Nov. 2022 album review of Live at the Fillmore 1997 on their website page for the album; Ondi Timoner and her doc Last Flight Home shared my interview with her on Twitter; the Video Archives Podcast liked and shared my Best Podcasts of 2022 list on Twitter; Cadence13 and David Spade of the Fly on the Wall podcast liked my Best Podcasts of 2022 lists on Twitter; TV Guidance Counselor host Ken Reid liked and shared my Best Podcasts of 2022 list on Twitter; Completely Conspicuous host Jay Kumar liked my Best Podcasts of 2022 list on Twitter; U2 Daily Tour News shared my U2 movie review and album review on their daily newsletter and on Twitter; the Video Archives Podcast liked and retweeted my Quentin Tarantino birthday post; Andy Summers shared my concert review on his social media; the Chasing Chasing Amy team shared my movie review on Twitter; X (the band) shared my concert review on their Facebook; the There Was No Alternative team shared my interview with author Jeff Gomez on their Facebook; and Tremolo Productions liked and retweeted my Congrats to them on 20 Feet From Stardom being added to the National Film Registry on Twitter.

Exene Cervenka and I backstage at the X concert

Interviews: I got to interview a number of entertainers I find fascinating including director Ondi Timoner, musician Glen Matlock, Exene Cervenka of X, author Michael Azerrad, author Jeff Gomez, and Pete Stahl of Scream!

me hanging with Indiana Jones

Movie Reviews: I got to review loads of movies including One Fine Morning, Marlowe, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, my annual guide to the Oscar Nominated Short Films, Scream VI, Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming with Dave Letterman, Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan: Brothers in Blues, Spinning Gold, Air, Little Richard: I Am Everything, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, Master Gardener, Lynch/Oz, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The YouTube Effect, Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One, Oppenheimer, Chasing Chasing Amy, Stop Making Sense re-release, Flora and Son, The Holdovers, The Stones and Brian Jones, Silent Night, The Sacrifice Game, and Godard Cinema!

Album Reviews: I got to review tons of albums including Shonen Knife's Our Best Place, Inhaler's Cuts & Bruises, Philip Selway's Strange Dance and Live at Evolution Studios, U2's Songs of Surrender, Mudhoney's Plastic Eternity, The Kinks' The Journey - Part 1 and The Journey - Part 2, Wilco's Crosseyed Strangers: An Alternate Take on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Cousin, Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power RSD Essential release, The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet RSD edition and Hackney Diamonds, Galen & Paul's Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day?, Hollywood Vampires' Live in Rio, Tommy Stinson's Cowboys in the Campfire's Wronger, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds' Council Skies, Alice Cooper's Killer and School's Out Deluxe Editions and Road, Extreme's Six, the Asteroid City soundtrack, Deaf Charlie's Catastrophic Metamorphic, Wham!'s The Singles: Echoes from the Edge of Heaven, Brian May and Friends' Star Fleet Sessions, Neil Young's Chrome Dreams, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros' Live at Acton Town Hall, London, Aerosmith's Greatest Hits, Speedy Ortiz's Rabbit Rabbit and Major Arcana (10th Anniversary Edition), Courtney Barnett's End of the Day (Music from Anonymous Club), Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense Expanded Edition Remaster, Huey Lewis and the News's Sports 40th Anniversary Edition, Will Butler + Sister Squares' Will Butler + Sister Squares, The Replacements' Tim (Let It Bleed) Edition, The Breeders Last Splash 30th Anniversary Original Analog Edition, Ringo Starr's Rewind Forward, Haim's Days are Gone 10th anniversary edition, Chris Shiflett's Lost at Sea, Duff McKagan's Lighthouse, Prince and the New Power Generation's Diamonds and Pearls Super Deluxe Edition, Snail Mail's Valentine (Demos), Jimi Hendrix Experience's Hollywood Bowl: August 18, 1967, Scream's DC Special, The Beatles' 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, Pearl Jam's Vs. 30th anniversary edition, and The Black Crowes' The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion Box Set.

TV Reviews: This year I branched out and got to review some TV shows including Lucky Hank, John Carpenter's Suburban Screams, Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bassists Human Too?, and John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial.

my friend Ron and I at Boston Calling in May

Concert Reviews: I wrote about my day at the 2023 Boston Calling festival and I also got to cover concerts from Andy Summers, X, Sting, The Breeders, and Scream. I also started a new feature called Concert Pics, where I share pics from concerts I attended but didn't review.

Blu-ray Reviews: I got to review some blu-rays including Project: Alf, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, and We Are Not Alone.

Book Reviews: I got to review and cover some books including Stewart Copeland's The Police Diaries, Michael Azerrad's The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, and Jeff Gomez' There Was No Alternative.

my friend Jenn and I at Jagged Little Pill

Theater Reviews: I got to review Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill when it played in Boston!

Comedy Reviews: I got to cover The State reunion show in Boston!

me at the Boston Underground Film Festival in March 2023

me with Mr. Sam J. Jones at 2023 MusicCon Collectibles Extravaganza

Film Festivals, Conventions and Events: In February I got to cover Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Man of the Year presentation to Bob Odenkirk and Woman of the Year to Jennifer Coolidge; the 2023 Northeast Comic Con Spring Edition; the 2023 Boston Underground Film Festival (my first time covering them since 2019); the 2023 Salem Horror Fest; the 2023 Independent Film Festival Boston; the 2023 MusicCon Collectibles Extravaganza; I got to cover the Stop Making Sense reunion Q&A simulcast from TIFF, IFFBoston's 2023 Fall Focus mini-fest, and the 2023 Northeast Comic Con Fall Edition.

Me seeing Stop Making Sense on the big screen!

Stray Observations:

I got to cover Hollywood Vampires collectively and individually: In June I got to review Hollywood Vampires' album Live in Rio and I got to see them live in July, I also saw Joe Perry solo in April and I got to review Aerosmith's Greatest Hits in August, and I got to review Alice Cooper's Deluxe Editions of Killer and School's Out in June and his newest album Road in August.

It was a sad year for Gen X: in May MTV News announced they were ceasing operations; and there was also the passing of Andy Rourke of The Smiths, Sinead O'Connor, and Paul Reubens, all staples of the 80s and 90s :(

The Police never ended: It's as if I got to see a Police reunion this year because I got to cover guitarist Andy Summers' concert in July, singer / bassist Sting's concert in September, and while I didn't see drummer Stewart Copeland live, I did get to cover his book The Police Diaries in October!

Tough year for physical media fans like me between Netflix ending it's DVD by mail service and Best Buy announcing they're going to stop selling DVDs. Time to go to my local library more often for DVDs and blu-rays!

...And the Biggest Postings and News of the Year on Green's Party:

1/2/23: This blog turned 10! It feels like I'm just getting started in some ways!

1/20/23: A very rare clip of The Eric and Mike Show, the cable access TV show I co-hosted and co-produced as a teen, surfaced online.

Jan. - Mar. 2023: I rolled out my Best of 2022 lists in time for awards season!

3/15/23: I had my 3000th post on this blog!

4/18/23: After Netflix announced they would be discontinuing their DVD by mail service, I wrote my remembrance of Netflix DVD.

6/26/23: I shared my thoughts on the Best of 2023 so far.

9/14/23: I got to cover the re-release of Stop Making Sense, the re-release of Talking Heads' soundtrack album, and the simulcast of the Talking Heads' reunion Q&A at TIFF with Spike Lee.

10/28/23: I posted about Dave Grohl's history of SNL appearances. 34 notes.

10/30/23: I got to cover The Holdovers screening with an intro and Q&A from director Alexander Payne.

11/25/23: I wrote about the passing of Marty Krofft. 16 notes.

11/29/23: In memory of George Harrison's passing on that day in history, I posted his music video for "Any Road". 10 notes.

11/30/23: I wrote about the passing of Shane McGowan. 192 notes, making it my biggest post of the year!

11/30/23: I was quoted in a Boston.com article about the best holiday music!

Nov - Dec. 2023: I got to do an album review of Scream's DC Special, interview singer Pete Stahl and cover their concert, a rare hat trick for me!

12/27/23: I wrote about the passing of Tom Smothers. 11 notes.

Thank you for attending Green's Party in 2023! Now onto more pop culture thoughts in 2024....

[a-simple-gaywitch]

Composed of the Elements

Spencer Reid x Reader

Summary:  When a case takes the team to (Y/N)'s home town, her best friend Spencer helps her leave all the baggage behind.

Title Song: Sweet as Whole, Sara Bareilles

Word Count: 2705

Warnings: high school bullying, brief mentions of a case, smoking

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” -Oscar Wilde

~

You walked into the bullpen with a coffee in one hand and your phone in the other.

“Morning, (Y/N),” your best friend, Spencer, called from his desk.

“Morning, Spence.” You sat down at your desk. Before you could get settled, JJ announced a case.

“We’ve been called in to a small town in Indiana,” JJ said, clicking on the slide projector.

“Wait. When you say small town…” you said, feeling your body tense.

“We’re going to (L/N)’s hometown,” Hotch confirmed. After going over the details of the case, he said, “Wheels up in thirty.”

Spencer reached for your arm, but you were up and moving to the bullpen before he could catch you. He watched as you grabbed your bag from your desk, ignoring Morgan’s attempts at conversation. Your usual peppy, outgoing self was gone, replaced with a stranger.

When the team gathered on the jet, they discussed the case together. You sat at the back of the cabin, staring out at the clouds, tapping on the table in front of you.

“Hey.” You looked up to see Gideon sitting in front of you. “Are you okay?”

You shook your head. “I never thought I’d be going back there. I thought I could leave and never look back.”

“Hey, I know it isn’t easy, but we need your help. You know this town and the people in it. That can help us.”

You sighed and stood up. “Fine.” Walking over to the team, you said, “One thing you need to know about these people: they don’t like outsiders. At all.”

“What do you mean by outsiders?” Hotch asked.

You scoffed. “Anyone who isn’t born and raised in the town. Even if you’ve lived there for years, if you weren’t born in Newton, you’re not to be trusted. You’ll see first-hand when we meet with the local PD.”

“What about the victims?” Derek asked you.

“I knew both of them in high school,” you said, flicking through the file. “But I don’t know what anyone has been doing with their lives.”

Spencer couldn’t help but notice the sadness in your eyes. Despite his aversion to touch, he reached out and rested his hand on top of yours. You were his safety net. He loved you, as more than just his best friend.

~

When the team got to the police station, you stuck to the back of the group while JJ and Hotch made introductions.

“Detective Miller,” Hotch said, holding his hand out. “I’m Agent Hotchner. You’ve already spoken to Agent Jareau. This is SSA Gideon, Dr. Reid, SSA Morgan, and SSA (L/N).”

“Wait. Little nerdy (Y/N) (L/N)?” the detective said, finally noticing you. “Wow, who would have thought you’d come back to Newton?” You swallowed hard, keeping your eyes down.

“Do you have a place we can set up a case board?” Spencer asked, noticing your unease.

“Sure.”

“Did you know the victims well?” JJ asked him.

The detective nodded. “We all do. Kelly’s my son’s teacher. Julia and I dated in high school. Our kids are friends.”

“Does everyone in town know each other well?” JJ asked as she helped you pin the crime scene photos to the board.

“Of course. We’re like a family. When your town only has 300 people, you have to look out for each other.” You couldn’t hold back your scoff. “You have something to say there, (Y/N)?”

“She’s Agent (L/N) to you,” Gideon interrupted. “JJ, Julia Coleman’s family is here.”

~

“You look different,” Detective Miller said to you as you worked late to help nail down the profile. “You look good.”

“Detective Miller-”

“Come on, you can call me Tim.” He stepped closer to you. “You don’t have to be so professional.”

“Excuse me,” you said, though it was no more than a whisper. You slipped out of the room and stood outside the precinct, leaning against the wall. You pulled a small box out of your jacket pocket.

“Since when do you smoke?” Spencer asked you, coming up next to you.

You lit a cigarette and took a drag before saying, “Since high school.” Seeing Spencer’s concern, you said, “Relax, I haven’t for a while. It’s only when I get really stressed.”

“You know, each cigarette takes about seven minutes off your life.”

“If it’s seven minutes I don’t have to spend with Timothy Miller or anyone else from this damn town, then I don’t care.”

“What did he do to you?”

You shook your head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Come on, (Y/N), it’s me. Talk to me. Please?”

You looked at your best friend’s pleading eyes and sighed. You put out your cigarette and said, “You know I didn’t have a good high school experience. After my mom died, my dad moved us to his childhood home. I moved schools halfway through the first semester. I was the weird new kid who wore all black with braces and clunky glasses and was way too into Stephen King books. I was an easy target.” You cleared your throat. “Julia and Tim were my biggest tormentors. When they dated, it was worse.”

“What do you mean?” Spencer asked.

You chewed your lip. “Tim asked me to the prom when he and Julie were on an off period of their relationship. I got so excited, like an idiot. I mean, I knew he didn’t like me in that way. After all, why would he?” You laughed, but there was no joy behind it. Spencer felt his heart clench at how you saw yourself. He thought you were the most beautiful, amazing woman to ever exist.

“But I thought at least I’d have a friend, you know? I rented a dress and did my hair, all that stuff. Tim said he was going to pick me up. He never came.” Your eyes burned with tears at the memory. “The worst part was, my dad didn’t know there was anything going on. After-after my mom died, he gave up. When he wasn’t working, he was drinking and smoking.” You shook your head. “Tim just brought all those feelings back.”

Spencer reached out and wiped the tears off your cheek. “You didn’t deserve any of that. No one deserves that.”

“Carrie was my favorite book in high school. I wonder what that says about me.”

“Why don’t we head back to the hotel?” Spencer offered, holding his hand out to you. “Rest might help us with the case.”

~

The next morning, the team discovered there was another murder. Misty Lincoln had been killed in the same way as the other two victims. Spencer was graphing the geographical profile while you sat at the table, staring at the crime scene photos.

“You see something?” Hotch asked you.

“I’m not sure. Uh, could I- could I take like two hours? I think there might be something that’ll help us in my dad’s old things.”

“Sure. But you’re not going alone. Take Reid with you.”

You knew better than to argue with your boss. “Yes, sir.”

When you and Spencer got into the SUV, your fingers started tapping the steering wheel as you drove, letting muscle memory guide you. You pulled into the parking lot of a storage facility. Spencer followed behind you as you passed row after row of storage units. When you finally stopped, you flipped through your keychain until you found one you were looking for. You hadn’t spoken to Spencer since getting in the car back at the station, and he was starting to worry.

After you opened the door to the unit, you looked at Spencer. “After my dad died, I moved all his stuff here. I got rid of some stuff, of course. What would I ever do with an old couch that had more cigarette burns than upholstery?” You ran your hand over a white garment bag. The golden lettering was faded, but Spencer could still make out the word bridal, and what he could infer was the word boutique from the few remaining letters. “Some things I just couldn’t get rid of.”

“Hey, can I ask you something?” Spencer asked you, picking up a picture at the top of an open box. You were between who he could only assume were your parents, and you all looked happy. You looked just like your mother. The small you, who couldn’t be much older than 8, clung to the woman’s side. Your father had his arm around your mother’s waist. It all looked very domestic.

“Sure,” you said, digging through a box at the back of the unit.

“Why have you been acting so different since we got here? I mean, you’ve been acting so meek and timid, which isn’t you. I once heard you threaten a cop that you would, and I quote, ‘shove your foot so far up his ass that he would taste the mud on your shoe.’ What’s going on?” He set the frame back on the top of the box.

You shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess… I spent so long trying to distance myself from this place and when I came back, I was back to being a scared little 15-year-old.”

“But, you’re not, (Y/N). You’re strong and confident.” It was then Spencer heard you sniffle and noticed you were crying. “(Y/N)?”

You wiped your face. “Sorry. It’s just… I worked so hard for the image of me that you all see and-and I’m just so afraid that being here is going to erase all that. I worked so hard at the Academy to form an identity that wasn’t this and-”

“(Y/N), (Y/N), hey,” he said, taking your hands in his. “Breathe. Our image of you is not going to change just because your old tormentors are here. I- uh, we, the team, we love you. You’re our family. I think Garcia would riot if Hotch ever tried to get rid of you.” You chuckled at that and it made him smile. “Now, how about we get out of here and work more on our profile?”

~

When you got back to the precinct, Hotch asked you, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yeah.” You pulled an old yearbook out of your bag. “All the victims are from the same graduating class, and they were all in the same extracurriculars. Look.”

“We’re ready to give the profile,” Gideon said after flipping through the book.

Your team gathered the police department to deliver your preliminary profile.

“We’ve come to the conclusion that our unsub can only be a local,” Spencer said. “He-”

“There’s no way,” Officer Miller interrupted. “No one in this town would do that. Besides, why would I trust this walking stick insect over the people I’ve known my whole life? You’re wrong, Stick-Bug.”

“How dare you,” you said, stepping forward. The rest of your team stepped away. They knew what was coming. No one would say it, but they all knew how you and Spencer felt about each other. “How dare you talk to Spencer that way. Captain Bell invited us here to help you find out who’s murdering members of your community. You have no right to talk to my family that way.”

“Your family? These people are your family?”

“A family is anyone who makes you feel loved, and by that definition, yes. These people are my family. And if you ever talk to any of them like that again, I will bring your life crashing down around you with one simple phone call.”

“Oh, look who’s finally got a backbone,” Tim laughed. “Little (Y/N) thinks she sounds all big and threatening.”

“It’s not a threat, Timothy, it’s a promise,” you said. “And I’m sure Captain Bell would take you off this case if I told him you have a conflict of interest. I’m sure he’d love to know you’d had an affair with one of the victims. You and Julia never could stay away from each other, could you?”

Spencer fought a smile at seeing you return to yourself, as well as seeing Timothy’s face pale. He chewed the inside of his cheek, trying to think of a way to thank you.

~

The case was finally over. Like always, Spencer had been right. The unsub was a guy from your graduating class who felt the women from your class shunned and mistreated him. Thankfully, you were able to sympathize with him and get him to come in without any extra violence.

Hotch was giving the team the night in the hotel before heading back to Quantico in the morning. You were flipping through the channels on the hotel’s TV, already in your pajamas by 8:30. You finally settled on some old reruns of Friends when there was a knock at your door. You groaned and extracted yourself from your blanket cocoon and trudged over to the door.

“Spence? What are you doing here?” you asked after opening your door to reveal Spencer, still in his work clothes.

“Come with me, I want to show you something.”

“Spencer, I’m in my pajamas-”

“That doesn’t matter. Just, come with me. Please?”

You tugged your old sweatshirt on and followed Spencer down the hallway, to the elevator.

“Where are we going?” you asked him.

“It’s a surprise.”

“A surprise?”

“You trust me, right?”

“Of course, I do, Spence. You know that.”

“Okay well,” he covered your eyes with his hands and guided you forward. He dropped his hands and said, “surprise.”

You were standing on the patio of the hotel’s restaurant, the tables had been pushed to the side and lights were strung up all around.

“Spence, what’s all this?” you asked as he gently pulled you to the center of the patio.

“A way to say thank you,” he said. When he saw the confusion on your face, he said, “For sticking up for me at the precinct. I know it must have been hard to stand up to Detective Miller. And-and I remember you telling me that you don’t have many good memories here, and then I thought about your prom story, so…” He held his hand out to you as music started playing. “May I have this dance?”

You smiled and took Spencer’s hand. He rested his free hand on your waist, and your free hand rested on his shoulder as the two of you gently swayed to the soft music coming from the patio’s speakers.

“How’d you pull this off?” you asked him.

His smile was a bit sheepish. “Morgan and Garcia helped me pull some strings.”

“Of course they did. Garcia is the all-powerful puppet master.”

Spencer laughed as the two of you continued to dance. When Spencer heard you sniffle, he stopped and pulled away.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” He brushed a tear off your cheek. “Did I do something wrong?”

You shook your head and smiled at him. “No. It’s happy tears.” When you saw that Spencer still looked confused, you explained, “I never thought I’d have someone in my life who cares about me this much. I mean, look at all this. You did this just to make me happy.” You rested your forehead against Spencer’s and wrapped your arms around his neck, your fingers playing with his hair. Spencer’s arms wound around your waist, pulling you closer.

“Of course I did. I love you. I-I mean, I care about you. Because you’re my best friend and-”

“Spence,” you said, stopping his rambling. You pressed a soft kiss to his lips, lingering for just a moment.

Spencer’s brain, which usually worked at three times the speed of the average person, slowed to practically a halt. You had just kissed him. The girl he’s been longing for just kissed him. She kissed him . You were about to say something to him when his brain finally caught up and he kissed you back.

When the two of you pulled apart, you said, “Well, I guess my prom was worth the wait.”

Spencer smiled at you and kissed your forehead before continuing to dance with you.

~

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." -Anais Nin

[aboutcaseyaffleck]

Casey Affleck Gets Philosophical About Life, Time & The Whole Damn Thing

“Time,” reflects Casey Affleck, “is something I have been thinking about lately. It is ironic how the older you get, the better you are at being patient. With less time left, people become better at waiting. But this year, I feel much older and a lot less patient. I guess you’ve got to accept that time is never wasted? That doing is no different than not doing? That you can’t kill time no matter what you do, and that no matter what you do you can’t prevent the opposite from happening either? I don’t know. It’s a double-edged sword.”

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in early January, and Affleck and I are doing the Zoom thing, ostensibly to discuss his two new movies, the recently released indie Our Friend and the upcoming 19th-century period drama The World to Come. Yet our virtual tête-à-tête has become far more interesting, jumping wildly from his love of trains and travel to weightier topics like family, the future and the search for something more, something meaningful.

“I like the idea that time is an illusion. That past, present and future are all happening at once. I like it even though I can’t totally get my head around it. But either way, the me in the mirror gets older every day.”

Like most of us, he’s not only had plenty of time on his hands in recent months, housebound in L.A., but he’s tried to use his downtime wisely. “I tried to use this year of quarantine constructively,” the 45-year-old Oscar winner says. “I tried to see it as a winter season for shutting down and restoring something inside, but I just couldn’t. I’m not that evolved, I guess. I didn’t take up a new hobby or learn an instrument or get better at ‘self-care.’ If anything, I let my better habits and routines fall off. It was all I could do to keep my head above water and help buoy my friends and children when I could.”

As a guy with two teenagers at home — Indiana, 16, and Atticus, 13 — it hasn’t been easy, but he’s doing his best. He tried taking his sons on their annual camping road trip over the summer, but it was short-lived. Instead, he’s been focusing on making a happy home. “My kids don’t get to see their friends a lot, so I’m doing a lot more stuff with them, coming up with activities for the three of us, which they mostly hate, and I mostly let drop. And then I try again with the same outcome 90 percent of the time.”

While trying to create innovative plans to sustain his boys, he came up with one he thought might do some good, too. In June, he launched Stories from Tomorrow, a social-media initiative focused on creative writing by kids.

“At the beginning of all this last March, the first thing that occurred to me was that the quarantine would have a big impact on young people’s emotional well-being — the disruption they’re going to feel is really going to affect their mental health more than anyone else,” he says. “When I would sit down to write creatively, I felt better. But I couldn’t get my sons to journal or do creative writing much. I didn’t want to twist their arms about it. So I was like, ‘I’ll make a social media platform that inspires young people to write creatively, because it is such a good way of working out difficult feelings. And the way I will do that is have well-known people read the kids’ writing publicly.’ I knew that hearing your own writing read was exciting. I thought it would be really inspiring, that creative writing would be a great outlet for kids stuck at home.”

He enlisted some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Robert Redford, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Jon Hamm, Matthew Broderick, Kyle Chandler and Danny Glover, as well as two current costars, Vanessa Kirby and Jason Segel, and arranged for donations made through the program to go to children’s hunger nonprofit Feeding America and Room to Read, which supports female education. He reached out to schools in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Haiti, hoping to create a global community.

Affleck was excited to make progress, to have done some good, but the initiative didn’t take off as planned. “In the end, an Instagram account for creative writing by tweens just couldn’t possibly compete with the quintillion bytes of daily data generated online. I don’t know. But I tried! And anyway, since then lots of other organizations started doing basically the same thing, and they are more organized than I am, and they have done a better job. So be it.”

Yet, adults have been disrupted, too, including Affleck himself, who is aware that, relatively speaking, he has gotten through mostly unscathed. “Am I happy? I mean, I’m relatively okay. It’s been a hard time to find balance and to keep it. I would say it’s been a hard time in my life, but I know that it’s been harder for other folks. So far we haven’t lost anyone, and we haven’t lost our house. And I rediscovered that when you’re feeling bad, there’s nothing better to do than to try to help other people. Being of service not only helps others but is a great way of getting outside of yourself. Also — and I really believe this — I think this time will be remembered as one when our country made leaps and bounds in the right direction; we are changing and growing and it’s uncomfortable, but we will be much, much better. I wish I could see the next couple hundred years. It’s going to be amazing.”

At the end of the day, it’s family that’s keeping him going. “Having my kids around and being able to spend so much time with them has been amazing. It is the brightest silver lining in all of this. They are what gives me the most joy. They are funny and smart and interesting and interested. They are just the best company ever,” he says. “Anytime I try to parent out some ‘teaching moment,’ I find they are two steps ahead. They help me make sense of stuff just as much I help them, if not more. I don’t have any answers, but batting the questions around, back and forth, is a good way of coping.”

CALEB CASEY MCGUIRE AFFLECK-BOLDT feels he is luckier than most. Although he and many of his peers have gone jobless for a full year, he spent 2019 working hard. He had not one but three films done and dusted prior to the start of the pandemic; the last one wrapped a week before mandatory quarantine. Two of these have back-to-back release dates: the tearjerker indie Our Friend came out in January, and sweeping period drama The World to Come will be released February 12. Thriller Every Breath You Take is slated for later this year. “I am so, so, so glad I spent 2019 working that much. It is what kept us afloat all through 2020,” he says.

The films themselves are radically different, but there are a few common threads. In both of his winter releases, Affleck plays a man who has lost a family member and whose marriage is in shambles. In both, he is a man in pain.

In the LGBTQ masterpiece The World to Come, which revolves around the love that blossoms between two married women on the mid-19th-century American frontier, his character, Dyer, says very little but manages to convey a wealth of emotion with his eyes alone. He may seem stoic, but he is suffering.

“The World to Come is a story about a couple who have lost a baby. They’re dealing with the grief in totally different ways and having a very hard time coming together again,” he explains. “My character wants to heal that by having another, but his wife [played by Katherine Waterson] is coping in a different way. She is severing all emotional attachment to him because it triggers more and more grief. She [only] seems to come alive when she is with their neighbor, a woman on the next farm [played by Vanessa Kirby]. He wants his wife happy, but he also would like her to love him. To me, this is the story of how couples can have their relationship shattered by a sudden loss. And it’s definitely a beautiful story about two women who feel that they have to hide their love and find the courage to love each other anyway.”

Affleck likes layers. He himself has many, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s drawn to roles written as fully formed characters, not caricatures. With Dyer, that’s abundantly clear. “Crisis is fun to play, [and Dyer] is in an interesting crisis,” he says. “I think he’s a really good person — a really decent, solid, loving person — which is what I loved so much about playing him and what I love so much about the writing. It’s more interesting when there’s no bad guy, just a conflict of circumstances and feelings that get so complicated that it drives two people apart.”

In Our Friend, a different set of circumstances drives the leads apart. Affleck and Dakota Johnson take on the true story of Matthew and Nicole Teague, whose imperfect marriage was strained by his long absences and her affair, neither of which seem at all important when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer.

“To me, Our Friend is really a story about how petty grievances between people can divide them and then be forgotten when a gigantic tragedy is dropped in their laps. [Matthew] was wronged, it’s true — his wife cheated on him. On the other hand, he wronged her in a bunch of ways; [they] were just more passive and not quite so salacious. He wasn’t around. Matt got to be a dad and he got to travel the world as a journalist. He left her to take care of the kids. She wanted to have a life too, she had dreams of her own — she wanted to be a singer, she wanted to work — but she didn’t get to do that. She just got to be a mom. She was left holding the bag, and it wasn’t fair.”

He spent a fair amount of time immersing himself in the journalist’s life while filming in Fairhope, Ala., in 2019. (The film’s title is taken from Teague’s award-winning Esquire essay, “The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word.” The friend in question — played by Jason Segel — is a man who puts his life on hold to help the family during their darkest days.) But he did not become Matt Teague, which is an important distinction. “[Director] Gabriella Cowperthwaite asked that we not portray the personality traits of the real people. No accents, no mannerisms. [But] I did steal his style, because I had never seen someone nail the dad look any better than Matt. I say that with affection.”

As for the dreams Nicole gave up for her family, Affleck says, “If you were to ask Matt, I’m sure he would acknowledge that he was neglecting his role. He was neglecting her dreams, and that is a part of marriage, supporting what the other person wants. Like all relationships, it was complicated.”

Like life itself, really. This is why he can identify with both sides. He understands Nicole’s pain about the deference of her dreams as well as Matt’s desire to escape through travel — especially now, when Affleck himself has been completely grounded. Since the age of 17 he’s taken 20 cross-country road trips. His love of driving is secondary only to his enthusiasm for trains: Amtrak is his jam. He even fantasizes about owning his own train car one day.

Immersing himself in each location — whether it’s the sleepy Alabama town of Fairhope or the more exotic locale of Romania, which served as a stand-in for the East Coast of the U.S. in The World to Come — is actually one of the most desirable parts of the acting life, he says. “One of the things I love about working as an actor is that you go to some brand-new place and the community invites you in in a way that they don’t usually if you’re a tourist,” he confides. “You get to see what it’s like to really be there and imagine yourself living there.”

And he has — over the past ten years he’s spent so much time in cities including his hometown of Boston; Vancouver, British Columbia, the location of Light of My Life; Atlanta, where he shot the 2016 action flick Triple 9; Argentina, where he made Gerry; Dallas, for A Ghost Story; Calgary, Alberta, where much of the epic western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was filmed; Our Friend’s Fairhope set; Cincinnati, for The Old Man and the Gun; and Braddock, Pa., where he filmed the 2013 drama Out of the Furnace. “I have loved moving in and settling down and living a character’s life and then moving on. But I feel most at home in places that are struggling to get by. It reminds me of the neighborhood I grew up in. I feel lighter in those places, more relaxed. I feel like myself. I fit in.”

For him, the where is almost as important as the who — immersing himself in the place is imperative to understanding his character. This is part of what makes him such an accomplished actor — he and most of the parts he plays merge. I draw a crappy analogy about how the characters are like a coat, which he very obligingly works with. “You have to build the coat from all of the scraps and pieces of yourself; all these characters are made up of little pieces of me,” he says, noting, “Obviously, sometimes they can’t be. Sometimes I have no connection whatsoever, and those are the jobs I look back on and I either feel nothing for, or worse. But sometimes you have to take the job that is available, like most people in the world. You know? I don’t think my dad wanted to be a janitor. But he did it.”

He’s won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Critics’ Choice Award, a Golden Globe and an Independent Spirit Award, among others, and appeared in films that run the gamut from box-office juggernauts like the Ocean’s 11 franchise and Tower Heist to indie darlings like brother Ben’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone and Manchester by the Sea. He has even written and directed, most recently 2019’s Light of My Life, a bizarrely prescient movie about raising children in a pandemic. At this point in his career, he should have his pick of parts. “Not really,” he says. “There are a lot of people out there who have done good work, who are driven, and who have something to share. I have never been someone studios embraced as a ‘movie star,’ never knighted. I have always had to fight for the parts I have gotten. And you know what? That’s fine. Let me fight. It’s how I cut my teeth, and it is how I will keep them sharp. You can’t ask for more than a chance to be in the ring. Also, movies and TV aren’t all I care about. Sometimes I think, ‘Well, jeez, I have to work, and there are two jobs available to me, and the one that isn’t as good is the one that is close to home and I can see the kids, so I guess I am doing that.’ I love movies and really try hard to make them good. I really bust my ass every day when I get the chance to make one. I care more about my family than any movie. It’s not [always] the job I love, but this is the reality of my life. But maybe life will be long enough for a few more chapters.

The forward momentum of his future is an interesting topic. At the moment, he isn’t so much planning for the future as he is exploring it, because Affleck is not someone who likes to live with regret.

“I guess [at the end of the day], regret should be reframed as a reminder to be different,” he observes. And so, with this in mind, he embarked on a personal journey several years ago and decided to go back to college (at the Simon Fraser University in British Columbia). He had completed two years at Columbia University, but he never graduated — his film career kept getting in the way.

“I went back to school because I hadn’t finished, and I wanted to think about new things in a way that school can help you do,” he says. “I couldn’t go in person, so I found a strong online school and got started. You know, I’m 45, and I just thought, ’This is halftime. This is where you hit the locker room and think about how you want the rest of the game to go.’ You know what I mean? Like, ‘Okay, we went out, we played our best, we didn’t know what the other team was going to be like, we made some mistakes, we are in the game, so let’s adjust like this.’ Also, I’m not sure I want to be an actor forever. I had made a small pivot from acting into directing, and into producing more. And I like to direct movies. The most satisfying creative experience I’ve had in a long time was being a director. But ultimately it wasn’t quite enough. So I wanted to go study some of the things I was interested in. I wanted to do more with my life.”

Although he needed general credits to graduate, he found an unexpected passion for juvenile justice along the way, with a particular focus on alternative accountability programs. “I don’t know where this will lead me, or why I am so interested in it, but finding and implementing better systems for addressing harm and conflict among kids, adults too, but mostly young people, is something I care about. And the work that I have done so far has been fascinating and deeply rewarding.”

When I ask if this stems from his own experiences as a troubled kid growing up in Cambridge, Mass., with Christine, a single mom — his parents divorced when he was 9; his father, Timothy, an alcoholic tradesman, checked into a rehab facility in Indio, Calif., when Affleck was just 14 — he muses thoughtfully, “I love my parents and think they both did the very best they could and cared a lot. Period. Did I get into some trouble as a teenager? I got into some trouble when I was a kid, and I struggled a lot through high school with depression and substances, yes. Much of it I didn’t even know wasn’t normal. I don’t know if I was ‘troubled.’ Either way, as an adult, I’ve come to see that, regardless of how I compare to anyone else, I want less conflict in my life. That might be part of the reason why I’ve been so interested in learning about better ways of resolving conflicts, both with children and with grown-ups. It isn’t something they teach in school for some reason. Man, there is a lot they don’t teach you in school, huh? A lot you’ve got to learn on your own.”

And on this journey, mistakes will be made. That’s par for the course, and Affleck is no exception. “I have made so many mistakes, but life is the time for mistakes. I do believe people should hold themselves accountable and repair harm they have caused. That is important to me, and I try hard to do that whenever it is called for: apologize for mistakes and repair them,” he admits.

This is when our conversation, as such conversations are wont to do, comes full circle. Before we say goodbye, Affleck remarks, “You know, I heard Bono talking on Howard Stern’s show, and he said something about Frank Sinatra that was interesting. He said that he heard two versions of Frank singing ‘My Way.’ One version was recorded when Frank was young, and the other version was recorded when Frank was old. Each had the exact same words, same arrangement, same everything. But when Frank was young the line ‘I did it my way’ sounded proud, and when Frank was old it sounded humble. Whatever else time does to a person, I think it also does that.”

[source]

[penzyroamin]

Hi I know it’s been a bit but I’m the confused bi anon. I really really appreciated your response and it wasn’t too long. You made me feel a lot better. I was wondering if you could maybe suggest some books, tv, movies with bi female characters. Thanks soo much for the entire last response . You are absolutely incredible and so sweet. This means more to me than you could ever know❤️

of course!! i’m glad that my first response helped <3

disclaimer of course: i’m not bi! so i’m not an Authoritative Source on bi rep and what people want to see more of. i do actively seek out stuff about lgbtq+ characters, specifically girls and women, so i have some recs! however, i’ll also be adding some things that some bi folks i know have recommended because while lesbians and bi women have a lot in common, these are at the end of the day representing them, not me :)

extra-super favorites will be bolded! i’m putting this under a read more because... i read a lot of books. and recommended a lot of them.

books:

her royal highness by rachel hawkins-- this book is a pretty easy read-- don’t expect any massive revelations about life from it, and you’ll have a good time!!! essentially, a bi texan girl named millie, after having her heart broken by her friend-turned-sort-of-gf, goes to boarding school in scotland and ends up rooming with the princess, flora. if this sounds outrageous and sappy, that’s because it is! and i love it! sexuality isn’t a BIG part of this book, but it’s discussed, and it’s just a generally fun enemies-to-lovers story about a bi aspiring geologist and a no-fucks-to-give lesbian princess and them falling in love!

fried green tomatoes at the whistle stop cafe by fannie flagg-- hello this is actually my favorite book! unlike hrh it is... a LOT to read. it essentially follows 2 stories-- one about a housewife named evelyn and her friendship with an old woman named ninny threadgoode who she meets at the old folks home her mother-in-law stays at, and the other about the stories ninny tells her about her sister-in-law idgie and her partner, ruth. the book was published in 1987, and ruth and idgie’s story is set during the great depression, so they aren’t actively labeled as lesbian or bi, but it’s made obvious enough through coding and the fact that ruth has relationships with men prior to idgie while idgie spends her entire childhood pining after ruth. both storylines are fantastic-- they have a lot to say about the lives of southern women in the 30s and 80s, and about race relations at both periods. i’ll warn you that there are depictions of extreme racism and of abuse, but it handles both delicately. it’s a critical piece of southern literature, and a landmark for lgbtq+ storytelling. as a bonus, my copy has a bunch of great recipes in the back, so if you read it you might chance upon an edition with those in it. if you like poignant period pieces about wlw relationships, women losing their damn minds, and abusive men getting what they deserve, this is the book for you! you will sob. this is a fair warning.

you should see me in a crown by leah johnson-- i haven’t personally read this one, but i’ve heard great things about it from everyone i know who has! an anxious black bi girl in indiana has to win prom queen at her mostly-white school in order to get enough scholarship money to go to the college of her dreams, but ends up falling for mack, another girl running for queen. 

@landlessbud wanted me to shout out red, white, and royal blue by casey mcquinston-- you’ve almost definitely heard about it before (first son and prince of wales, enemies-to-lovers with a side dish of political drama), and it is primarily about a mlm romance, but nora is a fabulously fun bi girl side character and there’s a lot of great stuff about figuring out your sexuality in it.

leah on the offbeat by becky albertalli-- i’ve read a lot of complex thoughts on this book, and mine are... i like it! it’s flawed, sure, and i wish it had handled a few things a little better, but you know what? it’s cute as fuck! leah is a fat bi drummer, and she’s super cool! abby is a great love interest, and she goes through a whole bi realization throughout the book. all in all, it’s just a fun wlw high school romcom with a couple solid dramatic beats and a lot of goofball shenanigans. also, if you were an american girl kid??? one scene in this book will make the entire experience worth it for you.

harley quinn: breaking glass by mariko tamaki and steve pugh-- hey, we’re in graphic novel territory now! this book is RAD. a really neat look at gentrification, community solidarity, giving people what they deserve, and fantastic lgbtq+ found families. teenage harleen quinzel is taken in by a group of drag queens, and is caught between two sort-of love interests-- mysterious vigilante the joker and classmate and community activist ivy-- and the different forms of protest and resistance they represent. the art here is STUNNING, and it’s a great read!

laura dean keeps breaking up with me, by the great mariko tamaki with art by rosemary valero-o’connell-- the vast majority of the characters are lgbt, with a lesbian main character, and the supporting cast including a bi nonbinary character, a bi girl character, and two mlm characters! this is mostly a piece about modern lgbtq+ teenagers and the way toxic relationships take over our lives. it’s one of the most cathartic things i’ve read in a LONG time, and especially if you’re at a point where your sexuality feels kind of vague, this is a great read because it embraces that vagueness by not needing to clearly label the characters and celebrates whatever point of clarity the characters are at. probably some of the most gorgeous art i’ve ever seen in a book, with a beautiful black-white-and-pink color scheme and a really neat approach to visual storytelling.

movies:

i don’t watch many movies, because i get bored really quickly hskdhskhds. but the movies i DO watch are usually gay!

wowie zowie its fried green tomatoes again!-- fannie flagg came back to adapt this into a film and HOT DAMN is it just as good. the plot is primarily the same, with some stuff obviously cut or trimmed to make it a two hour movie instead of a 450 page books fhsjdhsjhds. mary-louise parker plays ruth!!! it got a GLAAD award and an oscar nomination, and god it’s good. there are a couple scenes in here that i think are going to be in my mind until the day i die. the level of pure butch energy that idgie radiates in this film is a one-hit k.o. and it KILLS me.

birds of prey-- listen. this is not a profound movie. harley’s bisexuality isn’t emphasized, and romance is basically nonexistent in this movie. there is some... quite graphic violence. that said, this movie is so fucking fun. it’s mostly just a bunch of women fucking up everyone who crosses them while margot robbie gives a gleeful performance that you can just TELL she enjoyed the fuck out of. the last 20-30 minutes of this movie are the absolute best part, with a long sequence that kind of reinvented what an action/superhero movie could be for me. again, bisexuality isn’t a massive part of this-- it’s mentioned, and then harley just continues on in her gloriously campy outfits and breaks peoples’ knees. again, i CANNOT overemphasize just how fucking good the last 20-30 minutes are. this movie knows what it is and it embraces it. also, women beating people up in costumes that don’t horrifyingly objectify them is always a plus!

imagine me & you-- i’d be remiss if i didn’t mention this one, considering it’s probably one of the most iconic wlw romcoms. a woman named rachel, while at her own wedding, meets a florist named luce, and they fall in love. it’s a very sweet look at questioning your sexuality when you were already secure in it, and rachel’s husband wins “most genuinely understanding guy in a wlw movie” award. it has a lovely happy ending, and articles have been written about the importance of rachel being a bi character who a) gets a happy ending and b) isn’t shamed for figuring out her sexuality later on or slutshamed. this is just... a sweet movie. it’s the romcom a lot of us need in our lives. also, a LOT of floral imagery.

tv shows:

ok, i’ve got a confession. i reaaaaaaally don’t watch much tv. seriously, the only shows i’ve watched a substantial amount of recently have been parks and rec, schitt’s creek, the good place, and gilmore girls. i have a really REALLY short attention span.

that said, eleanor from the good place is bisexual!! the good place is a really wild ride, it’s half afterlife comedy half philosophical musing, and it will almost certainly make you gasp, laugh, think, and also probably cry. also, eleanor is just buckets of fun and she, like many of us, is often blown away by tahani (jameela jamil) and her beauty.

ummm shows i haven’t watched entirely or at all but that have bi women in them and seem pretty good: black lightning, sex education, jane the virgin, arrow. 

if you haven’t already watched it, do not believe what people are going to tell you about watching glee. it will drag you into a pit of despair and white men rapping, and it’s quite biphobic to top it all off.

i hope you enjoy at least some of these!! i tried to include some of my own favs and some that were pointed out to me, so i hope that at least a couple connect with you and make you feel better. again, the bolded ones are my 100% favorites. i love you and i’m glad you reached out again!!! feel free to send some more asks later on <3

[missmudpie]

Name Ten Films That Have, For Whatever Reason, Stuck With You

@millennialfangirl tagged me, and this was harder than I thought and I might have gone over the ten.  Also, tumblr is being tumblr and not cooperating with gifs, so only the first film has one.  Here they are, in chronological order:

Casablanca, 1942

Look, Casablanca is the best film ever made.  Is it my favorite?  No, but it’s the best, much better than Citizen Kane, which is often heralded as the pinnacle of cinema but is about a rich old white guy who loves his sled.

Here’s looking at you, kid.  Of all the Gin joints.  Round up the usual suspects!  I’m shocked - shocked!- to find that gambling is going on in here (Your winnings, sir.). This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  As Time Goes By.  Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and a supporting cast to die for.  Renault throwing away the bottle of Vichy water.

I could go on, but here’s why Casablanca has stuck with me: It’s one of my Dad’s favorite movies, too.  When I think of Casablanca, I think of him.  One Christmas (I can’t remember if I was in high school or college), the old timey theater in town played Casablanca.  I got us tickets as his Christmas present.  It is one of my favorite movie-going experiences (more on that below).

Star Wars, 1977

When I was little, we used to go to my maternal grandparents’ house every Tuesday, and I would watch Star Wars.  I was probably waaaaay too young - there’s audio of me playing out Star Wars with my My Little Ponies and I was like, three.  On my college essay, I wrote about how Return of the Jedi was my first movie (true story, I was six months old and slept through the whole thing, because apparently taking your sleeping infant to the movies is something parents did in the ‘80s).

Star Wars is where I learned about the Hero’s Journey.  About princesses and rebellions and wizards and flying spaceships.  I devoured the Timothy Zahn books and Young Jedi Knights series.  And yes, I’m a little down on it all after Episode IX - but I still love it.  It has impacted me in so many ways.  I know my life would be the poorer for not having seen it.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981

If Princess Leia was the first damsel I saw who get herself out of distress, Marian Ravenwood was the one who solidified the idea that women were perfectly capable of getting into and out of trouble themselves, thank you very much.  Then there’s Harrison Ford in being Peak Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones - Intelligent, clever, brave-bordering-on-reckless.  Who wouldn’t want to go on far-flung adventures to find hidden treasure, and maybe punch some Nazis while you’re at it?

The Goonies, 1985

Speaking of far-flung adventures, how about going on one in your hometown?  Booby-traps, pirates, Italian gangsters, Sloth, hidden treasure - it’s every kid’s playtime fantasy come magically to life.  I still want to go down those tunnel slides and shoot out into a hidden lagoon.  They just don’t make movies like this any more - fun, family movies that don’t dumb down the action or characterization for kids, that’s a ride for both kids and parents alike.  This was the first movie I showed my kids during quarantine.

The Princess Bride, 1987

Inconceivable.  The Six Fingered Man.  Death cannot stop truly love.  Only mostly dead.  Have fun storming the castle!  Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die.  ROUSes.

This is a perfect movie.  It is.  It is lightning in a bottle and it should never, ever be remade (those were just rumors, right?).  This is romance and humor and suspense and two of the best swordfights in cinematic history (fight me on this.  No, really, fight me.  I took fencing in college because of this movie), all wrapped up in the sweetest Happily Ever After.  I love it so much.

Jurassic Park, 1993

I’ve told this story before, but here it is again.  In the summer of 1993, I was 10 and my sisters were 8 and just turned 6, and we convinced our parents that we were for sure old enough to see Jurassic Park - a book my mother had read and thus knew what level of horror to expect.  It did not go well.  I ended up burying my head in my dad’s chest; my youngest sister was in my mom’s lap; and my middle sister, with no where left to go, ended up under the seat in front of her.

Now, it’s the movie we quote (Hold on to your butts).  When my youngest had jello recently, I told him to hold it up and look scared, then texted the picture around.  We all knew immediately what I meant.  The DVDs are given as gifts and then immediately stolen.  My youngest sister can recite the entire movie.  I can’t wait to scare my sons with it.

The Shawshank Redemption, 1994

I don’t remember this movie when it came out; I remember it was this movie I hadn’t really heard of at the Oscars, where it won none.  Not until I was much older did I realize what a travesty that was.  I first watched this on a pep band bus trip in college - not the time or place to truly appreciate it.  Months later, I rented it (remember renting movies?) and fell in love with it.

This is a beautiful movie about friendship and hope and finding light in the darkness.  It’s always on TV, and I will always stop and watch at least a few minutes of it.  The ending - the last half hour, really - is pure cinematic poetry, but noting beats Red’s monologue as he travels to find Andy on that Mexican beach.

That Thing You Do!, 1996

This movie is Capital-D-Delightful.  Just thinking about it makes me smile.  This is the movie that tipped me from Tom Hanks Fan to I Love Tom Hanks and Need Him to Be My Best Friend.  He WROTE and DIRECTED this gem of a movie.  The talent.  The song is legitimately catchy, the characters are Wonder-ful (see what I did there?), and it’s all in Day-Glo ‘60s color.  I love this movie and make no apologies.

Toy Story 2, 1999

Speaking of Tom Hanks, this is my favorite Toy Story.  Look, the first is a technological marvel, but Woody is an ass throughout most of the film.  The fourth is it’s own thing, and the third is really, really good and I ugly sob at the end, but it’s also got a lot going on there.  But the second - oh the second is beautiful in its simplicity.  In addition to all of Andy’s toys, we get Jesse and Bullseye and even Stinky Pete.  It’s an ode to friendship and love and the realization that life, for toys and people, eventually ends, and we have to appreciate every moment we have now.  It is my favorite Toy Story.

Finding Nemo, 2003

I don’t know if it’s my favorite Pixar film, though.  It depends on the day, but most of the time that distinction goes to Finding Nemo.  I first saw it when I was twenty, a decade before my first kid was born, but it has greatly influenced how I parent.  The conversation between Dory and Marlin in the whale, the idea that keeping anything from happening to your kid cuts both ways, the leap of faith, the mantra of “just keep swimming,” the notion that your kids don’t just want, but need to have independence - it’s all there, in Pixar’s stunning ocean animation.  I get choked up just thinking about it.  “Now go have an adventure!”

Honorable Mentions:

Forrest Gump, 1994

I loved this movie.  I love Tom Hanks in this movie.  I would watch it in snippets during college, while I ate dinner or lunch or just needed a quick study break.  But it’s been years since I last saw it, and I wonder if it still holds up.  It’s a Boomer movie made when the Boomers were - basically, just a little older than we old Millennials are now.  It’s American history in the last half of the twentieth century, but the big events - Vietnam, Civil Rights, even AIDS - are filtered through the lens of a straight white man who kinda wanders into history but doesn’t really get why the moments are historic.  I feel like it’s a film I appreciated at a certain time, but wouldn’t love as much now.

Avengers: Endgame, 2019

There just hasn’t been enough time for this movie to make the list.  Ask about it again in ten years.  Although, to be honest, I haven’t seen the whole thing since I saw it in theaters, and I fear it won’t live up.  It was the best movie-going experience I’ve ever had.  The crowd was so into it, and the last battle had everyone, me included, screaming at the screen.  Part of what makes Endgame so special to me is that, among the three big franchises that ended last year (Avengers, Star Wars, Game of Thrones), this one actually stuck the landing.  And yes, I could argue that Steve Rogers’ end doesn’t actual make any sense and deprives Peggy Carter of her agency - but in the emotional moment of the film, it worked.  That portal scene is the culmination of twenty-plus films, and I still can’t believe it works as well as it does.

Thanks again for this! I second tagging @lerayon for this.  I feel like I’m kinda cold-calling mutuals from our Arrow days, so no pressure.  But I’d love to hear what @machawicket @dust2dust34 @dettiot @theshipsfirstmate​ have on their lists.

[thinkolicity]

Arrow 8x03

Eeeeeeeee omg. That ending thoo. I enjoyed this episode way more than last week’s, and not only because BS with her confuzzled bs were not in it - thank u lord for sparing me.

Bonus points to me for remembering Italy entered Daylight Savings Time this past weekend so Arrow aired 1 hour ealier than usual. Screaming at 3 am is more acceptable than 4 am.

Anyway, let’s quickly not-recap! I’ve been taking notes on my phone.

SPOILERS

Ah Nanda Parbat..land of glorious memories and pains.

Queen siblings fight yas. My baby Theaaa I missed her, she’s so pretty.

Confirmed - again, in case we forgot - Mia was named after Moira and not after Thea’s alias in Corto Maltese back in Season 3.

Theroy are still...not Theroy. I’m sad.

Nah stahp it Oliver, you’re not gonna die. I say so. Common sense says so.

Mia says “frack” like her mamaaa! I’m sure it’s not the 1st time we heard it, but I was surprised anyway.

Mia’s also not taking “no” for an answer tonight.

But Lyla bb u are investigating ARGUS corruption, you cannot trust anyone but John and still you are lying to him about your involvement with Mar Novu!!! Beaucoup problemo, Calvin Lyla!

Talia al Ghul, hola. You owe Oliver and he’s come to collect.

“I see you survived prison” why yes, Talia he did.

Tell us Talia, is The Monitor a faux? A fraud? To the catacombs we go. 

Meanwhile in the future William keeps being the comic relief I need; he’s so goofy I love him #mustprotect

“You are afraid of losing your brother” Zoe gets it.

So Dyla are on a mission in Kasnia. They have to rescue Sandra Hawke and lil Connor. They pretty.

In Nanda Parbat Talia delights us with some local lore.

Thea speaks arabic.

“Why can’t everything just be easy” oh Thea my precious, same.

Overprotective Big Bro Oliver™ is back..and with good reasons, my poor son.

Ugh Talia ffs. Don’t you just love that Oliver wants to do his stuff in peace but he always unwillingly gets involved in other people’s businesses.

So basically Talia has to stop some woman named Athena, I think, from taking Ra’s al Ghul (I think) sword buried deep in the catacombs. We can’t have our rival restore the LoA!!

“Since when have I ever cared about virtue?” Lmao Miaaaa.

“You are the only family I have left” Miaaaaa 😭 And BONUS: “Oh and if you tell anyone about this conversation, I’m going to kill you myself” yes we love these Queen Siblings Feels.

More old school QSFs with Oliver and Thea having a heart to heart on the side of a mountain.

“To survive death you must embrace it” Seeee?? This is why you’re not gonna die Oliver. You are embracing your, apparent, fate but you’re gonna come out on top. 

Little Connor is so cute :3

This episode is turning into a Relic Hunter episode. Indiana Jones would be pround..wait wat.

So Art Nouveau Mar Novu is not trying to prevent the crisis, au contraire *pretends to be shocked*

Thea defeated Talia in combat so she’s technically the new leader of the LoA..but nope! Goodbye League of Assassins welcome League of Heores with both Thea & Talia as leaders yass, gurl power. I want Nyssa too, thooo.

“Whatever happens, promise me you’re going to remember the good times” OH LYLA. Child. Famous words.

“See you later... and please don’t die” Thea gets it. Thea & Oliver’s goodbye was the saddest thing ever.

“No Hōzen this time?” “Felicity gave it to William”. 😭😭😭

“You just don’t know when to quit” oh JJ..I love my SmoaknHawke but listen...Enemies to Lovers is my trope. And now I want it.

Zoeeeeeeeeeeee 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 oooh Mia’s gonna blame herself now 😭😭😭

An Oscar for Kat pls.

Omfg yaaassssss! That ending! Who screamed?? I screamed!! Somehow FTA is in Star City 2019 and I live. Family reunion 😭😭😭😭 Kinda.

Man this episode was noice. Very noice. I mean I liked it, it kept me awake so 🤷

ETA: I managed to not notice KC directed the episode. It’s tainted nowwww lmao, I’m joking. Bravo.

[fuerimmer-andeiner-backe]

Brombeeren pflücken mit unserem kleinen Oscar Indiana, wir lieben dich so sehr, klein Indy. @lookingforlibertalia

[preface2adreamplay]

Under Your Spell (Chapter 23) - Oi To the World

Summary: A Jared Padalecki/OFC /Oscar Isaac fiction.

Christmas in New York.

Chapter warnings: Swearing.

Chapter WC: 2,804

Christmas was upon her so quick it made her head spin. Stef was standing at the airport arrival halls, checking her bag every few minutes in case her passport jumped out and made its way home.

Her nerves were pinging like overstretched guitar strings. She spent every Christmas with Darius and Oscar, why was this one making her antsy?

They had misplaced her suitcase, that was irksome. The kind man at the lost baggage desk assured her it would make its way to her address before Christmas Day. With three days to go, she wanted to believe him, but figured she should hit up some stores just in case.

Stef had learned years ago that if the airline ‘lost’ your bag it would either arrive very late or not at all, several years before while on tour, she had ended up playing a show in her boots, grimy jeans and her bikini top because she had nothing else that was clean. That was a messy tour for everyone. Since then, she kept a bag with the essentials with her while she traveled; clean underwear, a spare shirt, make up, toiletries and...oh fuck, she remembered that she hadn’t packed pjs.

‘Mom!’ Darius was elbowing his way through the crowd of people in the arrivals hall, a big smile on his perfect face.

‘Hey kid, how are you?’ Stef pulled him into a hug, her chin resting on his broad shoulder.

‘Good, dad’s outside, there is literally no parking, this place is crazy!’

‘Well, it is Christmas.’

Darius looked about for her suitcase, giving her a look. ‘What? No presents?’

‘Airline lost my bag, I’m annoyed.’

He nodded sympathetically. ‘Come on, before dad is in a bad mood too.’

Oscar leaned in to kiss her cheek, ‘Hey momma.’

Stef rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t make me say it.’

Oscar smiled, his hand fondling the keys in the ignition.

‘Ok, hey daddy.’

Pumping his fist he started the car. ‘I’ve waited so long for you to do that.’

Darius slid into the back seat, missing their exchange. ‘The airline lost mom’s bag.’

‘Aw, shit, no.’ Oscar pouted.

‘I got my essentials,’ Stef patted the bag at her feet.

‘What a way to start the holidays. But, I got the eggnog ready, the place looks amazing, Dar helped me with the decorating,’ he held his fingers out, counting each thing to look forward to.

‘And of course, Indiana Jones is waiting for us.’

Stef felt the whoosh of excitement, it was truly a tradition at this point. Peeking over at her ex lovers face, she saw the blood rush to his cheeks, he was positively giddy.

Darius was texting, ignoring his parents. Stef wondered how many more Christmases she would be spending with him before he started his own traditions.

Oscar nudged her elbow, ‘hey, this’ll be fun. You’ll learn to chill.’

‘My mind doesn’t chill, you know that.’

‘We’ll see,’ he replied, before starting the engine.

***

Moments after dropping her bag at the door and pulling off her boots, there was a cup of eggnog in her hand. Darius was on some handheld gaming device that Stef didn’t recognise (Oscar always organised the tech gifts) and Oscar was lazing in his sweats, guitar in his lap, strumming mindlessly.

This is what it was for Stef at Christmas. Up late singing with Oscar while Darius slept curled up on the rug by the fire, at least until he grew a bit too old to sleep to get excited about Father Christmas visiting.

‘You could at least take off your coat and relax.’

Oscar leaned his head against the back of the sofa, his curls falling against his brow.

Stef was wearing her warmest, fluffiest sweater, it had been mind-numbingly cold when she left home that morning, but Oscars living room was lit up with Christmas lights, candles and a fire burning, and honestly she was starting to sweat a little.

‘I’m gonna shower first if you don’t mind.’

Oscar shrugged, turning back to the guitar, strumming a few familiar chords.

Stef noticed her album propped up against he wall next to his stereo, she felt the warmth in her tummy at the idea of him listening to it. He was always so supportive.

The shower pressure was thunderous, the water beating down on her already sensitive skin. Wincing, she reached over and turned down the spray. Any other day she would have loved it. But, not after the last few love making sessions she’d had with Jared. Each time they started making out it had been nice, soft, and ended rough and intense, him bending her body to his will, trying to find different ways to outdo the last time she came. Every orgasm he pulled from her was done with love, she knew, but her body was starting to fold in upon itself. That was just what Jared wanted.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she could see the bruises on her hips, her ribs. Pressing against the finger marks on her thighs she could feel him there, the hot sting of him buried inside her, his breath on her neck.

Her nipples were hard at the thought, remembering him in the bathroom, the fogged up glass of the shower cold against her palms as she tried to hold herself up while he fucked her. Then afterwards, he took her from behind while she watched in the mirror, seeing his mouth fall open while he slid inside her, one hand wrapped around her neck, bending her over the sink. Each thrust of his hips brought her to the edge, his fingers grabbing hold of her hip to keep her steady, legs shaking beneath her.

Even now, two days later, she could still feel him. And she missed it. Missed the power he had over her, trusting him to do as he wished with her.

Her fingers were trailing against the marks on her shoulder, teeth marks and hickeys, trailing down to her breast and right there by her nipple, a fresh bite. That had hurt. His fingers were inside her, all of them, ripping her apart as she came hard, his teeth sinking into her. There was nothing else in the world like it, the throb of her pussy, swollen from his hands and his mouth, before he even started fucking her.

Stef moved her hand between her thighs, her head falling forward. If she was quiet, she could get herself off in a couple of minutes thinking of Jared’s mouth on hers, grabbing her face between his hands, throwing his head back to get the hair out of his eyes. The way his eyes closed and he swallowed hard when he entered her.

‘I know you will come when I tell you to.’ He had said, holding her head in his hands, his forehead against hers.

Her cunt was aching to be filled, her fingers weren’t enough, but the thoughts of him was, she was dripping when she came, biting her lip hard so no one would hear her.

Oh god, she thought, the fuck is wrong with you??

After she cleaned up, scolded herself again and slipped on the extra pair of clean clothes, she checked no part of her skin was visible. The choice of sweater covered her neck, only a little of the burn on her right wrist could be seen. She stared at it for a moment, poking at it with her finger. She probably should put some cream on it, it stung a little, she had pulled against her restraints, it was gonna happen.

‘You ok in there?’ Oscar called from the other side of the door.

Stef opened the door, letting the steam escape. ‘Have you forgotten what it’s like living with a woman? We take our time in here.’

Oscar looked sheepish, ‘sorry. But the pizza is here.’

‘Pizza! You never said there was gonna be pizza!’ Stef hopped onto his back as he walked into the kitchen, his strong legs bracing to keep himself upright.

‘Have you taken your pills today, Effie?’ He laughed, one of her arms was around his neck. ‘You’re choking me a bit.’

‘Sorry,’ Stef jumped down and grabbed a slice of the biggest pizza she had ever seen. ‘All veg?’

‘All veg,’ Oscar stuffed his mouth and licked his thumb.

‘So how’s life?’

‘Same as it always is.’ Stef answered between mouthfuls. Darius had a plate perched on one knee in the living room, his ear to his phone.

‘His girlfriend,’ Oscar nodded toward him.

‘Cute.’

Oscar shrugged again. ‘I’d like to say we had our shit sorted when we were his age, but who does?’

‘If anything, we were in disarray.’

Both of them sat quietly studying their son for a minute.

‘Life sucks and then you die,’ Stef said quietly, feeling Oscar’s eyes turning to her.

She laughed, then snorted, causing Oscar to fall into a fit of laughter.

Darius turned around in his chair to look at them, rolled his eyes and continued his conversation.

‘Life doesn’t suck now though, right? You’re happier than I’ve seen you in a long time.’ The invitation to talk about Jared was there, she knew, but she didn’t want to offer up any information.

It was her turn to shrug. ‘I suppose.’

She heard him sigh. ‘Come on, eat up. We have so much tv to catch up on.’ Oscar knew she would relax after a while. Always afraid to tell him anything, lest the rug be pulled from under her. He understood, he was partly, or mostly to blame for the rift between them. Actually, he thought, he was all to blame.

She was better with him now, this relationship had brought out the playful side of her again, he had missed it more than he cared to admit.

‘I got you a gift you can open now!’ He suddenly burst out, startling her.

‘It’s not Christmas yet, Oscar.’

‘No, it’s perfect timing since your bag isn’t here.’ He hopped off the kitchen stool and jogged over to the tree, grabbing a nice sized package. Stef followed him in, curious as to what was going to sort out the no clothes issue she was having.

Darius had finished the call, looking a little glum. ‘Open it, mom, he seems real excited about it.’

Oscar was smiling, eyes twinkling as he watched her rip open the perfectly wrapped gift. Heavy material fell open in her hands, ‘Oscar, what the hell is this?’

Both men were laughing, Darius bent over holding his ribs.

‘Amazing, Oscar thank you. A Star Wars onesie with your face all over it.’

‘Hell yeah,’ he choked, ‘and look’, he pointed to the crotch. His face really was adorning all the important parts.

Stef buried her face in it, she couldn’t hold back the laughter. ‘Thanks so much, it’s everything I ever wanted.’

‘Should have gotten Dar one as well.’

‘No thank you.’ Darius piped up, shaking head, throwing back a glass of eggnog.

‘You made that way strong, dad, jeeeesus.’

‘Yep, trying to get your mom drunk.’

‘Ugh, please no. You’ll be up all night.’

Oscar’s eyebrows shot up with surprise, ‘Darius, what the hell way is that to talk about your mother.’

‘Ugh, I meant singing and playing guitar. Oh god you guys are gross.’

‘Hey, no arguments. I have been here an hour!’ Stef emptied her own glass and shoved it in Oscar’s direction, jiggling her hand so he knew she wanted a refill. ‘I won’t say no to getting a little fucked up.’

‘Now we’re talking,’ Oscar flicked Darius’s ear, ‘follow your mom’s lead, she’s the sensible one here.’

While Oscar disappeared to get refills, Stef’s phone started buzzing in her jeans pocket. She slid out onto the back porch cursing the cold air as she answered the call.

‘Hey girl, get to NY ok?’

‘Yeah, I did, not here long and the airline lost my bag.’ She grumbled.

‘Aw man, shitty.’

‘How is everything on your end?’

Jared sighed heavily, ‘home and surrounded by children and I need a break already.’ Stef could hear someone screaming in the background, following by crying.

‘Shit, hang on.’ He disappeared for a moment. ‘It’s ok, it’s been handled.’

‘So what’s the plan for the next few days?’

Stef ran through the general stuff that always happened around Christmas time. Some shopping, some sleeping, drinking, playing cards and writing songs. Standard stuff.

‘And you’re with Oscar and Darius?’ Jared queried, as if he didn’t already know the answer.

‘Yep, same as always. Though, I wonder how long before Darius doesn’t want to hang with us for the holidays anymore.’

‘I still hang with my folks,’ Jared offered, trying to cheer her up.

‘Sure, but if he goes and spends it in a different country or gets married it’ll just be me and Oscar staring at each other. How awkward would that be.’

‘You guys don’t get along if he’s not there?’

‘We do, but we know each other a long time, it’s not exactly exciting.’

Jared chuckled, ‘Christmas is never the same unless you are a kid or have kids.’

Stef shivered, ‘agreed, I’m in the yard and man, it is fucking cold here. I wish I had you to keep me warm.’

Jared hummed on the other end of the line. ‘That’d be nice. I most likely won’t get to see you until after the new year, probably the end of January.’

End of January, a whole month to go, Stef thought unhappily.

His family needed him more than she did, that was for sure. She was being greedy with his time, wanting every spare moment he had to be spent with her.

The familiar gut clenching sensation was back, oh why did she have to feel for him? That wasn’t in the plan. That wasn’t what she had wanted. Honestly, she had forgotten how it was when you met someone and fell for them over time. It hadn’t happened for her in a long, long time. She hadn’t fallen for anyone since Oscar.

Stef turned to look in at the living room where Darius was still eating pizza, talking to his father. Oscar was gazing back at Stef, nodding in agreement to whatever Darius was saying.

Had Oscar ever fallen for anyone else since her? She had been sure years ago, he seemed pretty serious with someone for a while, but that fizzled out.

He was intense. Everything about him made her tingle, even now with his eyes on her, Stef rubbed her neck unconsciously, wondering what the hell was thinking.

‘Stef?’ Jared was laughing, ‘you still there?’

‘Sorry, distracted.’

‘Yeah, no kiddin, want me to call you back later?’

‘Sure, go have fun with your family.’

‘You go have fun with yours.’

My family, she thought, stepping back into the warmth. This was her family. Sighing happily, she threw her phone onto the sofa and took the eggnog from Oscar’s hand, their fingers brushing for a second.

He didn’t say anything, everything he wanted to say was in his eyes, his perfect expressive eyes.

‘I think I’ll slip into that onesie, the eggnog has made me feel like jeans aren’t the right thing to lounge in.’

Oscar raised an eyebrow and watched her make her way back to the bathroom, she was humming away to herself.

Darius burst through the door when she had changed, she could hear him release the loudest piss as she giggled her way into the living room.

‘Close the damn door, no one wants to hear that, buddy.’ Oscar shouted. ‘Ha, look at you.’ He eyed Stef, asking her to do a twirl.

She spun on her tip toes.

Oscar licked his lips, ’Well, you did tell me once that you had a beautiful place for me to put my face.’

Stef looked down at her crotch to see Oscar’s serious ‘Poe’ face look back her.

‘Oscar, you’re a bad man,’ she sighed.

His nose crinkled as he smiled at her, ‘ready for a movie?’

‘Yeah,’ Stef threw herself down onto the sofa, loosening her ponytail. Oscar sat at the other end, grabbing her feet and gently placing her legs across his lap.

Stef looked across at him while he settled in, pushing at a cushion until he got it at the perfect angle, his fingers working the remote.

The opening scene started up, Darius joined them with a beer in a glass she remembered stealing from a pub in the city.

Smiling to herself, she caught Oscar looking at her. ‘Ready?’

Stef grinned back at him, ‘ready.’

Let’s just relax and forget about the world outside of this house for the next three days, she told herself.

No band, no music, no complicated relationships. Just her, Oscar and their son.

[frasier-crane-style]

Elseworlds

Well, Tumblr isn’t dead yet and the CW-DC just did a big crossover, so I think it’s time to make fun of the CW........ for the last time.

Did you know Tim Allen actually ended Home Improvement after season 8 because he knew the show couldn’t maintain its level of quality and was on the way downhill? Tim Allen has more creative integrity than anyone involved in the making of Supernatural. Think about that.

Anyhoo, lots to digest! Largely, this crossover felt to me weirdly lackluster and obligatory, like the whole thing was just a trailer for the oncoming Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. It just felt unambitious, which is the last thing an ‘event’ like this should feel like. In fact, it felt a little like I imagine the result would be of filming a bunch of people playing DC Universe Online. We visit Smallville and see Lois Lane! We go to Gotham and meet Batman...’s cousin, and fight a breakout at Arkham Asylum, complete with Mr. Freeze...’s gun and the Scarecrow...’s fear gas. Then, we wrap the whole thing up with an Evil Superman, because God knows, DC never gets bored of that.

-Petty nitpick department: Batwoman just standing around on rooftops looks weird. Not only does it give the odd impression that she’s spent the entire time between episodes just, uh, standing, but c’mon--you’re supposed to crouch. Or at least hunch. Everybody knows that!

-Weirdly missed opportunity to have Ollie do the Flash narration, considering all the other opening narrations are futzed with.

-The whole thing is pretty much a glorified body swap--Stephen Amell is playing Barry Allen and vice versa. I can see how TPTB would be too pressed for time to explain a whole ‘nother continuity where Barry Allen became Green Arrow and Oliver Queen became the Flash, but still, it’s not as much fun.

-They also wholeheartedly borrow the thing of Ollie having to be happy to use Barry’s powers and Barry having to be mad to use Ollie’s ‘powers’ from the episode of Teen Titans where Raven and Starfire switched bodies. So, I guess, congratulations on making the central plot point of your crossover the same as a half-hour episode of a children’s cartoon.

-Remember that time Barry was too happy and too confident in his abilities, so his dad died?  

-They got a good actress to play the Lois Lane to this Clark Kent, considering they both just look kinda awkward? His chin looks like he had a face transplant done and her nose looks like someone is constantly Photoshopping it.

NHHHA, He-Man!!

-Don’t do a callback to Smallville, show. Oliver Queen has now spent more time in costume as the Flash than Tom Welling did as Superman.

-Direct fucking hit when Oliver said that Barry couldn’t take a crap without getting a peptalk from his team, but on the other hand, Oliver can’t take a crap without Felicity wondering what it means for their relationship. “Oliver didn’t tell me he needed to go to the bathroom! Why wouldn’t he trust me?”

-I’m just saying, last season on Agents of SHIELD, pretty much every character was in a relationship--there was not so much damn drama. It’s a fucking body-swap plotline, guys. You don’t need to treat it like it could lead to someone’s divorce! Really, at this point, if you’re in a relationship with a crazy superhero, you should be used to it. 

-(Although I suppose I’m a little hard to please here, since over on Legends of Tomorrow they suddenly expect us to care about Constantine rescuing the love of his life when we’ve seen their relationship for all of four seconds. But hey, like I said, Agents of SHIELD manages a happy medium and finds time for Ghost Rider to show up.)

-For the post-apocalyptic hellscape they make Gotham out to be, the police respond awfully fast to disturbances.

-”We’re on the corner of Burton and Nolan!” Groooooan.

-Ruby Rose, everyone: the Less Convincing Michelle Rodriguez. It’d probably a bad sign for how compelling Kate Kane is as a character that everyone would rather talk about where Batman is and why Batman would leave. And, speaking as someone who both watched Birds of Prey and The Dark Knight Rises--Rocky, that ‘Batman Retires’ plot point never works!

-(Is Batwoman even that popular a character to get her own spin-off? I suppose she’s ‘TV show’ popular, but still--I think she’s one of those Batfamily members that is somewhere behind Alfred but ahead of Ace, right next to Azrael. And I do think it’s hilarious that TPTB were insistent on casting a real, authentic lesbian!!!--and then immediately got complaints that they didn’t cast a Jew. Oh, Ziggy, will you ever win?)

-I don’t want to be too hard on Ruby Rose here. Yes, she doesn’t showcase anything other than one mode: Snide And Slightly Pouty (Stephen Amell ain’t winning no Oscars, but he can differentiate between Ollie As A Civilian and Ollie In A Halloween Costume). But the writing does her no favors in making a case for this character as being deserving of any amount of screentime, besides the fact that she dresses like Batman, the guy we really care about. She’s a heroine, as are featured variously in every Arrowverse show. She’s queer, as is Alex Danvers, Sara Lance, John Constantine, et al. She’s rich to the point of having unlimited resources, as are (sometimes) Oliver Queen, Barry Allen, Kara through her billionaire friends. She lives in a crime-ridden hellhole, as Ollie has done for several seasons. What makes any of this compelling? The Gotham setting? Arrow has already turned itself into an effective facsimile of that, to the point of having Ra’s al Ghul show up to make Queen into his son-in-law. Arkham Asylum seems completely generic, as does Wayne Tower. It’s all just a different part of Vancouver; who cares?

-Likewise, Supergirl, speaking to you as a TV show--you really should either be adamant that Kara is heterosexual or give her a weirdly flirtatious scene with Batwoman, but not both. I know you need, need, need to let the audience know Batwoman is a lesbian...

Pictured: The CW subtly letting you know about a character’s minority status.

But c’mon. We’ve been over this.

-Speaking of minority status, maybe it’s not the best idea to let slip that John Diggle is an AU John Stewart. Yes, there’s ten brothas in the DC Universe, and four of them are actually the other six. There are so few Negros on Earth-1 that they had to make Barack Obama into a superhero. The Batfamily has two black folks and they’re both related to Lucius Fox. There’s so few black people in Metropolis that Black Lightning knows who his father is!

Folks, the DC Universe is so white, the Black Lanterns are all dead. The DC Universe is so white, they don’t even have black Kryptonite. The DC Universe is so white, even Black Condor is a honky. The DC Universe is so white, they don’t even need a Justice League of Africa, they just have a Batman of Africa! The DC Universe is so white, the blackest guy on the Justice League is a refrigerator with one-half of a brother’s face on top of it. The DC Universe is so white, they named the black woman on the Teen Titans after a bug that’s half yellow! Now Milestone, the Milestone Universe is black. It’s so black, Aquaman is the most powerful superhero there, because he’s the only one who can swim!

(-I’m planning on being chased off of Tumblr like Indiana Jones after he snags an ancient artifact.)

-Would it be that hard for them to go to Arkham and run into the Ventriloquist or Orca or someone memorable, so long as they have access to the Batman toy chest? We got, uhh, Lady Who Can Pick Up Gun and Psycho Pirate I Guess? Like I said, unambitious. Wouldn’t it be so much cooler if they got someone from Gotham to film just one little cameo? 

-Also, considering the sex scandal these shows have had, maybe it’s not the best idea to joke about their EPs being depraved maniacs? (Was Guggenheim the one who actually got MeToo’d? Because if so, Dude--Not Funny)

-The show had to character-shill Batwoman so hard that Ollie and Barry stopped being fear-gassed just to reiterate that she is too an interesting character in her own right! (If the characters have all heard of Batman, wouldn’t they have heard of Batwoman too if she’s been an active vigilante more recently?)

-But who cares about four unstoppable superheroes teaming up when we can find out how Felicity feels about her relationship? Just a thought--if you fight with your SO all the time about nearly everything, maybe you shouldn’t be in a relationship. 

-Long story short, Doctor Destiny rewrites reality again to make Barry, Oliver, and Kara into supervillains in a world where he’s the hero. He also makes the other characters into pointless cameos, and weirdly gets criticized by Kara for... not giving himself a sex-change operation by becoming Superman instead of Supergirl? He doesn’t have gender dysphoria, Supergirl. I thought she was all about trans issues this season?

-Like, I don’t know, if a woman used a magic lamp to wish herself President, would anyone criticize her making herself a lady President instead of a man President?

-I guess it wouldn’t be Supergirl unless they crowbarred in an extremely awkward girlpower message where Superman and Lois agree that Supergirl/women in general are more useful than men, despite the fact that all Supergirl did was the exact same thing as Barry, while Superman and Oliver fought Dr. Destiny, and all Lois did was call in a bunch of men as reinforcements and then need to be rescued.

-But like I said about being unambitious--wouldn’t it be fun to see our heroes be forced to team up with a few supervillains to save the day? Instead, we just have Cisco playing a villain (something he’s done numerous times before). They get his help, have a weirdly poor showing in a fight against Jimmy Olsen, get Superman’s help again, yadda yadda. 

-We also get Superman proposing to Lois Lane. Yeah, considering they’ve been in a relationship at least since Supergirl Season 1, she’s carrying his child, and they’re planning to move to an alien world together, yeah, I should think so? I know Superman probably isn’t a Republican, but does anyone think he’d be so blase about putting a ring on it? Hell, if nothing else, he should want to tie the knot before Ma or Pa bite it. Couldn’t they have just made it that he wants to renew his vows with Lois in a Kryptonian ceremony or some such? 

[my-awesome-roadtrip]

Still Day 14

Finally we reached our destination, Indiana PA. 

We had come to see a museum dedicated to its most famous son, James Maitland Stewart.

If I’m honest I’m not a great Jimmy Stewart fan, but it was on the way and it was a good stop to stretch our legs.

We were quite surprised, Indiana is a largish thriving town buzzing with people, the shops were open and brightly painted and it’s  obvious to me it’s an affluent place.

So we parked up quite easily and walked to the Museum which was on the third floor of the town library.

What was astonishing was the size of the Museum and the info about Jimmy himself.

A really very sweet lady called Joy gave us an orientation talk and after asking where we from she actually said 

“ Thank you for making the time to visit this museum”  How welcoming is that?  We learnt so much about this home town boy, that he joined the army and was promoted to Brigadier General and was awarded the Croix de Guerre.  Jimmy also made over 80 films ranging from frothy comedies, to westerns to the suspenseful, he won an Oscar for The Philadelphia Story ( when his father heard that he had won “ some sort of award” , he asked his son to send it back home so he could display it in the window of the hardware shop that he owned).  There was also an exhibition about Grace Kelly which held my attention for quite a while, included were some her original dresses.

We left after about an hour with a load of instructions from Joy on how to locate Jimmy’s house. We didn’t have time, but she was just so kind to do that for us.

So we are having two nights amongst Ohio’s Amish community at The Waterview Lodge which is run by them, it’s self catering which is ok with us and gives us a chance to eat super healthily.

Last night we watched fireflies amongst the trees, little dots of lights darting about in the darkness, from one point to another and this morning the bullfrogs started their chorus of burps and croaks.

We have spent around 4 hours driving the Amish County Byway, taking in the Amish culture which co exists quite happily with the mainstream community.

Now here comes the however, things have changed a lot from the last time we came here around 5 years ago, it seems to me that this Amish community is a huge money making exercise, I am sure there are still orthodox families amongst them, but there are lot of Amish shops selling a lot of kiss me quick Amish tat. There are also so many cheese making shopes, I lost count, Walnut Creek Cheese, Heini’s Cheese Outlet, Guiggisberg Cheese but to name a few. Also there is a fella named Yoder who owns almost everything in Millersburg.

Ok, I admit I’ve  based my opinion of the Amish on the film “ Witness” starring Harrison Ford, so perhaps I’m a bit ill informed, but seeing Amish women pushing trolleys around Walmart just hasn’t done it for me, in my mind I see them tilling the land, sewing clothes and making home made cakes, what I saw instead were women riding super fast on mortised bikes, as for the men, not much sign of them.

[bcntancort-blog]

[ oscar isaac / cismale [he/him ] ⌋ ━━ look its JIM HOPPER.. you know, the ( canon ) character from stranger things! in our world they’re EMMANUEL BETANCORT, a thirty nine year old heterosexual working as a university professor. they have a rep for being passionate & stoic ; we all agree [ heroes by david bowie ] should play when they walk in. they ( have ) regained ( all ) of their real memories. played by yadira [she/her/pst].

 hey what’s up guyyyys! bringing you that quality trash with the introduction to jam hooper, please bear with me i have never played this wonderful character but i will try my hardest!

before THE CURSE:

Jim Hopper was loveable---- not, he was a cop, a regular old cop who wanted to do the right thing, but he had also gone to war so he had seen some shit in his day.

He was happy once upon a time, he lived in New York for a while with his wife and daughter. Unfortunately his daughter passed away and he couldn’t keep his marriage so he moved back to Hawkins, Indiana.

He got tangled up in the government helping Joyce Byers with her son and along the way adopted Jane Hopper as his own and he lived happily ever after---- in secret because no one knew Jane existed.

about EMMANUEL:

Emmanuel was raised by Cuban immigrants, and he himself was an immigrant as well settling in Miami, but though it to be too stereotypical so he moved to New York to pursue an education--- once he turned 18.

Emmanuel loved history, sociology and basically he just loved learning. So he pursued higher education and eventually landed a tenure teaching position in Port Vista, right after his divorce I might add.

Unfortunately, he knows his whole life is a lie because he knows he is Jim, which confuses him to this day but wants to figure out what happened but most importantly find his little girl, Jane.

[blackkudos]

Morgan Freeman

Morgan Freeman (born June 1, 1937) is an American actor, producer and narrator. Freeman won an Academy Award in 2005 for Best Supporting Actor with Million Dollar Baby (2004), and he has received Oscar nominations for his performances in Street Smart (1987), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and Invictus (2009). He has also won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Freeman has appeared in many other box office hits, including Glory (1989), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Seven (1995), Deep Impact (1998), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Bruce Almighty (2003), The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005–2012), The Lego Movie (2014), and Lucy (2014). He rose to fame as part of the cast of the 1970s children's program The Electric Company. Morgan Freeman is ranked as the 4th highest box office star with over $4.316 billion total box office gross, an average of $74.4 million per film.

Early life and education

Morgan Freeman was born on June 1, 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the son of Mayme Edna (née Revere; 1912–2000), a teacher, and Morgan Porterfield Freeman, a barber who died on April 27, 1961, from cirrhosis. He has three older siblings. According to a DNA analysis, some of his ancestors were from Niger. Freeman was sent as an infant to his paternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi. He moved frequently during his childhood, living in Greenwood, Mississippi; Gary, Indiana; and finally Chicago, Illinois. When Freeman was 16 years old, he almost died of pneumonia.

Freeman made his acting debut at age nine, playing the lead role in a school play. He then attended Broad Street High School, a building which serves today as Threadgill Elementary School, in Greenwood, Mississippi. At age 12, he won a statewide drama competition, and while still at Broad Street High School, he performed in a radio show based in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1955, he graduated from Broad Street, but turned down a partial drama scholarship from Jackson State University, opting instead to enlist in the United States Air Force and served as an Automatic Tracking Radar Repairman, rising to the rank of Airman 1st Class. Freeman's service portrait appears in his character's funeral scene in The Bucket List.

After four years in the military, he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he took acting lessons at the Pasadena Playhouse and dancing lessons in San Francisco in the early 1960s and worked as a transcript clerk at Los Angeles City College. During this period, Freeman also lived in New York City, working as a dancer at the 1964 World's Fair, and in San Francisco, where he was a member of the Opera Ring musical theater group. He acted in a touring company version of The Royal Hunt of the Sun, and also appeared as an extra in the 1965 film The Pawnbroker. Freeman made his off-Broadway debut in 1967, opposite Viveca Lindfors in The Nigger Lovers (about the Freedom Riders during the American Civil Rights Movement), before debuting on Broadway in 1968's all-black version of Hello, Dolly! which also starred Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway.

He continued to be involved in theater work and received the Obie Award in 1980 for the title role in Coriolanus. In 1984, he received his second Obie Award for his role as the preacher in The Gospel at Colonus. Freeman also won a Drama Desk Award and a Clarence Derwent Award for his role as a wino in The Mighty Gents. He received his third Obie Award for his role as a chauffeur for a Jewish widow in Driving Miss Daisy, which was adapted for the screen in 1989.

Career

Acting career

Although his first credited film appearance was in 1971's Who Says I Can't Ride a Rainbow?, Freeman first became known in the American media through roles on the soap opera Another World and the PBS kids' show The Electric Company (notably as Easy Reader, Mel Mounds the DJ, and Vincent the Vegetable Vampire[clip]).

During his tenure with The Electric Company, "(i)t was a very unhappy period in his life," according to Joan Ganz Cooney. Freeman himself admitted in an interview that he never thinks about his tenure with the show at all. Since then, Freeman has considered his Street Smart (1987) character Fast Black, rather than any of the characters he played in The Electric Company, to be his breakthrough role.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Freeman began playing prominent supporting roles in many feature films, earning him a reputation for depicting wise, fatherly characters. As he gained fame, he went on to bigger roles in films such as the chauffeur Hoke in Driving Miss Daisy, and Sergeant Major Rawlins in Glory (both in 1989). In 1994, he portrayed Red, the redeemed convict in the acclaimed The Shawshank Redemption. In the same year he was a member of the jury at the 44th Berlin International Film Festival.

He also starred in such films as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Unforgiven, Seven, and Deep Impact. In 1997, Freeman, together with Lori McCreary, founded the film production company Revelations Entertainment, and the two co-head its sister online film distribution company ClickStar. Freeman also hosts the channel Our Space on ClickStar, with specially crafted film clips in which he shares his love for the sciences, especially space exploration and aeronautics.

After three previous nominations—a supporting actor nomination for Street Smart, and leading actor nominations for Driving Miss Daisy and The Shawshank Redemption—he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Million Dollar Baby at the 77th Academy Awards. Freeman is recognized for his distinctive voice, making him a frequent choice for narration. In 2005 alone, he provided narration for two films, War of the Worlds and the Academy Award-winning documentary film March of the Penguins.

Freeman appeared as God in the hit film Bruce Almighty and its sequel, Evan Almighty, as well as Lucius Fox in the critical and commercial success Batman Begins and its sequels, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. He starred in Rob Reiner's 2007 film The Bucket List, opposite Jack Nicholson. He teamed with Christopher Walken and William H. Macy for the comedy The Maiden Heist, which was released direct to video due to financial problems with the distribution company. In 2008, Freeman returned to Broadway to co-star with Frances McDormand and Peter Gallagher for a limited engagement of Clifford Odets's play, The Country Girl, directed by Mike Nichols.

He had wanted to do a film based on Nelson Mandela for some time. At first he tried to get Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom adapted into a finished script, but it was not finalized. In 2007, he purchased the film rights to a book by John Carlin, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. Clint Eastwood directed the Nelson Mandela bio-pic titled Invictus, starring Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as rugby team captain Francois Pienaar.

In 2010, Freeman co-starred alongside Bruce Willis in Red. In 2013, Freeman appeared in the action-thriller Olympus Has Fallen, the science fiction drama Oblivion, and the comedy Last Vegas. In 2014, he co-starred in the action film Lucy.

In 2015, Freeman played the Chief Justice of the United States in the season two premiere of Madam Secretary (Freeman is also one of the series' executive producers).

Other work

Freeman made his directorial debut in 1993 with Bopha! for Paramount Pictures.

In July 2009, Freeman was one of the presenters at the 46664 Concert celebrating Nelson Mandela's birthday at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Freeman was the first American to record a par on Legend Golf & Safari Resort's Extreme 19th hole.

Effective January 4, 2010, Freeman replaced Walter Cronkite as the voiceover introduction to the CBS Evening News featuring Katie Couric as news anchor. CBS cited the need for consistency in introductions for regular news broadcasts and special reports as the basis for the change. As of 2010, Freeman is the host and narrator of the Discovery Channel television show, focused on physics outreach, Through the Wormhole.

He was featured on the opening track to B.o.B's second album Strange Clouds. The track "Bombs Away" features a prologue and epilogue (which leads into a musical outro) spoken by Freeman. In 2011, Freeman was featured with John Lithgow in the Broadway debut of Dustin Lance Black's play, 8, a staged reenactment of Perry v. Brown, the federal trial that overturned California's Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage. Freeman played Attorney David Boies. The production was held at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in New York City to raise money for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.

In 2015 Freeman directed "The Show Must Go On," the season two premiere of Madam Secretary.

Personal life

Family

From his early life, Freeman has two extramarital children; one of them is Alfonso Freeman.

Freeman was married to Jeanette Adair Bradshaw from October 22, 1967, until November 18, 1979.

He married Myrna Colley-Lee on June 16, 1984. The couple separated in December 2007. Freeman's attorney and business partner Bill Luckett announced in August 2008 that Freeman and his wife were in divorce proceedings. On September 15, 2010, their divorce was finalized in Mississippi.

Freeman and Colley-Lee adopted Freeman's stepgranddaughter from his first marriage, E'dena Hines, and raised her together. On August 16, 2015, 33-year-old Hines was murdered in New York City.

In 2008, the TV series African American Lives 2 revealed that some of Freeman's great-great-grandparents were slaves who migrated from North Carolina to Mississippi. Freeman discovered that his Caucasian maternal great-great-grandfather had lived with, and was buried beside, Freeman's African-American great-great-grandmother (in the segregated South, the two could not marry legally at the time). A DNA test on the series stated that he is descended in part from the Songhai and Tuareg peoples of Niger.

Religious views

In a 2012 interview with TheWrap, Freeman was asked if he considered himself atheist or agnostic. He replied, "It's a hard question because as I said at the start, I think we invented God. So if I believe in God, and I do, it's because I think I'm God." Freeman later said that his experience working on The Story of God with Morgan Freeman did not change his views on religion.

Properties

Freeman lives in Charleston, Mississippi, and New York City. He owns and operates Ground Zero, a blues club in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He formerly co-owned Madidi, a fine dining restaurant, also in Clarksdale.

Flying

At age 65, Freeman earned a private pilot's license. He owns or has owned at least three private aircraft, including a Cessna Citation 501 jet and a Cessna 414 twin-engine prop. In 2007 he purchased an Emivest SJ30 long-range private jet and took delivery in December 2009. He is certified to fly all of them.

Car accident

Freeman was injured in an automobile accident near Ruleville, Mississippi, on the night of August 3, 2008. The vehicle in which he was traveling, a 1997 Nissan Maxima, left the highway and flipped over several times. He and a female passenger, Demaris Meyer, were rescued from the vehicle using the "Jaws of Life". Freeman was taken via medical helicopter to The Regional Medical Center (The Med) hospital in Memphis. Police ruled out alcohol as a factor in the crash. Freeman was coherent following the crash, as he joked with a photographer about taking his picture at the scene. His left shoulder, arm, and elbow were broken in the crash, and he had surgery on August 5, 2008. Doctors operated for four hours to repair nerve damage in his shoulder and arm. On CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight he stated that he is left handed but cannot move the fingers of his left hand. He wears a compression glove to protect against blood pooling due to non-movement. His publicist announced he was expected to make a full recovery. Meyer, his passenger, sued him for negligence, claiming that he was drinking the night of the accident. Subsequently, the suit was settled.

Beekeeping

After becoming concerned with the decline of honeybees, Freeman decided to turn his 124-acre ranch into a sanctuary for them in July 2014, starting with 26 bee hives.

Activism

Charitable work

In 2004, Freeman and others formed the Grenada Relief Fund to aid people affected by Hurricane Ivan on the island of Grenada. The fund has since become PLANIT NOW, an organization that seeks to provide preparedness resources for people living in areas afflicted by hurricanes and severe storms. Freeman has worked on narrating small clips for global organizations, such as One Earth, whose goals include raising awareness of environmental issues. He has narrated the clip "Why Are We Here," which can be viewed on One Earth's website. Freeman has donated money to the Mississippi Horse Park in Starkville, Mississippi. The park is part of Mississippi State University and Freeman has several horses that he takes there.

Politics

Freeman endorsed Barack Obama's candidacy for the 2008 presidential election, although he stated that he would not join Obama's campaign. He narrates for The Hall of Presidents with Barack Obama, who has been added to the exhibit. The Hall of Presidents re-opened on July 4, 2009, at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. Freeman joined President Bill Clinton, USA Bid Committee Chairman Sunil Gulati, and USMNT midfielder Landon Donovan on Wednesday, December 1, 2010, in Zurich for the U.S. bid committee's final presentation to FIFA for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. On day 4 of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Morgan Freeman provided the voiceover for the video introduction of Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Comments on racism

Freeman has publicly criticized the celebration of Black History Month and does not participate in any related events, saying, "I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history." He says the only way to end racism is to stop talking about it, and he notes that there is no "white history month." Freeman once said in an interview with 60 Minutes's Mike Wallace, "I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man." Freeman supported the defeated proposal to change the Mississippi state flag, which contains the Confederate battle flag. Freeman sparked controversy in 2011 when, on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight, he accused the Tea Party movement of racism.

In reaction to the death of Freddie Gray and the 2015 Baltimore protests, Freeman said he was "absolutely" supportive of the protesters. "That unrest [in Baltimore] has nothing to do with terrorism at all, except the terrorism we suffer from the police. [...] Because of the technology—everybody has a smartphone—now we can see what the police are doing. We can show the world, Look, this is what happened in that situation. So why are so many people dying in police custody? And why are they all black? And why are all the police killing them white? What is that? The police have always said, 'I feared for my safety.' Well, now we know. OK. You feared for your safety while a guy was running away from you, right?"

Filmography

Awards and honors

On October 28, 2006, Freeman was honored at the first Mississippi's Best Awards in Jackson, Mississippi, with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his works on and off the big screen. He received an honorary degree of Doctor of Arts and Letters from Delta State University during the school's commencement exercises on May 13, 2006. In 2013, Boston University presented him with an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. On November 12, 2014, he was bestowed the honour of Freedom of the City by the City of London.

Wikipedia