#upper west side story film

[putellasawfc]

exposed !

jen beattie x arsenal!reader

( a/n: omgggg this has been in the works FOREVER, before jen announced leaving arsenal which i am still not over tbh. but it’s finally here! especially dedicated to @mccabeswife since she requested it ! i hope you enjoy ! )

-

another media day at the arsenal training grounds meant a lot of bored footballers sat around waiting for their turn in front of the camera, the current youtube video being filmed was for three pairs only, another one of those ‘guess what the person is saying whilst you wear sound cancelling headphones’ videos that people went crazy over. the lucky girls who had been paired together for said video had been chosen at random, and you had ended up with leah with frida, manu with katie and viv with lotte which meant the rest of you were trying to entertain yourselves elsewhere.

which wasn’t really an issue when you were all shoved into a recreational room with an assortment of snacks, gossip and phones in hand. beth, the self proclaimed quidnunc of the group had been sat in between you and alessia for the last ten minutes, and had yet to stop telling you about the ongoing drama in the west ham team that she had found out about at an event over the weekend. you paid attention for as long as you could, sharing looks with alessia as you both struggled to keep up with the fast paced ramblings coming from the yorkshire woman but beth was none the wiser.

you felt a dip in the sofa to the left of you, the last bit of space being occupied by someone who threw an arm around your shoulder and when you got a whiff of the familiar perfume she sprayed on every morning, you knew exactly who it was.

you turned your head and smiled at the culprit, jen sat sporting her usual messy bun on top of her head and cheeky smile on her face. she pulled you further into her side and gently squeezed your upper arm, “she still talking your ear off?”

you huffed a laugh at that, looking to see if beth had heard but she was still too busy ranting and raving, now focusing her attention on alessia since you were now occupied elsewhere, poor girl.

“something like that.” you hummed, snuggling up to your taller girlfriend who was happy to let you lean on her. “you finished your influencer activities?” you teased, referring to the number of tiktok’s she had forced some of the girls to take part in since they all arrived.

“aye, i get a lot of love and appreciation from the fans for providing them with five star, behind the scenes content i’ll have you know.” she told you, “but yeah. letting steph take over for now, think she’s really getting into those football murder mystery filters.”

you glanced over to where she nodded towards, indeed seeing steph with her phone in her hand obviously recording herself, with kyra and vic sat either side of her laughing at the story that was unfolding on the filter.

“what happens when she steals your tiktok crown?” you asked with a sly smirk, knowing the older woman would have a meltdown if steph’s content starting getting more love than hers.

“don’t jinx it.” she shoved you lightly, “i’d have to post something outrageous to get me my title back. know i have some mugshots of you deep in my camera roll, i’m sure they’d come in handy.”

“you wouldn’t!” you gasped, sitting up slightly in your seat and the scottish woman laughed at your reaction.

you knew she had accumulated a hefty amount of embarrassing pictures of you over the year that you’d been together, ranging from you asleep with your mouth open to you pulling the ugliest faces whilst you awaited the impact of the ball to hit you during games.

“then you better hope steph gets bored quickly.” she shrugged.

you playfully rolled your eyes at that, finally relaxing back down beside her, grabbing ahold of her hand that was hanging over your shoulder, interlocking your fingers as you did.

“you’re so mean to me, sometimes i don’t know why i agreed to be your girlfriend.” you shook your head as if you were disappointed with yourself, trying your best to hold back the smile that was itching to come out.

that didn’t last long though, as only a moment later the defender jumped up from her spot on the sofa and leaned most of her body weight on you, her hands flew to grab either side of your face so she could get a good view of it as she began to lather every inch of your skin in kisses, her lips not leaving one patch of your face untouched. your squealed and thrashed wildly beneath her, your shoulder knocking into beth’s who finally halted in her gossiping at the interruption.

she kept going, stopping for a second to grin at your flushed state. “you fancied me too much to say no to being my girlfriend you goon.” and with that she continued her loving attack on you.

you wriggled around, laughing as you fought for breath and attempted to push her from you but she wasn’t budging.

“jen! stop, i can’t breathe.” you shrieked between giggles, hands gripping at her red jumper, “you’re right! you’re right, please let me go!”

finally deciding you’d had enough, jen let go of you and you caught your breath as you sagged against beth with a hand on your chest. “you could’ve killed me then, i hope you know.”

“so dramatic you are.” she tutted, pulling gently on your arm so that you were sat upright once again. “now gimme a proper one.”

you grinned, and gladly leaned in towards your girlfriend, giving her exactly what she wanted as your lips met halfway and you sunk into the display of affection almost immediately, your lips moving together in unison before you felt a harsh nudge in your side.

you yelped and pulled back, glaring at beth who only looked proud of what she’d done.

“not in front of the children please.”

-

the next day you arrived back at the training grounds, this time with a full day of practice ahead of you rather than a day in front of the cameras which you were very much looking forward to. media day was always fun, especially when you were partnered up with the right person and yesterday you were lucky enough to have gotten cloe as your pal for the day, so you had no complaints.

but you were excited to get back to doing what you loved, especially with an important match ahead of you. you wanted to get your head in the game and make sure you were one hundred percent ready to face the opposing team on sunday.

everything was normal for all of five minutes, you walked in and greeted some of the staff lingering near the entrance before you headed off to the changing rooms so you could change into your training kit, but before you even had chance to push the door open, a body came barrelling into yours, making you stumble on your feet and your arm fly out to steady yourself against the wall.

you looked to the person with furrowed brows, your jaw dropped in shock at the scare you’d just gotten. “christ steph, what’s up with you?”

she looked worried, as her hands gripped onto both of your arms and the aussie looked behind her where leah and lia were approaching, with much calmer demeanours. “i have to tell you something before you find out from someone else, but you have to promise you won’t be mad at me.”

you eyed her warily, your head cocking to the side before you looked over to the two other girls with narrowed eyes. “what is it?”

“no! you have to promise first.”

you rolled your eyes at that, beginning to panic a little as your mind ran wild with possibilities of what information steph could be withholding from you.

“fine, i promise. now tell me.” you told her, not really meaning it, you just needed her to spill the beans before you tired yourself out from overthinking.

“i kind of, may have, accidentally posted a tiktok that had you and jen kissing in the background of it.” she winced, waiting a beat to carry on. “but i promise it was a genuine mistake! if i had known it was in there i would’ve never, ever posted it i know you guys didn’t want your relationship to be public yet, and i am so sorry please don’t be mad at me.”

“what?”

a stupid question, most definitely but it was the only thing that you could manage to say at this moment in time. you didn’t know how to feel or what to say as you processed the information just given to you by steph who was still watching you carefully, as if she was awaiting some kind of wild outburst.

an array of different emotions passed through you simultaneously, you were annoyed at steph for outing your relationship on a platform that spread content like wildfire. no doubt screenshots and recordings of the tiktok had already been shared to the likes of twitter and instagram, posts made that couldn’t be taken back now. how could steph have let that happen? why did she not spot it before she pressed post?

you were also panicking. did jen know? would she be annoyed? would this change things between you? you’d both agreed when you first began dating, after months of mutual pining, that when you got together you would keep your relationship as private as you could, for as long as you could.

something that was unfortunately common amongst women’s football, was how invasive some fans could be in the players lives. you had seen how they could overstep boundaries and pry too deep into stuff they didn’t need to know about many times, which would then jump to them spreading their opinions without a care about who was on the other side of their sometimes vicious comments. you’d been witness to it ruining some of your friends relationships, and you didn’t want that to happen to you and jen. jen who you loved, who loved you back, jen who you could see yourself marrying one day in the future. so you had come to the smart, unanimous decision to keep it hush for as long as you could. but now, it was out there.

“does jen know?” you asked next, deciding that was the priority for you right now.

steph shook her head, “no. i was gonna tell her but she’s been talking to jonas since she got in.”

jen had set off an hour prior to you, with fans sometimes lingering outside the training grounds in hopes of getting a photo with some of you before you came in, you didn’t want to risk them seeing you and jen showing up together a few times too many and start to put two and two together, so more often than not you took separate cars and showed up at different times.

you nodded at that, and took in a deep breathe as you tried to think of what to do next. seeing as it was already out, there was no way you’d be able to backtrack or deny that you were in a relationship with jen, so the only real option you had left was to come clean to the fans about it all. you just weren’t sure how to.

“are you still my friend?” you were brought back into the present by steph’s quiet voice, her eyes were still scanning you warily and you probably would’ve laughed at how silly she sounded if you weren’t the person on the other end.

“course i’m still your mate steph.” you told her, and the blonde visibly deflated in front of you. “just wish you had the common sense to check what’s going on in your tiktok’s before you posted them.”

you were half joking, half serious. but when steph tutted and shoved you playfully, you didn’t have the heart to be upset with her anymore. it’s not as if she had posted it on purpose, and with how she reacted when she approached you, you were sure she’d been beating herself up over it since she’d realised what she’d done.

“see! told you she wouldn’t be mad, got yourself all worked up over nothing.” leah spoke up, and then you remembered her and lia were still lingering in the back.

“yeah well, i wouldn’t have blamed her if she was.” steph said, and you pulled the aussie in for a side hug.

“it’s okay steph, just gotta find jen now and spill the beans.”

-

it was only twenty minutes later when jen joined you all in the changing rooms, already clad in her arsenal training kit and with her water bottle in hand, she spotted you almost instantly and her face brightened when she realised you had arrived whilst she’d been busy.

“when did you get here?” she asked, pulling you into a hug which you gladly reciprocated.

“not too long ago.” you told her, rubbing your hands up and down her back. “got something i need to tell you though.”

she pulled back a little at that, looking down at you with a raised brow. “should i be worried?”

you shrugged, “i mean, it’s not anything to panic about but … i don’t know if you’re going to like it.”

you nodded your head towards the door, gesturing to the empty hallway on the other side where you could both have the conversation privately with nobody there to eavesdrop. jen nodded in agreement, retracting from your embrace and pulling on your hand to tug you in the direction you had just motioned towards.

now standing in the vacant corridor, you leaned your back against the grey wall and watched jen as she stood in front of you with her hands on her hips as she waited for you to speak, which you did after a sigh.

“steph practically ambushed me this morning, she um, did something stupid.” you began, scratching your head as you thought about how to put what happened into words. “you know all those tiktoks she was messing around with yesterday?”

you waited for jen to nod, which she did a second later so then you continued. “well she posted some of them and in one of them, it has you and i kissing in it, in the background. and it’s definitely too late for us to do anything about it.”

you stood with baited breath, similar to how steph had been when she was breaking the news to you, all of a sudden wishing you had the power to read minds as jen’s poker face came out in full force, the brunette not hinting to how she was feeling at all. at least she wasn’t tugging at her loose strands of hair, or biting at her nails, two big tell tale signs that she was stressing which you’d picked up over the months you’d spent together, which was a small win you were willing to take.

“well i guess the secrets out then.” jen shrugged, her hands remaining on her hips as you looked at her slightly puzzled.

“you’re not bothered?” you asked, half expecting a bigger reaction from the woman who was always so careful with how you interacted in public.

“i mean, it’s not great is it?” she asked, “but honestly, a part of me is kind of glad its out there now. i love our little bubble, not having to deal with people we don’t even know deciding whether we’re a good fit or not and all that stuff. but at least now, we don’t have to stress over the littlest things everytime we go out together.”

you listened to the points she made, nodding along with pursed lips in agreement with what she was saying. one of the most annoying things about have a relationship that wasn’t public, was having to be on guard everytime you both wanted to spend time with eachother out of the house, leading to the two of you just ending up having most of your date nights at home instead, not having the energy to make sure there were no prying eyes wherever you went.

“and we don’t have to watch what we post on social media. no more making sure our stories don’t give away that we’re at the same place, or triple checking that none of our stuff’s in the background.” she added on, and your lips quirked up in amusement at the amount of times you’d had to quickly delete a story or instagram post when you realised there was a beattie shirt in the background, or anything else that gave away who you were with.

“so this is kind of like a blessing in disguise?”

she grinned, “yeah something like that. but don’t tell steph i said anything, she’ll be gloating for weeks.”

you laughed at that, finally being able to relax properly for the first time since steph had practically jumped you whilst you were on your way to get changed. jen approached you, clearing the few steps that kept her away from you and pulling you into her warm embrace, pressing a kiss to your forehead as she did. “at least now we don’t have to do any big, relationship reveal post. you know how much i’ve been dreading that.”

you hummed, “think we should get steph to do a big post for us? i’m sure her drafts are stacked with videos of us.”

“we can ask. but not yet, wanna pretend i’m really mad at her for a bit so i can bribe her into pampering me for a bit.”

you scoffed at that, giving the scottish woman a faux disgusted look. “you’re evil beattie.”

“you love me.”

[matttgirlies]

Matt & Me🎀

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

a story heavily based on Priscilla Presley’s Book “Elvis & Me” based in the 1950’s - 1970’s.

fem! reader x singer! matt

disclaimer!! - in no way am i saying matt would ever support or do these kind of things, for the sake of the book certain unethical things do happen at times.

warnings - mentions of drug use,, mentions of cheating,, physical violence

y/nn = your nickname for any confusion🩷

Chapter 12

Now I could spend every minute with Matt. There were times when we’d shut ourselves off from the rest of the world for days. Matt would leave word that he wanted “no calls unless it’s my dad or an emergency call from Colonel.” It was my time, and no one could interfere. He was all mine.

When we got hungry, I phoned down to the kitchen and ordered our food, which was brought up and placed outside our bedroom door. After we finished, we stacked our empty trays neatly back in the same place.

We saw no one, nor even the light of day. The windows were insulated with tin foil and heavy blackout drapes to prevent any hint of sunlight from entering. Time was ours, to do with as we pleased, for as long as we pleased. Matt had a few months free between film commitments, and there was no pressure to return to Hollywood. We always seemed to be more in love when we were alone. I loved those times, when he was just Matt, not trying to live up to an image or a myth. We were two people discovering each other.

Only in the privacy of our own quarters did Matt show me a side of himself which had rarely, if ever, been seen by others. With no Colonel, no scripts, no films or music, nor any other people’s problems, Matt could become a little boy again, escaping from the responsibilities of family, friends, fans, the press, and the world. Here with me, he could be vulnerable and childlike, a playful boy who stayed in his pajamas for days at a time.

One day he was the dominant one and would treat me like a child, often scolding me for an incidental action. On other days I was the stronger one, looking after him like a doting mother, making sure that he ate everything on his plate, took all of his vitamins, and didn’t miss any of his favorite TV shows like Laugh-In, The Untouchables, The Wild, Wild West, The Tonight Show, and Road Runner. We listened to early Sunday morning gospel singing—our favorites were the Stamps, the Happy Goodman Family, and Jake Hess—and we watched the old movie classics that Matt loved: Wuthering Heights, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Miracle on 34th Street.

When we weren’t watching movies, we played silly games like hide-and-seek, or we’d have pillow fights that often ended in heated discussions of who hit whom the hardest. Our arguments were usually playful, but I noticed that they could become serious, especially after we’d each taken a couple of diet pills.

One evening we had both taken uppers and were wrestling with each other. I threw a pillow at him. He ducked it, and then, laughing, threw it back. I hurled another one at him, and then another, and without giving him a chance to recover, I threw another one. The last one hit him in the face. His eyes flashed with anger.

“Goddamn it!” he snapped. “Not so rough. I don’t want to play with a goddamn man.” He grabbed my arm, throwing me on the bed, and while demonstrating how hard I had thrown the pillows, he accidentally hit me in the eye. I flung my head to the side and jumped up, accusing him of hitting me on purpose.

“You can’t play without winning,” I yelled, “even with me. You started throwing harder and harder. What did you expect me to do?”

I stomped off to my dressing room and slammed the door as I heard him yelling, “You’re not a goddamn man.”

That night, we went to the movies. My arm was bruised where he’d grabbed me, and my eye was swollen black and blue. To make matters worse—and to make sure he felt bad—I wore a patch over the bruised eye. Everyone teased me, and Matt joked, “Couldn’t help it. She tried to get rough with me. I had to show her who’s boss.”

That night I got named “Toughie.”

Despite his teasing, Matt felt terrible about the incident. He had immediately apologized to me and kept apologizing for days.

“Baby, I’m really sorry,” he said. “You know I’d never hurt you in any way, that I’d never lay a hand on you, don’t you? That was a real accident.”

Yet the incident frightened me.

From then on, I began taking fewer pills and eventually stopped. I tried to persuade him to do the same. I started to question the quantities even though I knew he had various ailments causing pain which necessitated taking prescribed medication. I did everything I could for Matt and we shared many wonderful happy times together. However, his harsh objection to stopping made me realize that there could be a problem. I assumed he knew best for himself.

Colonel William’s theory was: “If you want to see Matt Sturniolo, you buy a ticket.” Once you started passing out freebies, it meant a lot of lost income. He stuck to that policy.

Matt agreed with the Colonel, feeling that Colonel knew best, saying, “Colonel doesn’t mind taking the blame.”

When life got boring you could count on Matt to concoct some new escapade. He was extraordinarily inventive. One particularly dreary day he decided out of the blue that he didn’t like the looks of an old house located on the grounds in back of the mansion. His uncle Travis had once occupied the place, which was now used for storage. Matt took a long look at it, called his father, and told him to get a bulldozer over there right away and get rid of it.

I could imagine what was going through James’s mind: Good God, what’s he up to now? He knew if Matt was at home and bored between films, anything could happen.

When the bulldozer appeared, Matt insisted that he was going to do the honors, convincing his father—and the local fire and demolition departments—that he could handle the job himself.

Wearing his football helmet and his big furry Eskimo coat, Matt proceeded, as his entourage cheered him on, to bring down the house and set it afire. This brought the fire trucks screaming through the gates. “You’re a little late, fellows,” Matt said, a happy, mischievous smile on his face.

Another time, he ordered his go-carts to be brought out and readied to ride. He held the record, of course, for the fastest time around the large circular drive.

Trying to prove that I was just as good as the guys, I tried to equal his time. Terrified, I would speed along as Matt clocked me on his stopwatch, giving me an approving grin when I reached the fifteen-mile-per-hour mark.

He turned Graceland into a private playground for us all. He’d have gun-shooting contests and also “screaming thrill rides” when he’d pack several people into his custom-built golf cart and race around the grounds at top speed.

Graceland’s backyard had more holes in it than the moon has craters—all from Romancandle fights. On the Fourth of July Matt always spent a fortune on fireworks, which arrived by the boxload. The boys would team up sides, aim candles directly at one another, and fire.

Although there were casualties—burned fingers and singed hair—no one seemed to care. Matt himself was as carefree as a young kid, hiding and then sneaking around the opposition with surprise attacks. Matt knew how to play hard and have fun.

Unfortunately, the time came for him to go back to Hollywood. He was due to begin his new film, Viva Las Vegas. His bus was parked in front of the white stone lions flanking the front steps of Graceland, loaded and ready to go.

I hated to see him leave. Arm in arm, we walked out the door.

Suddenly I pulled him back and tried to tell him what I was feeling, but there were distractions all around—people saying goodbye, music blaring from inside the bus, Alan yelling to George Klein to keep the sound rockin’ and rollin’.

I thought, If only it were quieter, if only Matt would take me aside so we could have some privacy.

But his attention was on all the activity and he was caught up in the excitement of going back to work.

“What is it, Baby?” he asked.

“I just wish you didn’t have to leave so soon,” I said, still unable to tell him what was really on my mind. “Just when we were starting to get used to each other, you have to go. I wish there were more time.”

“I know, Little One. Just give me a couple of weeks to get into the film and maybe you can come out for a while. Be a good girl, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He gave me a quick kiss on the lips and boarded the bus, the doors slamming shut behind him. Then I heard the familiar shout, “All right. Let’s roll it!”

With a roar, the bus cruised down the hill and through the Music Gates where, as always, his fans were loyally waving goodbye and urging him to “hurry home!”

I watched until I could no longer see the red taillights fading out on Highway 51.

Cursing myself, I wondered why I couldn’t tell him what I feared. I’d been upset ever since I’d learned that his new leading lady was going to be Julia Ernst, the fastest-rising starlet in Hollywood. Julia Ernst had made only a few movies, including Bye-Bye Birdie, but she’d been dubbed “the female Matt Sturniolo.” Matt was curious about her, pointing out that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

I realized that even had I told him my fears, he could have said nothing to put my mind at ease, because one evening he had made the mistake of telling me about the romances he’d had with many of his costars. Trying to listen calmly to these stories, I justified his behavior by reminding myself that I’d been living in Germany during those years and that we’d had no real ties then.

Now I was in his territory, living in his house with his friends, his family, and mementos of the past. It didn’t occur to me then, but I was living the way he wished—out of Hollywood society, the girl back home. I adapted. I wasn’t with him, but in a sense I was. And I assumed that he would be as faithful to me as I was to him.

Each time I would get ready to join Matt in Los Angeles he would delay my visit.

“Baby, now’s not the time to come out. There’s a problem on the set.”

“What kind of problem?”

“It’s just that all hell’s broke loose. I’ve got some crazed director madly in love with Julia. The way he’s directing it, you’d think it was her movie. He’s favoring her in all the goddamn close-up shots.” He paused, his anger rising. “Not only that, they want her to sing some of the songs with me. Colonel ’bout blew a fuse. Told ’em they’d have to pay me extra to sing with her.”

As I listened to Matt rant and rave, I tried to sympathize with him and his situation, but emotionally I was far more concerned about his leading lady than his director.

“Well, how are you and Julia Ernst getting along?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s okay, I guess.” He casually dismissed her with the line, “a typical Hollywood starlet.”

My concern was temporarily allayed. I knew that his attitude toward actresses was unfavorable. “They’re into their careers and their man comes second,” he’d say. “I don’t want to be second to anything or anyone. That’s why you don’t have to worry about my falling in love with my so-called leading ladies.”

I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t help noticing the national gossip magazines and the headlines about the torrid affair on the set of Viva Las Vegas. The problem was that the affair was not between Julia Ernst and the director. It was between Julia Ernst and Matt.

We were talking on the phone one night and I asked, “Is there anything to it?”

“Hell, no,” he said, immediately becoming defensive. “You know how these reporters are. They blow everything out of proportion. She comes around here mostly on weekends with her motorcycle. She hangs out and jokes with the guys. That’s it.”

But that was enough for me: She was there and I wasn’t.

Infuriated, I declared, “I want to come out now.”

“No, not now! We’re wrapping up the film and I’ll be home in a week or two. You keep your little ass there and keep the home fires burning.”

“The flame’s burning on low. Someone had better come home and start the fire.”

Matt laughed. “You’re beginning to sound like me,” he bragged. “I’d better watch it. There can’t be two of us walking around. I’ll be home soon, Baby. Get everything ready.” By the end of our phone call, I was eagerly making plans for his return.

I took out my calendar, counted the days until his homecoming, and then crossed them off one at a time. Threatened with doubts and fears, I did everything I could to please him, from educating myself about the gospel music he loved to taking good care of Graceland.

My eagerness to please Matt was so overwhelming that it almost angered him. He always had an excuse why his other relationships hadn’t worked out. “They were either too hometown and couldn’t fit in with my Hollywood life-style,” he said, “or they were actresses too into their careers.” But how could he get out of a commitment to such a willing partner as me?

I often felt sorry for myself, and angry at Matt for putting me in a situation in which I was forced to be alone for literally weeks at a time.

Bored, I resorted to exploring the attic at Graceland. I’d asked Grandma once what was up there, and she’d answered, “Oh, nothin’, Hon, jus’ some old junk. God, I haven’t been up there in ages. No tellin’ what’s up thereor who.”

There was no question that something was stirring around in the attic. Many nights strange noises were heard above the kitchen. Grandma said she’d heard the noises herself, lying awake, praying for daylight before even closing her eyes for sleep.

She imagined that it might be Mary Lou’s spirit up there, watching over Matt.

“Do you believe in spirits, Grandma?” I asked.

“Ah, yes, Hon. Sometimes I wander through this house and I can just feel ’em all around. Ask Hallie, she knows. She’s felt ’em too.”

Hallie was a large dark-skinned woman, our faithful and devoted companion. She stayed with Grandma and me at night while Matt was away, guarding us with her life—and a small gun that she tucked securely under the bed each night.

One evening, after Hallie turned out the lights, I asked her, “Hallie, do you think there’s spirits there, like Grandma does?”

“Well, Miss y/n, all I can tell you is that I hear strange voices I ain’t never heard before in any house I’ve ever been in, and sometimes it gits awful quiet here, a kind of stillness that I ain’t never felt neither. But don’t you lay there and worry, child. If there are any spirits, they’ll do you no harm.”

“Amen,” Grandma said.

The next day, I decided to venture up to the attic, to see for myself what was there. As I walked up the stairs, I rubbed my hand up and down the gold-painted banister, noting the chipped paint. I called out, “Don’t you think this should be repainted, Dodger?”

Grandma, standing at the bottom of the stairs, lifted her dark shades to get a closer look. “Yes, Hon, we’d better tell James. That does look bad.”

“Maybe we should do it before Matt gets home and surprise him. I’ll ask Mr. Sturniolo in the morning.”

At the top of the stairs I entered the attic and discovered Matt’s world.

Several trunks were filled with his military gear. There were old television sets and furniture that had been in his bedroom years before. I ran my hand over a couch, wondering who’d sat there with him. Jealous, I walked away.

I found two closets side by side and opened one. It was filled with clothes from Matt’s early days—black leather jackets, motorcycle hats, and a pink shirt I’d seen in pictures. I loved the way he looked in that shirt and wished he’d wear it again.

With growing curiosity, I sorted through everything. I felt closer to Matt just by touching his things, and all I could think of was what girl he’d been with at the time—Lucy, Judy, Nicole, Bonnie? I was so possessive, I had to know.

Then I came across some letters hidden under an old sweater, letters from Nicole, all addressed to him in Germany. I put them in dated order, from his arrival in Germany to his departure, and sat there for hours poring over every one.

Nicole had written at least two letters a week, all saying basically the same thing: she loved him, missed him, and was counting the days until his return—just as I had done. She had been in the process of acquiring him as a lover just as I’d been losing him. Clearly Nicole had been telling her that she was the only one in his life. Confused and hurt, I realized that he had been writing to his “Little Bit,” as he called her, that he couldn’t wait to come home and see her, at the same time that he had been holding me tightly, telling me he couldn’t bear to leave his “Little Girl.”

I felt betrayed, as I’m sure she felt when she read and heard about me. Returning the next day to investigate the adjoining closet, I came upon Mary Lou’s belongings—her clothes, her old photos and papers. It was strange to see all her dresses, hanging neatly. I knew Matt had had them put there. He couldn’t have faced throwing away any of her personal belongings.

I tried on one of her dresses and could tell that she liked soft materials on her skin, just as I did. By the size of her dress, I could see she was a small woman, and by the texture, I knew she cared more about the feel of a dress than about fashion or style. She liked to dress simply and comfortably. I felt guilty in her dress, but it gave me a better sense of Mary Lou Sturniolo: a woman, as Grandma had described her, with a heart of gold—yet you never wanted to cross her. When she was angry, “she cussed like a sailor and had the wrath of God in her.”

I felt sad—for Matt, for Mary Lou, for us all because we have to contend with death. Life could be so different if Mary Lou were here, I thought, weeping as though she were my own mother. I felt Mary Lou’s presence in that little room, also her grief and loneliness. Maybe it was her spirit that Grandma and Hallie sensed.

All of a sudden, Hallie’s face appeared in the doorway. We both screamed with fright, yelling, “What are you doing up here?”.

“Child, this ain’t no place you should be. Too many sad memories. B’sides, it’s dark and scary. Only reason I come up is ’cause Miss Minnie was worried ’bout you.”

Then, as Hallie walked away, waving her hands above her head, she said under her breath, “No ma’am, I don’t like it up here.”

The next time Matt returned to Los Angeles, where he was to begin filming Kissin’ Cousins, I flew with him. I loved L.A. It was exciting compared to the slow pace I had grown accustomed to in Boston. Best of all, I felt a part of Matt’s world. His hectic schedule and daily life were realities to me now, no longer just remote events chronicled in our nightly phone calls.

The problem was that his life still included Julia Ernst, despite the fact that their film, Viva Las Vegas, had been completed six weeks before. The newspapers were reporting their “blossoming” affair daily, each article hitting me like a slap in the face. I thought, When will this be over—the news, the gossip, the headlines, the affair.

Matt returned from the studio one afternoon, carrying a newspaper and fuming. “I can’t believe she did it.” He flung the paper against the wall in disgust. “She had the goddamn nerve to announce we’re engaged.”

Though I was pretty sure of the answer, I asked, “Who?”

“Julia Ernst. Every major newspaper in America’s picked it up. The rumor’s spread like a goddamn disease.”

Turning to me, he said, “Honey, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave. The press will be hanging around the gate and following me all over for a statement. Colonel suggests maybe you should go back to Boston till it calms down.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Suddenly all the months of unbearable silence broke and I screamed, “What’s going on here? I’m tired of these secrets. Telephone calls. Notes. Newspapers!” I picked up a flower vase and hurled it across the room, shattering it against the wall. “I hate her!” I shouted. “Why doesn’t she keep her ass out of here where she belongs?”

Matt grabbed me and threw me on the bed. “Look, goddamn it! I didn’t know this was going to get out of hand. I want a woman who’s going to understand that things like this might just happen.” He gave me a hard, penetrating look. “Are you going to be her—or not?”

I stared back at him, furious and defiant, hating him for what he was putting me through.

After a long pause, our tempers cooled considerably. Once again desperate to please, I said, “I’ll leave tomorrow. I’ll be waiting in Boston.”

Excerpt from: "Elvis and Me" by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley. Scribd. This material may be protected by copyright.

a/n - 3 songs for extra long chapter!! (can you tell i like ultraviolence😬) 🎀

[whileiamdying]

At 70, Cyndi Lauper Has Nothing Left to Prove

At 70, Cyndi Lauper is charging back to action with a road show and “Let the Canary Sing,” a film that tells her life story.Credit...Thea Traff for The New York Times

She’s plotting a farewell tour. She’s starring in a documentary about her life. And she could only ever be herself.

By Amanda Hess June 4, 2024

One Friday afternoon in May, Cyndi Lauper stepped out of her Upper West Side apartment building and into the streets of New York City. She wore glitter-encrusted glasses, sneakers with rainbow soles and a stack of beaded bracelets on each arm. A rice-paper parasol swung in her hand. As she walked, she examined the crowds and remarked when glints of interest caught her eye.

“Of course, up here it’s fashion hell,” she allowed of her tony neighborhood. And yet, every few blocks she rubbernecked at another woman’s look, her famous New Yawk accent lifting and tumbling in pleasure at what she saw:

“Look at these dames, how cute are they?”

“Did you love those pants? I kind of loved those pants.”

“Look at this lady,” she said, stepping off the curb and clocking a passerby. The woman moved nimbly, tomato-red streak in her silver hair, body draped in shades of fuchsia and cherry as she pushed the gleaming metal frame of a walker. “Fabulous,” Lauper exclaimed. “Come on!”

At 70, the pop icon and social justice activist isn’t just charging back into the streets. On Monday, Lauper announced her final tour, the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, which will have her headlining arenas across North America from late October to early December. And “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary about her life and career that premiered at the Tribeca Festival last year, is streaming on Paramount+.

Lauper has not staged a major tour — “a proper tour, that’s mine” — in over a decade. But now her window of opportunity is closing, so she’s leaping through it. “I don’t think I can perform the way I want to in a couple of years,” she said. “I want to be strong.”

Lauper photographed at the Scarlet Lounge on the Upper West Side, the Manhattan neighborhood where she lives with her husband and two pugs.Credit...Thea Traff for The New York Times

And until recently, when she finally agreed to sit for the director Alison Ellwood, she could not envision committing her life story to film. “I wasn’t going to do a documentary because I’m not dead,” she said. More to the point, she did not feel particularly misunderstood. From the moment she danced across the city in the 1983 video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” she felt that she had articulated precisely what she wanted to say.

“Everything I wanted them to understand was in that video,” she said of her fans. She has a lot of people who get her: The clip has been viewed on YouTube more than one billion times. Forty years later, she holds it up as a thesis, the key to decoding her artistic perspective and understanding everything that followed. After all, “You never have to wonder where a New Yorker stands,” she said. “They’ll tell you, straight up.”

CYNDI LAUPER, BORN in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, bopped around the house to the Beatles’ songs, her older sister, Elen, singing McCartney’s parts and Lauper taking Lennon’s. It was her earliest lesson in harmony and song structure. But when she left home at 17, it was with a copy of Yoko Ono’s feminist conceptual art book “Grapefruit” in her hands.

Ono taught her that “you can create art in your head, and then you can view things differently,” Lauper told me. This attitude served her well as she tried (and often failed) to work as a painter, a shoe saleswoman, a racetrack hot walker, an IHOP waitress, a gal Friday at Simon & Schuster and the singer in a cover band.

Singing other people’s music in Long Island clubs and dive bars, Lauper struggled to find her place. She tried to channel Janis Joplin, but “I was stuck inside her body, and she didn’t like it, and I didn’t like it,” she said. She tried to sound like Gene Pitney, and “it came out sounding like Ethel Merman.” After a while, “You start to feel that you’re just not good enough.”

Lauper in 1986, the year she released “True Colors,” a song she felt drawn to in the wake of a friend’s death from AIDS.Credit...Pictorial Parade and Archive Photos/Getty Images)

But really, she was just no good at being anyone other than Cyndi Lauper. When she started writing and arranging songs for herself, “I told the stories that I knew about the women that I knew,” she said. “About my mom, my aunt, my grandmother.” They guided her back to the rhythms of her own life, even if, in the beginning, few were interested in listening. “My first concert was to 14 people,” she said, “and I did the encore, OK?”

The documentary’s title is a line ripped from a real-life courtroom drama: Early on, Lauper’s career got entangled in the ambitions of an ex-manager, who sued her to retain control of her music. She sank into bankruptcy trying to escape him. When the judge sided with Lauper, he banged the gavel and said: “Let the canary sing.”

Once freed, Lauper connected with Robert Hazard, who had written a track called “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” He’d arranged it as a rock song from a man’s perspective — the girls were the ones he imagined sleeping with — and Lauper had some edits. She recast it as a gleeful public announcement, calling out a sexist double standard (“Oh mama dear, we’re not the fortunate ones”) while claiming liberation from the workplace, the home and the patriarchy. And she rearranged the notes, pitching her voice so high that it could not be ignored. “I sang that high because I was trumpeting an idea,” she said.

And then there was the video. “That video was what you call ‘inclusive’ nowadays, and that was the most important thing,” Lauper said. In addition to the Italian American pro wrestler Lou Albano, Lauper featured her mother, her lawyer, her manager, a crop of record-company secretaries, and a racially diverse group of singers and dancers. “I was sick of the segregation” of the music industry, she said. “It’s people together that create a style.”

“Everything I wanted them to understand was in that video,” Lauper said of the clip for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

MTV was still in its infancy in 1983, and it was fortuitous that Lauper’s debut album, “She’s So Unusual,” came out just as the network was ascending. She saw her public image as a visual art form. Her makeup artist was a painter, and her stylist was a vintage buyer.

“People sometimes get the wrong idea that it was very thrown together,” Laura Wills, the founder of the vintage shop Screaming Mimi’s, said of the singer’s style. “People just didn’t look like that.” In the early ’80s, Lauper worked for Wills, often bartering her labor for clothes. When her career took off, Wills started styling her, and the pair often constructed Lauper’s outfits as if sliding chips across a poker table, as in, “I’ll see your polka-dot socks and striped capris, and I’ll raise you a plaid top,” Wills said. “I’ll see your polka-dot socks, striped capris and plaid top, and I’ll raise you a paisley hat.”

Lauper seemed to shoot to fame as a fully formed feminist icon. She refused to tell interviewers her age (“I’m not a car,” she said), and she insisted that they recognize the politics behind her aesthetic choices. “I wore the corset to undo the power of the binding of women,” she told the press. She graced the cover of Ms. Magazine and recorded the 1986 song “True Colors,” which resonated with her in the wake of a friend’s death from AIDS.

“I know that I probably lost business because I talked about AIDS a lot,” she said, but figured “I ought to stand up like any good Italian and stick up for my family, you know?” In 2008, she founded True Colors United to help combat homelessness among L.G.B.T.Q. youth. And in 2022, she created the Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights fund to support abortion access and other reproductive justice movements.

In 1985, Lauper won the best new artist Grammy after the release of “She’s So Unusual.” The album — and songs like “Time After Time” and “All Through the Night” — broke records. But something odd was happening. She looked around and saw versions of herself everywhere. “When I first became famous, I felt like the whole world just kind of went” — here Lauper made a sharp slurping noise — “and sucked everything up. The jewelry, the color, the corsets on the outside, the whole thing. And then used it. Spit it out. Next!”

“I don’t think I can perform the way I want to in a couple of years,” Lauper said. “I want to be strong.”Credit...Thea Traff for The New York Times

Lauper was accused of being a manufactured package. “No, it was me. That’s how I dressed. That’s how I looked. That was my community,” she said. “I have a brain.”

When Lauper got a call that a movie studio was adapting her big hit into a movie, she balked at its fluffy premise. “I guess it was about a couple of girls … trying to have fun,” she said. (Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt starred.) Lauper refused permission to use her song, so it featured Hazard’s version with other vocalists instead. “For me, it sucked,” she said. “You took my style. And it had nothing to do with me at all.”

In the ’80s, Lauper was compared so closely to other female musicians that it was implied there was not space for all of them. She was pitted against other women — mainly Madonna, who released her debut album the same year. On chat shows and in schoolyards (and even on the charity single “We Are the World”), celebrities and fans were asked to choose one. “It was like apples and oranges,” Lauper told me. Or as she put it in Newsweek in 1985: “She’s just doing her thing. My thing happens to be different.” It was a shame, Lauper said: “I would have liked to have a friend.”

Though she fought her battles mainly alone, Lauper has inspired generations of women. Among her acolytes are Nicki Minaj, who in April brought her onstage in Brooklyn to duet on the song that samples her, “Pink Friday Girls.” When an interviewer asked the 26-year-old singer-songwriter Chappell Roan, “How does it feel to be called the Gen-Z Cyndi Lauper?” she replied, “I think Cyndi Lauper is the Gen-Z Cyndi Lauper.”

Lauper made 11 more albums after her debut — among them a blues record, a country record and a dance record. In the early 2000s, she walked over to Broadway, starring in “The Threepenny Opera” and writing the music and lyrics to the musical “Kinky Boots” after Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, tapped her for the gig. “There’s a small group of people I consider my children; she’s one of my daughters,” the actor and writer, who turns 72 this week, said. Fierstein told me that he had suspected Lauper’s talents were underused in rock, and he wanted to see what it was like for her to write a song that she would never sing herself.

Lauper accepting the Tony for best score, for her work on “Kinky Boots.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“My favorite was a recording she made on her phone, in the beauty parlor, with her head in the dryer,” he said. (Lauper was often multitasking.) Her autoharp competed with the salon noise. “It’s really hard to sell a $10 million production on a recording of an autoharp song with a dryer background,” he said. “But that’s what we did.” Lauper won the Tony for best score, the first woman to win alone.

In an industry that requires the rapacious pursuit of the new and the cynical extraction of identity, Lauper was never willing to abandon herself. She had forged the revolutionary style, sang the totemic song. She inspired millions, billions, of fans to be themselves. Why should she have to change who she was?

AS LAUPER AND I traversed the Upper West Side, we ducked into an exhibition about the abstract artist Sonia Delaunay, passed the original Screaming Mimi’s location (now a dry cleaners), and wound back to her apartment, where she invited me up.

Past the doorman, past a cheetah-print doormat and a cheetah-print curtain, two little pugs named Lulu and Ping awaited Lauper’s return. She disappeared to arrange a plate of ginger cookies, the same kind Jackson Browne always sent her on Christmas, while her husband, the actor David Thornton, told me about their meet-cute on the set of the 1991 film “Off and Running.” She played a fake mermaid, he played a murderer. Off the set, he was struck instantly by her winning sense of humor.

“She’s the Rodney Dangerfield of rock ’n’ roll,” he said. As in, she is so funny that she does not always receive the respect she deserves. “I don’t think anybody has any idea how hard she works,” he said.

Though Lauper was accused of being a manufactured package, she was the real deal. “That’s how I dressed. That’s how I looked. That was my community,” she said. “I have a brain.”Credit...Thea Traff for The New York Times

To prepare for the tour, she blasts the stereo in her apartment and dances and sings, vexing the pugs. She works with a vocal coach four days a week. And she trains like it’s a sport. Her weekly exercise routine includes physical therapy, weights, stretching, physical therapy, weights, yoga, more weights, yoga, aerobics, physical therapy, weights again. She’s been chomping on enormous salads that make her feel like a horse.

“But when you’re a singer, you have to be an athlete,” she said. “You can’t [expletive] around. When you’re 20, yeah. But when you get older? No.”

As the tour approaches, she’s been daydreaming about “all the crazy stuff I tried that didn’t work” in the long arc of her career. The butterfly-winged black dress that she was meant to reveal as she stepped out of a cocoon. The bit where she was supposed to change behind a backlit screen like an old cartoon character. A kind of mechanical skirt that resembled a globe, slowly spinning her around as she sang.

She’s not exactly sure what she’ll pull off this time. Whatever changes, one thing remains the same: “Who the hell I am is who the hell I am.”

Amanda Hess is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times, covering the intersection of internet and pop culture. More about Amanda Hess

[generic-whumperz]

Vinny (Character Sheet)

Picrew

Playlist | Masterlist | Character Info

Playing opposing roles as Wyatt's partner in crime and Waylon's inside man, Vinny skillfully navigates the tumultuous dynamics between his older cousins, guided by genuine love and loyalty.

After The Aid's shocking murder attempt on Wyatt, Vinny took it upon himself to assume a greater role as The Aid's keeper, a move that revealed his pragmatic understanding of the asset's value to the Sullivans' empire and his surprising knack for diplomacy. When not attempting to broker moments of harmony between Wyatt and The Aid or covering supply runs for the family business Waylon mans, Vinny fuels his own destructive habits with Wyatt—recklessly hitting casinos and bars before scoring a bag to split for the night. Vinny is fiercely driven by his desire to help maintain family power and status in Apocamerica's supply chain, quelling both brothers by serving Waylon by day and partying with Wyatt by night. Despite his twisted, one-sided “friendship” with The Aid, his unwavering kinsmanship with Wyatt outweighs all as they both share a hunger for twisted delights–and Wyatt knows just how to fan the flames of his wild side.

Full name: Vincent Warren Sullivan (Vinny)

Role: secondary antagonist, Whumper/part-time Carewhumper

Date of Birth & sign: June 1, 1985 (47), Gemini (story takes place in the year 2032)

Gender: cis-male

Sexuality: pansexual

Height: 6'2"

Weight/body type/build: 180lbs-ish. Wiry, long-limbed, a bit pigeon-chested.

Hometown: Newark, New Jersey

Family Members: Sullivan family tree. He bounces around a lot because of work but basically lives with Wyatt. Very close with Wyatt and Waylon, basically their brother.

Left/right handed: right

Fav genre of music & anthem: 90s & early 2000s rap (claims East Coast is superior, yet his anthem is a West Coast classic), How I Could Just Kill A Man by Cypress Hill

Occupation: "Independent contractor." Jack of all trades and Waylon's right hand: fixer, security, transportation guard, caporegime (capo), hitman, former Army medic, torturer and snuff film cameraman. Somehow knows a little something about everything and always "knows a guy." He didn't get his HS diploma or GED; instead, he joined the Army soon after he got out of Juvie.

Ethnicity (+ American): Italian, French, Greek, English, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Serbian, Armenian

Hair color & length: dark brown/brown-black wavy mid-length grown-out hair. Usually combed and slicked back to make it look straighter than it is, shaved down on the sides with an undercut. Some chest hair, but not super hairy. He is usually clean-shaven around his signature petite goatee.

Hygiene: looks like he smells like an ashtray and liquor, and usually does. Not the best hygiene, also not the worst, somewhere in the middle, but is more up-kept when on the job. He uses minimal products and will just dose himself with cologne to mask the cigarette and vodka smell. But he takes good care of his teeth and has a collection of grillz, usually sportin' gold tooth caps on both canine teeth + inlay, and gold trip gap filler between front teeth (pictures below).

Eye color: pale, steely blue, almond-shaped, and hooded eyes.

Skin tone: olive with cool undertones. He can get a lot darker if he gets a tan, but he is usually inside or hiding under shade if outside, so he's rather pale.

Facial features: long, inverted triangle-shaped head. Thin, boxy upper lip mouth. Long, downturned, Roman nose. Straight eyebrows with little to no arch. Narrow ears. Narrow jaw, long chin. Long, thick eyelashes that make him look like he's wearing eyeliner. He usually has bags under his eyes because he's running on nothing but 3 hours of sleep, caffeine, and coke.

Mannerisms: clicks tongue or runs tongue over his gold teeth, sniffs/wrinkles nose, clears throat, and purses lips frequently. Lots of face twitching. If he's not smoking, he's smacking on some gum or snacking on gummy candy. Fidgety, has a hard time sitting still, therefore he’s either pacing or bouncing a knee. Bit of a jabber jaw, sings or hums tunes (someone thought they had a rap career as a youngin). Gets bored easily. Obsessively cleans his guns and knives. Resting bitch face looks like he's unamused or irritated. He snorts and laughs a lot, always cracking jokes. Files his nails daily. Cracks knuckles, neck, and back. Shuffles a deck of cards he has on hand. Checks his tackle-box drug stash he carries around like a lunch pail.

Nervous ticks: it takes a lot to make him nervous since he's spent a lifetime rubbing shoulders with gang members, spent time in juvie, in the trenches of war zones, and as a professional hit man, and has killed countless anthrophages without hesitation. He's good at maintaining a level head in stressful situations, but even he has his limits. When he's actually nervous, he'll rub his chin with his index finger, comb his fingers through hair and scratch his head, yell and punch things, may shoot off bullets into the air or throw knives at something, and in an effort to collect himself, he'll swallow hard and count backward from 5 or 10 to try to ground and calm himself. Rolls his shoulders and shakes his head as if trying to shake off the tension.

Posture: relaxed, cocky and confident. Go-to stance is the power pose with his hands on his hips or clasped in front of him (and perhaps fingers wrapped around a gun). He often leans against things with one shoulder. Uses a swagger walk with a lot of sway in his shoulders. When sitting, he's usually laid back with his legs spread or hunched over, fiddling with something in his hands. Moves a lot and shifts from side to side if he's sitting or standing—rather douchey body language.

Style: in a pressed, solid black Giorgio Armani suit with black Italian leather loafers (when working), in a dingy tracksuit with a white tank underneath, or jeans with a T-shirt or button-up and a leather jacket with motorcycle boots. Wears chains around his neck, rings, and small hoop earrings. Always strapped and always blinged out.

Guns he always has within reach—Colt 1911 Government, 45 ACP, 7 + 1, Cathedral, All 24K Gold, and GLOCK 20 Gen 4 Semi-Auto Pistol (pics).

Health: for as many drugs he does, the amount of cigarettes he smokes, and the volume of alcohol he drinks, he's surprisingly healthy—or as healthy as he can be. He works out a few times a week and gets in his cardio with jogging and boxing. Agile and can fight. He doesn't have the best diet but thinks eating a salad every other day, chugging protein shakes, and eating trail mix is the secret to his health success. Enjoys a good smoothie creation with The Aid, and it doubles as a small, weird thing they bond over.

Piercings/tattoos: ears pierced and wears small rings, bunch of tattoos—like too many for me to go into detail right now. Here are some tat ideas I swiped off Pinterest (I didn't make any of these) to give an idea, a tat mood board, if you will.

Birthmarks/scars: scar around his neck from when a gang of kids tried to strangle him to death with a wire in juvie. He has a lot of scars from fighting and his time in the Army, but covered them up with tats.

Language(s): English. Thinks he knows Italian, doesn’t.

Personality: dependable. Loyal. Sycophant to rivals. Cleaver. Resourceful. Quick-witted. Surprisingly competent and knowledgeable. The embodiment of controlled chaos. Voyeuristic. Talkative. Spontaneous. Fidgety. Protective. Restless. Sarcastic. Tough. Cocky. Dangerous. Rowdy. Violent. Noisy. Impulsive. Vulgar. Aggressive. Pragmatic. Inquisitive. Can be cruel and debaucherous. Teasing. Eager. Can take on a mediator role between Waylon and Wyatt, or Wyatt and The Aid. Oddly, he reserves a gentler soft side (as gentle and soft as he can get, that is) for The Aid. Low-key psychotic and dominant (as are all Sullivans).

Vices: benzos (Xanax), cigs, coke (lines or rubs it on his gums, but refuses to smoke it because that's "crackwhore behavior"), shots of hard liquor (preferably Cîroc or Gray Goose vodka). Shooting things. Breaking shit. Throwing knives or darts. Going on a ride on his motorcycle. Dismembering anthrophages or cutting up an already dead cow at the slaughterhouse.

Voice: raucous, sarcastic, and neurotic. Has a thick New Jersey accent. Kinda raspy. Sounds animated and expressive with a wide range of tones, pitches, and speeds.

Smells like: burnt rubber and oil from doing donuts on his bike. Cigs, alcohol, leather, and too much cologne, probably something like Gucci Guilty, or GIORGIO ARMANI Acqua Di Gio.

Face claim(s): Adrian Brody.

Character inspiration: put all these guys in a blender, add ice, and shake it up, and you have yourself a Vinny smoothie—Vincent Vega (Pulp Fiction), Edward Blake/ The Comedian (Watchmen), Todd Alquist (Breaking Bad & El Camino), Mickey Milkovich (Shameless).

Other: Admittedly, my second favorite Sullivan.

Moodboard

[rosencrantzsguildenstern]

West Side Story is set in the mid-1950s in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, then a multiracial, blue-collar neighborhood. The musical explores the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds. The Sharks, who are recent migrants from Puerto Rico, and the Jets, who are white, vie for dominance of the neighborhood. The young protagonist, Tony, a former member of the Jets and best friend of the gang's leader, Riff, falls in love with Maria, the sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks.

it is a musical. it is wonderful. it is relevant still today. Shakespeare and Bernstein, Soundheim, and Laurents. iconic

At the age of seventy, after years of consolidating his empire, the Great Lord Hidetora Ichimonji decides to abdicate and divide his domain amongst his three sons. Taro, the eldest, will rule. Jiro, his second son, and Saburo, his third son, will take command of the Second and Third Castles but are expected to obey and support their elder brother. Saburo defies the pledge of obedience and is banished.

It's beautiful. It's Kurosawa's biggest, most expensive film. It's about nuclear war and how technology has only made killing easier. It's about Kurosawa's fear that he was old and obsolete. It's an adaptation which asks what sins Lear had to commit to become king. This is the only version of King Lear where Goneril is implied to be a kitsune. (Or, where Albany is a kitsune, however you want to look at it)

[sloshed-cinema]

Rango (2011)

Las Vegas was a mistake. Where films like Chinatown or Who Framed Roger Rabbit tackle the dark side of the development of Los Angeles in some form or other, Rango is in a way a similar approach to the monument of hubris and human folly in the desert that is Sin City. When would-be thespian and all-around chameleon out of his habitat Rango stumbles into a frontier town called Dirt, he quickly learns they’ve got a water crisis. And as is tradition with this sort of matter, of course the politicians are never the true controlling or corrupting hand in the mix. Never! There are plenty of colorful characters and Wild West archetypes to explore, from the feisty gunslinging love interest holding out on selling one final land deed to the mayor to the gaggle of saloon ne’er-do-wells to the old dude with the bristly mustache who sounds like a rusty door hinge. As a chameleon, if you will, Rango slips effortfully between various Wild West caricatures himself as the need fits him, easily digging his own grave deeper and deeper only to escape at the last second. Similarly, a heavy leaning on the visual stylings of John Ford Westerns makes for fun action set pieces where the filmmakers combine gambits we’re familiar with and this specific world. An endless pursuit of stolen water is replete with low-horizon images of our heroes on roadrunner-back as they traverse Monument Valley. Bats with Gatling guns and musical accompaniment dive-bomb our fleeing caravan after a bottle of water has been retrieved, and make airplane noises when they crash and explode. This race to and from becomes, if you will, Mad Max: Furry Road.

The approach to character design in this is equal parts clever and gleefully horrifying. The bristle-mustached feller is an owl, so his pointed nose is his upper beak, but his lower beak? What happened to it? Where did it go? Why does that bar wench frog lady have giant frog tits? Why does the mayor’s turtle face remind me so much of the bad guy from A Bug’s Life? There’s also a very perplexing Goofy and Pluto situation. Most bird characters in the film are sapient, and yet they ride roadrunners because it’s a fun gag. Our villain predators—Rattlesnake Jake and the hawk—are both more animalistic in form, but only one of the two speaks. Interestingly, both have fun metal mods: the hawk has a metallic beak tip, and Rattlesnake Jake’s tail is a Gatling gun. Why are some insects actual insects, and others part of this town? The answer is “because a character designer thought of a sick-ass way to make a snaggle-toothed scorpion dude for one scene so it made the cut” and fuck it, that’s FINE.

In a year when meta is so exhaustingly oversaturated (oh boy, I can't wait for more Deadpool killmenow), it’s wild to see something so self-aware in an earlier form. Opening with commentary from our adorable narrator mariachi burrowing owls who ferry us through the film, the story wastes no time in letting us know it knows what it is. Rango literally breathes condensation on the fourth wall to draw a rectangle and put himself in a frame, which is both the screen and the glass of his habitat from which he is about to escape. He will break the fourth wall, if you will. Along the way he encounters briefly “himself” in a nod to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the Spirit of the West is a gruff Clint Eastwood type who also draws that same rectangle. I mean, it’s no Ryan Reynolds making asinine pop culture references which will be irrelevant 15 seconds after release, but it’s something.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says 'quest' or 'water'.

The mariachi owls show up in a scene.

Direct camera address.

Isla Fisher's "Western" accent gets very dicey.

BIG DRINK

Humans appear in a scene.

Someone gets pricked by cactus thorns.

The hawk shows up.

[popentertainment-moviereviews]

APARTMENT 7A (2024)

Starring Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest, Jim Sturgess, Kevin McNally, Marli Siu, Rosy McEwen, Amy Leeson, Scott Hume, Andrew Buchan, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Rosy McEwen, Nikkita Chadha, Julia Westcott-Hutton, James Swanton, Brooke Walter, Hannah Morley, Patrick Lyster, Dylan Baldwin , Mellanie Hubert, Anton Blake Horowitz and Eva-Marie Kung.

Screenplay by Natalie Erika James & Christian White and Skylar James.

Directed by Natalie Erika James.

Distributed by Paramount Pictures. 104 minutes. Rated R.

There have been a ton of horror films over the years that have ripped off Roman Polanski’s classic 1968 horror film Rosemary’s Baby (I’ve seen at least two which stole scenes from it in just the last few months), so it is kind of a surprise that it has taken so long for an official reboot of the movie.

Apartment 7A is not a remake of Rosemary’s Baby – it’s actually a prequel – but the film is based on Ira Levin’s classic novel (as was the 1968 film) and has a very similar storyline and old-fashioned style to the original. In fact, it seems that the movie was originally conceived as a remake as written by Skylar James, but when that project didn’t take off, writer/director Natalie Erika James reconceptualized the story to show the happenings in the Bramford, a mysterious old apartment building in New York. (As with Rosemary’s Baby, the Bramford is filmed in the famous Dakota on Central Park West in the Upper West Side.)

In fact, the makers of Apartment 7A are being a bit coy about the connection, not really pushing the fact that it is a part of the Rosemary’s Baby story, particularly not in its very generic sounding title.

However the lead character Terry Gionoffrio did appear, briefly, in the Rosemary’s Baby novel and film. This film is that woman’s backstory. (I won’t go into details as to how she fits into the original storyline, because that could be considered a bit of a spoiler for Apartment 7A.)

The basics of horror cinema have certainly changed a whole hell of a lot since Rosemary was released in 1968, and interestingly Apartment 7A sort of settles into the old-fashioned, more measured, spooky vibe of its predecessor. Which makes the film rather interesting, if occasionally a bit slow-paced for modern audiences.

We meet Terry (Julia Garner) as an aspiring Broadway dancer. During a performance, she badly injures her foot, leading her to have to stop her promising career for a period of months. (The accident becomes so well known that on Broadway she is broadly referred to as “the girl who fell.”) She tries to hurry herself back to work before she is ready by using painkillers, eventually becoming addicted to the pills.

After a particularly humiliating audition, Terry follows the producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess) to his home at the Bramford. When she is unable to get through to him, she passes out due to her drug use. She is brought in the building by a sweet-seeming older couple named Roman and Minnie Castavet (Kevin McNally and Dianne Wiest), who quickly offer to put Terry up in an apartment that they own. Of course, if you have seen Rosemary’s Baby, you know that the Castavets have ulterior motives. (Wiest, in particular, does a stunning job of recreating the character as played by Ruth Gordon in the original. Close your eyes and you may think it was the same actress.)

In fact, their plans for Terry are very similar to their later plans with Rosemary. In fact, according to this storyline, the satanist residents of the Bramford have tried similar acts several times with multiple women.

None of it is completely surprising – if you are familiar with the original story, you have a pretty good idea how it will all end – but Apartment 7A is still an interesting chapter of the tale.

Jay S. Jacobs

Copyright ©2024 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: September 19, 2024.

[freneticfloetry]

Ohh what about "had we but world enough (and time)? <3

Michelle! Short answer: it's the TiMER fic. I've posted a bunch of snippets already (check out its tag), but I'm still so excited -- I love TiMER, both as a film and as a soulmate storytelling concept, and I've wanted to write a fic fusion for it for years. At this point I'm convinced it was waiting for Tarlos.

It does use canon as a framework, with some obvious (and necessary) changes. A few things about the way it's unfolded have taken me by surprise, but none so much as the presence of Enzo, who, prior to this fic, I'd never really imagined writing as an actual character. (It helps, I think, that @liminalmemories21 made him Stanley Tucci in my head.)

It had taken two years for his mother to move Enzo into their Classic 8 on the Upper West Side, and all of ten minutes for him to make himself at home. He'd turned the kitchen they’d only used for baking and bowls of cereal and endless bags of takeout into his base of operations, for everything from wild culinary experiments to weekly French Toast Fridays.

This fic also contains an epistolary piece that is one of my favorite Tarlos things I've written so far. I kind of can't wait until this story is out in the world. I've waited so long to tell it.

[educatedinyellow]

People I Wanna Know Better

Thanks for thinking of me, @sanguinarysanguinity :)

Last song?

My son has been singing Tale As Old As Time from Beauty and the Beast all day. He's super adorable doing it, too, and you've gotta love a classic <3 We miss you, Angela Lansbury.

My funniest musical adventure from this week, though (as you know, Sang), was finding out that David McCallum -- who apparently played oboe and arranged orchestral scores, having studied music at first before switching to acting -- recorded a jazz number in the 1960s which then got sampled by Dr. Dre in the 1990s to create what, according to my brother, is 'definitely one of the most famous hip hop beats of all time' (warning: explicit language including the n word).

Who knew? Like a good secret agent, his influence pops up where least expected!

Favorite color?

Blue-green.

Currently watching?

Not much of anything lately, to be honest. I just haven't found time to fit in a movie at the end of the day, and I don't have any new TV shows I'm currently following. But I'm sure I'll catch the Dr. Who specials when they come out in a month or two. I might watch Loki season 2. And I do still like to read and watch movie reviews and collect a 'to be watched' list for myself.

A couple films that came out this year that sound good & I would like to catch up with are Rye Lane ("Raine Allen-Miller reinvents the romantic-comedy genre utilizing vibrant colors, a fisheye lens, and British rap to present a truthful depiction of London that celebrates Black joy in Rye Lane." -Jillian Chilingerian; "Rye Lane is a shock to the system and the current landscape of romantic comedies. It’s loving, genuinely humorous, and an effortless crowd pleaser. A beautiful, energetic reminder that love is worth going after time and again." -Tina Kakadelis)

and Fancy Dance ("Cloaking a family drama in crime-film conventions, the plot of Native American filmmaker Erica Tremblay’s exceptional directorial debut concerns a young woman’s disappearance from an Oklahoma reservation and her family’s urgent attempts to locate her....not even halfway through the film, Tremblay (who is from the Seneca-Cayuga nation) and co-writer Miciana Alise’s keenly observant script has touched on a disconcertingly complex array of social issues, including endemic poverty, racism, foster care, and drug and alcohol abuse in Native communities. For the filmmakers, though, it’s the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls that provides the film’s thematic throughline. Handled with candor and grace, these concerns are well integrated into the narrative and dialogue (often in the Cayuga language) so that they’re recognizable, but not melodramatically manipulative." - The Hollywood Reporter)

I'd also like to rewatch some Man From UNCLE, catch up with Spielberg's West Side Story, watch the latest Indiana Jones movie (which despite all the negative press my brother says was good fun), and sometime maybe get around to the Sandman series from last year and Good Omens 2 from this year.

Last movie?

Uhhhhh, maybe Mission Impossible 7 back in July?

Sweet/spicy/savory?

I dislike spicy. I like savory just fine. I like sweet best, but I have had to learn to seek it out in new forms this year. In January my blood test results indicated I was approaching the upper edge of what's considered pre-diabetic and edging close to full-on Type 2. I have been at high risk to develop it, not only due to family history, but also because I had gestational diabetes when I was pregnant a decade ago. I was told at that time that 1 in 2 women with gestational diabetes go on to develop type 2 within 10 years, and, ahaha, look at the time. So, this year I have been working much harder to reverse those trends and make healthy changes to my diet and get more active. I joined a Diabetes Prevention Class (there's a national program for this, by the way, though it's not well-advertised. My doctor didn't tell me about it, because they never told me anything, but I found a search engine online that helped me find classes locally. Mine is a free, virtual, 12-month program run out of a nearby hospital as a community health initiative and geared toward helping people make lasting lifestyle changes using a small support group style). All this is just to say that I am eating fewer sugars and carbs these days, but I can still get my sweet tooth fix enjoying my red peppers, honeycrisp apples, chocolate-dipped quinoa crisps, and coconut water :) I'm also happy to say that when I was retested in July my blood sugar was so far improved that I have almost dipped out of the pre-diabetic zone altogether and back into what's considered normal range. But of course, it's not something you can stop once you hit a certain number -- the goal is to keep doing this for the rest of my life. So far, it's been going fine and I'm figuring out what I like to eat that's within my new purview. I have to say that California Pizza Kitchen's cauliflower crust mushroom pizza makes me very happy <333333

Relationship status?

If my marriage were a person, it would be old enough to vote. Hurray!

Current obsessions?

My cousins introduced me to a spelling bee game this summer, and over the last week I've picked it back up and am finding it a bit addictive. The two of them regularly ace its highest levels, but I content myself with the goal of getting to the "Great" goalpost and then walking away :) It's fun, but the full word list is, to me, a bit frustrating because it's hard to guess what anachronistic spellings, odd plurals, or never-used permutations they will decide to count (you won't take 'glugging' one day, but you want me to try 'ufts' the next? bah humbug!!) *shrugs* If you're not a completist and would be happy just finding as many patterns as you can, it's a good little daily hamster run for the brain. The solutions to one day's challenge are posted on the following day.

Last thing you googled?

Glugging, LOL. I was, like, oh god, is it somehow not a real word? Better check before I post. But it is!! VINDICATION!!

I will say I also got miffed at the thing for wanting "annum" but not accepting "unum" (oh, we're accepting Latin if it's for accountants but not if it's for a national motto? FINE.) And I was denied "unarm," but that one I eventually had to concede -- you can be unarmed or you can disarm someone else, but 'unarm' by itself isn't actually a thing, okay. But neither is 'ufts', spellbee, GET OFF MY LAWN.

Anyhow, I argue with it and then come back the next day to play again :)

I tag anyone who wants to share, of course!

[danieljreboot]

Manhattan, Upper West Side, 1957. Against the backdrop of the decaying tenements in the San Juan Hill neighbourhood and the constant threat of the wrecking ball, two warring gangs--tough Riff's Jets and swaggering Bernardo's Puerto Rican Sharks--fight for supremacy. Now, with a once-and-for-all, winner-takes-all rumble on the cards, an unexpected whirlwind romance at the high-school dance between former Jet brawler Tony and Bernardo's delicate little sister María sets the stage for an all-out turf war. But what's a gang without its territory? Above all, when the future is uncertain, what's hope without love?

Directed by Academy Award® winner Steven Spielberg, from a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award® winner Tony Kushner, “West Side Story” tells the classic tale of fierce rivalries and young love in 1957 New York City. This reimagining of the beloved musical stars Ansel Elgort (Tony); Rachel Zegler (María); Ariana DeBose (Anita); David Alvarez (Bernardo); Mike Faist (Riff); Josh Andrés Rivera (Chino); Ana Isabelle (Rosalía); Corey Stoll (Lieutenant Schrank); Brian d’Arcy James (Officer Krupke); and Rita Moreno (as Valentina, who owns the corner store in which Tony works). Moreno – one of only three artists to be honored with Academy®, Emmy®, GRAMMY®, Tony® and Peabody Awards – also serves as one of the film’s executive producers. Bringing together the best of both Broadway and Hollywood, the film’s creative team includes Kushner, who also serves as an executive producer; Tony Award® winner Justin Peck, who choreographed the musical numbers in the film; renowned Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor and GRAMMY Award® winner Gustavo Dudamel, who helmed the recording of the iconic score; Academy Award®-nominated composer and conductor David Newman (“Anastasia”), who arranged the score; Tony Award®-winning composer Jeanine Tesori (“Fun Home,” “Thoroughly Modern Millie”), who supervised the cast on vocals; and Grammy®-nominated music supervisor Matt Sullivan (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Chicago”), who served as executive music producer for the film. The film is produced by Spielberg, Academy Award®-nominated producer Kristie Macosko Krieger and Tony Award®-winning producer Kevin McCollum. “West Side Story” has been adapted for the screen from the original 1957 Broadway show, with book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and concept, direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins.

[more-than-a-princess]

【ME & 𝗣𝗘𝗢𝗣𝗟𝗘 𝗜'𝗗 𝗟𝗜𝗞𝗘 𝗧𝗢 𝗚𝗘𝗧 𝗧𝗢 𝗞𝗡𝗢𝗪 𝗕𝗘𝗧𝗧𝗘𝗥】

⠀

- ALIAS / NAME: Rae

- BIRTHDAY: August 22

- ZODIAC SIGN: Leo/Virgo cusp and I absolutely live up to it. I have never felt like I'm solely a Leo or solely a Virgo. I'm a combination of both.

- HEIGHT: 5'8"

- HOBBIES: Writing, reading, watching a lot of TV and movies (sometimes for work, sometimes not), cosplay and fan conventions, fashion (especially luxury accessories and classic cuts and patterns. Though much of my style inspo comes from France and Italy! I love a timeless look with a nod to retro fashions, especially from the 50s-70s), visiting cafes, and dreaming of travel.

- FAVORITE COLOR: Sapphire blue! Both my engagement and wedding rings have sapphires for this reason.

- FAVORITE BOOK: This is an absolutely rude and cruel question how dare you expect me to choose-

- LAST SONG: This Is Taylor Swift playlist on Spotify, but mostly going through Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights tracks for RP reply inspo.

- LAST FILM / SHOW: I'm currently watching Only Murders in the Building with my husband and we're loving it! A few of my family members grew up and/or lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan so seeing all of the familiar architecture is entertaining. As well as the murders, the character personalities, etc. I still don't believe Steve Martin and Martin Short's characters are heterosexual in this show and it should be 'Selena Gomez and her two gay adoptive uncles' but I digress.

- RECENT READS: I finished House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas at the very beginning of February and I've had a book hangover since then! Not that I was 100% satisfied with the ending of Crescent City but it's been hard to get into something new. I've started book 1 in the Crowns of Nyaxia series, The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent, but I haven't managed to finish it or its sequel yet. After that, I'll probably go back to finishing the Letters of Enchantment duology by Rebecca Ross, The Cruel Prince series by Holly Black, or the Hades and Persephone saga by Scarlett St. Clair. I'm tempted to finally dive into some Leigh Bardugo works, some V.E. Schwab, or start Katee Robert's Neon Gods series.

I have 166 books on my Kindle and I've finished maybe 50 of those so far, if it's any indication on how long my TBR list is. And I haven't even mentioned my historical, contemporary, and/or gothic romance picks on that list...

I really love books, y'all.

- STORY BEHIND URL: It's how Sonia wants to be seen by everyone she meets.

- FUN FACT ABOUT ME: I got married in November 2022 but I'm finally taking my honeymoon next month in April 2024. My job takes most of the blame for this, but I'm very close to securing a promotion soon (which means I'll be able to assign some of my work to others!).

That said, a lot of April will be a long hiatus from this blog. I'll be coming back to write when I've returned, but leading up to the trip, two weeks on the trip, and coming back and catching up with everything means much of April will be queued aesthetic posts around here.

That said, I'm so ready for London, Paris, and Disneyland Paris!

TAGGED BY: @mechatiqe (thank you!)

TAGGING: @quickdeaths, @hxpelessnurse, @dcviated, @tacitusauxilium, and you!

[hb-writes]

Any Halloween headcanons of your OCs?

Yes, of course. 🙂

Suits (Charlie Specter) - Charlie absolutely loves horror films and haunted houses. The more nightmare-inducing, the better. Harvey cannot understand the appeal. She usually ends up knocking on his door when she can't fall asleep afterwards.

Peaky (Clara Shelby) - Something about the chillier air in autumn makes Clara want to bake so she always pesters the chef at Arrow House to teach her new recipes. She's an absolute scaredy cat. Terrified of ghost stories. And I'm not entirely certain on the nature of Halloween in 1920's UK, but from a brief search, going around to houses in costume and performing for food appears to have possibly been a thing. And I can absolutely picture little Finn and Clara doing just that, developing a little performance and going house to house for some spare sweets.

Twilight (Mia Cullen) - Mia dresses up as a vampire more than once for Halloween. She does it as a child to be more like her family and then again as a teenager just to be a smartass.

The Punisher (Lenny Falconio) - Lenny loves Halloween and doing all of the stereotypical fall things. She's very serious about pumpkin carving, apple picking, and putting together homemade costumes for everyone.

True Blood (Elisabeth Northman) - Elisabeth has never gone trick or treating.

Shades (Emmeline Grey) - Emma has always had the most extravagant Halloween costumes. Like thinking full gowns and tiaras when she wanted to be a Disney princess. Her birthday is shortly after Halloween, so she also usually liked to have Halloween-themed bday parties while growing up.

The Family Stone (Maggie Stone) - Most of Maggie's Halloween costumes growing up were old costumes belonging to her older siblings and almost all of them were difficult to guess what they were supposed to be (Sybil and Kelly are a bit eccentric, after all).

Supernatural (Nora Winchester) - Pretty sure Dean is more into Trick or Treating than Nora because he always makes sure she gets to go even if they're on the road. It's a great way to get boat loads of free candy and to pick up chicks. Nora's fine with it until she gets to be ~13 years old and feels too old to be going door to door, but Dean pushes it anyway.

White Collar (Alice Burke) - Alice loves going to look at the fancy Brownstones on the Upper West Side decorated for Halloween. She gets special permission to have Neal's radius extended temporarily so he can go with her.

Marvel (Maxine Parker) - Max dresses up as a different avenger each year (another girl being a casual smartass 😅).

[blindmanbaldwin]

I saw “The Fablemans” a few days ago (it’s great), and as I watched it I couldn’t help but think of Spielberg/Kamiński‘s prior collaboration “West Side Story” (2021).  

Their adaptation of the musical had an incredibly difficult task given how iconic the 1961 film is, particularly in its expressionistic use of color. For their spin, the two masters made it their own through some powerful use of shadows with light being used as representative of Maria. Considering what their adaptation (in Tony Kusher’s outstanding screenplay) does with Tony — adding a bit more darkness to his character — the aesthetic choices with their relationship emphasizes the idea that he is a beast of the underworld locked up until this light of love enters into his life. He’s denied his humanity until he sees it reflect off of him through her. It is rather beautiful. New York feels equal parts ground and stylized, fantasy and reality, lived-in and dreamlike. This conflict in the aesthetic of synthetic blues to warm yellows is the conflict within Tony — compassion and retribution. Notice how these colors as well as the presence/absence of light plays out in some of the screenshots below. Kamiński‘s cinematography is incredibly effective in motivating the arguments of the screenplay. These images they craft can stand alone in propelling the emotional weight forward.

Like all tragedy, there is a release found in the pain. Catharsis. The upper west side of the movie is undergoing forced evolution, gentrification. All the poors are being forced out so the rich can move in. Their neighborhood torn down for an arts center. Functionally, this is a dystopia. And this dystopia breeds sectarian conflict, racial strife, and outright bloodshed. Yet amidst all this suffering — love blossoms. Transcendent love. Compassion is the only thing that breeds hope within during times of great suffering. Compassion for the other, compassion for the enemy. Nothing can stop the death of the world, but the light of love can cause us to move out of the suffering. The “Beast” becomes a real boy again through true love. The two worlds become one. The flesh dies, the soul lives on. That bright soul, that light soul. That loving soul. 

A few evenings ago, after I saw “The Fabelmans”, I flipped through “West Side Story: The Making of the Steven Spielberg film” and Spielberg ends the book with a quote that gets at the timeless of the story: “The message of ‘West Side Story’ is what is going to live forever...What it’s about is what we are living in this country today—a time of division and distrust, and the waste of human life through violence, racisms, and xenophobia. And even though the story is a tragedy, like all great tragedies, including ‘Romeo and Juliet’  [inspiration for the original musical], ‘West Side Story’ suggests that hope can be born amid devastation and despair, and thanks to [Leonard] Bernstein and [Stephen] Sondheim’s score, there’s a feeling that despite all the sorrow and ugliness, love transcends...That’s why I wanted to tell this story right now. It is even more about now than it was about then.” Let the light break through the underground cage we all lock ourselves up into from time to time. 

[weakling-grace]

living in this story podcast in which Justin Kirk plays a 3d character.ai simulation operator goshhh his voice is so 😍😍😍

[jadelotusflower]

Obscure Christmas Movie Rewatch: Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus

This was my absolute favourite Christmas movie when I was a kid (behind Muppet's Christmas Carol), and it is so veiled in nostalgia I'm not sure I can be objective (or snark too much), but here we go.

Purporting to tell the story behind the 1897 Editorial Is There a Santa Claus? by Francis Pharcellus Chruch, the events and characters have been heavily fictionalised (as the text and v/o at the end helpfully reminds us). I'm therefore going to do some fact checking as to historical accuracy, but only out of interest, and certainly not intended as a criticism. I genuinely love this movie!

We open with Francis P Church (the late great Charles Bronson) in a cemetery, brushing the snow off the grave of his wife Elizabeth and baby Eleanor who died a year earlier. He opens up a gold watch with her picture inside, and it plays a gentle tune. He then takes out a bottle of whiskey, but turns away from the grave before he takes a swig.

In real life Church was indeed married to Elizabeth Wickham, but they had no children and I can't find any information about when she died (Francis passed in 1906). However in terms of framing a character, this is pretty effective.

We see The Sun newspaper being delivered, giving us the date of 17 December 1897.

Then we're at the docks, where James O'Hanlan (Richard Thomas) and Dominic Donelli (Massimo Bonetti) are fired after getting into a fight with another worker who levies several ethnic slurs and anti-immigrant rhetoric at them. Thomas was apparently one of the Walton kids (which I've never seen), and is one of those working actors who has seemingly been in every procedural known to man - he was also in The Americans and Ozark (but I haven't seen those either).

Their eight year old daughters Virginia (Katherine Isabelle) and Maria (Virginia Bagnata) meanwhile, are being mocked by her classmates for believing in Santa Claus. Look, the child performances in this movie are...what you would expect. But I'm not here to criticise kids, they do their best.

James can't find another job, reduced to reading The Sun a day late once it's put out in the trash, and the family is struggling. His wife Evie (Tasmin Kelsey, who I remember as Gairwyn from Stargate SG-1) is an optimist and tells him to keep up his spirits. James: "The trouble is there's too much damn spirit and not enough damn jobs."

In actuality, Philip O'Hanlan was a surgeon and coroner and they were a middle class family who lived on the Upper West Side. Virginia went on to achieve a doctorate in childhood education and was a teacher for over 40 years - her childhood home is now a school.

Frank stumbles into the offices of The Sun to pick up another bottle of whiskey from his desk, and then to the local bar to brood. Local pompous aristocratic jerk Cornelius Barrington (John Novak - who has apparently been in every Canadian-filmed production ever, including Smallville and Stargate) arrives to goad Frank about his affinity for those filthy poors. In doing so, he makes Frank sound legitimately badass: "The great egalitarian editorializer, friend and champion of the common man, would-be slayer of the capitalist dragons!"

The newsroom is populated by editor Edward Page Mitchell (the late great Ed Asner), copyboy Teddy (Shawn Macdonald), and sole female reporter Andrea Borland (Colleen Winton - apparently she was also in two episodes of Stargate but I can't place her). She's ambitious and frustrated that Mitchell will only let her report on society matters. Not gonna lie, there's a whiff of Perry White, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen about them (or maybe it's just that I rewatched the 1978 Superman recently). There's a bit of snappy dialogue:

Andrea: Did you like my society piece on the Vanderbilt ball?

Mitchell: I printed it, didn't I?

Andrea: Well...half of it

Mitchell: That was the half I liked.

Andrea heads to the bar and hesitates only for a moment at the "men only" sign before going in to find Frank and try and retrieve the article Mitchell was looking for - "The Shame of Greatness".

Frank hands her a page of a few ideas and a lot of gibberish, while Corenlius watches literally eating popcorn. There's just a big bowl of popcorn sitting out in this men's bar and grill!

If gifs were a thing in the 90's this would have been a meme.

Andrea rewrites the article and gives it to Mitchell in Frank's name. It's a great success, with Teddy walking around reciting lines and calling it "a real humdinger!" Frank confronts Andrea, and she confides in him that it was his lecture at her university that inspired her to keep going when she was only one of three women in the class (and the other two ended up getting married).

We get the dramatic irony in Frank's refusal to be impressed: "Tomorrow it will be yesterday's newspaper, and you can wrap a fish in it. Nothing that you, or I, or anybody else writes for a newspaper has a lifespan of more than 24 hours."

Cornelius approaches Andrea and offers her a job to work at his uncle's paper The Chronicle in order to expose Frank as a fraud (in real life Church actually once worked at The Chronicle, which was published by his father). But as a woman of principle she coldly rejects him, and honestly, I love her. Frank has been nothing but dismissive and patronising towards her, so it's clear it's not solely about protecting him (and perhaps the ideal she had of him) but more about who she is and what she believes. Underrated character in an underrated movie.

James foils a robbery, and the police arrive with accents of the diddly dee potatoes variety. When he arrives home he's greeted by his Jewish neighbor Mrs Goldstein. It's interesting that this is a very similar setting to Mrs Santa Claus - New York at the turn of the century and has some thematic similarities - the immigrant experience and the importance of community in particular.

James reads aloud The Shame of Greatness article to the family:

"We have become a great nation, but at what cost? Ask the red man, the black man, the immigrant, the elderly, the ill. We have built a railroad across the 45 states and bridges across rivers but there is no bridge of brotherhood. Why? Because there is no profit in that bridge. Ask the captains of industry, ask the robber barons, ask the politicians about that bridge."

Unfortunate racial wording aside, it's a sentiment that wouldn't be out of place now, 31 years after this film was made, and 125 years after the film is set. I like a little activism in my Christmas movies.

It's also worth noting that most of the above passage were parts written by Frank, so Andrea's suggestion that they were his ideas is given credence - we don't know what the rest of the article went on to say but it's implied Andrea is a great writer able to match Frank's voice.

James speaks to the frustration of America not being the promised land: "It's hard to believe that fifty years ago our people came to this country because they were starving in Ireland. Potato famine indeed! High rents ha! It's no different over here."

As a child watching this movie was the first time I'd heard of the potato famine, and it's only this rewatch I noticed that Virginia is reading a book about Oliver Cromwell! Yikes. I don't know if that was deliberate, but certainly an interesting touch.

Evie however, takes the other side of the argument, telling James to stop feeling sorry for himself, and to be grateful for what they have - family, a place to live, and food (and God - this is certainly the most religious movie of this rewatch). Evie: "You can be poor if you want to James O'Hanlon, but I'm rich. And I grow richer every day of my life."

Virginia asks her father if Santa Claus is real, and he is the envy of every parent in quickly thinking to deflect and encourage her to write to The Sun for an answer instead.

Frank is back at the bar, where Cornelius goads him about Andrea, implying there are other things she is taking care of for him. Finally Frank is moved to respond, and when Cornelius warns him that he was "Captain of the Yale boxing team" Frank punches him square in the face, knocking him to the floor.

"I've done some fighting myself, Captain," Frank says, "around Hell's Kitchen." When I was a kid I didn't realise this referred to a gritty part of New York and thought it was a metaphor and an allusion to his roving reporter life - I think it works either way.

At the postbox, Virginia is gifted a stamp by the kindly German postman Hans Schuller, in another example of this community of immigrants helping each other through the hard times.

At The Sun, Frank looks at his wife's picture in the watch, and Teddy remarks that one day he'll have a watch like that ("a real himdinger!" - an annoying catchphrase, but it's meant to be annoying). Frank takes the picture out and puts the watch in an envelope with Teddy's name on it, then goes home where he turns off the fire but leaves the gas on, in the grand tradition of family Christmas movies including attempted suicide!

I admit this went right over my head when I first watched this as a kid, I think subtle enough not to be too dark for younger viewers. There's also a nice bit of production design comparing Frank's warm and furnished apartment with the O'Hanlan's grey and bare abode.

Mitchell arrives to give Frank the assignment of answering Virginia's letter, and we get to the core of Frank's depression - that he was a man who lived for his work, never even spending one Christmas dinner with his wife because he was away on assignment, and the irony that he was in Panama writing about yellow fever while she was dying of pneumonia - guilt and longing and regret. It's pretty complex stuff for a family film, and something I never really appreciated until I was older.

Now, it's certainly wholesale fiction - Francis Church married Elizabeth in 1871, so not merely married for "more than three years" as in the film. In fact, her birthdate on the grave is 1860, which puts a bit of a different spin on things with Frank significantly older rather than being her contemporary as in real life. This is alluded to in their conversation as Frank says he took many more years than most men to find a wife, adding to his guilt for not being there for her and appreciating what he had.

There's also nothing I could find that indicated he was an alcoholic - allegedly he was an atheist and hated writing the famous editorial.

But Ed Asner and Charles Bronson are both great actors, and play so well off each other. I do give credit for this scene not being too overwritten - if you actually pay attention to the grave at the beginning you see that Elizabeth and Eleanor died on 24 December the previous year - which is on the nose, but it remains subtext rather than Frank giving exposition of the "They died on Christmas and that's why I hate it!" variety.

The next day at the paper we get a cameo from screenwriter Andrew J Fenady as the reporter who tells Mitchell things are "heating up" in Cuba, referring to the Cuban War of Independence and a precursor to the Spanish-America War. I do enjoy these small historical touches.

Meanwhile, James and Dominic find jobs for the day but have another run in with the dock workers and get to thoroughly beat them up in a nice bit of karma. There's really no point to this scene other than to see the bigots get punched, but hey, I'm here for that, and it also keeps James' story parallel to Frank's.

Frank wanders around the city and is inspired by what he sees - the poor being fed by a soup kitchen, a policeman helping an elderly homeless man, people donating to toy drives, and a scene in a park complete with brass band, sleigh rides, ice skating, and general seasonal joy. He finds a baby's rattle that inspires part of the editorial, and sees a young couple with their child, sending him back to visit his wife's grave. He buys flowers but decides to throw them away rather than placing them on the grave - along with his bottle of whiskey.

I actually think this is a great example of show-not-tell writing - a lesser piece would have had Frank talk to his wife at her grave, saying how sorry he was he never appreciated her enough when she was alive, asking how he was going to answer Virginia's question when he himself doesn't believe in anything anymore, and then make a breakthrough. But not a word is uttered - we have Bronson's performance, we see him start to experience life again and decide to stop wallowing in his grief and return to his passion for writing. It's actually very deftly done.

Mrs Goldstein appears again to give the O'Hanlan's some brisket because she "made too much." It's very sweet but James gets in his feelings about it because he's not the one providing for his family.

The police arrive to take James down to the station for questioning about the robbery, and while he's gone Virginia uses a penny she found on the street earlier to buy a paper - wanting to give her father the gift of The Sun on the day it's printed rather than the next.

Back at the paper, Frank puts his wife's picture back in his gold watch, and instead gives Teddy another: "it's not gold, and it doesn't play a tune, but it was my first watch and it helped me start the day for many years." He also tells Mitchell he will come to Christmas dinner after all, and Andrea asks him to follow her somewhere, repeating his earlier words back to him: "there has to be a finish to every story."

James arrives back at home with a tree and laden with gifts, including a pet kitten (that he befriended earlier on). Turns out he was given a reward for his part in the robbery, and that both he and Dominic were offered jobs on the police force. Something could be said about James and Dominic becoming cops on the basis of punching people really well, but perhaps this isn’t the place for it.

Virginia gives her father the paper, and of course sees the editorial and reads it aloud, as all our friends arrive, including Andrea and Frank. It's actually a rather moving scene, the community that has supported each other, and who all played a part in the letter being written, delivered, and finally answered.

I honestly think this movie holds up despite the nostalgia goggles - there is some cringe, but through fictionalising the story behind the editorial, it becomes it's own metaphor - the weaving together of these disparate lives and their various struggles, united by hope and faith. Bronson gives a great performance that really grounds the film (and the part must have been particularly resonant for him, as his wife Jill Ireland had died the year before the film was made). I really recommend this movie, and think it's a shame that it isn't as enduring or well known as the original editorial.

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. 

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. 

Not believe In Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. 

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. 

No Santa Claus! Thank God he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

[heavenboy09]

Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 To A Very Talented Rising Star 🌟  / Latina Actress Of This New Age Of Acting She is Puerto 🇵🇷 Rican & Has African American & Partial Italian 🇮🇹 Descent This Young Latina Is A Actress, Dancer, & A Singer She Made Her made her television debut competing on the sixth season of So You Think You Can Dance in 2009, where she finished in the top 20. She then made her Broadway debut in Bring It On: The Musical in 2011 and continued her work on Broadway with roles in Motown: The Musical (2013) and Pippin (2014). From 2015 to 2016, she originated the role of The Bullet in Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton, and appeared as Jane in A Bronx Tale (2016–2017). In 2018, she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance as Disco Donna in Summer: The Donna Summer Musical. In 2022, she hosted the 75th Tony Awards. She appeared in the Netflix musical film The Prom (2020) and the Apple TV+ musical comedy series Schmigadoon! (2021), before gaining widespread recognition for her role as Anita in Steven Spielberg's musical West Side Story (2021). For her performance, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, making her the first queer woman of color to receive an Oscar in an acting category. Starring In 1 Of The Most Important & Legendary Musicals 🎼 Of All Times From The Play, Broadway 🎶 & To The Major Motion Picture Of The Year Written By Jerome Robbins with Music by Leonard Bernstein A Age Old Tale Of A Love Story Between 2 People in 2 Families & Groups That Have Been Feuding With Each Other For A Long Time In the Bustling City Of New York Of The Upper West Side A Story Is About To Be Told Through The Emotion & Heart Of Music 🎶 ♥ WEST SIDE STORY She has received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award and a nomination for a Tony Award. In 2022, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Please Wish This Bright Young 🌞 Latina Actress 🙏 A Very Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 Arianna DeBose  #AriannaDeBose #WestSideStory https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn2fu-Bys5YGCGfCDb7XGUk95zPv0t_5A5GFD00/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=