EPISODE 633: THE LUGGAGE STORE INSIDE THE CANDY STORE
Destroy the Concealment.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
So it’s Thanksgiving week, aka That time when we think to ourselves, Won’t it be nice to slow down a little, except in reality it’s jampacked and won’t slow down until January 2nd.
At the same time, we’re also entering that time of year where magazines are starting to produce some really wonderful think-y pieces that are weirdly predicated on the whole idea that this is that time of year where we do actually start to slow down and we’re sitting out on the weather-proofed porch with a cup of hot cocoa. And when we finish drawing little smiley faces in the fog on the windows from the cup while we watch the people outside freeze to death, we think to ourselves, “Mm, wouldn’t it be nice to read something that normally I don’t have the time for because I’m too busy reacting on Twitter to the headlines of other things that I haven’t read?”
(Why is it all my thoughts about relaxing during the holidays involve a smoking cup of something and also me saying “Mmm”? That feels weird.)
So, in my ongoing and abiding desire to be there for you, today I want to give you some things you might check out if indeed you are able to resist the hurricane of busyness that is sweeping your way right this instant. (I can see it from here, and don’t look now but there’s a green-skinned lady cackling inside it, and/or a totally misunderstood alto with an interesting skin pigmentation.)
Seven Things For Your Potential Quiet Time Holiday Pleasure:
1) How Mel Brooks met Anne Bancroft – Mel Brooks has a new memoir coming out, and this week Vulture released an excerpt in which Brooks talks about how he first met the love of his life Anne Bancroft.
Here’s how it begins:
It’s 1961, and I’m working with Charles Strouse and Lee Adams on a Broadway show called All American. They had just had a huge hit with Bye Bye Birdie, and I was brought on to write the book for their new musical project.
One day, in the middle of writing, Charles, whom we all called Buddy, said, “Mel. Come with me. I have to go to a Perry Como show rehearsal at the Ziegfeld Theatre because I’m going to be playing the piano for Anne Bancroft. We’re rehearsing for a performance she is going to do at the Actors Studio later this week, and I have to find the right key for ‘Just You Wait (Henry Higgins).’ After I get the key, we’ll go back to work at my place.”
So I tagged along. After a few minutes, the guest star, Anne Bancroft, takes the stage. I’d never seen anything like it.
She was wearing a stunning white dress, and she was singing in a sultry voice a Gertrude Niesen favorite, “I Wanna Get Married.” She was just incredibly beautiful.
When the song was over, I leapt to my feet, applauded madly, and shouted, “Anne Bancroft! I love you!”
She laughed and shouted back, “Who the hell are you?”
I said, “I’m Mel Brooks! Nobody you’ve ever heard of!”
She said, “Wrong! I’ve got your 2000 Year Old Man record with Carl Reiner. It’s great.”
That was the beginning.
After Buddy got the key for their song, he said, “Let’s go back to my place.”
I said, “Forget it. I think I’m in love.”
2) Life After Catastrophe(s): Rob Delaney is a U.S. comedian and actor and the co-creator of the U.K. show Catastrophe, which I highly recommend if you want a story about marriage where both parties involved pull absolutely no punches at any time and yet somehow it really does kind of work?
Here’s a scene from it.
Delaney’s a really thoughtful guy and he and his family have been through some real stuff, and he recently did an interview with the Guardian where readers could ask him questions. It’s wonderful.
I’m sorry to be the one to bring this up, but has it ever occurred to you that your wife may be having an affair with her karate sensei? Marc, Sunderland
Sometimes on Twitter I pretend my wife is clearly having an affair with her karate teacher and I am oblivious. It’s a long-running gag that I don’t know if anyone else enjoys, but for some reason it makes me laugh. In real life, my wife doesn’t take karate – and if she is having an affair with any kind of trainer or person more athletic than myself, she’s doing a good job hiding it.
3) Your Moment of Jeff Goldblum: If you know from my years of work trying to make a bunch of university Jesuits approachable on social media, you know that I am a huge fan of Jeff Goldblum.
Actually, the truth is while I have always liked Jeff Goldblum, I wouldn’t have said I was a huge fan when I started doing the LMU Jesuits Facebook page. But pretty close to the start of me running their page I had the thought, I should try to do some things that people don’t expect from a bunch of old priests—and also that that bunch of priests won’t be offended by. (When you live with 40 priests, this is not an easy thing to accomplish.)
And Jeff Goldblum was just out there enough that most of them would not have any opinion about him one way or another. And so I started posting GIFs of him in response to other people’s comments on their pages and mine, like this:
And the more I did the more I fell in love with him. He seems to treat everything that happens to him like it is the most delightful surprise, and responds pretty much in kind. I love him for it.
Here’s a bit from a new interview he just did with Vulture:
My dad came from a poor family from Russia. They came here and had a little luggage store [inside] a candy store. He needed to pull himself up by his bootstraps. He thought at 18 that he’d either be a doctor or an actor, and chose to be a doctor but always had an interest in theater. My mother flirted with the stage also. They would drive to New York and come back with cast albums from the musicals they’d seen. They had sophisticated taste; they saw Lee J. Cobb do King Lear. They’d take us to the museum and I had some facility as an artist early on. They gave me special art classes, and I got tap-dancing classes, and they exposed us all to musical lessons. My older brother had a clarinet.
4) The Gratitude of Joaquin Phoenix: I love culture commentator Mike Ryan. He’s always a lot of fun on Twitter. And he was recently tweeting about having had this unusual experience of interviewing Joaquin Phoenix, who absolutely loathes being interviewed, and yet somehow the experience of interviewing him was not terrible despite that. Which I thought was really interesting.
Phoenix is one of a small group of actors who consistently produce really incredible work, in my opinion. So I am here for whatever he wants to talk about—which in this case is The Six Million Dollar Man, the way he picks his jobs (which is really spiritual in a way) and his unspoken mantra, “Life is a fucking maybe.”
5) Saying Goodbye to Insecure: When I was a writer on Preacher, we had planned to finish the first season of writing on a Friday—which weirdly was going to be Good Friday. I actually got hired on my first project on Valentine’s Day, then I got hired on this to start the week of Thanksgiving, we finished during Holy Week. I’m planning the future of my writing career exclusively around big holidays.
Anyway, on the day before we were supposed to wrap, we suddenly found ourselves done. Like, it just happened – 4pm, and suddenly the episode was done. There was nothing more to do.
We just looked at each other for a minute. Then the showrunner said, let’s have a drink. And then it was over. I was like, “Wait, but I should still come in tomorrow, right?” And they were like, Um, no. It’s done.
The long-running HBO show Insecure is just about to end. One of my friends from UCLA has been a writer on the show all five seasons—a really funny and wonderful human being. And at the start of this interview the whole writing team did on the show ending, she told a story that reminded me of that experience.
What was it like to work in a Zoom writers’ room this season?
Issa Rae: The fuckin’ worst. So much of a comedy room’s dynamic is in the jokes and looks you share with people, and to not know, like, I made that joke for them. Did they get it? It sucked, and things took a lot longer. It was pretty devastating to write the last season of this show and not be able to even hug. The last day, we were all crying and saying good-bye to each other and I think Kindsey was like, “So we just press ‘Leave Room’ and we’re done?”
Amy Aniobi: On that last day, I walked away — I think I was getting a drink — and I came back and everyone had logged out.
Syreeta Singleton: We were trying to give her a Fresh Prince moment.
Fran Richter: The Will Smith moment.
Kindsey Young: The lights-out switch.
Working in Hollywood can be ROUGH.
Insecure has been really groundbreaking in a lot of ways. I love for its humor and for its insistence on telling a story of 20 and 30 something black people as they are, rather than as Hollywood generally imagines them. If you’ve never caught it, you should try it.
6) We Need to Talk about Juliette Binoche (or I Do, Anyway): One of the things you need to have at the ready when you’re working in Hollywood is the story of how you got into the business in the first place. What led you here?
And the fact is, there are lots of versions of that story, at least for me. And one that I almost never tell is very simple: I saw this film Bleu, about a French woman who is the sole survivor of a car crash that kills her husband, a famous composer, and their daughter. And she walks away from her whole life and tries to start over somewhere else.
And the largely silent performance of the woman playing the wife was just the most incredible thing I had ever seen (and still is). And so I wanted to work in the movies.
That woman was Juliette Binoche. And this is a recent profile of her.
Many of Binoche’s women seem unable to accept the unbridgeable distance between two consciousnesses, and throw themselves, continually, against a wall. Binoche described a similar hunger to dissolve boundaries between herself and others, and told a story about working on “Blue” (1993) with the revered Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, in which she plays a woman grieving the sudden death of her husband and child in a car crash, and trying to discover a way to go on. She was anxious about getting into character because the costumes were too conceptual. “The costume director, you know, was going through different blues, and it was so intellectual. And I was feeling, ‘This is not working for me because it’s too on the nose.’ And [Kieslowski] agreed, so we had to change it at the last minute and it was like a week before, and I was worried, and Kieslowski said to me, ‘What are you worrying about? Don’t be worried. You know, I’m only interested in your intimacy.’”
She didn’t understand what he meant at first, but then, on the first day of shooting, during a scene in which her character, who is herself injured, lies in bed watching a televised broadcast of her husband and daughter’s burial, “the camera was inside my bed, me crying like crazy. And then I realized, OK, now I know what he means by that, by the intimacy. Because he couldn’t be closer. He was like that, in my eye.” Since then, she has had a special affinity for close-ups: “I’m more aware that if the camera comes closer, somehow, the director wants to be closer. And so it touches me. They want to see what’s inside.”
7) I’m pretty new to Brandi Carlisle, but I stumbled onto this article where she talks about gratitude, being gentle and forgiveness, and I just really loved it.
As a teen, Carlile saw baptism as “the final step in [her] journey to community and self-acceptance.” So she had Pastor Steve prepare her for the sacred rite. On her baptism day, she wore the swimsuit and invited her parents — who didn’t attend that church — to the ceremony. But before things could even get started, Pastor Steve told her that if she couldn’t repent of what he deemed the sin of homosexuality, he couldn’t baptize her. She left that church but never could shake the faith.
“Everyone hated Pastor Steve after that … But I wasn’t mad at him,” she writes in Broken Horses, going out of her way to say how hurt Steve looked as he was hurting her, reasoning that she couldn’t feel wronged by him if her sexuality still felt wrong to herself. “Looking back on it now,” she writes, “I see grace everywhere.
Here’s a great song from her.
If you’re looking for other content, I also really enjoyed this piece from one of America’s O’Hare fellows talking about feeling disillusioned with his music idol Adele and this very funny piece from two of our editors on the topics they wished the bishops would have talked about. And if you love Brandi Carlisle I also really recommend this piece.
(I also did a couple pieces this week, one on how to deal with unvaccinated family members during the holidays and another on the crisis of despair among Catholic priests. The first piece seems to have generated quite a bit of…energy online, which shouldn’t surprise me, but I actually was trying to be helpful.)
Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving. See you next week.