Thanks and entertainment

Friends, I started this newsletter in early July and started actually telling people about it in early August, so Rose-coloured is either two or three months old, approximately, depending on how you count it. Many thanks for reading this far, for subscribing and commenting and generally being pals to Rose-coloured. I don’t say a lot about my creative work but it is not going super right now and this newsletter has been a very joyful fun way of writing all the time and connecting with readers and not feeling bad about my limitations, and I really appreciate everyone who has joined in and read along or even said, “Hey, it’s great that you have a newsletter,” in a vague no-further-questions-at-this-time way. All encouragement helps, truly.

It has been a nice holiday weekend here with food and movies and tv and family and cats and magazines. Would you like some content recommendations born of this time? Why, of course, happy to oblige.

Mark saw a recommendation in the newspaper for English Teacher and put it on when I was already quite sleepy, but I perked right up when I saw it stars Brian Joseph Alvarez. I loved his webseries The Gay and Wonderous Life of Caleb Gallo back in 2016ish so much (how did I come to watch that? I don’t usually watch webseries? I think I heard about it on a podcast??) that I even tried to watch him when he had a role on Will and Grace, even though I REALLY don’t like that show (and still don’t, BJA couldn’t help me there). So I was amped for English Teacher. And…it’s pretty good. It’s about a gay English teacher at a suburban high school where the students are disaffected and the staff is weird. The very deadpan principal is hilarious and all the actors are good but the plotlines leave something to be desired. I mean, even for a sitcom these plotlines are inane, but all the actors are charming and funny and they occasionally have the manic, layered dialogue that I loved so much on New Girl. And the main character is genuinely melodramatic and self-destructive instead of just ““““charmingly quirky””” like most tv protagonists, so I feel like there is hope for real comedy here. BUT OMG, please watch Caleb Gallo, about some truly chaotic oversexed people in their early twenties running around LA and just having ALL THE DRAMA. It’s so fun. I’ve linked to the first ep above—there’s only five so it won’t even take you that long and if you have a bad time you can complain to me. BUT YOU WON’T.

We went to the film Saturday Night and it was pretty fun. It definitely focused on Lorne Michaels: Tortured Auteur more than I cared about and the structure (the ninety minutes BEFORE the first episode aired, when everything was going haywire and people were freaking out) made for an intense and propulsive film but with little backstory. Nevertheless, I was able to glean some gossip and there were plenty of good jokes. The actors, who were mainly unknowns cast seemingly for their uncanny resemblance for the stars they were playing, were actually very good and charming, and if I didn’t quite feel like I was at Rockfeller Centre in 1975, it was a good facsimile. But as someone who REALLY got into this story when I was younger, I recommend Bob Woodward’s biography of John Belushi Wired, which has a lot of the background chaos from the show. There’s tonnes of books written about the show in that period, and all periods, and the movie made me want to read more of them. Gilda Radner wrote a memoir called It’s Always Something but it’s mainly about having cancer—still good though.

More stuff I’ve been enjoying lately—I finally got the memo about Chappell Roan and surprise, she is that good. A book I blurbed called The Elevator by Priya Ramsingh launched last week from Palimpsest Press. This blurber said, “The Elevator is a warm, thoughtful, realistic novel…” Read more—and order your copy—at the link above. I still love Modern Cat magazine and believe it does help me to be a better pet owner, even though some articles are just for interest and fun, like when Mark looked over my shoulder when I was reading an article about cats that are brown and said, “Ah, news you can use.” On a colleague’s recommendation I listened to Geordie Greep’s new album and it was so weird it made my eyes wide, but I think…I like it? More research is needed.

And finally, today is thanksgiving and there is only one good Thanksgiving song that I know of, and that is Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie. (Incidentally the only other person who has ever mentioned liking this song outside of my immediate family is Linguist-in-Chief of Rose-coloured Anne-Michelle Tessier, indicating how clearly she was born for the job.) For many year’s this anti-(Vietnam) war song was a charming throwback, but of course, now there is another war. As Guthrie says, “If you want to end war and stuff, you gotta sing loud.” I don’t know the more current protest songs yet and have not done a good job of singing so far, but I resolve to do better. Not the traditional time of year to make resolutions but really, is there a bad one?

And now, this:

Thursday

RR: Well, they didn’t really do anything wrong but at this point I just dislike them so much it’s just everything they do annoys me. You know the term, “B*tch eating crackers”?
MS: …
RR: So like if you dislike someone enough, even if they are just sitting quietly eating crackers, you’d still think, gosh, what a b*tch, right?
MS: Oh, without a hyphen?
RR: What? You thought…b*tch-eating crackers? Like the crackers that ate all the b*tches?
MS: So…subject verb object? Not compound adjective noun? Got it. Not a demon-possessed box of Saltines.
MS (texts me later while I am ON A VIDEO CALL) Or maybe it’s about white-trash cannibals from the American South.

<3

RR