TueDo List: Holiday Cookies + Story Doubleheader + The Crown Finale
Plus a new dating show for women over 50
THIS WEEK
📖 READ: An ode to the single life. Candace Bushnell’s new dating show for women over 50. Never rely on a man’s money. “We don’t owe the world our bodies” — a great pre-holiday pep talk from Virginia Sole-Smith. How Norman Lear changed ‘70s television. A Gen-X mom’s advice for dealing with bullies. Millennials and Gen Xers might be the unluckiest caregivers in history.
👀 LOOK: News anchor’s epic response to body-shaming comment. Pantone’s color of the year, peach fuzz, is giving ‘80s and ‘90s vibes. Fab queer holiday films. The best ‘90s toys you can still buy today. Nahbucks! shows every non-Starbucks coffee shop in the U.S.
🎧 LISTEN: Mariah Carey, Ariana Grande and Jennifer Hudson performing “Oh Santa.” Brenda Lee performing “Rockin Around the Christmas Tree.” For when your favorite song isn’t long enough: the eternal jukebox.
🤣 LOL: 100 greatest SNL holiday sketches. This comic strip about growing up in the ‘80s. To anyone too young to remember the ‘90s, we offer our pity. Insert the “dead” (NOT laughing) emoji here. Jenna Lyons is triggered by televisions over mantelpieces.
😋 YUM: This guy is making this year’s NYT Holiday Cookies every day this week.
🎟️ GO: Tix on sale now for Kathleen Hanna’s big-venue book tour. A great workshop from Writers at Work if you’re thinking about starting a Substack.
🛒 ADD TO CART: Retro telephone handset for your iPhone. ‘80s and ‘90s inspired cassette tape tumblers. Get historical letters delivered weekly right to your mailbox. The perfect calendar for tired-ass women.
📺 WATCH:
This week: Under Pressure: The U.S. Women’s World Cup Team (Netflix).
Thurs: MTV Unplugged returns with A Hip-Hop 50th Celebration of Jersey’s Finest featuring Queen Latifah, Wyclef Jean and more (Paramount+). The conclusion of The Crown Season 6, Part 2 (Netflix).
Fri: Funky adult animated series Carol & The End of the World (Netflix). Timothée Chalamet as Willy Wonka (Theaters).
Sat: Kate McKinnon returns to host SNL’s Holiday Special with musical guest Billie Eilish.
STORY: The Strange Aftermath of a ‘90s Mass Shooting Is Still Teaching Me Lessons Today
By Melissa Rayworth
It’s nearly midnight on December 7, 1993. I’m lying in bed in my Long Island apartment. I can’t sleep, but at least I’m alive. That’s not the case for the dying who’ve been brought to the hospital just outside my window.
My bedroom blinds are closed, but the light from the emergency room parking lot across the street is so bright that it paints dozens of thin white lines across the ceiling above me. I can’t stop staring at that light, a physical reminder of just how close the hospital is to our home.
And yet somehow, tonight it was too far to travel for the man who lies next to me, sleeping soundly. The man who’s been my husband for just three months.
When I think back now, it seems almost crazy that I was lying still at that moment. My life back then was spent in perpetual motion, especially at night.
I was an actress with a full-time day job, racing out on my lunch hour for auditions all over New York City. I’d also managed to get hired at a theater on Long Island that was actually paying me to act nearly every night of the week. I spent every Wednesday through Sunday night performing on their stage, and every Monday and Tuesday rehearsing the show that would open next.
It was exhausting, but it worked if I moved fast. I would sprint out of my midtown office at exactly 5 p.m. each night, race through the tourist-filled concourse under Rockefeller Center, jump on the subway, then pop out at 34th Street and run a full block to hurry down the escalator into Penn Station and grab a seat on the 5:33 train.
STORY: Can Writing Be My BFF?
By Carlene Bauer
One Sunday this past September, I went to the Met to see an exhibition by the painter Cecily Brown. She’s British, she’s 52, she’s a fellow Gen Xer. She lives in New York City, and for expediency’s sake let’s call her an abstract painter.
In the middle of the exhibition, I noticed that she’d titled a painting BFF, which made me laugh. She was ironizing the concept and sending it up, but it was also a sincere acknowledgment of a guiding principle. According to the card next to it, one of Brown’s mentors told her to make painting her best friend, because, like a best friend, it would always be there for her. In other words: the challenges of working out a vision could provide reliable comfort when all other comforts proved disappointing.
I tend not to have blindingly acute site-specific realizations, but standing in front of that painting I found myself sitting spiritually upright and in possession of possible insight.
I’ve been writing as long as Cecily Brown’s been painting, and while I’ve asked my writing to be many things, I’ve never really asked it to be a friend. Maybe it was, sort of, back in college, when the page was one of my favorite places to be. The papers and poems and stories I wrote for my classes helped me to become a person I really liked: confident, razor-witted, brilliant, charming. Crafting a self on the page transformed me the way spending time in the company of people you really, really love and trust can transform you.
Sending out nothin’ but good vibes, TueNighters!
Can't wait to see if Candace can help older women find love.....seriously? Gratuitous bs just like "And Just Like That."