Happy 70th to my very cool dad, with whom I am forever obsessed. Thanks for being a person of whom I can be proud.
Thank you also to Lena Dunham for being the ultimate liking-our-parents-into-adulthood representation. I too love my parents in an unusually genuine way. I enjoy living close to them geographically and being uncommonly close to them psychologically.
As I often say, my parents are objectively cooler than me. They raised me and I am a nerd, but they are actually cool and normal. They are not the kind of parents who introduced us to Star Trek or Lord of the Rings. They are not why I am like this. They were too busy being jocks in high school and then doing interesting theater in New York and protesting nuclear proliferation under Reagan to build their identities around consumerism. Catch them being iconic always and only rarely cringey, a precise inversion of my own ratio.
I often think about a time when I was being an awful teen and my mother told me she did not want or need to be my friend, because she had to be my mother. At this big age, I enjoy the fact I have now been friendly with her for at least half as long as I’ve been alive (and I hope more). And don’t even get me started on my father, who taught at the same high school I attended while I was there and truly was more popular than me (see CPS featurette above for proof). Anyway, it is my dad’s 70th birthday today (celebrated yesterday with a lovely party), and so there’s going to be even more I Like Hanging Out With My Boomer Dad™ content in this issue.
My dad got me into Paul Simon, and now I am taking us to see him at Ravinia on July 18. Ravinia is an outdoor music venue in a random wealthy suburb of Chicago to which you can take the regional Metra train. People bring full picnics and camp chairs and fight mosquitos and weather to listen to great acts do the same. Anyway, it will be my first time seeing my favorite singer-songwriter, and my dad’s second, because of course he saw THEEEEE SIMON & GARFUNKEL LIVE IN CENTRAL PARK CONCERT in 1981! Because, again, cool.
Perhaps this is a direct consequence of living with a lover, I do not know, but we are seeing way more movies in movie theaters than I’d have expected. We saw Sheep Detectives (funny! forgettable!) and I Love Boosters (inventive! pulled its punches!). Both movies, though they were at different theaters (an AMC and a local spot), had nearly 35 minutes of previews. Is this possibly a factor in why no one goes anymore?!
My takeaways from those movies are 1) I wish I could have a lamb as a pet and 2) they SPOILER should have killed the Demi Moore character, respectively.
Randomly this week, I texted the resident Swiftie in my life, Margaret H. Willison (congrats on your NEW JOB (see above!), to ask what was going on with Taylor Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce, since I hadn’t heard about them in a while, and lo and behold, it was a subject of I <3 Mess this week:
My partner has been reading Right Ho, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse to me at night, and it has reliably put me to sleep within a paragraph each time. I have friends who write and read fanfic about the chatacters, and I could and have gone down that path, but mostly, I find the original books and stories unforgivably tedious. I am not English, and they aren’t really gay enough to interest me. While there is a lot out there speculating on Wodehouse’s asexuality and manner, the most interesting distillation I’ve come across is this 1978 analysis by Martin Green:
Perhaps most interesting of all is the antiestheticism of this sensibility. Wilfred Sheed has aligned Wodehouse with Kipling and Conan Doyle and the W.S. Gilbert of “Patience,” as concealed esthetes - who persecuted the confessed esthetes of their times. Especially after the Oscar Wilde scandal of homosexuality (which occurred during Wodehouse’s adolescence), there was a strong reaction against estheticism in English society, and some of its sharpest spokesmen were men of letters, themselves devoted to the practice of art. Wodehouse spent his life at the typewriter and talked to his friends almost exclusively about the craft of writing. But the humiliated fraud or fool in a Wodehouse plot is quite likely to be a poet — a modern poet, proud of his sensibility. Sheed calls Psmith (the nearest thing to a Wodehouse hero) a typical warder of the public school prison camps. At such schools, boys like Psmith, though themselves esthetes in dress and manner, oppressed the boys who wanted to be poets.
Anyway, my aversion to the books does not extend to the Stephen Fry/Hugh Laurie TV series they made out of them in the nineties, with which every House MD fangirl I knew 20 years ago was, like me, obsessed.
My favorite bit in late night came back last week:
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When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine unspooled a bit, I could breathe again, and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole forty-five-minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty- five minutes back from physical therapy. She’d say that even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang, because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she gave up to drive me, or how her day was before this chore. Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio, and I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.
It’s on Apple and it stars Matthew Rhys. I know little else, but horror-comedy is my jam.
What are you reading and watching? What should I be checking out?
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