I’m sorry I am probably the last person to tell you about the Bridgerton Ball fiasco here in Detroit last weekend. (Not as sorry as the dailies should be, who fumbled a story that went national. New York magazine even had an interview with the pole dancer. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
I’m not a Bridgerton fan, or even a watcher, although I know the premise of the show, which is sort of a fantasy Regency-England costume soap on Netflix, now in its third season. It’s based on a series of books, and produced by Shonda Rhimes. The producers practice what you might call “Hamilton” casting, which is to say, it’s color-blind, and so London high society is chock-full of people of color, which is never remarked upon. Even the queen is black, and it’s n.b.d.
Because of this casting, the show has a lot of black fans, which led to a non-show-affiliated party or parties to get the idea for a Bridgerton Ball in Detroit. Tickets were pricey, well over $100 to start and upward from there, and the idea was that you’d get dressed up in ball gowns and tiaras for the ladies (breeches and tailcoats for the gents) and attend a party on the scale of the ones in the show. (Never seen the show, but I gather it has a lot of balls.)
The first warning sign was when the party was moved from August to September over “venue issues,” but eventually the day came, and guests arrived at a historic event space to find: Scarce food, much of it cold or undercooked. Harsh lighting against bare white walls. No seating whatsoever. No orchestra playing waltzes, but a single violinist. Some paper backdrops for photos. And a pole dancer.
This photo, from the pole dancer’s Instagram, captures so, so much:
Part of me can’t stop laughing. I mean, this interview!
Did you see any of the details that have been reported — like, that there was chicken that was served raw or that plates were being reused?
No, but when I was doing character work for them, I did try going downstairs to see what was going on. The first floor was a mob of people, where you couldn’t really walk, so I just went back upstairs.
What is character work?
They basically just had me walk around and say, “Hello, I’m your Bridgerton fairy,” and just add to the ambience of the night. I don’t know. [Laughs.] It was weird.
Did they tell you to say that? What did they tell you to do?
No, I was going off-book because I didn’t know what they wanted me to do. They just said, “Do character work.” That was it. Usually when I work, I’m going to events as Tink the Fairy, so I just switched it to the Bridgerton Fairy.
Were you dressed as a fairy?
No, I was wearing what you saw in the video. But I did have a short lace robe on over it. I was trying to make the best of it.
And another big part of me feels terrible, because it looks like a lot of black ladies (and white ladies) just wanted to play dress-up for a night and pretend they were members of a royal court, but instead got a royal scam.
I know you will be as shocked as I am that the people who put this on — an LLC called Uncle N Me — is nowhere to be found. I’d say check the Tower of London, but I know we’re in an alternate reality here.
Anything else? Oh, I have some angry JD Vance stuff, but at this point, let’s not spoil the weekend. March into it like you’re Queen Charlotte! We’ll talk after it’s over.
Julie Robinson said on September 27, 2024 at 6:23 pm
Just saw Sherri’s comment at the end of the last thread, and am happy to report we’re fine here. Wind and rain, and the lights flickered a few times. Large tree down a couple blocks away, some light poles bent over downtown. Small tree debris in the yard. Our Harris/Walz sign broke.
The west coast sustained significant damage, but so far everyone I love is safe. Can’t wait for next year’s insurance increase.
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Jason T. said on September 27, 2024 at 7:55 pm
The Bridgerton Ball reminds of a similar situation that happened earlier this year in Scotland:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/27/glasgow-willy-wonka-experience-slammed-as-farce-as-tickets-refunded
The bar for being a decent human being is actually quite low, which makes it all the more surprising that so many people don’t even try to clear it.
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Sherri said on September 27, 2024 at 8:09 pm
Glad you made it through okay, Julie. I’m reading about pretty severe flooding well inland, with a dam failure, a washout of I-40, and 50 people stranded on a hospital roof in East Tennessee.
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Alan Stamm said on September 27, 2024 at 8:21 pm
Others connect the same dots Jason does, dubbing last Sunday’s fiasco Willy Wonka II on Reddit.
And to reinforce Nancy’s reference to the local dailies snoozing through national and U.K. coverage:
* The first staff-written Freep article went up late Thursday morning. (It reposted a USA Today piece by a New York writer on Wednesday afternoon with no direct guest quotes, just a few from social posts.)
* The News had nary a word ’til 9 p.m. Thursday.
It’s sad to see fresh evidence that Detroit’s dailies can’t always step up the way they used to. Editors are forced to pick their spots more narowly than when rosters were larger, and it seems fewer staffers keep an eye on social media — where this tale surfaced Monday and Tuesday. Legacy journalism in Detroit, as elsewhere, teeters on shaky legs.
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Bruce Fields said on September 27, 2024 at 9:43 pm
Nitpick: Bridgerton isn’t quite color-blind casting exactly, as there is an in-story explanation (not really developed until a prequel series that came out between the second and third seasons).
Seeing people dress up and have fun with it makes me happy, and I hope this incident doesn’t overshadow that….
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Jeff Gill said on September 28, 2024 at 8:49 am
Striking how quickly the storm arced from the Gulf of Mexico to Evansville, Indiana; here in east central Ohio it hit hard enough to put the power out for the evening, but nothing like what it did to North Carolina. Tampa certainly got walloped, and I haven’t seen anything clear about how Cedar Key made it through the surge.
Now it’s a giant lawnsprinkler still generating a circle of showers for today and tomorrow, but as everyone here keeps saying “we needed it.”
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Little Bird said on September 28, 2024 at 10:20 am
I read someone’s first hand account (with photos!) of the Bridgerton debacle. From what I could tell it was very much like that Scotland incident, very little effort was put into it, supplies ran low, and the entertainment was laughable, if the patrons hadn’t paid so much money. The article I read included a photo of the woman who went and her husband/boyfriend. She was dressed to the nines. He could have been doing a grocery store run. It was sad.
I very much enjoy the show, the costumes are incredible, and I really like some of the character arcs. If you’re ever looking for something to watch when you’re either sick or kinda depressed, this is perfect. Pretty to look at, easy to follow, and just kinda fun.
The costumes get a little crazier as the series goes on.
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Mark P said on September 28, 2024 at 10:22 am
We live near Rome, Ga, in northwest Georgia. As late as the day before Helene hit Georgia the forecast track for the center went right over Rome, but it actually went east of Atlanta. Atlanta had flooding (in all the usual places) and some trees down. There was significant damage further south and east. We had been in a drought for two months, and we got exactly what we needed to end it, 4.5 inches of light to moderate rain, but essentially no wind. A few trees came down in the valley north of us, but that was because of saturated ground rather than wind. I was expecting a long power outage, but our power didn’t even blink.
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Mark P said on September 28, 2024 at 1:43 pm
Jeff — I heard a report from a resident of Cedar Key. Apparently the entire place was devastated. The bridges were under water, so there was no relief for a while. I saw some video that was kind of dark, but there was a lot of very deep water.
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tajalli said on September 28, 2024 at 1:59 pm
Well, off the topic here, but just saw the owner of Xitter referred to as Melon Husk. Get my laughs however I can.
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Julie Robinson said on September 28, 2024 at 3:18 pm
We’re getting more rain today than in the hurricane. I’m struck that 3/4 of the deaths were outside Florida. Daughter says they don’t have the same experience as Floridians, and don’t know when to get out. It’s so painful to see and read.
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alex said on September 28, 2024 at 6:40 pm
Gloomy day here with the threat of big rain overnight, so I decided to make this a comfort food kind of day and try my hand at stuffed bell peppers again.
I browned the meat and veggies first, put a splash of vinegar in my tomato sauce for some tang and cheated on the rice with one of those 90-second nuke packets. Then I filled my parboiled peppers and drizzled them with the remaining sauce.
I’m amazed at the number of online recipes where you leave the ingredients raw and add tons of cheese and sugar, neither of which I used here. I’m trying to recreate my mother’s way of doing it, which was pretty basic but always delish.
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David Edelstein said on September 28, 2024 at 6:43 pm
I’m so torn about color-blind casting. A few years ago in a theatrical adaptation (terrible) of the movie Network, the William Paley network prez was played by a Black actor. Great for him but so odd when you remember just how off-limits mainstream TV production was to anyone who wasn’t white. (Jews got let in, of course, though often adopted WASP-ish airs.) You can’t really reckon with the twentieth century media without understanding that it was exclusively white and almost exclusively male. In a wonderful Irish comedy set in the distant past, tongues wag because Jessie Buckley’s character lives with a guy out of wedlock. No one apparently thinks twice that he’s Black–when of course it would be unimaginable at the time (maybe even now, in some places) in real life. I know it’s fiction. And I know that color-blind casting is here to stay and is great and important for actors of color, Black and otherwise, who have never had the opportunities they do now. But it distorts history so much that it causes (in me, anyway) a sort of disconnect. For some that’s proof of my racism and I wouldn’t even have brought it up if you hadn’t in relation to Bridgerton. I don’t mind suspending disbelief, but I don’t want to suspend historical memory.
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alex said on September 28, 2024 at 7:39 pm
To me, the magic of acting is on display when an actor inhabits a character so fully that the audience forgets to believe its own eyes. Unfortunately, colorblind casting doesn’t always mean that you’re seeing people who possess this gift.
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Julie Robinson said on September 28, 2024 at 8:14 pm
Hamilton made me comfortable with color blind casting, but there are times when it just doesn’t work. Case in point; the Broadway show The Notebook, which uses three sets of actors to portray the main characters at different ages. Only they mixed them up, and the evidence is audiences found it confusing, not sure who was who. Never underestimate the stupidity of audiences.
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Deborah said on September 29, 2024 at 4:02 am
I’m not sure if the wind we’re having in Chicago is a result of the hurricane but it started here around the same time. The closer you get to the lake, the more ferocious it is. Not the worst wind I’ve encountered here but it’s unpleasant for sure. It seems improbable that it has anything to do with what’s happening/happened in the southeast but maybe?
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Jeff Gill said on September 29, 2024 at 8:06 am
If the wind is coming from the northeast off the lake, yep, it’s part of the vast counterclockwise movement of air around the center of the system, still visible over central Kentucky this am.
https://x.com/knapsack/status/1840360056161816831?s=46&t=lTe6A3w90NPa0QkooAjJrw
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Dorothy said on September 29, 2024 at 8:57 am
David @13 – I like the last sentence of your post. I had almost forgotten about something I encountered in 2004 when I did Steel Magnolias for the second time in Middletown, OH.
In Washington PA I played Truvy the first time I was in Steel Mags; then in Middletown I played Clairee. A few years after playing Clairee I got to play M’Lynn in Mount Vernon, OH. Anyway, when I was playing Clairee, during the rehearsal period the actress playing Truvy had to drop out. The director was not given a choice with regard to re-casting Truvy. The woman who ran the theater (Christine)insisted the part now be played by a woman who was African-American.
She was okay as an actress, but she had to scramble to learn a LOT of lines in a very short time period. Also it just seemed to throw off all the relationships in the play to have a Black woman in the role of the owner of a beauty shop, where all the clients were white, in the deep south in the 1980’s. I would have happily stepped into the role of Truvy because I still remembered all the lines, and the new gal could have played Clairee. But that possibility was not discussed.
Christine was a hellion. During that same period I had a family situation come up that required me to miss a couple of rehearsals so I could go to Pittsburgh to support my husband, whose dad had tried to kill himself. Christine gave me a really hard time about it – lectured me that she had, over the years, missed many family occasions like weddings or birthdays or funerals because of obligations to a show. Well that was her – it wasn’t me. And I was only missing rehearsals, not performances. I should have told her to go f*** herself and drop out of the show, but I didn’t want to do that to the director, who I liked a lot, and the other actresses. I never encountered anyone like that Christine again when doing plays and I’m glad of it.
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Dexter Friend said on September 29, 2024 at 11:33 am
When I was touring all over the Southern U.S. playing baseball 50+ years ago, Asheville was my favorite city. The professional baseball field was beautiful and well kempt, and the city was vibrant even way back then. To see the devastation there, in that city that was voted “most-livable” or something year after year, made me sad and stunned. My grandson Anthony is a medic whose company responds to tragedies around the nation, so he’s in North Carolina now doing what he does.
Seeing the areas from New Bern to OBX being ripped to shreds is also touching, as we stayed in New Bern for a few months shortly after I retired some 20 years ago and vacationed at OBX many times.
All I have to complain about is another blown out tire…a tire with just 4,000 miles on it. Luckily Walmart had one tire my needed size in stock but I had to wait 2 hours there in the store before my turn came up. I walk with canes or rollator so I grabbed a sit-down electric cart and toured sections of the Super Walmart I never visit. This was my first time ever driving a shopping cart like that. It won’t be my last I suppose. I have learned one thing: I will never again buy a tire brand like the brand that has caused me a couple headaches in a year’s time. No need for me to post the brand name; maybe others love the brand.
Well, capital punishment is being bantered about today on the talk shows. I heard Trump vows to execute every person on the nation’s many death rows. Oh yeah, also to execute “his” generals who left him, So be good and don’t fuck up and end up dead on a table with black death coursing through your veins.
Trump is bellowing he cannot lose unless we cheat. So let’s get to cheatin’! Anything to keep that orange monster away from power and hooded, shackled, and cuffed on his way to prison for life.
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Suzanne said on September 29, 2024 at 4:48 pm
We were on the Outer Banks last week for a visit with some friends from college. We left a day early to visit some other friends in the Raleigh area but left after a day there to beat the hurricane remnants. We drove through parts of western N Carolina and western Virginia on Thursday and had no trouble but it rained the entire time we were driving on both Thursday and Friday. We were very glad we left when we did.
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