I turned on the Oscars just in time to catch the screenplay awards, where they run the text at the bottom of the clip from the nominated film. And Bradley Cooper says, “I’m reining it in,” but the super says “reigning.” Sigh. As if the world wasn’t stupid enough.

I went to bed right before Emma Stone won for Best Actress, but I’m glad she did, despite the overwhelming push for Lily Gladstone. We watched “Poor Things” the night before — it’s on Hulu — and her performance was spectacular, with a much higher degree of difficulty than Gladstone’s. I know this was assumed to be a shoo-in for the Native American actress, as Hollywood loves to give at least one award a year to make it feel good about its social principles, or just to recognize a promising newcomer. But I don’t think Gladstone was robbed; she took home a lot of statues this award season, just not this one. And Stone deserved it.

That’s the thing about the Oscars — it’s just a vote, and we never know how the other finishers did. Stone may have edged her by a one, 100 or 1,000, but in the end it doesn’t matter.

Martin Scorsese, now — he knows about robbery. The greatest living director, and he has exactly one Oscar for it. (“The Departed,” 2006.)

In other frippery from the weekend, I’ve been studiously avoiding any of the Kate Middleton speculation and gossip, because why subject yourself to that when American democracy is swaying on its foundations and she’s probably fine anyway. Then the weekend photo business happened, and I must admit: I’m intrigued. It takes a lot for the world’s serious news agencies to put out a mandatory kill on something as silly as a courtesy photo from the British royal family. But in this case, the Zapruder-film examination of it makes me wonder what might be going on.

Most of the speculation has concentrated on some obvious — if you consider going over a picture with a magnifying glass obvious — editing of some of the clothing, but to me, it’s the black hole at her midsection that looks wonky to me. The most informed speculation about what might be ailing her, in my opinion, came from a doctor I follow on Twitter, who suggested she might have had some sort of temporary colostomy for the treatment of Crohn’s disease, and it would track that the rail-thin princess wouldn’t be photographed with any indication she might be wearing a bag. It would also explain the secrecy, because ew poop. Whatever. I do hope she’s going to be OK, because who wouldn’t.

Also, the British celebrate Mothers Day in March? Really?

And now it’s Monday again. Time to get it in gear.

Notta lotta time this morning. I’m debriefing myself on the State of the Union, which I did not watch, because I never watch. I read the text the following day, absorb several different stories about it from reputable news outlets, and consider myself informed. I gather the laugh lines landed, and the GOP response was even worse than Marco “gimme a sip of water” Rubio’s, way back when.

I just watched a couple clips from Katie Britt’s community-theater-audition response. It’s worse than I thought.

Instead, come with me down my latest media rabbit hole, i.e. photos of people taken at Mar-a-Lago. Why does everyone there look like they are residents of the Capital in the Hunger Games movies?

This one ⬇️ is so weird I wonder if it’s real, but apparently it is. And to think these people have a problem with drag queens.

Kim Guilfoyle, looking practically normal in this gang:

The one on the right here is the same as the one on the left in the first photo. Not sure about the other one.

These two could be a mother/daughter pair. “People are always getting us mixed up, it’s so weird!”

It must be a condition of membership that every woman wear the same hairstyle. This one is giving me “Russian mistress,” how about you?

This must have been the No Strapless Bras luncheon. Second from left is the older one of the mother-daughter pair above. Not sure about the others.

And there you have it, just a glimpse into the membership of America’s trashiest country club. Feel free to make merry, but I have to get ready for the day.

How do you start your week? Even in my semi-retired state, I tend to spend a few moments on Sunday or Monday thinking about my obligations for the week ahead — pay this bill, meet this deadline, call that person, etc. All of it leads up to “The Week That Was,” the web show for Deadline Detroit that for some reason none of us can stop doing, and then, when it wraps at roughly 12:30 p.m. Friday, the weekend begins. I feel like Fred Flintstone sliding down the dinosaur’s tail.

We almost always go out, if only for a burger somewhere, on Friday. We only occasionally go out on Saturday. Go figure.

But this Friday the Derringers are going to…the opera. Allow me to explain.

The Michigan Opera Theater, now the Detroit opera, hired a new artistic director, Yuval Sharon, just before the pandemic, and boy is he artistic. This production put him on the damn map, at least if you consider attention from The New Yorker and New York Times to be something (and I do):

In the psychogeography of modern life, parking garages are sites of anxiety and subtle terror. The doctor’s appointment is minutes away, and yet you are still frantically circling. The space you find is so torturously narrow that it could have been designed only in consultation with auto-body shops. Afterward, desperation rises as you wander acres of concrete, listening for your faintly beeping vehicle. The lighting is sepulchral, the air dank. Few soothing scenes in movies are set in garages: shady deals are done, witnesses are offed, Deep Throat speaks.

It made sense, then, that Yuval Sharon, the new artistic director of Michigan Opera Theatre, chose a Detroit parking garage as the impromptu set for an abridged production of “Götterdämmerung.” The final installment of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle ostensibly addresses the twilight of the gods, but no gods appear onstage: according to the libretto, we glimpse them only in the far distance, at the climax, as fire consumes Valhalla. Instead, the opera is dominated by a compromised array of human beings, who move through a darkening, decaying world. In the prologue, we are told that Wotan, the chief of the gods, fatally wounded the World Ash Tree when he tore a branch from it to make his spear of power. The death of the tree stands in for the ruination of the earth by capitalism and industrialization. A multistory parking garage is as good a spot as any for the Wagnerian apocalypse.

This was during the Covid closures, and the parking garage “Gotterdammerung” worked like this: Your ticket got you admittance to the garage, in your car, needless to say. You drove slowly through the levels, stopping at scenes where a singer would perform a particular piece, with the music coming through your car’s sound system, tuned to a special frequency. When he or she completed the number, you drove on to the next one. Socially distanced and, for my money, the smartest, coolest way to put on a work of art in a time when most places just went dark. Was it the entire opera? Of course not; the whole experience, renamed “Twilight: Gods” took about an hour. But it was a triumph.

Of course we couldn’t get tickets. But now, with Sharon in the fourth year of a five-year contract, already a MacArthur Foundation genius, I figure we’d better get our butts in the seats if we wanted to check him out before he’s snatched up by a bigger city. So we’re going to this production, “Europeras: 3 & 4,” which promises to also be pretty weird:

Pioneering composer John Cage reassembles European opera as a collage in Europeras 3 & 4. These intimate, avant-garde operas exemplify his life-long fascinations that forever changed music history. Chance operations dictate everything in the production, from the staging to the costumes to the lighting design. In its joyful anarchy, Cage’s work invites audiences to embrace the unexpected.

I’m looking forward to this.

This week, I got 90 percent of my work done yesterday, so today I cashed in one of my birthday presents, a gift card for the Schvitz. Hallelujah, one of the massage therapists had an opening, so I snapped it up. I regret to say both the dry sauna and the steam were so hot I could barely stand them — both well over 200 degrees. The steam room temperature display read ERR, as in, the numbers didn’t go any higher. I came back after my massage, and it was down to 230, and I could handle it for maybe five minutes. However, this didn’t affect my enjoyment of my solitary afternoon one bit. The place was blessedly quiet, and I could discreetly take in the amazing tattoo variety without having to crane my neck. A good afternoon.

I think self-care is the only way I’m going to get through the next few months, frankly. It’s gonna be so ugly.

But now the week is under way, right? Let’s get through it.

An acquaintance back in Fort Wayne has taken to sending me Tim Goeglein columns, which are appearing with increasing frequency in the Journal Gazette, the surviving daily newspaper. The latest one was the usual cliché-strewn mess, a reminiscence about his childhood piano teacher who gave him his love of music and once played the most beautiful piece he’d ever heard or ever will hear, etc. (It’s not paywalled, unless you’ve reached your three-article limit for the month, so hey — enjoy.) I read it twice, then drafted a letter to the editor, which I let marinate through the day. I don’t think I’m going to send it, but in the interest of not letting 250 words go to waste, I’ll paste it here:

I haven’t lived in Fort Wayne for nearly 20 years, but given the role I played in the loss of his White House job, I’ve since taken a particular interest in Timothy Goeglein’s writing, appearing occasionally in the JG’s opinion section. As a writer myself, and as one who wants everyone to be a better one, sometimes this is painful; I’ve rarely seen such floridly composed word salads, to use a phrase Tim might employ. I won’t call them “hate reads” — I’m trying to be a better person in my dotage — but my fingers often twitch toward an imaginary blue pencil to strip the lard, the filigree, and especially the adverbs out of his rhapsodical tributes to whatever misty water-colored memory is striking him today.

I’m also an editor, and know that self-editing is difficult. So can’t anyone at the Journal Gazette take a little hot air out of these balloons, perhaps by paring Tim’s “tall and willowy, thin as a rail” piano teacher down to just “willowy,” as that word literally means tall and thin?

To Tim, I offer my services as a writing coach. My email’s easy to find. Give me one paragraph, 100 words tops, on…something you dislike. Make it tight. No adverbs. We’ll start there. You know what they say about a journey of a thousand miles, but as a gesture of goodwill, I’ll take it with you.

The offer stands, if he happens to read this. I doubt the JG would have run it, and ultimately, I suspect Tim thinks he’s really a pretty great writer. You can’t solve a problem until you admit you have one, right?

If you live around here, you know how insane the weather has been this week. Yesterday it was nudging 70 degrees. Today the wind is howling and the temperature is plummeting. It’s 28 as I write this; it was 56 when I worked out at 6 this morning. Do you guys have the wind map bookmarked? You should; it’s a lovely presentation of how the breeze moves across the continental U.S., and on a day like today, especially so.

So, the Michigan primary came out pretty much as expected. The big story today is the declare-uncommitted vote against Biden, which is being spun as danger-Will-Robinson to the president, and perhaps it is, but I doubt it. I heard, before the voting began, that the uncommitted movement was hoping to get 10,000, an absurdly low number. Dearborn is a city of roughly 100,000, more than half of them Arab immigrants or native-born Americans. And it’s only one of several municipalities with significant Arab populations expected to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Then fold in the young voters of all ethnicities who are appalled by the Gaza war, and you come up with something closer to the actual count last night: 101,436.

Others have pointed out that it’s disingenuous to assume all these voters are Democrats to begin with. Arab Americans around here are socially conservative, and recent culture wars have driven many of them back into the arms of the GOP, which is where they were before the Gulf War(s). There is a significant Dem presence there, but it’s not a solid wall. My hope is that these people decide, in November, that a no-choice vote at the top of the November ticket is one for Trump, and as bad as things are in Gaza now, they will be 10 times worse with Bibi’s buddy back in the White House.

As always, we will see. And P.S. Nikki Haley stole 3x that many votes from you-know-who.

OK, gotta suit up for lifeguarding swimming lessons. I hope the natatorium heat adjusted to the plummeting temperature.

I went to an estate sale this weekend. It was the usual story: An enormous, three-story house stuffed to the rafters with junk that should have been thrown away, given away or sold years ago. A useful lesson in the importance of keeping your stuff lean — you always think, and this is what the family didn’t want — as well as why the amount of stuff you drag through life is directly proportional to the space you have to keep it in. One day I will live in one of those tiny houses, and Kate’s chore upon my death can be carried out in less than a day.

A woman passed me on the staircase: Old, I’d guess 75 or beyond, wearing a coat that had seen better days. The real shocker was her hair, which was a mess, but a deliberate one, with the centerpiece an enormous, teased bump at the crown of her head. Think 1962-era Ronnie Spector, only blonde and bigger. Think ’60s Priscilla Presley, ditto. An egg sac for the biggest spider in the world. And so on. I don’t want to be cruel. I know we’re supposed to be all you go girl about pretty much any presentation of femininity, and I often remind myself that there is no one way to be a woman, that it covers everyone from the butchest lesbian to the most Kardashian-worshiping girlie girl. There was a movie about this out this summer, perhaps you saw it — “Barbie.”

Anyway, I read Dwight Garner’s very positive review of Lucy Sante’s new memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name.” It’s the story of her gender transition, at 66 years old. She was once Luc Sante, who I saw read here in Detroit a few years back:

Second paragraph of Garner’s review:

She can hear what some of you are thinking. She fears that, by coming out as transgender now, she will be thought to be “merely following a trend, maybe to stay relevant.” She worries her transition will be viewed as a timely shucking of male privilege, a suit of armor that has grown heavy and begun to rust, or as a final bohemian pose, or as something more literary to do in semiretirement than sucking on a Werther’s Original.

I plead guilty to thinking many of those things. As someone who has enjoyed Sante’s work for some time — I found Luc when one of his books was used as the basis for “Gangs of New York” — I found myself, as I so often am when confronting this issue, rather baffled. Would Lucy Sante have been able to publish so many interesting books, or would she have been pigeonholed as a women’s writer? Would a transition, say from female to male, be framed as her abandoning or somehow betraying her children? (Sante has an adult son, barely mentioned.) And yeah, nice way to shed one’s male privilege. But mostly I’m thinking why every one of these memoirs has to talk so much about clothing and makeup and jewelry:

Her memoir is moving for many reasons, but primarily for its observations about aging and vanity, as seen through the separated colors of a prismatic lens. She has, in her late 60s, begun to shrink. She has back problems, knee problems and kidney stones. She is told that, because her facial hair has gone gray, she cannot have laser treatments to remove it. These would have been vastly quicker and less expensive than the painful weekly electrolysis she must undergo instead.

The better news is that she gets to go shopping, and she takes us with her. The reader experiences these vividly written scenes as if they were montages from an updated, late-life version of “Legally Blonde” — “Legally Platinum,” perhaps.

I learned that an empire waist on a long torso will make the wearer look pregnant, that shapeless things like sweatshirts only flatter 20-year-old bodies, that flouncy tops require considerable mammary buttressing, that puffy shoulders make me look like a linebacker, that suspiciously cheap clothes are best avoided for both moral and aesthetic reasons, that wanting to look like the model in the picture does not constitute a valid reason for buying the garment.

There is so much more to being female than this bullshit, but then again, it’s also how we identify one another at first glance, so maybe the obsession is understandable. When a twit like Caitlyn Jenner says the hardest thing about being a woman is selecting a nail polish color, half of me thinks it’s a joke and the other half wants to smack her silly face. I don’t see that passage above as a vividly written scene; it’s basically the interior monologue of every woman who looked in her closet this morning. Dwight Garner! Do you know any women?

The a-ha moment rings false:

In early 2021, she found FaceApp, which has a gender-swapping feature. The images, some of which are printed in this book, floored her. “She was me,” Sante writes. “When I saw her I felt something liquefy in the core of my body.” She showed them to her partner of 14 years, who was confused by what Sante was trying to tell her. They ended up parting ways. They were both upset and torn. “It was not so much that I had betrayed Mimi’s trust, but that I had never honestly earned it,” Sante writes.

Nope, sorry, you betrayed her trust, girlfriend. A human being should expect change in a life partner, but not that kind of change. “They ended up parting ways” has to be the understatement of the decade, like it’s Mimi’s fault she couldn’t deal. There are spouses who can easily transition (ha ha) to being best friends or some other variation of it in a situation like this, but you can’t blame the ones who can’t. It’s a big bomb to drop into a relationship. And in my reading to understand gender dysphoria, I’ve read many accounts of men and women who knew, deep in their bones, from their earliest memories, that something was disconnected between their mental and physical selves. This is the first one I’ve read that was brought on by an app.

But! Luc Sante was a great writer, and I’m sure Lucy will be, too, and ultimately it’s her life, not mine. She can live it on her terms. I’ll see her speak the next time she comes through town. I am keeping my mind open.

So. The weekend was nice, though more or less uneventful. We stayed in. (It was cold.) We watched movies. (It was cold.) “Priscilla,” about the aforementioned Priscilla Presley, was strangely blank. It was in large part about Elvis’ interest in his teen girlfriend’s female presentation, and didn’t explicitly call it grooming, although it obviously was. I didn’t like it as much as most critics did, but the acting of Cailee Spaeny in the title role was very good, spanning the main character from 14 to her late 20s.

I also watched the original “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” a great memory of old New York and of the way movies that take place in cities always used to have the full spectrum of ethnic types found there. So the hijacked subway train features an old Jew, a woman who speaks only Spanish, a cool black dude, etc. But it was fun to watch, getting in and out in about 90 minutes. That’s pro filmmaking.

With that, I’m drawing the curtain on my sedate life and turning my attention to making spaghetti. Monday awaits.

I am running out of steam to talk about you-know-who, but goddamnit, the Detroit News stuck this fucking paywalled piece of crap into my face this morning, and OK then, I’m taking the bait.

A rare double byline, for starters, the longtime editor and his current underling go on a Cletus safari to the latest Trump rally, last weekend in Oakland County. What is yet to be learned about Trump disciples? I haven’t a clue, but the headline tells us: Trump’s messianic message resonates with the forgotten and I nearly spit out my coffee. Forgotten? Forgotten? I feel like these people and their mystifying beliefs have been shoved in my face on a near-daily basis for years. But OK, let’s read on:

Three buddies are sitting in an Irish bar in Waterford Township, drinking beer and talking politics.

It’s Saturday night, and one of the trio is waiting to go to Donald Trump’s fly-in rally at nearby Oakland International Airport. The other is killing time while his wife attends the event. And the third is not sure where he stands on Trump and would like to hear what the former president has to say. But he doesn’t have a ticket.

“You wouldn’t happen to have an extra one, would you?” he asks us.

That’s our first indication of what the night ahead holds. Most politicians have to bus people in for their appearances to make the venues look full. For Trump, the crowd is scrounging for tickets.

Ooh, a scene-setter. And shoutout to the dude who still — still! — isn’t sure where he stands on Trump and would like to hear what he has to say, but alas, there’s apparently no way to find out short of standing in an unheated airplane hanger for a few hours. But here’s the part that sent the top of my skull into the rafters:

“He’s endured untoward suffering on our behalf,” said Ed Chandler, a pastor and bus driver from Grand Blanc who arrived early and found a place to stand right up front. “The least I could do was to show up in person to support him. It’s important for all of us to take a stand for what we believe is right.”

The messianic undercurrent ran through the evening, and Trump played to it. After a lengthy diatribe on the litany of legal attacks on him by what he called crooked judges and corrupt prosecutors, Trump told his devotees, “I’m being indicted for you. Never forget.”

Intentionally or not, it brought to mind Christ’s communion promise, “This is my blood, shed for you.” Trump’s new covenant sounds much like the old one, built on promises to build a wall, put criminals in jail, derail the green agenda and bring China, Russia and Iran to their knees with just the sound of his voice.

I’d say Pastor Ed needs to go back to divinity school and learn a few things about Jesus. But I’ve read this before — he says it every time he opens his mouth — and what’s more, I’ve heard it repeated by idiots. A woman in my Facebook network quoted her husband saying just that, after the Stormy Daniels hush-money indictment came down, and I replied that as long as her husband wasn’t paying adult-film actresses for their silence, they’d probably be OK, and yes, this is coming from a public Christian and what the hell has happened to American Christianity, that they’ll swallow this bullshit so eagerly? You tell me. More:

While Saturday night’s crowd was still mostly White, we noticed it was a lot younger than in the past. A generation that came to age during the upheaval of the COVID pandemic is also looking to Trump to save it.

“My generation is most concerned about housing,” said Christian Armstrong, a 21-year-old Wayne County Community College District student from Detroit. “We want to be able to buy a house to get a start in the capitalist system, and we can’t.”

Armstrong also is sympathetic to Trump’s claims of persecution. “They’re trying to keep him off the ballot, and that’s not right,” he said.

When I was 21, I was in no position to buy a house, either, but at least I have some sympathy for this plaint, because it’s legit. I have no idea what Trump is going to do about it, but if he wins, there may be an explosion of inventory that will drive prices down, as millions of Americans flee to Canada or Mexico or Costa Rica or Europe. But this, this, was the coup de fuckin’ gras:

Rola Makki, a young woman from Livonia who showed up in a red “Arab Americans for Trump” shirt, explained her attraction to the enduring figure.

“He’s never dismissed the suffering of the Palestinian people,” she said. “He’s always highlighted that yes, it’s both sides. To me, that’s someone who has humanity and compassion for people no matter what their background is.”

Her perception of Trump’s empathy can’t be dismissed. Trump speaks directly to the frustration and fears of a large portion of the electorate. President Joe Biden hopes to convince voters they’re not really as bad off as they think they are and has ignored their worries about inflation and immigration. Trump gives voice to their angst. He hears people who believe no one else is listening.

This must be what happens when legit news operations die, that an Arab American can believe this when Trump has said right out loud that he would reject Gazan refugees, impose a religious and ideological purity test for immigration, and said of the war in Gaza that “you have to let it play out,” not to MENTION his relationship with the Israeli prime minister — I mean, I’m just speechless. (Of the Abandon Biden movement gathering steam in Dearborn we will not speak. Yet.) Oh, and a little Googling revealed that this “young woman from Livonia” holds a vice-chair position in a state GOP outreach committee, so this column wins a bonus Salena Zito Jes’ Folks award, too.

I don’t know why I let this stuff bug me, but I do.

And now it’s Thursday, the weekend is right around the corner, and I intend to enjoy mine. I hope you enjoy yours, too.

Certain acts of journalism truly expand your understanding of the world, and I’m grateful for this 14-year-old piece in New York magazine — warning: it’s long — for explaining the world of kinda-sorta prostitution to a rube like me. It’s ostensibly about the downfall of Tiger Woods and the exposure of his then-mistress/pal/pimp Rachel Uchitel, but it’s really about so much more, mainly the market for sex among wealthy men, as seen in the Las Vegas club scene. I think of it whenever I consider our former First Lady, Melania Trump.

Melania Knavs came to the U.S. to be a model, which everyone knows. Less remarked-upon was her age at the time, 26. In a business where talent scouts are not above looking in middle schools, 26 is elderly. Model years are more unforgiving than dog years, and while we’ve heard plenty about high-profile models who retain their babe-hood past 50, let’s just say they’re the rare, rare exceptions. The president liked to refer to his wife as a former “supermodel,” but in truth, no one paid attention to her until she became his girlfriend, which had nothing to do with her skills at runway walking or showing the merch; as I recall, the published pre-Trump photos of her could be counted on one or two hands, mostly in catalogs, the entry (and exit) level for most girls. Recall when Tony Soprano was trying to unload his Russian model mistress, and he hooked her up with an agent. The news wasn’t good: “Salad spinners!” she spat at Tony later.

These details give me a little bit of sympathy for Melania. Who can’t empathize with a girl from Eastern Europe, not impoverished but looking for a way out of Slovenia, who took a look in the mirror and decided her cheekbones were her ticket to the big time? Bobbie Gentry had a hit song about girls like that.

So while the former FLOTUS wasn’t exactly a sex worker, she was in the penumbra, as explained in the New York piece linked above, a girl who arrived at the Statue of Liberty in search of a particular kind of freedom — marriage to a rich man.

Which she got, and then cemented with the birth of Barron. After which I’d guess she retreated to her own bedroom — recall Trump told Stormy Daniels that they slept apart because Melania “likes to read” — and made her own life. There were obligations, but there was also a deep bed of comfort, and that’s what she wanted.

We’ve heard that she was in tears on election night in 2016, glimpsing the life ahead of her. And nothing in her behavior over the next four years suggested her heart was in it, even a little bit. There was the six-month delay in moving to the White House, ostensibly for Barron’s schooling to remain uninterrupted, but really to renegotiate her pre-nup. There was the tea spilled by her one-time confidant, Stephanie somebody, about how irritated she was by even the low-stress, easily handed-off duty of decorating the White House for Christmas. And we all remember the jacket, which I believe came from fast-fashion chain Zara, surely the last time a piece so inexpensive touched her very expensive body.

You can see I have mixed feelings about Mel. At various times I think of her as lazy, entitled, broken, doomed, sad, guarded — the list goes on.

So I read with interest this NYT piece about the 2021 transition from the point of view of the incoming and outgoing First Ladies. Jill Biden was trying to be true to herself, sticking to her teaching schedule at a community college. And Melania? Well:

For months, Mrs. Trump had taken to walking around the Executive Residence in hotel-style terry cloth robes. Throughout her husband’s presidency, she often perched on the bed in his room to listen to or join in on his calls with advisers and allies, Stephanie Grisham, Mrs. Trump’s former press secretary, said in an interview.

Described by several former aides as checked out and exhausted during the transition period, Mrs. Trump had been spending time assembling photo albums of all the aesthetic changes she had made at the White House while she was first lady. (“All she cared about was those photo albums,” Ms. Grisham said, using an expletive to describe the albums.) Mrs. Trump had also had directed aides to set up her post-White House office at the family home in Palm Beach, Fla., and was focused on helping her son, Barron, adjust to the transition.

According to several former aides, Mrs. Trump had visited the East Wing, where the first lady has an official office and staff, so infrequently that her empty office had been converted into a gift-wrapping room.

I saw this first on social media, with the usual accusations of laziness. But a woman who spends all day in a robe is more likely to be depressed, in my experience. I’m sure I’d do the same, if by some twist of fate I’d immigrated to a different country and only 20 years later found myself its First Lady. Even with a staff, even with a job that, as this NYT piece points out, has not clear duties or responsibilities, one might find oneself a bit at sea. So there’s the empathy. Unforch…

“Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness and violence?” Grisham asked her at 1:25 p.m. (on Jan. 6), around the time a mob had overtaken the back steps of the Capitol.

The reply was a definitive “no.” Mrs. Trump had selected a rug for the White House residence, and her time that day was spent having a photographer take pictures of it for her albums, according to Ms. Grisham, who had knowledge of her schedule. Ms. Grisham resigned later that day.

Sigh. Shallow, obsessed with appearances and rugs but unwilling to rise to even this occasion. Maybe she’s just an old ho’ after all.

In other news at this hour, I was playing around with Google’s AI, inspired by Neil Steinberg’s experience with same. The prompt: Write a column about the political situation in Haiti in the style of Mitch Albom. I’d call the result not quite there:

In Haiti, Where Hope Hangs on by a Thread

Haiti. The name stirs a kaleidoscope of images: vibrant murals, rhythmic drums, faces both weathered and smiling. But lately, the headlines paint a bleaker picture. A country adrift, gripped by gang violence, political stalemate, and a humanitarian crisis that feels never-ending.

I’m no expert, just a storyteller drawn to the human condition. But Haiti’s plight tugs at something deep. Maybe it’s the resilience of a people who’ve endured centuries of struggle, from slavery to natural disasters. Maybe it’s the spark of hope that still flickers, despite the darkness.

See, Haiti isn’t just headlines. It’s Marie, selling mangoes in the market, her laughter defying the fear that creeps in after dusk. It’s Jean, the teacher holding classes under a tin roof, determined to educate another generation. It’s Dr. Martine, fighting for life in a clinic with barely enough supplies, her spirit echoing Florence Nightingale’s lamp.

But their stories are woven with the harsh realities. Gangs carve up neighborhoods, extortion their currency. Fuel shortages cripple hospitals and businesses. Hunger gnaws at bellies, while a political vacuum breeds uncertainty. It’s enough to crush the faintest ember of hope.

Yet, hope persists. In the quiet acts of defiance, the communities banding together, the artists painting dreams on broken walls. They know change won’t be easy. It’ll require more than foreign aid or empty promises. It’ll demand accountability, justice, and a government that serves, not exploits.

But here’s the thing about hope: it’s contagious. We, on the outside, can play a part. Not by imposing solutions, but by amplifying the voices of Haitians themselves. By supporting organizations led by them, for them. By demanding our own leaders act with compassion and respect.

Haiti’s story isn’t written yet. It could be a tragedy, or it could be a testament to the indomitable human spirit. In the end, it depends on all of us. Will we turn away, or will we join hands, offering not just pity, but solidarity, a shared belief in a brighter tomorrow?

Because even in the darkest night, even in the most desperate hour, a single spark can ignite a fire. And in Haiti, that spark still flickers. Let’s not let it die.

Remember, friend, hope is a choice. Let’s choose it, together.

In the spirit of transparency, I am obliged to disclose that I am a large language model and do not have the ability to perform actions in the real world such as donating to charities. However, I can provide information and resources that may be helpful.

But as they tell us, it improves every day.

Off to dust and sweep the house. Happy Tuesday. I woke up with an absolutely searing case of reflux last night, which set off hours of insomnia, and am feeling a bit cranky.

Home again. The blind schnauzer and her bouncy baby brother were turned back over to their humans on Friday afternoon, and then the rest of the weekend took off like a rocket ship, which is to say, I had plans for one night, can you believe it? and it left me a little worn down.

But the even keel is back and all is cool. I don’t know what it is about sleeping in someone else’s bed, or a hotel bed, or any bed other than my own, for a few days — it’s different (appreciated), but also weirdly unsettling (less so).

So, Friday. Shadow Show had their record-release parties over two night, Friday and Saturday, both sellouts at a local bar. We went Friday night, and Alan went back Saturday, too. (Me, I could not handle it, after a couple hours of standing on Friday night. My knees were screaming.) But it was a smashing success, and both shows were well-received. They brought in some friends to do guest appearances on individual songs, but the big surprise was the Friday-night encore. They invited Zoe, their old vocalist from the Deadly Vipers days, and they did a short set of their 2015-era songs. I was totally surprised, and it sent me back to their very first gig, when we took them to a blind pig* in the north end of Detroit. A *blind pig is Detroit patois for an illegal spot, and this place was a dark storefront that someone had briefly liberated into an underage nightspot. But the set went off well, even though I can’t tell you how, exactly, they got electricity into the place. And Alan remembers broken glass strewn across the floor; I remember a pile of beer and pop cans in the corner, perhaps waiting for deposit redemption. Whatever, I do remember that the Black Lodge closed a few weeks later, when they tried to stage a burlesque show and it was busted by the police.

Anyway, the shows this past weekend were pretty great. And they got played three times the following day on WDET, so again: Good news. A couple pix, from an admittedly terrible angle because it was crowded as hell. Here’s the bassist for Shadow Show, shown appropriately in shadow:

And here’s the encore, with Zoe looking all sassy:

Now for the break, and the national tour starts at month’s end, with the European leg to follow. If any of you live in Los Angeles — and yeah, I’m looking at you, Mary — you might want to save this date:

It’s not every day that you get to see a girl group with a psychedelic-garage sound perform with marionettes, after all. This is the gig that was cancelled in 2020 for Covid.

And that was the weekend. Tomorrow starts a perfect week — if I play it right, the best balance of work and not-work. I’ll take it.

I was a few minutes late for my part-time job the other day (lifeguarding for swimming lessons), and explained my tardiness thusly: “I’m dog-sitting for a medically fragile schnauzer.” And that’s why this is the first blog of the week. My life’s been disrupted a little bit.

This is my dear friends’ dog, and I don’t mind watching her, but hoo-boy. She’s diabetic, and blind as a consequence, so caring for her is not just a matter of taking her to the boarding kennel and waving goodbye, or even taking her to my house. I have to go to her. She needs insulin injected twice a day, plus two more meds. And letting her outside is a matter of snapping your fingers so she’ll follow the sound, then watching so she doesn’t walk into the swimming pool, which she has done, although not on my watch. She did walk smack into a wall yesterday, however. Poor dear.

Her brother dog is a spoiled-rotten but charming Morkie (Maltese/Yorkie cross) who does not hesitate to ask for attention whenever he feels a lack of same. So I’ve got my hands full. Upside: They have a luxurious bathroom — the shower squirts out of multiple heads, it’s so fabulous — and one of those new Dyson hair dryers, so there are compensations. And I’m always willing to do a favor for friends.

Happy Fat Tuesday, by the way. No, I will not be looking for paczki today. They’re jelly donuts, and I fail to see why I have to drive to Hamtramck, or even Kroger, for jelly donuts.

In my solitude, I’ve been reading. Looking back over the last few years of this blog, I’m starting to wonder at the damage you-know-who is going to my psyche, because it seems like every FUCKING day there’s something to be outraged about, and that can’t be good for one’s cortisol levels. But being an engaged citizen is part of one’s duty in a democratic republic, and so on we plow. Today’s outrage is this piece in Talking Points Memo, about what document discovery is revealing about the 2020 election aftermath:

Donald Trump’s months-long effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election culminated on a single, now-infamous day: Jan. 6.

But there was an alternate scenario gamed out by Trump’s lawyers — one that would have expanded the hours of indecision caused by the Trump campaign’s efforts and stretched out the process for weeks, all the way until Jan. 20, 2021, the Constitution’s ironclad deadline for the transfer of power. If their scheme succeeded, these lawyers hoped, Joe Biden would never take office.

…The plan would have seen the Trump campaign pushing Republican lawmakers to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win not just on Jan. 6, but for days afterwards. GOP legislators would have feigned confusion over competing slates of electors, paralyzing Congress as the Trump campaign brought increasing pressure on the Supreme Court to step in and resolve the election in their favor.

Is it wrong to want to see these people not just in court, but in federal prison? Maybe gen-pop at Leavenworth? I don’t think so.

Hate to cut this short, but the morning is slipping away and I have some work to do, i.e., thinking about lunch. If Lent is upon us, can spring be far behind? I don’t think so.

A friend recommended “The Greatest Night in Pop,” a documentary now airing on Netflix, about the making of the “We Are the World” single in 1985. I took his recommendation, and found his summation fairly accurate: Suffer through the first 30 minutes of showbiz bullshit, and you’ll be rewarded with an hour of watching musical superstars feeling and acting very superstar-y, which is to say, often like spoiled brats and other bad-behaving archetypes.

I have to confess my prejudice up front: “We Are the World” and its predecessor, the “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single out of the U.K., ushered in an era that got on my nerves, the time of ’80s/’90s feel-good “philanthropy” that required nothing of the philanthropist more taxing than a trip to a record store. Or affixing a particular color of ribbon to your clothing. Or joining hands in some sort of stunt to “raise awareness” of homelessness. And the song was terrible, too; at least the British song had a Christmas-carol sound to it, with all those bells. “We Are the World” was syrupy treacle, made for linking elbows, swaying back and forth and proclaiming not that others were in mortal peril, but that we, the singers, are the ones who… well, let’s just paste the chorus here:

We are the world
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me

Beyond a few references to “people dying,” it’s entirely self-congratulatory. Which is to say, it’s got the smell of Michael Jackson all over it. He wrote the lyrics, Lionel Richie the music. And Richie is the one who leads the narrative lookback, although there are other talking heads, too, including Bruce Springsteen, Sheila E., Cyndi Lauper and the most surprisingly amusing of the bunch, Huey Lewis.

The hero of the whole project is Quincy Jones, who had to herd all these cats toward their common goal, and to do so in the course of one marathon overnight session. Part of the showbiz-bullshit portion of the film talks about simple steps toward that goal as though they’re brainstorms unique to the brilliance of Quincy — i.e., to have all the soloists record in a big circle, facing one another, rather than retreating to booths where they can complain quietly and nitpick their performance to death. I guess that was a brainstorm for a field that requires no small amount of diplomacy, but if there’s one thing we know about divas of all kinds, it’s that treating them like normal people will work, at least for a little while. (It’s such a new experience for them.)

There were some amusing moments, as when Stevie Wonder suggested they should sing at least a few lines in Swahili, presumably because Africa. This led to Waylon Jennings walking out, but honestly, I was in full agreement (with Waylon). Then someone pointed out that Ethiopians, the presumptive recipient of this charity project, don’t even speak Swahili anyway.

And there’s always the shock of seeing how many of these famous, or semi-famous faces have had serious work done since 1985. Smokey Robinson’s mug is tight as a drum, and Richie’s lower face looks so plumped with fillers it appears to have become a balcony extending from his forehead. All forgivable, because we all have our vanity.

But I was most surprised by my reaction to Jackson, who is painted, as per usual, as a genius, an icon, a magical sprite who was simply too special and talented for this dirty world. I have a long-standing policy of not confusing artists with their art, but Jackson tests it too much for me to look away, as I do about, say, Miles Davis’ history of abusing women. Jackson was a pedophile, period, which makes all his lyrical references to children deeply creepy. I find it hard to enjoy, or even listen to, most of his catalog today. Sorry.

Also, see above for my feelings about the song he co-wrote.

Worth your time? Sure, if you’re into pop music and remember the era. There’s a lot of sic transit gloria mundi on display — hey, Kim Carnes! — and a few good lines. My fave was Paul Simon’s: “If a bomb falls on this place, John Denver is back on top.”

Finally-finally, I’d really like to know more about where the millions this project raised were spent. Did it go directly to food aid? That’s key, because we tend to gloss over the fact that in the modern world, there is enough food for everyone, even with crop failures, drought and other natural causes. There is more than enough, but getting it to people who need it remains problematic, and the Ethiopian government bears at least some responsibility for what happened. That was another thing I disliked about the project, that it led the rest of the world to believe the solution was as simple as raise money > buy food > give food to starving people. When it absolutely wasn’t, and isn’t.

OK, the weekend is almost here! Back to listening to the SCOTUS hearing on you-know-who and hoping against hope.