I’ve read a lot about Alice Waters, the doyenne of California cuisine. I’d never discount her accomplishments, which are considerable. If you cook with any sort of adventure in your soul, if you can tell a shiitake mushroom from a morel, if you consider seasonality and sustainability when choosing produce and meat and fish, you have Alice Waters to thank, for leading a food revolution, starting in the 1970s and still continuing.

However. I also concede she’s a bit of a nut on this subject. Her Marie Antoinette attitudes about how poor people should spend their food dollars are daft and condescending, and I’m sorry, but I’m not forgoing leafy greens through a long Michigan winter, as she has suggested we do. (“There are so many turnips and potatoes to enjoy!”) But I don’t want to get into that now. I’m thinking of the passage in a particular story, in which the writer playfully asked her how she’d feel if she knew her daughter, then a teenager, was sneaking McDonald’s. He described Waters as being genuinely saddened and distressed by the very idea of her child consuming a Big Mac. That’s how awful McDonald’s is, or was. (Psst, Alice: It’s worse now.)

I know Waters is a committed lefty, but I can’t help but wonder what she’s thinking about the Washington crew these days. She and Croaky and Casey Means, his nominee for surgeon general, seem to have a lot in common. I thought of this on a dog walk after reading this excellent essay by Talia Lavin, about Means and her ideas about eating and health:

Casey Means, the Trump administration’s new nominee for Surgeon General of the United States, has a prescription for America. You can find it in her 2024 book, “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.” In Means’ vision, “Good Energy” is a holistic approach to health, one predicated on the idea that “everything is connected.” The text strikes a tone that mirrors Means’ own career path, from training to be an ENT surgeon to life as a wellness influencer whose Instagram, @drcaseyskitchen, boasts nearly a million followers: there’s a sprinkling of grounded research that cites reputable medical journals, and a blizzard of plausible-sounding nonsense. (Means dropped out of her surgical residency and is not currently a licensed doctor.) Either way, what she offers is a kind of earthly paradise, one in which “you can enjoy balanced weight, a pain-free body, healthy skin, and a stable mood… the natural state of fertility that is your birthright.”

But like many other visions of paradise, to attain Means’ state of Good Energy, you have to obey the rules. And there are a lot of them.

According to her dubious statistics, only 6.8% of Americans are “optimizing energy production in their cells,” which is the prerequisite for the aforementioned earthly Eden of the body. For the other 93.2 percent, Means lays out a checklist of all that you must do to become one of the corporal elite. The section of her book on “Food” includes a daunting 23 items, starting with “I currently use a food journal or food tracker consistently to monitor what foods and beverages I’m consuming” and continues with eating three cups of leafy greens a day, plus avoiding foods with “refined seed oils,” all pastries, all sweetened drinks, all white flour, all artificial sweeteners, and—for a bonus—having the ability to not eat for longer than four hours without feeling “excess hunger or cravings.” There are further sections on “Toxins” (don’t store your food in plastic containers or eat high-mercury fish or use plastic water bottles or eat anything with artificial food dyes) and “Meal Timing and Habits.” Altogether, the material on food dwarfs the rest of the (very long) checklist, which includes sleep and the mind-body connection.

What it all amounts to is that Means’ “bold vision for health” in America involves an incredibly stressful, highly involved method of examining absolutely everything that goes into your body. It entails researching whatever you may consider eating, and avoiding oral contraceptives, antibiotics, and over-the-counter pain medications like ibuprofen, plus plastic water bottles and unfiltered water.

As I read on, I realized what Means’ affliction is, about a paragraph before Lavin revealed the same conclusion: Orthorexia nervosa. As the National Institutes of Health defines it (for now; I’m sure this web page is marked for death), orthorexia is an eating disorder “perhaps best summarized as an obsession with healthy eating with associated restrictive behaviors.”

I first read about it when I was clipping health news for Big Pharma, and it’s funny how so many MAGA people have some form of it, from Jordan Peterson and his crackbrain carnivore diet (beef, salt, water – and nothing else) to the various Paleo/caveman/low-carb regimes practiced in the manosphere to the organic vegan menus followed by women like Means.

Lavin, who grew up in a strictly kosher home, goes on to tie it to the dietary laws followed in her family:

I’m intimately familiar with systems of eating that involve a lot of label-gazing, head-scratching, and consideration of ingredients. The irony is that, even though I lived through two decades of religious dietary strictures of byzantine complexity, it never felt half as much like a story about sin as Casey Means’ book does. In Leviticus, God never promises a longer, healthier, pain-free life if you avoid breaking any of the dietary laws. He never promises anything, except avoiding becoming ritually unclean.

By contrast, the Instagram orthorexics explicitly declare that you’re broken unless you keep up with an ever-shifting codex of purity that, incidentally, involves quite a bit of discretionary spending. Sure, two sets of cutlery and kitchenware is a big outlay. But Means wants you to buy, at minimum, wearable activity trackers for your movement and sleep; a food journal; blue-light-blocking glasses; access to a sauna; charcoal and reverse-osmosis water filters; a glucometer; and a whole new set of pantry staples (she even specifies a seed-oil-free hummus brand.)

And of course, there’s cruelty involved. Fall away from the kosher path, and you’re a bad Jew. Eat Nacho Cheese Doritos? Then you richly deserve any illness that befalls you. All of this is backed up by ridiculous overstatement; note how Croaky talks about food dyes or processed foods or seed oils “poisoning” children. I will grant you, it’s probably not a great idea to drink a gallon of Red 40 every day, but most of us can survive our bad breakfast cereal or red licorice indulgences just fine. But if you consume these things after you’re told you shouldn’t? Then it’s so much easier to take away your Medicaid, you fat p.o.s. with no self-discipline.

In this, they are marching happily next to the more garden-variety cruelty practiced by the rest of the administration. And they feel fine about it, because they’re only trying to Make America Healthy Again. IS THAT SO WRONG?

I’m so mad at Croaky these days, I can’t even. And now they’ve cancelled the Moderna contract for a bird-flu vaccine.

There is joy in the land, however. Stephen Miller’s wife is leaving the White House to follow Elon Musk to wherever he’s going, and there’s a hot rumor the three of them were in a shall-we-say throuple type of relationship. Our breakfast conversation Thursday was not about eggs, coffee or what we each had planned for the day.

Me: “God, I can’t imagine being railed by both those guys. Literally a fate worse than death.”

Alan: “Nah, that’s not how it went. Elon railed her while Stephen watched, jerking off.”

It’s enough to make you want to splash Red 40 right in your eyes, isn’t it?

Have a great weekend, all.

So we’re in the first month of Trump sitting on his fat ass behind the Resolute Desk, a pile of Sharpie Magnums at the ready, and he’s been…signing things. Not meeting with Congressional leaders, not holding policy meetings. He gave Elon and his broccoli heads the keys to the treasury and he’s retired to the Oval to sign stuff. It started with serious stuff, and three weeks later, he’s down to straws.

I’m beginning to think this isn’t serious, although it is very dangerous. There should be a strategy to fight this. The American system wasn’t meant to run on executive orders by a mad king, even one with many stupid followers and some unsmiling henchman. Seventy-four million voters said hell no to this bullshit, and millions more stayed home because they either couldn’t be bothered or simply despised both candidates. But one candidate isn’t in the picture anymore, so maybe we could redirect that sentiment? I dunno. Then there’s this:

Gillibrand on WNYC today said one reason they're all falling in line is that they get death threats.

[image or embed]

— Regina Schrambling (@gastropoda.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 3:31 PM

As more than one person pointed out in the replies, lots of people get death threats these days, but they don’t let a bunch of cowards change the way they live their lives or do their jobs. So nut up, Kristin Gillibrand. There’s work to do.

Now it’s time for the Super Bowl. It’s still more than an hour to kickoff, I just turned the game on, but I’m confident President Sharpie hasn’t showed up yet. The warmups are ongoing, and there’s a lot of helmet-knocking and close-up yelling player-to-player, which I gather is a bonding / amp-up ritual. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but part of me wants the Chiefs to lose, so Taylor and Travis break up and she writes a song about it.

This is the overwhelming Detroit vibe today:

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Let’s watch.

Edited to add: Friends, I wrote this yesterday before news of the plane crash broke. Obviously, we’ll all be watching those developments today. Feel free to thread hijack all you want.

I’ve probably talked about this before here, but if there are any newbies in the readership, here it is again: I’ve always felt a certain not-too-serious sisterhood with Caroline Kennedy. We’re so close in age — she is two days younger than me — that it’s the sort of thing your mom tells you when you’re both little, and her dad is president. What’s more, her younger brother’s birthday is on the same date as mine, three years later. So it’s:

Me: November 25, 1957
Caroline: November 27, 1957
John Kennedy Jr.: November 25, 1960

Mostly this was taken as a joke in my family: “I see Caroline Kennedy is interning for the New York Daily News this summer,” my mom might say, by way of noting that I was spending my break working the cash register in a Mexican restaurant. Caroline went to law school. Caroline has published many books. Caroline has served as ambassador to two countries (Japan, Australia). Needless to say, Caroline lives a cooler life than I do, but that’s to be expected.

This week Caroline made news for a devastating letter she sent to senators considering her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the president’s nominee to run the Department of Health & Human Services. You can see her read it here. The letter itself was very brave; she described her cousin as a “predator” and a malign influence on others. She scolded him for appropriating her father’s image and family’s reputation for his ridiculous presidential run, before “groveling to Trump for a job.” We’ll see if it has an effect.

But, shallow doppelgänger than I am, I couldn’t help but notice her face. I don’t want to snip copyright photos, so let’s look at the public-domain Wikipedia shot:

That is a 67-year-old, well-lived-in face. (Albeit one with Irish DNA and likely our generation’s casual relationship with sunblock.) And I think we’ve forgotten what that looks like.

We’re so inured to today’s fillered, Botoxed, surgically altered, Instagram-filtered face, we think that’s what older women should do, whether they want to or not. JLo is 55, and has not only no lines, but a 25-year-old’s body. The old ad line for hair color — “Does she or doesn’t she?” has moved from hair to our entire body. And speaking of 55-year-olds (in April), let’s take a look at another older woman:

It’s the new First Sex Worker’s official portrait. In the name of Photoshop, have you ever seen more filters deployed in your life? Not to mention the heavily plasticized body, with the breast implants, the slanty eyes, and god knows what else. Also 55 (although this photo is a few years old:

This photo was singled out for derision when she published it on her Instagram. It says a lot about her, if you ask me.

You can go online and find photos of both these women before they entered the Mar-a-Lago fembot factory. Others, too. Kristi Noem, age 53:

I can hear some of you men, or at least your horny ids, saying so what if Kristi and Kim got a glow-up? That high-necked pink blouse was doing her no favors, and her new hair is sexy. My reply would be: Why did she change her look so drastically? To catch the eye of a known sexual assailant, that’s why.

Speaking of Mar-a-lago:

(Shudder.)

Anyway. I’m watching the RFK Jr. hearing now. I can’t figure out whether Bobby has perma-dyed his skin the color of a walnut, whether he supplements with Bronx Colors makeup like his would-be boss, or if he simply spends so much time outside, maybe flexing his guns on the beach shirtless in a pair of jeans, or what.

Are we doomed? I feel like we probably are.

I was in Chicago summer before last, and Jeff Borden and I went to the club where Shadow Show was playing. At some point in the evening, he handed me a shot of some amber liquor and told me to go ahead, drink it.

I don’t worry that Borden will slip me a Pete Hegseth mickey, and I wasn’t even tipsy from the beer I’d been nursing, so I did, downing it in one go. My eyes bugged out of my head, my throat screamed for mercy and my brain started flashing neon ABORT signs.

“What,” I gasped, “was that?”

“Malört,” he said. “Otherwise known as the Chicago hello.”

I’m not super-big on liquor history, but I’d never heard of this stuff. Borden said it was made with wormwood, a word I recall mostly from Shakespeare. What is wormwood, anyway? All I can tell you is, don’t drink it.

But now, Malört is catching on, or so says the New York Times:

Malört is, in one word, unforgiving. Made from neutral spirits, wormwood and sugar, it tastes a little like sucking dandelion juice through a straw made of car tires. It is also kind of good. Intensely bitter, it’s herbaceous and a touch citrusy, as if you were to bite a grapefruit like an apple.

It is also, in five words, the unofficial liquor of Chicago.

Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant to the city, peddled Jeppson’s Malört as a digestif as early as the 1930s. “It was the only liquor to survive Prohibition because no one believed that a human being would drink that on purpose, and that it had to be medicinal,” said J.W. Basilo, the manager of the Promontory and a bartender in Chicago for more than 20 years.

Intensely local to the Windy City, Malört “became the designated initiation shot, something you downed to prove your Midwest mettle — a difficult drink for a difficult place to live,” the story goes on.

Hence the Chicago hello. I noticed that the next day on Shadow Show’s Instagram stories, they posted a photo of all of them taking their Malört punishment. Kate noted something to the effect that Chicagoans have some strange ideas about what’s drinkable.

Now, though — and this is the point of the NYT story — Malört is spreading beyond Chicago, probably because hipsters cannot stand not being in on a single city’s digestif secret. There’s even a Malört-centric bar now, in New Orleans. That city has its own signature cocktail, the Sazerac, but it also has to serve lots of thirsty tourists who want to be tipsy, but don’t necessarily want to be served the usual watered-down Hurricane in a go-cup. Novelty is the soul of capitalism.

I guess what I’m saying is, if someone offers you this particular digestif after the Thanksgiving turkey, think twice before you say sure, love to.

And now another tough week comes to an end. I can’t stop thinking about Pete Hegseth raping that woman (allegedly, yes), his dog tags swinging over her face before he ejaculated on her stomach. A rapist nominates a rapist, of course.

Next week is Thanksgiving. I’m going to have to dig for something to be thankful for, but not really. There’s always something, if you have food, shelter and family love. It’s just how long that could last, know what I mean?

See you then, at least for a little while.

I was ranting about Mitch Albom on Facebook — I’m already bored by it, but if you are in my network, you can read it there — when I started thinking about tropes.

Tropes as in, the expected motifs, even clichés, that we find in certain genres of writing. I was comparing Albom’s Sunday column about Mike Tyson (phoned-in, sketchy, error-strewn — the floor of a boxing ring is canvas with one S, not two) to Pete Dexter’s far superior one from 1996. That column, which I can’t link to because I can’t find one, described watching Tyson in training as he demolished a sparring partner. It describes the gym he was training in, in upstate New York, “on the third story of an old building, over the firehouse and the city hall.” It talks about the trainer who discovered him, Cus D’Amato, and the one who took over after D’Amato died, Kevin Rooney.

It reminded me that boxing gyms are rarely if ever luxurious, and are always on the third floor of an old building, or perhaps in a converted garage in a bad part of town. Men who take up this dangerous sport are often from lower-status ethnic groups, which in the 20th century were Irish (Rooney), Italian (D’Amato) or people of color. It reminded me of the studio executive yelling at the title character in “Barton Fink” about why his star writer, a playwright of the common man, can’t get his arms around a script about one:

What do you think this is? HAMLET?
GONE WITH THE WIND? RUGGLES OF RED
GAP? It’s a goddamn B picture! Big
men in tights! You know the drill!

Judy Davis, as Audrey in that same film, explains it deftly:

Well, usually, they’re… simply
morality tales. There’s a good
wrestler, and a bad wrestler whom he
confronts at the end. In between,
the good wrestler has a love interest
or a child he has to protect. Bill
would usually make the good wrestler
a backwoods type, or a convict. And
sometimes, instead of a waif, he’d
have the wrestler protecting an idiot
manchild. The studio always hated
that. Oh, some of the scripts were
so… spirited!

And yet? It’s all in how you put it together. Dexter’s Tyson column is trope-filled, but still manages to break your heart a little:

The first time I ever saw (Holyfield) was in Atlantic City, where he was standing otherwise unnoticed in a crowded hallway outside one of the casino auditoriums, wearing a suit. He wasn’t on the card that night, he was just there to watch.

It’s hard for me to understand how that person came to beat the fighter I first saw 11 years ago.

I did see it, though, in what most people thought was a beautiful fight.

There was a moment, though, near the end, as Holyfield went hunting and a tired, half-conscious Tyson stumbled and nearly turned his back, that was not beautiful at all. A right hand exploded, sweat flew up into the lights, a halo, and Tyson pitched dangerously sideways, and then staggered away, toward the far rope, and before he gathered himself and turned back into the onslaught to meet what was waiting for him there, in that moment, I think, confusion and exhaustion took him home, to the place he comes from, where there is no protection, and there is no one who cares.

A story I’d like to see written? How boxing, a sport that’s pretty much dead now, is being kept alive by Arab kids in metro Detroit. I don’t think there’s a boxing culture back home, but in any Detroit gym, there are always a few Mohammeds and Husseins. Most of them are Yemeni, which is the lowest echelon of Arab-Americans in Detroit. Come to think of it, when we saw Claressa Shields fight in Detroit, the undercard featured a couple of bouts with Russian fighters from Chechnya, the Yemen of Russian republics. So the trope holds. How desperate do you have to be to risk your life in a boxing ring? When you see it as a chance to improve your lot in life.

Albom’s Sunday column was typically dumb — his grand conclusion was that the crowd backed Tyson because he was old, and we wanted Gen X to triumph over Gen Z. He barely talked about Jake Paul, who won the fight, beyond describing him as “a 27-year-old YouTube sensation turned professional boxer.” YouTube sensation? Hmm, OK. Paul and his brother Logan got famous the way young people with no particular talent get famous these days: By acting like assholes on YouTube. That seems to be the quickest way to fame and fortune online — be an asshole. The Paul brothers explored a Japanese forest where people go to kill themselves, found a hanging corpse, and made fun of the dead man. They also traveled to Italy and treated the canals of Venice like a water park, jumping from bridges while onlookers gaped. If you want to read about the perfect example of this type, google Johnny Somali. That’s why I was rooting for Tyson. I wanted him to murder this shithead. Full Duk-koo Kim. I wanted Paul to be a grease spot on the canvas. It had zero to do with age.

I didn’t watch the fight. I figured Tyson would lose, and didn’t want another disappointment.

One more interesting angle Detroit’s most famous best-selling author could have explored: Tyson distinguished himself for terrible behavior in the early part of his life, and has been rehabilitated into something cuddlier in his late middle age. He has a one-man show that he tours with. He’s a cannabis entrepreneur. Like Snoop Dogg, he’s one of those black men who used to be scary, and is now someone you wouldn’t mind sitting next to at dinner. That’s an idea it would have been interesting to pick apart. A task for a much better writer.

OK, it’s Sunday, my cold has relented somewhat, and this coming week has to be pedal to the metal. First, a birthday dinner for the birthday twins. (In a fancy restaurant. I have lost some cooking mojo in recent days.)

I’d imagine most of us remember those fabulous ’80s, right? That’s when “classic rock” emerged as a radio format, often credited to the utterly loathsome Randy Michaels. By effectively shutting the door on new music, the genre became moribund, only occasionally spawning retro-new acts like the Black Crowes. For me, it’s when radio really started to suck.

But when hip-hop rose to dominate pop music — and when lots of classic-rock dudes had teenage sons who scorned dad’s records for the rap that their elders hated and feared, and did so beneath the private headphones of a Walkman — it got nasty. I vividly recall many station IDs where some male voice would snarl TODAY’S BEST CLASSIC ROCK…AND NO RAP. There was an action movie whose TV ads featured a black gangster snarling at Bruce Willis, “I’m wanna make you scream in pain!” and Willis replies, “Play some rap music.” Ha ha. A rock DJ in Fort Wayne told me that when he played Run-DMC’s cover of “Walk This Way,” the phone lines lit up immediately, and not in praise, if you know what I mean.

Racist? You bet. Hip-hop may not be your cup of tea, but you can’t say it hasn’t stood the test of time. Public Enemy comes up from time to time in my boxing classes, and it still sounds contemporary, which is not something you can say about the synth-heavy pop of the ’80s, which is so dated it makes you smell AquaNet. Even the scary-ass rappers every white person was afraid of have matured into cuddly pop-culture heroes (looking at you, Snoop Dogg) or even people we should respect and listen to; if you didn’t see Barack Obama paying tribute to Eminem last week, I certainly did, and reflected on when one of my editors in Fort Wayne, a true music appreciator across genres, was appalled by his Slim Shady debut to the point of alarm.

But some people, mostly old white GenX or Boomers, still hate it.

I thought of this a few years back, when I was browsing for a hairbrush at CVS and overheard a black woman, younger than me but not by much, singing along to Billy Joel on the store’s music system. She was doing it kind of absently, looking for something on the shelves too, but I was struck by how much feeling she managed to infuse in a lyric I’d already heard 187,000 times. She had every right to find it as lame as I did, but she didn’t.

This week we have a crew hanging drywall in the basement. They’re all black, and like all drywall crews, they pass the time playing music on a Bluetooth speaker. I’d expect a playlist, or a radio station, that draws from the deep wells of blackness in pop music, but no. At the moment, it’s the Eagles. Before that, U2. Before that, Hall & Oates. The only black artist I can recall hearing this morning is Tina Turner, and “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” a fine track, but not exactly a deep one for that artist. I texted the family about this, and Alan noted, “The first day I thought they were curating their playlist so as not to frighten the white folks upstairs. But no. (The crew leader) knew the lyrics and was singing along to a Foreigner song.”

When it dropped, I know I linked to Wesley Morris’ contribution to the 1619 Project, a podcast episode called “The Birth of American Music,” and I still think it’s one of the best explanations of how we got here that you can get in half an hour. It starts with a funny intro about yacht rock, and here’s the pivot point:

This is the sound not just of black America, but the sound of America. It is deeply American, almost especially when it’s sung by British people like David Bowie and Annie Lennox and Amy Winehouse. And it fills me with pride. Like, I know that there is something irresistible and ultimately inevitable about black music being a part of American popular music. But it also reminds me that there’s a history to this, a very painful history. And in the most perversely ironic way, it’s this historical pain that is responsible for this music.

It goes on from there, but I don’t want to spoil it.

There’s a whole YouTube subgenre of black people listening to white music. This is only a mild taste of it. And all of this is, I hasten to add, FINE. It is great that we can all enjoy all the music that’s out there, even Foreigner. I just think it’s funny, how that woman in the CVS could take a Billy Joel song and make it pretty great. I’d buy her record! “In the Aisles: A CVS Shopper Covers Billy Joel,” maybe. That would drive the rock DJs nuts. But these boneheads who run rock radio can’t find it in their cinder-like hearts to enjoy a little Kendrick Lamar.

OK, then. Just a few more days until widespread civil unrest breaks out in American cities! Let’s listen to music and take our minds off it.

I don’t believe we have yet said goodbye to Mitzi Gaynor. She died last week, at 93. She was mourned in the usual modern fashion — some amusing clips of her energetic dancing posted online, some YAS QUEEN, a note added to the lengthening list for the In Memoriam reel at next year’s Oscars.

I will remember Mitzi mainly for her effect on Eddie Fisher.

Eddie was a sportswriter in Columbus, already past his prime by the time I arrived in 1979. I don’t know if he even had a beat, but he looked like the kind of guy who’d cover horse racing. A bachelor. He always had a wet cigar stub clamped in his jaw, smelled like a wet cigar stub and had a tendency to look at women like a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon. Eyes bugging out on springs, tongue rolling out like a carpet runner — you know the type.

He’s gone now, and his obit informs me that he spent a stretch as the paper’s entertainment editor. Even though he toiled in Sports, he hung on to one assignment from his earlier job, and that was writing advances for at least some of the Kenley Players summer-stock productions, and certainly the ones starring Mitzi Gaynor. I think he considered her a friend of sorts.

He loved, loved, loved Mitzi, and rarely missed the chance to drop her birth name into his slavering stories: Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber. I once walked past his desk when he was interviewing her. I think he was actually drooling.

Admittedly, Mitzi was quite something, an energetic hoofer with the legs to match. Her summer show wasn’t a play or musical, just “The Mitzi Gaynor Show,” with hoofing and jokes and false eyelashes and a crowd of backup dancers in tight pants and top hats. If you like that kind of thing, it was your kind of thing.

Mitzi had an active Instagram account, where she or her reps would post old clips of her dancing in some short number with a rhinestone-studded fringe hem. I guess that means she was young at heart. I could certainly watch her sing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” on repeat for about an hour.

In the midst of looking up stuff, I found a short piece about John Kenley, founder of the players, with this startling revelation:

Born to Slovakian saloon keepers in 1906, John was born in Denver Colorado, after the family had fled increasing prohibition laws on the East Coast. Born intersex, John (who occasionally went by “Joan” but utilized male pronouns when at work) entered show business when the family moved to Cleveland Ohio, where he worked as a female impersonator, acrobat, dancer, and audience plant at comedy show before he made the move to New York City.

I had no idea.

So farewell, Mitzi. You were a true entertainer.

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I asked for sweata weatha, and I got it. Highs today in the low 50s, and because our Nest thermostat is always trying to save us a few pennies, I realized today that once again it had nudged the thermostat down to 66 and my nose was cold. And this reminded me of a nose warmer that some catalog we used to get carried; it looked like a stocking cap for your nose, and you would presumably give that as a gag gift to someone like me, but certainly never wear it where any other human being could see you.

I couldn’t think of the catalog’s name. And while it wasn’t Hammacher Schlemmer, that’s the only one that came to mind. Does it still exist? It does, as a website now.

And it’s still pretty weird:

And:

But this being the 21st century, guess what, they have vibrators. Behold, the “Award Winning Women’s Sexual Wellness Massager:”

“Come on, CVS carries those things now,” Alan told me. OK, but still. This is the place I first saw the “weather forecaster” that was a picture of a donkey with a tail made of yarn. “If the tail’s movin’, it’s windy. If it’s wet, it’s rainin’,” etc. It was something of a surprise.

But never fear, you can still buy a nose warmer, but not at Hammacher Schlemmer. This was from some other outfit:

They are surprisingly numerous on Etsy, as well. Go figure.

OK, then. I was going to stay away from you-know-who today, but the clips coming out of the Univision town hall last night were absolutely brutal; I suggest you dial some up. And I leave you with this banger of a deep dive out of Fort Wayne, about how Parkview Hospital grew and grew and got greedier and greedier. It’s detail-packed and riveting:

Revenue pressure was even brought down to the level of nurses – some of whom say they have been pushed to charge for the smallest of items from Kleenexes to batteries. One 2022 email, obtained by the Guardian, shows a supervisor at Parkview DeKalb telling nurses that she had reviewed their charts for the week and found they had “missed” $50,000 in charges as a team. The following year, managers told staff to be more stringent about how many linen towels they handed out to patients – an initiative they termed “linen stewardship”.

“It makes me feel disgusting. It makes me feel dirty,” said one current Parkview nurse, describing how staff have been made to charge for supplies and services down to the micro-level. “Why should I be trying to make sure that they’re getting the most money that they can?”

In some cases, these volume and coding protocols resulted in enormous bills and significant additional revenue for the system, according to medical and legal records reviewed by the Guardian.

In 2021, after a young girl went to the ER for an accidental razor cut, a doctor applied an “adhesive skin affix”, a special type of wound glue, on her finger for about 10 seconds, according to her mother. Afterwards, Parkview charged just over $85 for the glue capsule, about four to five times the price listed online. The hospital also tacked another $295 onto the bill for the labor, which it classified as an intermediate surgical procedure, according to paperwork reviewed by the Guardian.

Have a great weekend, all.

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.

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.