Victoria: It's our last issue of 2020 (we're giving ourselves a little break for the holidays). And what a year it's been!
Dear readers, originally we had scheduled this issue as some sort of 2020 best-of issue, but the last 12 months were so confusing and overwhelming we found it hard to tease out what we wanted to talk about in a fun and kooky way. So now you get this!
At the end of the year there's a lot of pressure to focus on the good, and only the good. I am sure that many people I know will be posting IG captions on December 31 along the lines of "This year threw so many challenges at us, but I'm so glad I had you by my side for it all, babe." And I'm describing that in a kind of nasty way, but probably I'm just jealous that 2020 isn't like a weird, quirky year for me — or at least that I can't pretend it was. I can't even do an Instagram #topnine because too many of the posts will be about my dad dying, and I don't think anyone wants to relive that. I feel sad and down and depressed. I have a hard time feeling hope for 2021, and all the years after that.
Yeah, there were good things in my year, but they feel sparse. I feel ungrateful even writing that, but it's true.
How are you feeling about the end of 2020, Hayley?
Hayley: Well Victoria, I'm glad you asked. I feel very bummed out about the end of 2020! For small reasons, like how I can't celebrate my favorite holiday the way I want to. But also for bigger existential reasons, like how the horrors of 2020 are going to follow us into 2021 and beyond. There seems to be this large-scale inability (or maybe it's just a survival mentality) to reckon with the fact that these years are socially constructed and nothing is going to change for us as soon as midnight strikes. There will still be coronavirus, millions of people unemployed, and hundreds of thousands of people sick and dying. It's hard to feel celebratory at all about any of this.
I am a person who, almost to a pathological extent, can always find a silver lining. This has served me well overall, but in times like these it just feels like a cruel joke. I know that there are things that I am very grateful for this year, but the realization that we will endure this nightmare for many more months makes my chest tighten up like an angry little fist. I hate it!
You and I were both laid off from our writing jobs in the early spring, and have spent the last nine months essentially trying to find some sort of creative purpose to fill our time. It felt necessary for self-preservation but next to impossible given the circumstances. By August, we had finally decided on a framework for a newsletter that felt like "us" — funny, smart, warm yet critical, and steeped in pop culture. When I think of what I am most proud of accomplishing this year, it is this very newsletter. For four months, we have kept pace with a schedule that, now that I look back at it, is honestly pretty intense in terms of newsletters! But with a few breaks here and there, we've created something that I'm really proud of, that *big sigh* would not exist if we were both employed full-time. It's like we squeezed one little drop of lemonade out of a pickup truck full of lemons. Really shitty lemons.
What are some of your favorite Gold-Plated Girls newsletters? How do you feel about this project we've embarked upon together?
Victoria: Gold-Plated Girls and our little community are of course the main highlights of this bad year! I am grateful for our friendship all the time, and in a lot of ways this newsletter just lets us share our friendship with the world, and that's beautiful and fun. When we were talking about doing this back in the summer, the thing I personally found so frustrating is that there are so few places on the Internet to publish weird, fun stuff. I'm glad we're both like "Hey let's put our stuff here, and it will be valuable because we value it!" It’s not a solution to modern media, but I take a lot of pride in what we're doing.
I love our issue about Reese Witherspoon; since Reese keeps doing things, I am thinking about her all the time. A lot of people thought we went too hard on her, while I thought we went too easy on her! I suppose that's a good balance, then. All your Timely Stuffs have been deeply enjoyable for me. A lot of these shows I will never watch, but I like learning a little bit about them through your eyes! Personally I am glad I finally found a place for all my thoughts about Mariah's Ring Pop ring.
Other, non-Gold Plated Girls things I liked this year: the movie Emma., which I loved so much I watched it with two of my friends, and then the next day again with you; the movie Imagine Me & You, which came out way back in 2005; memoirs by Jessica Simpson, Demi Moore, Andre Leon Talley, and Mariah Carey; two! new Taylor Swift albums (honestly more new albums in general than I care to name); Never Have I Ever on Netflix. I did a lot of cooking this year; a lot of the time it felt so boring and terrible, but also I made a lot of yummy stuff that I was glad to have tried.
What GPG issues have been your favorites? Do you have media highlights from this year?
Hayley: My favorite issues of GPG are the ones that start off as us feverishly texting each other about shared opinions and then going "Wait should this be our Friday convo?" That is how our Saoirse Ronan conversation started, and it was fun to nerd out about a shared passion of ours like that. My favorite convo so far though has been about Tangled, which made me channel a lot of the very strong beliefs I've had about that film into one place for the first time. It was enjoyable but also cathartic. Your Dash & Lily deep dive remains the best thing I've read yet about the heartbreaking nature that is not being able to celebrate the holidays — or anything —right now.
Watching Emma. with you was one of the first times I did a "watch party" type of movie viewing this year, and it was so much fun. I also enjoyed watching Pride & Prejudice for your birthday in August. Rachel Vorona Cote's Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today was the last book I read in the Before Times and Jessica Simpson's memoir Open Book is the first book I read once the shelter in place order began. Both of them are great books, but they are forever associated with this weird shift in time in early March when we had no idea what was happening. Jasmine Guillory's romance novels were the perfect escape from reality. I also finally read the 800-page historical nonfiction tome The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser, a deeply fascinating and engrossing book that was a different kind of escape for me.
It has also been really fun to run a fantasy league for The Bachelorette with you and many other people in Gold-Plated Girls Nation. (We need a name for our community, dear readers, please weigh in!) It's weird how much I crave the highly fictitious "reality" of the Bachelor franchise right now. This weekly ritual has made life feel slightly more normal. I assume this is how sports fans felt once they finally started that little baby MLB season.
It's hard to look forward to anything in the future because it's been a big black hole of unknowns lately (I mean more so than usual). Will my friend get to have her wedding next year? Will I ever get a job? Will I ever be able to go on a date and listen to a man explain comedy to me? Frankly, it's the worst "To Be Continued" we've ever had.
Victoria: I also read Rachel Vorona Cote's book (it's so good!) right before quarantine, and the Jessica Simpson book right after it began! Jessica's book was the first book we talked about in my quarantine book club, which had been another highlight of the year. There are a lot of people in my life now who I didn’t know in January, and I am grateful for them all, even if the ~state of the world~ means they mostly, as the Grand Dame of Potomac Karen Huger would say, live in my phone.
It's funny you mention baseball. I did watch every Mets game, and I mostly had a good time. But I also felt very guilty, because it was dangerous and they risked a lot of covid exposure. And there were outbreaks, and we don't know what the lasting effects of those will be. Also, it annoys me that going into the 2021 season, which people expect will be normal-ish, people are predicting how players will perform based on what they did in 2020. Like, if someone had an off year in 2020 .... maybe it's because he wasn't allowed to see his family for months and was living through a global pandemic!!! Seems hard to do sports good under those conditions! People have no empathy for players and it deeply bothers me.
Today I was thinking about the best things I cooked all year, and your buffalo tofu is 1000 percent on the list. Thank you for bringing it into my life!
2021 just feels like a gaping maw. It's hard to even pick out little things to look forward to! Technically all my canceled 2020 concerts got rescheduled for next year, but will they happen? There are many movies I wish to see but will they be released? Will I get to have cake with my friends on their birthdays? I can’t even bring myself to set a goal on GoodReads. It's painful. I'm so, so tired.
Stuff Hayley Recommends:
My brilliant friend Devin started a newsletter called The Pace of Glaciers, where “you can expect to read about my experiences finding home, navigating the world as a queer trans man, and other glimpses into the lifelong journey of coming home to myself.” That’s gonna be an instant subscribe from me, dawg.
This tea from Trader Joe’s is so good I cannot believe it! I added a splash of oat milk to mine today and it was just delightful. It’s a perfect cold weather tea.
This week I made this Noodle-Free Pad Thai-inspired dish which is incredibly delicious. (Note: in true Minimalist Baker form, this dish does *not* take 30 minutes to make. I would say it’s closer to an hour from start to finish, especially if it’s your first time making it.)
It’s my last chance to shout out Olive & June nail polish for 2020, so if you haven’t gotten on board yet, use my code for $10 off your first order. DM me if you need help picking out polishes.
Things Victoria Likes:
This savage review of the new Wonder Woman (which I will probably still watch)
If you want to watch one of this year’s new Hallmark movies, make it the Lacey Chabert vehicle The Christmas Waltz. Delightful!
This story about the Christmas tree shortage made me cry!
Unfortunately I’ve become obsessed with the New York Times Spelling Bee game. Join me.
Gold-Plated Girls comes out twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays! Don’t forget to check out Victoria’s reflection of Rosie O’Donnell’s Christmas albums from Tuesday!