When I was a junior in high school, I was captain of the dance team. The “governing” body of high school dance teams is called the Universal Dance Association (UDA) and every year they send a block of dancers to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In November 2006, I was one of the dancers who went.

I went to New York with three other girls from my team. Before I left for New York, they sent me a package that included my costume, a huge puffy red “Parade Participant” jacket that I was legally required to wear every time I left the hotel, and a DVD (lol!) with a welcome message and a recording of the routine that I needed to learn before the big day. 

We were in New York for a full week, arriving the Sunday before Thanksgiving and flying home the Saturday afterwards. We stayed at some big fancy hotel with one of those big fancy lobbies that you want to walk in and spin around, absorbing it in slow motion before one of your friends yells, “Come ON!” and pulls you out of your reverie, like a girl in a movie about New York City.

This wasn’t my first time in the city; I had been two years earlier for a wedding (which I obviously told everyone about in the most insufferable way). Every day we had rehearsals, and sometimes we had two. In between rehearsals we were taken on a full tour of the city. We went to the top of the Empire State Building and we went to Ground Zero. We saw on Broadway, we took one of those bus sightseeing tours, went to Times Square, and we got to go to Macy’s for Christmas shopping (obviously). One day they just dropped us off in Chinatown for a few hours and my friend and I were looking at knock-off designer purses in a storefront when an old woman said “Come with me” and for some reason we did (???) and we followed her up two flights of stairs and into an apartment and then into a walk-in closet filled with factory rejects of designer purses. I bought a Kate Spade bag that had the inside label sewn on crooked and a Coach bag that had an extra panel of liner fabric. Concrete jungle where dreams are made of!!!!

Hayley: It's that time of year again: the Holiday Season is upon us! And boy, what a weird one this is going to be. I got a Peppermint Mocha last week that made me cry, so clearly I'm doing very well. 

I am going to be honest here, because I think that's what the readers of Gold-Plated Girls expect from us — beautiful, perfect, honest opinions: I am not a huge fan of Thanksgiving. Sorry!

I know that this is some people's favorite of the season, but for me, Thanksgiving has never quite taken off in my brain. It's like all the stress of Christmas without any of the gifts. It's the anxiety of New Year's Eve without the celebration. 

I am very sad.

There is a new Netflix show called Dash & Lily. It is, in spirit, a Christmas movie, just one that’s been stretched into eight episodes of about 20 minutes each. It could have easily been seven episodes, or even six, but the powers that be gave us eight. I started the first episode on Friday afternoon, and in the blink of an eye I’d seen them all. They go down smooth.

The plot of is not important. It’s light and cute and sweet and not that deep. The two leads, high school students, never go to school, and their parents are conveniently absentee so they can go on Christmas- and Hanukkah- themed adventures in N.Y.C. Other viewers have compared the series to a Hallmark movie, but as someone who has actually watched a lot of Hallmark movies, it is better than that. It’s not great, but it’s much better than it needed to be. The show is warm and charming and a nice little escape from the hell we live in.

Victoria: Today! Is! The tenth anniversary of the premiere of the iconic Disney animated film Tangled. Frozen might loom larger in American culture, but we both know that  is far and away the superior late Disney animation film!

In Timely Stuff, Hayley reviews period dramas currently available for streaming and decides whether they’re worth your time or not. 

Hayley: I was born in September so my very first Halloween was spent as a little one month-old pumpkin blob. I think it should be a legal requirement that you dress your baby as a pumpkin for their first Halloween because it is very cute.

Growing up I had the incredible asset of a mom who was thrifty and creative and made almost all of my Halloween costumes and accouterments. Usually the base was some form of an old dance costume (I had approximately 900). Of course all I really wanted was a prepackaged Princess Costume from the store because that was "a real costume" to me. Kids are brats. But my mom did let me get a Princess Costume once and it was terrible: it didn't fit right, it was scratchy and thin, and it certainly didn't make me feel very princess-y. Mom 1, Hayley 0.

If you had asked me, circa 2012, what I associated with Mariah Carey, you probably would have gotten this list:

1. All I Want For Christmas Is You,

Victoria: This week we're talking Saoirse Ronan. If your brain is tumbling over those vowels, Saoirse tells people to pronounce it sir-shuh, so that it rhymes with inertia (though I believe a more traditional Irish pronunciation is seer-shuh). Sometimes I copy RuPaul and .

The first time Olive & June came into my life was last year, when I wrote up a small piece for the Cut about their foray into an at-home manicure kit. I received the Spring 2019 collection and for free a few weeks after that article went live. While I remember thinking that everything was very cool, aesthetically pleasing, and fun to use, my obsession didn’t really start there. I was getting so much PR from beauty brands at that time that everything kind of blended together. 

Hayley: On September 22, you tweeted: "'historical accuracy' is honestly kinda fake!!" and I have been wanting to revisit this ever since.

It’s election season! If you social media pages look like mine, it seems that every other post is encouraging people to check their registration, to apply for a mail in ballot, to make a voting plan now so their vote will be counted. Your vote matters!

I am not going to say voting isn’t important. I checked my registration multiple times. I applied for my absentee ballot in August, and, when I finally got the correct one, I mailed it back the same day. I have badgered many people in my life to make sure they do the same.

But also…it’s not actually true that my vote matters, and pretending that it isn’t a lie is pissing me off.

Victoria: There's been a lot of social media chatter about comfort movies during this year, for obvious reasons. The two of us rewatched The Parent Trap with our friend Brita last week, and it was definitely a comforting moment for me.

A comfort movie is built through repetition. When I was a kid, that meant wearing out the VHS tapes of the movies we liked the most, like and, of course, . Then there were movies my parents bought us because liked them — I'm thinking of watching  with my brothers in our basement. Han and Leia's enduring love burnt itself into my brain earlier than I can remember.

In Timely Stuff, Hayley reviews period dramas currently available for streaming and decides whether they’re worth your time or not. 

Hayley: On Tuesday, my friend Ashley tweeted something that quickly went viral. It was about the Amelia's Notebook series, which I had completely forgotten about until she brought it up. I remember having all of those books and loving them, and also asking my mom to buy me composition notebooks (which, actually, I did not like because they were not spiral bound). 

Sunday morning, I woke up and did my daily “scroll through my phone while I try to motivate myself to get out of bed” ritual. I noticed, not for the first time, a meme about the game “Among Us.” I knew it was popular, and I was vaguely familiar with the characters, who are brightly colored astronauts who look like cute little jelly beans. But despite seeing references to this game for weeks, Sunday morning was the first time I googled it. Twenty minutes later, I played my first game.

You can play “Among Us” on a PC for $5 or your phone for free. You compete with a group of friends, Internet strangers, or a mix of both. In a round of the game, you and up to nine other people are sent to an adorable little space station, where you must complete basic tasks. While you try to do them, some of your fellow jelly bean astronauts are trying to kill you. Every time a body is discovered, the beans try to vote out the killers. If you get rid of them before they kill you all, you win. If you die, you come back as an adorable ghost bean who can finish tasks.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in March, both of us have bought a lot of stuff: loungewear, activewear, bras, underwear, sweaters, socks, shoes, nail polish, hair dye, snacks and more. Early in the summer, Hayley went through a big iced tea phase that Victoria soon copied. Victoria made her hair orange, then pink. Hayley got new leggings for her yoga teacher journey. Here is a brief accounting of the best, worst, and weirdest things we purchased during this dumbass pandemic.

The Best Thing I Bought:

In Timely Stuff, Hayley reviews period dramas currently available for streaming and decides whether they’re worth your time or not. 

Last week, Netflix dropped the trailer for its new adaptation of Rebecca, starring Armie Hammer, Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas. The film will hit the streaming service in October. I decided to reread Rebecca this weekend; I read it once in eighth grade and found the whole thing horribly romantic. I made it about halfway through before sitting down to write this.

Victoria: I want to say the first Reese Witherspoon movie I watched was Legally Blonde, but I think I got Sweet Home Alabama from Blockbuster first. A bad choice.