Countdown Euphoria
Hello, Dames Nationals! This will be our final full issue of 2020, but we hope to see you all again for our December 27th livetweet of The Muppet Christmas Carol. Thank you for hanging in here with us and being a reliable source of communion in a year when it was desperately needed. And, speaking of sources of communion, let us sing the praises— unexpectedly?— of terrestrial radio.
The Countdown, most regrettably, did not include “Countdown”, though you will hear “Formation” should you listen to the full playlist
This week, both of Your Dames were swept away by a wave of enthusiastic listening & commentary as Philadelphia’s music-focused public radio station WXPN played a weeklong countdown of the 2020 best songs ever, as voted on (using ranked-choice voting, aka the best kind) by listeners.
All week, we revelled in the unexpected juxtapositions, the joys of hearing instant-replay favorites alongside songs we hadn’t heard in years, the occasion to re-evaluate songs we thought we didn’t like, and thrilling to the possibilities of what would be in the Top 10. Best of all, we got to do so in conversation with friends. Our frenzied musical texting circle about the countdown was an especially fun and occasionally moving cocktail party right there in our phones, and it reminded us of how much fun it is to experience a communal cultural moment. We can’t wait to be able to do so again in person, but we’ve gotta say, this was pretty great.
The playlist of all 2020 songs is available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music and you don’t need to shuffle to get a dose of the serendipity and unpredictability a countdown like this doesn’t just provide but celebrate. Wesley Morris’ piece on the countdown, what it means, what it can’t tell us, and its quintessential Philadelphian-ness is of course a must-read by a loving son of the city. And if you’re into charts of the chart and statistics, the station has you covered, with a searchable list (which can be downloaded as both a PDF and A SPREADSHEET!), as well as breakdowns by most-played albums and artists, top artists and albums by airtime, round-ups of songs you probably missed if you maintain a diurnal sleep schedule, and more. Parsing the list after-the-fact is proving nearly as fun as listening to it live was— for example, let’s all agree that while some Christmas songs are being artificially included merely because the holiday’s proximity is putting them at top of mind (“Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses— a piece of holiday kitsch Dame M. will defend with her dying breath, but one of the 2,020 greatest songs of all time? Surely you jest), others (“Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” by Darlene Love) are receiving only their proper recognition in the canon.
Some new-to-us gems: “Hypnotized” by Fleetwood Mac, “I Got A Line on You” by Spirit, “Do Ya” by Electric Light Orchestra, “If We Were Vampires” by Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, and “Wake Up Everybody (feat. Teddy Pendergrass)” by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes.
Livetweet Reminder: The Muppet Christmas Carol on Sunday, 12/27 at 2:30pm ET
Given that our first attempt at a cheerful holiday matinee ended up a bit muddled, we want to take a second crack at it. Ergo, at 2:30pm ET on Sunday, December 27th, we are going to host a livetweet of The Muppet Christmas Carol, a movie Dame Margaret has seen at least twenty times and one that Dame Sophie will be experiencing for her very first time! It is streaming for free on Disney+ and also rentable on most other streaming media platforms for less than $5. The details:
When: Sunday, December 27th at 2:30pm ET
How: Streaming via Disney+ or rented on another platform.
Where: Either on Twitter with the hashtag #MuppetDames or in the Substack open thread we will send out that morning.
Dame Margaret’s Warm, Almost Sedative Brain Bath
So, this week at Vulture, Rachel Handler was able to devote an entire week to celebrating the movies of Nancy Meyers producing, single-handed, content as varied as an in-depth (and occasionally challenging) interview with La Meyers herselfand a (hilarious) first-hand account of getting high and making croissants as Meryl Streep does in It’s Complicated (I Your Dame’s favorite Nancy Meyers movie). In and of itself, this package was a delight but, best of all, it provoked some truly hilarious petty drama when Nancy Meyers’s daughter Hallie, affronted by Handler jokingly attributing Hallie’s directorial debut to her mother, decided the… loving, week-long tribute to her mother’s work was actually deeply sexist and NOTHING with which Sofia Coppola would ever have to deal. Which led to some Discourse-based hilarity and at least one great Lainey Gossip post— truly, the perfect outcome.
Handler’s work put me in mind of a few things:
Finally watching The Intern earlier this year and finding it to be the absolutely perfect, stakes-free movie with gorgeous sets and extremely pure characters to consume in month six of social isolation caused by an profoundly stressful global pandemic. Handler’s observation that Meyers’s movies are like “a warm, almost sedative brain bath” is exactly right. If there are any of her films you haven’t seen (and your tolerance for extremely rich white people with practically no problems is high), I strongly recommend you treat yourself to one.
And then, once you have, you might check in with Blank Check’s miniseries on Meyers’s films, Something’s Podda Cast, where each film is lovingly and comically dissected at great and satisfying length.
It also reminded me of another niche labor of love: A Simple Podcast, Jordan Crucciola, Alanna Bennet, and Cherished Damespal Christina Tucker’s nine-episode podcast dedicated to dissecting Paul Feig’s comedy-thriller masterpiece, A Simple Favor. Much like Meyers Week, this podcast is funny, loving, and surprisingly serious and insightful about a film most people would discard as fluff. I was able to participate in one episode— discussing the perfection of Anna Kendrick’s casting in the film— and it really felt like an honor.
If swaddling yourself in an enormous white cashmere turtleneck does not feel like an appropriate response to a global pandemic, can I interest you in a subculture of internet teens who are dressing up as medieval plague doctors? Because, as Amanda Mull noted on Twitter, this is one of the best lede paragraphs of all time:
And lastly, as I am writing this very email, I am making good use of my external monitor by watching Dua Lipa’s Tiny Desk at Home concert for… at least the sixth time. It is, I would dare say, an aesthetically perfect and purely delightful thing. Join me in basking in it:
Dame Sophie’s Giddy Literary Adaptation Excitement
I only ever want to feel this transported when words I love become moving pictures
On Wednesday, news broke that The Thief, the first of six books in Megan Whalen Turner’s alternate-history adventure series The Queen’s Thief, has been picked up for a tv adaptation by Disney+, sending my Twitter timeline to flip all the way about in giddy anticipation of seeing the world we’ve been imagining for so long come to life. The Thief and its sequels are published by an imprint at HarperCollins, so it’s not as if these are obscure books, but they’re also not the all-anyone-can-talk-about blockbusters they deserve to be. If you haven’t read them, now is a great time to acquaint yourself with the Mediterranean-to-the-Balkans-ish analog Turner has created.
If they’ve floated along under your radar, it could because over the last 20 years the series has naturally evolved from being a spirited, Newbery Honor-winning middle grade delight to YA to Adult. There’s so much delicious intrigue and geopolitics and slow-burning romance afoot in these pages that I recommend them for readers of nearly every age who are into twisty, plotty, fun & heartbreaking swoony stories about political machinations set in an alternate but easily recognizable world. Best of all, the audiobooks — narrated by Steve West — do the print books justice. I’ve reread my two favorite books in the series (Queen of Attolia and King of Attolia) on audio twice in 2020 alone. If this sounds like it’s up your alley, run, don’t walk, to your local library or independent bookseller. And if you’re in the market for more thoughts on book-to-screen adaptations, I invite you to read Dame Margaret’s and my extended thoughts on the subject in an issue from last winter, which I had entirely forgotten we wrote until I went looking for a gif capturing the essence of literary adaptations and found a perfect one...thanks to Google’s image search serving this issue up to me.
I love a good tradition, and Drew Magary’s annual Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog is among my very favorite Christmassy traditions, one that blessedly, can’t be cancelled by Covid. Somehow he hits the dead-center of the target every time, capturing both the wickedly witty eyerolling the catalog’s breathlessly described and totally absurd luxury items so richly deserve, and the tiniest soupçon of nose against the glass desire to live with the kind of income that would make it possible, nay, a breeze, to have a set of eight hand-embroidered Christmas tree napkins. You’ve gotta buy eight, at least! Who buys just four of these things? How would you even hold a halfway decent Christmas dinner without at least seven guests????? If you need more hilarious hateration, here are the 2019, 2018(ish), and 2017 versions.
And finally, beloved DamesPals and two-time guest editor champions Andrew & Craig invited me to be a special guest on their podcast, Overdue! I read Never Tell, a romantic thriller by Selena Montgomery (aka Stacey Abrams) and we had a great time discussing its twisty-windy plotting, quirky vocab usage, and the challenges of executing a successful face turn so that your initially overbearing Byronic love interest is revealed to be an actually very solid dude worthy of the protagonist’s love. As always, hit play for the insights into the books you’ve been meaning to read, stay for the supremely silly goofs.
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
We appreciate you, readers of Dames Nation!
Every time you tell a friend to subscribe, some woman, somewhere, finally has her remarkable body of work analyzed with the love, respect, and depth it’s always deserved.
Help us build Dames Nation by upgrading to a paid subscription on Substack
Share your saucy opinions with us on Twitter whether jointly as your @twobossydames, or in single size servings as @MrsFridayNext & @sophiebiblio!
And! You can catch Bossy Extras on Tumblr.