Oz and television show.: An Ode To Love

In November 2013, a few months into our friendship, I sent Mallory an email about a piece I hoped to write for her recently launched website, The News of the World Top.

I’m not ready yet to write it – I have to finish watching it first. but I want to write about the importance of the show and how it’s been overshadowed by subsequent shows, which is a shame, because I think it’s actually the only show I’ve seen that actually depicts men and men’s relationships honestly, in a way that is not “single male character where the world that revolves around him” or “male tyrant” or “idealized male desires.” it’s not tony soprano, walter white, don draper. it’s men dealing with friendship, love, sex, vulnerability. men not having control over their lives or their bodies – something women can relate to. those who accept their guilt and responsibility fare better in some ways than those who don’t. the show takes violence and sexual assault very seriously, both for men and women. it has some terrible subplots but some incredible character arcs that are astonishing.

The ways in which the characters sometimes change and become men to the best of their abilities within a very constrained, confined context because that’s all they can do. nothing is actually transformative in a huge way, but sometimes some things are transformative in small, daily struggle ways that are realistic, heartbreaking, real. these are men who are not allowed to be “men” as we see them in society but some of them struggle and grow much more than the men we see depicted elsewhere.

ALSO ALSO ALSO

how intense Said gets in season 5, like he consumes Adebisi and transforms into him, his rage and guilt

“YEP,” she replied, in what I would come to know was classic Ortbergian fashion.

I never wrote that piece.

---

When Oz first aired in July of 1997, I was 22 years old. A year out of college, I didn’t even own a TV. My roommate had a small one, but I hadn’t been able to watch much TV since the last time 90210 and Melrose Place aired back-to-back on the same night. I kept reading about this wild, boundary-pushing new TV show HBO was showing. When I got a new job in 1998, I befriended an intensely smart and acerbic guy who watched every episode. He would tell me how graphic it was: full-frontal nudity and violence and sex. It seemed at times too much even for him. It was too new, too different, a TV show that was doing what TV shows had never done before. More than merely depicting the existence of violence and rape, more even than showing deeply human characters in a maximum security prison, Oz was showing what it was like for men to survive in a place where the boundaries of their own bodies were constantly subjected to the rules, laws, whims, and desires of others.

The thing you should absolutely know about Oz before you watch it is that it is at times ridiculously over-the-top. Occasionally it’s just plain ridiculous. It is not artfully subtle by any means. There are some abysmal subplots. At least one character’s fate betrays the the beauty of his many seasons-long story, as well as the investment you’ll make in his growth, and this will make you mad for a very long time.

You should also know that the show is very graphic. There are scenes depicting assault where the camera does not cut away. There are violent scenes between characters of all types, between men and women, and between men of all kinds.

There are also many transcendent moments. Beauty, pain, friendship, love, loss, affection, growth. There’s betrayal of others and betrayal of the self. There’s hope and its immediate erasure. (Speaking of transcendent, there are some incredible butts and at least one kiss that will make you stand up and cheer.)

There are characters who are so vile you wish for their destruction. When they turn around and reveal how they too are flawed and human, you think about the part of you that wanted them to suffer—what does that mean? How are they different from the other flawed, broken men who you wanted to succeed? What does wishing you could see anyone be destroyed make you?

Oz is a show that asks, sometime forces, you to think about men in ways we rarely do. In the daily grind of Oswald Maximum Security Penitentiary, surrounded almost entirely by other men and under constant surveillance by guards and fellow prisoners alike, you begin to wonder how a person maintains his sense of humanity. The endless machinations of particular characters and the show’s steady stream of violence and death keep things lively and were doubtlessly useful in those early HBO days (a few seasons aired before The Sopranos even existed). But beneath the ruckus you can see the characters blossom—then wither and crumble, and then sometimes blossom again.

A human has needs beyond fresh air, decent food, and freedom. But a human also needs friendship, affection, trust, non-violent physical touch. Oz is about life on the inside, so it allows you to consider a lifetime of literally having to live inside—inside your own self, a place deep within you that you try to protect at all costs because everything and everyone wants to break it and you.

Oz creates artistic freedom through the virtue of constraint: It closes its characters in, and so it allows them to open up in very small, real ways.

This is why it’s fascinating to watch a group of men make choices about trust, friendship, love. They succumb to manipulation, to hope, and to the very basic desire of needing to feel loved. When Beecher and Keller (calling all Christopher Meloni fans) go through round after round of love and betrayal, you want them to stop being horrible to each other but god, do you also want them to make it. And make out. Or when you watch Miguel deal with the emotions around his baby, you want him to make better choices, to believe in the man he wishes he could be.

Oz approaches this need for an internal strength through faith as much as it does through human connection. Even better, it does this in part through Father Mukada and Sister Peter Marie, played by B.D. Wong and Rita Moreno, respectively (on the secular side, Patti Lupone makes a cameo. I’m telling you, Ozis a miracle). Oz was also one of the only mainstream American shows to depict Black Muslim characters with nuance and respect, particularly the character of Kareem Said, played by Eamonn Walker (particularly surprising, considering nearly three full seasons aired after 9/11). In fact, one of the show’s only true missteps, one that lazily and without reason violates the show’s own logic and careful treatment of faith-related issues, is with a Jewish character (one of maybe two Jewish people depicted in the entire series). This will make you mad for many reasons. In fact, much of the last season will make you mad for many reasons. We can talk about it when you get there.

---

I didn’t watch Oz when it aired on HBO. In fact, I didn’t see a single episode until 2013, the year I became friends with Mallory. She immediately shoved the DVDs for the first season in my hands. We watched the first few episodes, and then I made the huge mistake of bingeing the rest of the season on my own. I called her, distraught. “Don’t watch any more by yourself!” she admonished me. “You need me there.” She was right.

Oz flipped many scripts. It didn’t shy away from race riots. It put characters on death row and didn’t always pardon them, put them the hole and in solitary and showed how that damaged them. It showed men struggling to find emotional and spiritual connection, while also contending with not owning or being in control of their own bodies. I thought about my old friend in 1998, and I wonder if he was ready to think about all those things, especially on his own.

So if you are going to watch Oz, watch it with someone. Sure, Mallory and I will forever share a love of Dino’s need to run the kitchen, of Adebisi’s hat, of Martin Querns and of Torquemada (I love you, Bobby Cannavale!). We’ve referenced Ozto make a lot of jokes but we have also talked seriously about this show and its implications. Of course, art and music and film give people a shared language and a tangible culture to use as shortcuts in getting to know one another. But I like to think that as much as it entertained and allowed us to shriek at Beecher’s-gone-wild facial hair or the dentistry scene, Oz made us go inside a little bit too.

PS: This time I’m the Beecher, the one who finally stopped being so goddamn afraid of writing an essay about a television show.

Holding Hope: On Being a 911 Operator

I’ve listened to a lot of people die, and take it from me, people don’t slip away quietly like they do on screen, with one last longing look and a soft sigh of disappointed resignation. There are, of course, some quiet deaths—dying in one’s sleep is something many of us hope for. But the body is built to fight, and even in the most exhausted of frames, it can kick up a racket on its way out. It’s not polite. It doesn’t ask permission. It rattles and gasps and wheezes like an accordion being run over by a tractor-trailer. It fights with the bouncer and hurls epithets over its shoulder as it’s carried out.

I’ve worked 911 for seventeen years as the first of the first responders. I’m the person who tells you how to do CPR when you see a guy drop in front of Starbucks, when no one else wants to help, when you can’t remember one single thing you learned in that class you took before you had your first kid.

I’ve heard so many people die that sometimes I can tell the person is dying before the caller does. That fish-gasp-snore sound (called agonal breathing) is the reason CPR is sometimes started too late to help.

“Ma’am,” I say. “He’s not getting enough oxygen. I’m going to tell you how to do CPR.” 

“Oh, I can’t do that. He’s still breathing, can’t you hear that snoring? Just gethere!” 

But I can tell by the sound that he’s not snoring, he’s actually dying, and without immediate intervention he won’t make it. It’s up to me and only me to convince the eighty-year-old woman that she’s strong enough to pull her husband off the bed in order to get him on a flat surface (You can’t do compressions on a bed. Pull the sheet he’s lying on. Don’t worry about the fall is what I say. You can’t hurt a dead man is what I don’t say). It’s up to me to convince the seventeen-year-old girl to give mouth-to-mouth to a friend who’s overdosed, even when the caller is high as hell and doesn’t want to get anywhere near the stuff coming out of her friend’s mouth. It’s up to me to tell the mother how to cut down her son who’s hung himself with a rope made from his stepfather’s ties in case there’s still oxygen lingering in his blood. Speed. Now. The faster, the better. The more convincing I can be, the better chance the person has of being revived.

*

You answer the phone. You talk two hikers through giving CPR to a stranger on a hillside. Tell one how to pull the latitude and longitude off their iPhone because the call came in on the wrong line while coaching the other hiker not to stop compressions (tip: know how to find this location info on your phone). Get the helicopter ordered, help it land safely in the right place.

Finish your slice of pizza long gone cold. Fiddle with the crossword puzzle from the day before. Answer the next phone call. Don’t ask about the endings. HIPAA laws make it clear that unless you have a need to know, you have no right to know anyone else’s medical information. It can be frustrating to never know the endings. Unless you make the endings up yourself.

I started writing them down, fictional plots based on nothing but the conglomerate of grief I stored in the back of my mind—the endings I wrote to all my novels were hopeful, because hope was what I heard every day on the phones. The hope that I—that someone—could help before it was too late.

One novel’s inspiration came from talking to too many people with early-onset Alzheimer’s—they always know something’s wrong, but they can’t quite tell me what it might be. Sometimes they can’t remember their names or why they called 911. But they always hope I’ll be able to help. With something.   

Another novel, The Ones Who Matter Most, was the result of listening to hundreds of women over the years entering miscarriage. “No, no, no, no. Not this, no.” The liturgy these women chant is millennia old. Don’t sit on the toilet, I tell them. Don’t cross your legs. They cling to my words, hoping that if they do what I say, they can change the ending.

Hope. I hold out hope.

Because without hope, we don’t go on. Hope is the only thing that lets us say goodbye to our loved ones in the mornings—the hope we’ll come back together later, safely.

Hope is the thing our brains hold without us having to try. Our bodies, even at the edge of death, still hope for oxygen, still try to grab at it. Hope is extravagant and senseless and often just plain ridiculous, and yet still it rises.

Once I took a call for a 103-year-old woman who stopped breathing while at a family birthday party. Her great-grandson did perfect CPR—I could hear the sound her chest made as he did compressions in exactly the right rhythm. All the while, he panted and muttered, “Come on, Grandma, you can make it. Come on, Grandma. You can do this.” Behind him, the whole family cheered them both on. I was listening to a house full of hope. A home full of love.

I don’t know if Grandma made it or not. I’m guessing she didn’t, but what a gift, to be 103 years old and your family’s still not ready to let you go. 

*

I’ve just left the day job. It’s not like it’s a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’ve been working both 911 and writing, ninety hours a week, for ten years. I’ve published three literary novels, ten feminist romances, and one memoir, and this is what I’ve been working toward. I’m as ready for this leap as I’ll ever be.

It’s been almost two months of complete self-employment and I’m still twitching from adrenaline withdrawal, but not having to wear a pager to go to the bathroom is great. Actually sleeping at night—every night—is even better. So even though my hopeful dispatch manager has put me on the part-time roster just in case I feel like picking up some shifts, I think I’ve made the right choice in taking off my headset for good. 

I spent seventeen years listening to what can go wrong, hearing stories of predictable losses and freak accidents. I had the two best jobs in the world: giving immediate, life-saving assistance, and then making up stories about what happened next (in all cases fictionalizing the stories completely to protect those affected, including in this essay). I knew that sometimes, while on 911, I helped someone save a life.

And then a couple of readers wrote to me, saying I’d saved their lives. That’s exactly as untrue as it would be if I took credit for actually restarting someone’s heart over the phone. In not one single case did I put my hands on a chest and push. There was always someone else following my directions—they did the life-saving. In the same way, I don’t believe my writing can actually save someone.

But in both those jobs, I played the same role: to be the holder of hope. On the phone, I was the placeholder, the voice the caller clutched while waiting for an actual hand. In my books, I’m also just a voice, something to cling to while a reader’s world slips sideways. And I’m hoping like hell I get it right. From now on I’m wearing no headset and leaving behind only black marks on a white page, holding the space for hope and the shaky breath that follows it.

*

Dorothy L. Sayers, Marjorie Barber, and the Story of a Wartime Lemon

In February 1943, Marjorie Barber, who was known to everyone as Bar, carefully wrapped a lemon in a jeweler’s box and sent it to her friend, the detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers. The packaging was appropriate: a lemon was as precious as a jewel in the depths of World War II in England. This was a war that devastated the home front: nearly 70,000 British civilians died, and no one escaped the shortages, the long hours, or the near-constant menace of bombs.

The ‘home’ front was fraught on another level for Bar and Dorothy. They were both in complex long-term partnerships that frequently offered stress rather than succor and uncertainty rather than support. Their quiet friendship was a refuge and a source of the fresh air, space, and humor that makes it possible keep muddling through in one’s marriage and one’s life, and the lemon, both treasured and refreshing, is its perfect symbol.

Wartime rationing and controls aimed to ensure that every person had access to a minimum supply of basic goods – not only food, but also clothing, furniture, and other items. A points system governed access to rarer items like cereals, lentils, and tinned (canned) foods. Lemons, though, were never rationed: like bananas and other items that had to be shipped from warmer climes, they simply became essentially unobtainable. The war disrupted trade routes and filled ships and cargo holds with munitions and soldiers rather than tropical fruits.

A queue for food in wartime London.

Dorothy called the lemon a “Museum Piece” for its rarity and splendor. Her husband, Mac Fleming, looked at it with a “stupefied gaze” and asked, in mock bewilderment, “What is it?”

But a lemon is not a jewel: it will not last forever. Mac said it “would be a pity to destroy it,” but Dorothy countered that “it would be a pity to let it dry up or grow green whiskers.” He wanted to put it in a glass case and sell tickets for the privilege of viewing it; she wanted to make that curry that he’d rejected before because it was “no good without a squeeze of lemon.” Manifestly unable to agree, they wrapped the lemon back up in its wadding and put it aside.

Bar had lived in London with her partner, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, since the 1920s; while Bar taught English literature to high school girls, Muriel was a Shakespeare expert and historian who taught at Bedford College and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. All three women had attended Somerville College, Oxford, together around the time of the First World War. Muriel and Dorothy were members of the same writing club there, the archly named Mutual Admiration Society. While Muriel and Bar were setting up house in their London flat and writing poems about their beloved cat, Dorothy had a more tumultuous romantic trajectory, involving some fraught love-affairs with men, a son born out of wedlock, and finally marriage in 1926 to Mac — a veteran of World War I, a journalist, and a gourmand who had already been married once before.

By 1943, both partnerships had been through good times and bad – the marriage of Mac and Dorothy, and the partnership of Muriel and Bar, who called each other “friends” or “companions” but functioned socially as a couple and wrote to each other with the frank love, deep concern, and possessive annoyance of spouses. Mac had eventually adopted Dorothy’s son, but the marriage had grown less close and was put under strain by his chronic ill health and the deaths, in rapid succession, of both of Dorothy’s parents. In the early 1930s, Dorothy considered separation and perhaps divorce; she took a long vacation with Muriel to discuss the matter, and ultimately decided to stick it out. Her subsequent letters narrate their spats and disagreements with a witty veneer that is hard to penetrate. To what extent had they found a reasonable modus vivendi, and to what extent does the humor cover a profound marital unease? The lemon incident is only one example: read the exchanges in different tones of voice, and their meaning shifts from the charming to the depressing.

Dedication page, BUSMAN’S HONEYMOON (the novel version, 1937) by Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy found, in her friendships with Muriel and Bar, both emotional and intellectual connection. With Bar’s regular input, Dorothy and Muriel collaborated on a series of writing projects, beginning with a play, Busman’s Honeymoon, that dramatized the early married experience of Sayers’ famous fictional sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, and his beloved Harriet Vane. By World War II, Muriel and Dorothy had launched an edited book series, “Bridgeheads,” that aimed to explore different aspects of a rapidly changing world. The three old school friends were in constant conversation about books, poetry, criticism, ideas, theology, and drama; Sayers’ letters to editors and other friends frequently cite something either Muriel or Bar has said on a given topic. Dorothy wrote a cycle of twelve radio plays on the life of Jesus early in the war, and her work was informed by the reactions of Bar’s students, who listened in each month. But Mac was not entirely left out of this circle: he painted a portrait of Bar, for example, in 1941, and sent it to her when it was not included in an exhibition.

Muriel and Bar, for their part, were separated by the war. Bar followed her students when they were evacuated from London, part of the large-scale effort to protect English children by moving them out of the zones likely to be worst-affected by German bombs. She worried profoundly about Muriel’s safety in London. And she found it harder and harder to cope with the terms of their relationship, which seems to have involved a certain degree of openness or latitude for Muriel to have relationships with other women. One such woman lived in their flat during the war, causing increased tension with Bar. Bar found, in Dorothy’s home, a refuge from those tensions. She spent long holidays with Dorothy and Mac, on a scale reminiscent of a Jane Austen character. Witness Dorothy’s invitation in 1942: “Well, dear, have a good term and come back at Christmas to pay us a nice long Eighteenth-Century visit.” Bar did spend that Christmas with her friends, leaving Muriel in London with her other companion.

Bar advised Dorothy to put the lemon in water occasionally to plump it out again, should it show signs of deterioration. This Dorothy did, until at last, about a month after the lemon’s triumphant arrival, she decided to take covert action. The lemon, it seemed, was beginning to grow whiskers, and the butcher had sweetbreads in stock. So, as she told Bar, “I cast reverence to the winds, cut the precious creature open (it was in perfectly good condition), used half the juice for the sauce, and served up the sweetbreads adorned with slices of lemon as per Mrs. Beeton.”

“You’ve CUT the LEMON!” Mac cried when he saw the dish. But Dorothy placated him by pointing out that he never looked at it and it was growing moldy. And they ate Mrs. Beeton’s sweetbreads and lemon, and then Dorothy made barley-water with the peel and even saved a small piece of the lemon to eat alongside some fish at the following morning’s breakfast.

It was “a very beautiful and encouraging lemon,” Dorothy said. And it carried with it the networks of love and care that had brought it to her doorstep. As she ate it, she told Bar, “I thought humbly and gratefully of you, and of our Armies in Africa and of the Merchant Seamen and the Warships and all the other kind and courageous beings who had toiled to bring the lemon and the sweetbreads.”

When life sends you war, rationing, and personal hardship, true friends send you lemons.

---

Sources

Barbara Reynolds, ed., The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Vol. II: 1937-1943: From Novelist to Playwright (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996)

Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939-1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

If Sarah Paulson Were Your Girlfriend

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, you’d wake up early on the weekends. In fact, you’d find it easy to wake up early, buoyed out of unconsciousness by her radiant loveliness.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, you’d slide out of your recently laundered sheets, and go into the kitchen. You’d have one of those big marble kitchen islands. You can’t remember when or how it got there, but it’s there now in the middle of your kitchen. And all your kitchenware matches and your kettle is like a sculpture. You’d get all the ingredients for brunch that you bought from the farmer’s market out of the fridge. You’d get out the bowl of hollandaise sauce that you prepared yesterday, because now that Sarah Paulson is your girlfriend you pre-make sauces. As you started to poach the eggs you’d smile because you’d know that as she lifts her still-heavy eyelids to take her first, fresh look at the world that morning she’ll say, “I’m hungry.” And here you are, making her brunch.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend you’d routinely finish things before the deadline; that’s just how your life would go. You wouldn’t send them in when you’d finished them because that would feel a bit too much like boasting, but you’d send them in a couple of hours early.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend you’d have an office and a well-organised alphanumeric filing system for your finances, your medical documents, and your personal correspondence. You’d keep all your receipts properly filed for your tax return. You’d buy a shredder, and never again worry about someone stealing your identity and bank-frauding you.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, you’d always know where your keys were.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, sometimes Marcia Clark would come over for dinner. Before Marcia arrived, Sarah would worry that what she’s doing with her life isn’t worthy enough. Once Marcia was there you’d all drink martinis and set the world to rights. You’d go to bed because you never drink too much anymore, but Sarah and Marcia would carry on. How can Sarah hold her drink so well when she has that slight, elegant frame? You don’t know; you only know that’s she’s perfect.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, she’d tell you that she wished that she could get a queerer hairstyle. “I’d love to get an undercut,” she’d say, “but I can’t because of work”. The two of you would imagine what she’d get done if she wasn’t a working actor. As you tuck her hair behind her ear she’d tell you she’d dye it too, pink or purple or blue.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, you’d be sitting on the sofa together late one evening, you’d stroke her thigh and whisper “put the wig on, baby”.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, they’d put you on the list of noted alumni from your school and university. And it would be because you do Important Work. Perhaps the most important work of anyone who ever went to your school and university.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend you’d look good in unstructured clothing. 

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, when you felt sad she would give you a pep talk, and in the pep talk she would use a lot of words beginning with the letter ‘s’. The sound of that gentle sibilant lisp would make your heart sing in your chest. And at the end of the talk she’d look into your eyes and say, “you knock my socks off.” And your heart would hit the high note, the particular frequency that makes happiness resonate, sending waves of happiness off around the world and you’d know that everything was going to be just fine.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, you’d always take your makeup off before going to bed. In fact, you’d take each other’s makeup off. As you softly wiped her face with a high-end cleanser, she’d say, “everything is so easy with you.”

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, men and women would open doors for you, but in a way that felt genteel, not institutionally sexist or weird.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, all your pitches would get accepted. People would fight to make your sitcom or get you in their writers’ room. At meetings, everyone would fall silent when you started to speak. You would never again have to bear the injustice of one of your jokes not being laughed at.

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, late one evening you’d be in the car driving home, listening to the new Tegan and Sara album in blissful silence. That’s the thing with you and Sarah Paulson; you don’t have to fill all the silences. When you arrived home, she’d turn to you. And you’d know what she meant, because you two would just be so in tune. You’d go in and up to the bedroom and this time you’d put on the wig and the power suit. She’d open her mouth to speak, and you’d press a finger to her lips and say, “shhhhhh, it’s my turn to be Marcia now.”

If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend, you would learn all the names of the stars. You’d go for nighttime hikes in the Hollywood Hills. Both of you would lie down and you’d point out all the constellations to her. And you wouldn’t be afraid of mountain lions. Not anymore. You wouldn’t be afraid of anything.

From the Desk of the Director, Cold War Reenactment Society

Welcome, new members of the Cold War Reenactment Society (henceforth known as the ‘Tradesmen Benevolence Society’ or simply ‘The Society’). As Director, it warms my heart to know that so many are dedicated to upholding the tradition of honest analog espionage. No computer program or data breach could possibly compete with the authentic satisfaction that accompanies a lovingly planted bug or the elegant jab of an umbrella-tip full of ricin. It feels so good to know there is a real person opening, reading, and then resealing your mail — that there’s a real pair of eyes behind those binoculars and dark, drawn curtains.

Expect no drones here, only flesh-and-blood, morally compromised people devoted to doing whatever it takes to do whatever it is we do here.

First let us deal with the practicalities. Your tweed jackets, tortoiseshell glasses, and tan trench coats are provided, but Society members are expected to provide their own heavy glass ashtrays and drinking problems. First assignments will be given after a short evaluation and bowler hat-fitting period. Secret families across town may be established upon request.

Please indicate if you are being blackmailed into spying for The Other Side via the enclosed necktie color chart. Double agents are encouraged to become triple agents. Quadruple agents will be mocked.

The Society includes three ranks of specialization. THIEF kit members will receive a crowbar, wire cutters, a black turtleneck, a ball-peen hammer, sanitary gloves, and a cassette tape cued up to to “The Girl From Ipanema.” FIGHTER kit members will receive duct tape, torn bedsheets, a lighter, five gallons of gasoline, one canvas sack, one dozen oranges, and a Walkman containing “The Other Side” by The Doors. WIZARD kit members will receive a graphing calculator, a transistor radio, a terminal connected to ARPANET, a short-sleeved dress shirt, and The Best of YES on vinyl.

Members wishing to specialize in asset acquisition and running will be given makeovers, a free fashion consultation, a weeklong improv workshop that includes a lecture from a “How to Win Friends and Influence People” guru, and a copy of “Kinsey Ain’t Nothing But a Number.” Members wishing to specialize in Administration have already been contacted at their respective Yale clubs.

For general advice on assignments, please consult the following supplementary materials: ‘So Your Gay Lover is Defecting,’ ‘Recruiting at Oxbridge: Wingtip Tips,’ ‘Advanced Redacting,’ and ‘101 Uses for a Windowless Room.’ These can all be found inside hollowed-out books titled NORWEGIAN MARITIME TAX LAW 1880-1887 located in friendly used bookstores.

In addition to our annual ‘We’re Not So Different, You And I’ meet-up with The Other Side, The Society hosts many recreational activities, including Wig Making Classes, Accent Acquisition, Honeypot Potluck, and Group Contemplation of the Grim Mathematics of Mutually Assured Destruction (21+).

Society members with small children are encouraged to get them involved by introducing the Shredded Document Jigsaw Puzzle game and re-casting ‘Hide and go Seek’ as ‘Front and Follow.’ Junior Society Members can practice their skills by observing and reporting on their friend’s parents. Remember: It’s never too early to get them used to using dead drops.

Society meetings will take place in movie theater balconies, alleyways near embassies, empty VFW halls, and when you’re least expecting it. Transcripts of previous meetings may be requested via cryptic messages in the classified section of your major daily newspaper. Please have a P.O. box under an assumed name for deliveries, or just have your oblivious spouse pick them up unknowingly.

If you need to contact the Society directly, merely flick the light in your upper-story bathroom twice or begin speaking into any public pay phone; an unmarked black van will be with you shortly. Members are advised not to use actual radio stations for communication. No one wants a repeat of the Mykonos incident.

Members are also encouraged to peruse alternate funding streams for the Society, such as goods transporting, people moving, and community narcotics outreach.

A request for a full copy of the Society Rule Book may be requested and then denied. Remember, whether you’re playing for your Crown, your Country, or your Party, it’s not about winning. It’s about making sure our off-the-books budget never decreases.

Good luck. We’re all rooting for you and/or plotting against you,

-D.

P.S.: Congratulations on successfully decoding this letter. It has been treated with a contact poison already working its way into your bloodstream. The antidote will be given at the next Society meeting.

Bella Hadid, the charm of Cannes (12 pic)

The sublime 21-year-old model has been overthrowing the festival for two years now.

She has only been to the Croisette for two years and she has already become a must. The charm of red carpet and crazy Cannes nights. Bella Hadid , 21, one of the most coveted models on the planet, never misses the Cannes Film Festival. It will also be in a few days on the red carpet of the Palais des Festivals as a series of Magnum House.

It must be said that in two years, Bella has succeeded. At each of her appearances, she makes a sensation. The press people takes his looks, his appearance, his attitudes all more sexy than the others. Who does not remember his arrival on the red carpet in 2016 with his red silk dress , which left little room for imagination? Who does not remember his appearance at the 2017 amfAR gala in a strapless diamond dress? Yes, Bella Hadid is the festival's it-girl, the photographers have understood it well, and are doing everything to follow the sublime daughter of Mohammed Hadid during the fortnight.

A few days before the beginning of the 71st Cannes Film Festival, Paris Match invites you to discover or rediscover the most beautiful Bella Hadid looks. Definitely, the charm of the Croisette.

A Day In The Life Of A Fictional Female Reporter

This Classic NEWSSVET Post originally ran on Apr 15, 2018.

9:17 am: Sleep with a source.

10:00 am: Sleep with my boss.

10:58 am: Find a powder-blue Oxford shirt that doesn’t quite button up over my breasts. Buy eight.

11:13 am: Internet.

11:45 am: Cultivate moxie, “stick-to-itive-ness.”

12:11 pm: Return to source’s house for more sex/to steal the incriminating book he keeps locked in his nightstand.

1:03 pm: Naked interview.

1:36 pm: Refuse to perform on-air puff piece about a cat show, demand to be allowed to

 tag along on big story; decide to strike out on my own and get to the bottom of things after being rebuffed.

2:27 pm: Sex on newsdesk.

3:00 pm: Sabotage source’s career in order to get the big scoop after sleeping with him one last time.

3:02 pm: Stare expressionlessly at computer monitor as if to say, “What have I done?”

4:15 pm: Publish big scoop, receive “well done” from boss I am sleeping with, whose approval I am no longer sure I want.

4:51 pm: Sex in press room during office party. Feels hollow, somehow.

5:39 pm: Return to source’s house for a quick round of hate-sex and then to help him find redemption. Together we’re going to find an even bigger scoop. And then I’m going to have sex with that scoop.

This story made me INCENSED on the writer’s behalf

I is deg.

---

Totes are up! Get ’em while they’re there! I wound up re-ordering both Ship AND Mermaid, because I have a soft heart. If you have emailed me about a freebie and heard back, you are getting one. If you have not heard back, you are on the (at press time, 25 person) waiting list, from which I will claw a name whenever I get a new donation to the bursary. I have also added 37 Spear totes back to the storefront, about to become a collector’s item!

Remember, if you are International and order a tote, shoot me an email if you don’t get a chance to place your email address in your order, since I’ll be mailing those totes out myself and either charging you more or refunding you slightly (everything is coming to you the slowest and cheapest way possible.)

“You just get stronger”: How Powerlifting Saved My Life

The free weights were in back of the gym, which meant I had to walk a gauntlet of giant, muscular men all grunting and yelling and slamming weights to reach the empty squat racks. Thankfully they were all empty or I might’ve walked out, unwilling to wait, unwilling to loiter near the intimidating men. I struggled to move the 45-pound bar to a height that could work for me, panicking momentarily when it felt so heavy being hefted by my scrawny noodle arms, but after stepping into the rack you can’t leave without squatting; that would be ridiculous. I stepped under the bar, and the moment my hands gripped the knurling, the knurling gripped my traps — there was nothing but me and the iron. I took a deep breath and I squatted. I stood back up without falling over and I grinned.

---

I started lifting in May of 2013. I was 23, just starting a pre-med post-bac program that was going to lead to medical school. I had quit my job as a preschool teacher, where I’d spent the past seven months overeating out of anxiety and boredom because there’s not much else you can do when you’re watching two-year-olds all day. When none of my clothes fit comfortably I decided to change my body instead of buying new ones, because I loathe shopping for clothes.

Running-loathing millennial that I am, I started to Google. Somehow I found this Nerd Fitness post about a powerlifter named Staci. The idea you could change your body composition without running was news to me, and Staci was close enough to my height and weight that her progress seemed attainable. So I kept reading. I bought Starting Strength. I watched form videos until I realized all I was really doing was procrastinating.

Starting Strength is (on the internet) the Beginner’s Bible for powerlifting. I’ve since gotten different advice and cues from other programs and more importantly from my coach, but it was an excellent starting resource for someone with social anxiety who didn’t have anyone to ask at the time. The most important thing I took from it was the importance of checking your ego at the door. Start with “just the bar.” Add weight every week; keep progressing until you can’t.

Movie Yelling With Mallory and Nicole: Captain America: Civil War

NICOLE: I have removed “off the record” on gchat which I never had selected in the first place.

MALLORY: I know, I had it selected
I always do

NICOLE: I mean there is no reason not to, except for the purposes of blogging about Civil War.
The young woman who tried to comment a thousand times about Bucky’s hair leads me to open with “we have covered Bucky’s bad hair.”
The hair was bad.

MALLORY: yes
I do also want to point out
that after I tweeted repeatedly about the hair’s badness and went to bed
you texted me
“you dumb fucking bitch you better call me as soon as you get up so I can explain Captain America to you”

NICOLE: I certainly did.
I did do that.

MALLORY: so explain it to me
what have I Missed

NICOLE: But I ALSO said you were right about the hair, for the record.
Here we go.
This is not a case of “a Marvel movie which doesn’t always make sense if you have not seen eleventy Marvel movies.”
This is a NAMED TRILOGY.
CAP ONE
CAP TWO
CAP THREE

MALLORY: I DON’T LIKE CALLING HIM CAP

NICOLE: (You are also correct that Cap is a bad nickname.)
lol

MALLORY: okay thank you
so this is not an Avengers movie