29. The Week in Me
I’d like to start off this week thanking every single person who read my essay on Moonstruck and offered such validating and mean full support. For example, from one of my favorite writers and not just because she’s my friend,
:
Thanks to my multiple Instagram tags the screenwriter John Patrick Shanley read the essay, which is still astounding to me two weeks later. And through Friend of the Newsletter Michael, John sent a letter with his many compliments. I considered including it here, but it feels too sacred to share in any other way than you each coming to my home to see it framed on my wall. What a gift. John told me to “keep going,” and now I simply must.
I was told, blatantly, by someone I considered one of my Best Friends this week that I am “too much.” I take up too much space by talking too much, too loudly, too flagrantly, too much of trauma, too disrespectfully for the environments I’m in, too laden with inventive and polyglottal profanity.1
The situation evokes a memory from the third grade: a dispatch to the principal’s office by a fifth grade class patrol monitoring Mrs. Claps’ class: one of the flag-football playing boys used the word “lesbian” and I, like the true nerd I am, grabbed the dictionary to define it. Being as loud as I was for my Lilliputian teensiness, my “What’s a lesbian?” carried and I wound up for the first and only time in the principal’s office, my mom being called to come get me and hear about how bad I was for using a “bad word.” (This was the 90’s and this is why I do not in any way claim my hometown.)
Every Lincoln School report card as a kid threaded a string of A’s across its perimeter, each plussed, with one glaring, missing vertical stripe down the row, an A- for Conduct. Not a disruption, not “hyperactive,” always a pleasure to have in class, but chatty.
My voice carries. I have tits that reach out to shake hands before my real hand with big, men’s rings on every finger can get to yours. I have a lead foot with the gas pedal of my Elantra and a heavy hand with my eyeliner wand. I’m political. I volunteer my salary to level the playing field. I’m an openly reformed Catholic and a loud Jew, more Sanders than sheitel on Palestine. I talk about what my parents spent the nineties warning me would trigger troubling verdicts from others over cake and coffee in Tuscany-chic suburban kitchens. I’m the black sheep of the family despite being the palest. I have been called intimidating by men. I have been told “I” am maybe the problem in just the sixth grade by a mother who took offense at anyone bullying her child but her. I am too fat for her to love, my kissing thighs a reminder of how she has failed in her parental sovereignty. I have lost friends over small things, first offenses, offenses a cop wouldn’t fine you for, 30 in a 25 zone, because I am so much, too much, too emotional, too traumatized, too willful, too loving to not let them fear a single kind critique would send me over an edge.
I’m too much, and yet never enough.
Except…in the absence of condemnations…I like myself. (Sometimes. Sometimes I hate myself more than anyone should have to bear, and it makes me bark out a frostbit laugh that anyone thinks they could ever destroy me more than I want to destroy myself. But that’s for future duloxetine deprivations and future essays.) Sometimes, I like myself, in my bigness and in pleasant smallness too. I sit at home without makeup in a faded band tee from high school and read articles on transgender sanctuary cities and watch Pauly Shore movies and find deals on shoes I want and write out my little newsletters to you, but really, mostly, to myself. It is a virtue that there is even an audience of two reading these words, because they are mostly an echo of what John Patrick Shanley (!!!) told me: Keep going.
When the “too muches” get to me, and I want to blot myself, wash a bit of myself away…the fatalism I was raised into in a battleground home tells me there is only one way. There is no gentle blotting with a tissue, no mother’s spit to smear away the offending stain. There is no club soda from a bottle, there is only walking into the ocean.
Fuck that.
What my inner sanctum of the self I like is telling me today? Your so muchness is so essential to who you are that only in death will it be blotted out. Life is so damn short, so precious. I see that this week, when two people I love are in states of health concern, mysterious, unfurling concern that leaves me worried in amber. I see that when people are willing to lose friends over weddings, lose relationships over their anniversary not yielding a Telfar bag, lose sleep over a boy with bad breath.2
I don’t want to blot myself out. If I am kind, if I am growing, if I remain curious, if I remain stalwart in addressing my flaws, if I am inclined towards consideration and thoughtfulness, if I am walking towards a hearth in my heart for myself, I don’t want to blot myself out. Or my words. Especially not my words.
I relish rifling through my gargantuan vocabulary (750 on the writing portion of the SAT’s, baby!) before realizing none of it blushes my ass as much as calling some bald billionaire bitch a '“smeghead.” I am more Katharine than Audrey of the Hepburns. I swung a friend of the bride into a dance at a wedding last week, and she began to ask if I would like to lead or follow - “wait, you look like you’d be the one to lead.” Ellen, that’s correct.
Here is to the act of keeping, going.
To watch:
I have previously discussed the Netflix show The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On and Ultimatum: Queer Love (no one calls it that, we all call it “Gay Ultimatum”) and guess what: IT’S BACK, BITCHES. I love this show. If I was employed right now, I would have called in sick to watch this week’s batch of eight episodes. As usual, this show asks “Are the straights alright?” as well as “Why has Jim Henson’s estate not put out a licensed Muppet brand of filler when that’s all these broads want?” and it is a Six Flag’s Nitro of emotions3. I went from thinking Roxanne and her darkass lipstick were a capitalist hellscape all and while I still do, I also want her to pan-sear and swallow Alex alive. Alex, you a bitch!!!
There was also a Dramatic Slow-Motion Run for Love. And who hasn’t missed this nearly lost art form?! Men will not answer a direct question you text them these days, let alone do cardio in jeans to rescue you. Antonio, girl, if that didn’t get Roxanne to put down her lil’ PalmPilot and take a day off to take you for some ice cream…call me.
From this interview of cast member Antonio Mattei by Brett White at Decider:
I may have cried watching my perennial crush John Goodman yell “Dude!” at seeing Jeff Bridges don the Big Lebowski sweater. Dudes rock.
This Technicolor screen test of Katharine Hepburn (again, I’m a Kate girl) offers a timelessness to an icon both beyond and very much of her era, and it was humbling to watch. Thank you
for sharing it:Loved this interview with my brilliant buddy Pierce Jordan of Soul Glo and the band’s cover of System of a Down’s “Soil”. Pierce is a peerlessly electrifying live performer and you can trust me on that - I’ve seen everyone:
To read:
Hey, want your day ruined? Read this new short story by
’s . Didn’t hit home for me this week, not at all, why do you ask:
Transgender protections are near and dear to my heart and would be even if I didn’t have many beloved friends reading this who are trans themselves. Here’s some great reporting on new, insidious anti-trans laws and the shrewd, organized resistance against them:
From
’s :
And
’s :
“Some days I am driven, other times I just want to disappear into the forest for a little while. We are more than our goals yet our lives become the sum of our dreams.” As always,
from with something that makes me nearly swallow my gum:A very short anonymous story from
. Hi, Julie!
And a delicious
with the legend, John Cale:
Various and sundry:
Deadline featured Assistant Directors (and former PA’s) Katie Hacker and Andrea Block, who established the Go for PA’s Alliance in July, an initiative to collect funds for production assistants, who are often the least paid (and least respected) members of an onset crew. As a former PA myself (here’s my IMDb) I had to share this resource.
I am obsessed with this woman and think she deserves her own capsule collection for Crocs, or hopefully something not ugly as sin:
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Love you bitches, and thank you for staying by my side,
TG
I was asked not to mention something several months ago, before the layoff, before a lot of life changes, I completely sincerely forgot, it came up in another person’s proffered conversation that I didn’t think precluded my contribution, I apologized seventeen times over three days of being harangued for hours on end, it was not enough. I feel bad. I also feel confused given the circumstances and who I knew this friend to be. I also feel that this was a major case of projecting and I am glad this person will not use the paleness of my face as their projector screen again. I also feel terrible. I also feel shame that as a writer, I made a grave mistake in communication. I am not without massive fault here. It goes on the “Tara is a Bad Person” mental list I run, for sure. (I conveniently don’t keep the “Tara is a Good Person” list, done in pale pencil, anywhere accessible.)
A fate I have succumbed to. Remember me for my wit!
I will never forget the first (and ONLY) time I went on Nitro with friends of the Substack Dan and Greg, and I shouted “DAN I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!” the entire length of the ride. I love rollercoasters. But that is a Kevorkian machine.
:))))