An overwhelming sense of nostalgia.

On Smash, the Challengers score, and the death of the Bacon Turkey Bravo.

Long time, no talk!

April has been kind of a weird month for me in terms of wanting to be present™ online. I’ve been feeling rather apathetic about Instagram lately and while I’ve been collecting items and ideas to newsletter about (yeah, it’s a verb now), I haven’t been in the mood to actually sit down and write ‘em out. I think some of it stems from the fact that I kind of hate the Sunday schedule I put myself on.

I’m a procrastinator by nature and I work best when I’m under the gun. I wrote 95% of my college assignments in the 24 hours before they were due (don’t worry, I’m sure I slayed every single one) and in the workplace, I’ve noticed that I’m most productive when I’m on a strict deadline. I know that about myself, which is why I created this little every other Sunday cadence, yet I’m having the HARDEST time sticking to it. I’ll keep you posted on when/if I’ll change the Sunday thing, but I have a feeling this newsletter might become a schedule-less woman, with new TL;DRs dropping whenever I feel like it. We shall see.

Let’s talk about fun stuff now, shall we?

7 pop culture moments I miss dearly

Last week, I was graciously invited to go see The Great Gatsby on Broadway by Scribner Books. I always love a moment at the THEATER (said in your finest Ms. Darbus voice) and the show was fantastic — I am not someone who feels qualified to criticize theater because I don’t have one iota of the talent they do. Broadway legend Jeremy Jordan stars as the titular Gatsby and I’m ashamed (but not?) to admit that for a large portion of the second act, I thought about where I could possibly stream the two-season fever dream that was Smash. That, coupled with the announcement that Bravo was opening the vault and putting a slew of their old shows on Peacock (REAL HOUSEWIVES OF DC! NYC PREP!) forced me into a nostalgic deep dive on the pop culture moments/books/websites/shows/magazines that I miss.

Without further ado, here are 7 of ‘em, presented in no particular order:

1. Smash. We’ll just get this one out of the way right now because I already salivated about it for a paragraph up there. A playwriting duo pens a musical about Marilyn Monroe and sets off to get the damn thing to Broadway! One of the biggest hurtles? Finding the perfect Norma Jean. Casting comes down to two very different performers—an ingenue from Iowa (Katharine McPhee!) and a seasoned Broadway ensemble staple looking for her big break. We also follow the show’s producer, the director (who is a scruffy British man with a questionable sexual agenda, obv), and an actor cast as Joe DiMaggio who threatens the marriage of one of the writers. While the initial premise of this show was simple enough, it derailed into something completely bonkers, which I say with the utmost love and admiration. I know nothing about the intricacies of Broadway so I can’t speak to the accuracy of the show, but it made me feel like such an insider. The true strength is the music. I’m 99.6% positive I could belt “History Is Made At Night” in its entirety. I’m listening to “Let Me Be Your Star” while I type this and I have CHILLS. “Fade innnnn on a girl/with a hunger for fame/and a face and a name to REMEMBER.” Don’t even get me started on “Second Hand White Baby Grand.” Season 2 is pure flaming garbagé compared to the perfection of the first season. In a tragic twist, this is not streaming ANYWHERE. In a lovely twist, it’s coming to Broadway! Meta.

2. Madison Finn. There were a lot of book series I read as a kid that made me the reader I am today (Lisi Harrison’s Clique series deserves a post of its own. Unclear when/if I will write that, so pls read Iman Hariri-Kia’s instead!), but one that I often feel deep pangs of longing for is From The Files of Madison Finn, a 20+ book series about an ordinary girl who loved fooling around on her laptop. She’s just like me for real, right down to the name! I would jones for one of these books every time my parents took me to a bookstore (which was often because I was persuasive and annoying!) As a LitHub writer put it, Madison Finn was “Sex and the City for boring tweens.” Me! I was a boring little tween who wore an “o.m.glee” shirt to school and I ate these the HECK up. Madison also had a blog, so she would 100% be a Substack girlie today. I noticed that they reissued these with new covers, which I feel some type of way about, and you know what, the way is not positive. (Although I am happy that a new crop of girlies will get to read these!).

3. Teen home decor shows. While I enjoy an HGTV watch every now and again, Home Town and House Hunters absolutely PALE in comparison to the serotonin that coursed through my brain upon marathons of Teen Cribs and Trading Spaces: Boys vs. Girls. Maybe it’s because the rooms featured in these shows were so bonkers that it was such a treat to watch the dejected face of someone whose new room is an ode to horses after they made a passing comment about how they rode a horse at a friend’s birthday once, or maybe it’s because in a sea of beige rooms and minimalist design, these shows gave us something unique! We had color! Pattern! Lamp mannequins! These days, I prefer to get home decor content on TikTok because I’ve honed my algorithm to solely give me homes featuring colorful book displays and gallery walls full of weird art peppered with irreverent references. Those videos feel like a callback to the weird little teen design shows I miss.

4. Print magazines. I know, I know. Print magazines still exist, but they’re rather hard to find. Most grocery stores no longer have a dedicated space for magazines (which is a deeply sad thing for me) and tons of the titles that I grew up loving have either shifted to digital-only or don’t exist at all. Up until I left for college in 2015, there were stockpiles of ~5 years worth of Glamour, Entertainment Weekly, Teen Vogue, InStyle, Elle, Town and Country, Cosmo, CosmoGirl!, Seventeen and Vanity Fair in my parents’ garage. Although there’s a certain ease to reading articles on your phone (I think Apple News+ is fantastic), print magazines were such an experience! The paper! The foldout covers for marquee events! (I always loved September issues because they were so thick to accommodate fall fashion advertising.) The perfume samples! I happen to work for one of the biggest magazine publishers in the world and while my role is solely on the digital side, I still dream of seeing my byline in print. It’s a bucket list item, okay?

5. Big Rich Texas, Jerseylicious, and everything else that came on the Style Network. One of my best friends and I have a running joke: in college, we were driving home from class and she turned to me and said, “Remember that show?” Without any context, I responded, “Jerseylicious?” That was indeed the show she was talking about. The Style Network had imprinted itself into our DNA. I’m a huge Bravo fan, but before I watched the Housewives, I fell head over heels for Big Rich Texas, which followed wealthy mothers and daughters living in the Lone Star State, and Jerseylicious, which chronicled life at the Gatsby salon in New Jersey. I cut my reality TV fan teeth on these series, which didn’t feel as polished and produced as current Bravo. If only someone could create a streaming service that serves up nothing but old reality TV shows…

6. The Mary Kate and Ashley universe. I’m not sure when I first discovered Mary Kate and Ashley, but I was absolutely entranced by their sheer teen media domination. I’m 90% sure Full House was not my first exposure to them (because my favorite on that show was always DJ — how the mighty have fallen). While I liked their shows, I was enamored by their movies and OBSESSED with their books. My favorite movies were Holiday In The Sun and Winning London because they tapped into my two personalities: beach girl and city girl in a trench coat. But the books! I could not get enough of ‘em (specifically these Sweet 16 books, which I now see are available for purchase even though I know for a fact that I have nowhere to store a collection of Mary Kate and Ashley YA novels). There was something for everyone, from the movie novelizations to a mystery series and a slew of graphic novels starring MK + A as spies. If I had to guess, I’m sure I owned at least 100 Mary Kate and Ashley books at one point in my life, and tbh, I’d go to great lengths to get ‘em back.

7. Girlsense. As we’ve surely established by now, I was very much a computer kid growing up. I was into the Internet from a young age, from playing games on American Girl dot com to making magazines on Microsoft Word to naming my Webkinz after Lola from Confessions of A Teenage Drama Queen. Perhaps my favorite site of all was Girlsense, in which you designed your own fashion line and sold it in your very own boutique. There was a social element to it with some sort of leaderboard for the creators who made the most “money” from selling their designs or had the highest shop rating. I never achieved this, probably because everything I designed was in one of the following color combinations: brown and turquoise, pink and orange, pink and green, or black and hot pink. I vividly remember that I could not experience all of the wonders of this site because you needed to pay for them and my mom steadfastly said she was not giving me her card number in order to play a fashion game on the Internet (fair), but I maximized the heck out of the free features on this site.

News that made me feel some type of way this week

This is one of the most irrational things I’ve ever written in this newsletter and I was 100% gonna cut it, but to know me is to know my love for the Bacon Turkey Bravo.

Although I live in one of the best food cities in America, I do love a meal from a fast-casual chain restaurant every now and again, the more suburban the better. One of my favorites was the Panera Bacon Turkey Bravo. I’d even go so far as to call it my favorite sandwich of all time. A few weeks ago, I was a little hungover and was craving nothing but my beloved Bacon Turkey Bravo, only to learn that it has been RETIRED by Panera. I have tried to recreate the beauty that is the Bacon Turkey Bravo multiple times over the years and I never have been able to make one that comes even CLOSE to what Panera could chef up. Cue Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel.”

Being that I’m super chill and relaxed and not at all a Panera Karen, I obviously DMed Panera on Instagram to tell them that I am deeply upset by this. Please revoke my DM access.

& finally, what I’m reading, watching, and listening to:

Reading: I’ll be in your inboxes again on May 1 with a full rundown of everything I read in April, but I’ll give ya this: HOW TO END A LOVE STORY by Yulin Kuang is most likely going to be my favorite romance of the year and Emily Henry’s FUNNY STORY is a close second. 99% sure Rachel Khong’s REAL AMERICANS will be my last read of the month.

Watching: Close this email and go see CHALLENGERS right! this! second!

I bow down to every single person involved in this movie. I was excited to see this from the jump because I love a twisted romance, I love the tennis aesthetic, I love Zendaya, I love when we get an ORIGINAL movie that’s not an adaptation (I love adaptations but sometimes we’ve gotta give ‘em a rest) or a sequel or a reboot but something completely unique). Honestly, I’d recommend going into it knowing fairly little so you can sit back and have your mind blown by the sheer genius, but here’s a quick rundown: Art and Patrick are best friends and tennis partners who find their dynamic forever changed when they meet tennis phenom Tashi Duncan. The movie switches timelines throughout, using a tennis match between Art and Patrick as a framing device to allow the backstory of their relationship to unfold.

Y’ALL. My jaw truly hit the floor 75 times during this movie. I was so stressed while watching it but in the BEST WAY. I was sweating bullets and lowkey thought I was gonna have a heart attack because my heart was truly POUNDING in the last 15 minutes. It’s funny and sexy and sharp and smart and diabolical. Cue me pretending like I know anything about film technique: the camera work is so crazy. Not all of it works (there’s one shot in particular towards the end featuring the back of Zendaya’s head with Art and Patrick on either side that I found cringeworthy) but it’s so refreshing to see techniques like that in a movie that doesn’t feel like pretentious Oscar bait. AND THE SCORE! I’ve been listening to “Match Point” while writing this and I swear to god, I have never typed so fast in my life. My heart rate is through the ROOF right now.

This is a spoiler-free chat, but this Instagram Story from Zendaya is so freaking good.

Listening to: A few things I’ve had on repeat this month:

Everything I’ve been into so far this year is in my 2024 playlist, which you’re free to peruse, as one of my greatest pastimes is Spotify stalking everyone I know.

Whew! Glad to be back in the newsletter game after a few weeks off. I’ll be seeing y’all on May 1 for my reading recap! Forward this to someone who you wanna go see Challengers with. I know for a FACT that I’m going to go see it again ASAP.