Newsletter recs 💌 & a bridal shower fail

Hi friends!

How are you? I’m doing well! The day this goes out, I will be up in Portland, Oregon for the weekend. My best friend from high school is having her baby shower up there, and I wouldn’t miss that, so I decided to make a weekend of it. Funny story, it turns out that the friend I was supposed to crash with in Portland is actually going to be out of town that weekend on a ski trip, but he’s still letting me stay at his place. He also decided to take a last-minute trip to L.A. for the first half of this week, so I still got to see him (and grab his keys)! He might be moving down here for business school, and I really hope he does! Isn’t it the best when old friends decide to move to your city?

So, I’m going to have his whole place to myself for the weekend, and lots of free time. I’m thinking it might be a nice little mini writing retreat for me. Last year, I applied for the Tin House Fall Residency, which is in Portland, to work on my book of essays. I didn’t get it, but now I get to go write in Portland anyway?? Pretty cool how life works out sometimes.

I will also FOR SURE be making time to go to Powell’s and buy too many books and go somewhere that has oysters and eat too many oysters and probably get brunch somewhere completely indulgent and amazing. Then, if it’s not too cold and rainy (which, it’s Portland in March, so that’s kind of a given), I will bop around some little shops and maybe get a nice coffee or pastry. The food in Portland is so good, it haunts me. I still think about the rye croissant I had when I was up there in 2022 and the Southern-style brunch I had when I was up there in 2021. Do you have haunting food memories, too, or am I just too obsessed with food? It’s a real possibility.

Then, of course, there’s the baby shower on Saturday, which I am actually pretty excited about. I’m not a big fan of traditional showers, but my friend is not very traditional. I just feel like I’m bad at girly stuff sometimes. One of the first newsletters I ever sent out was about a bridal shower I attended in my late 20s where I felt super out of place. Everyone brought these huge, beautifully wrapped gifts and baskets perfectly color-coordinated to the invitation colors. “Who even notices shit like invitation colors?” I’d asked my 18 subscribers at the time.

I brought the bride a 15-pound cast iron pan that I’d picked up in person from the Bed Bath & Beyond in Tribeca and lugged all the way on the subway to my apartment in Brooklyn, then on the LIRR out to Long Island that weekend for the shower. I’d paid extra for Bed Bath & Beyond to “gift wrap” it, which meant they’d thrown it into a giant purple garbage bag, put a bow on it, and called it a day. It did not match the invitation colors.

I stand by that gift (cast iron pans are awesome!), but I probably should have shipped it instead, and taken something light I could bring on the train, like some fucking his and hers hand towels or whatever. This was my first time at a bridal shower, and let’s just say I did not take to it like a duck to water. However, if you think I’ve learned anything in the 10 years since then, you would be incorrect. Last spring, I went to a local friend’s bridal shower here in L.A., and I stupidly chose to get her and her fiancé a bocce ball set, which I’m pretty sure was once again the heaviest item on the registry. It’s ironic, because I was also the weakest person at the shower, since she and many of her friends do CrossFit and lift hella weight. At least I got to lug that in an Uber and not on the subway, so fewer people saw my shameful struggle to carry it.

Anyway. This weekend’s baby shower is going to be at a bar with vegan food, and cool chicks with tattoos, and there will be karaoke after; so very Portland, I love it. I am SO happy for my friend and her husband and I can’t believe she’s going to have a little dude living in her house in just a few short months! Life is wild. And I already shipped her gift–a diaper pail, because I am the New Jersey trash aunt.

Let’s get into some things:

- Something a lot of people who don’t know me IRL don’t realize about me is that technically, my family and I pronounce our last name incorrectly. Galvao is Portuguese in origin, so it really should be pronounced as “gal-VOW,” with a little tilde: Galvão. However, my family has always Americanized it, and pronounces it “gal-VAY-oh.” Weird, right?

The other day, I was on the phone making a dentist appointment at a new provider, and they asked me for my last name, and the spelling. People always have issues when I spell it out over the phone after telling them the name is “gal-VAY-oh;” they think the “v” is a “b” and the “o” is an “l” and things catch on fire and all hell breaks loose. So, I decided to just make it easier and pronounce my last name “correctly” for once; “gal-VOW.” There wasn’t any confusion after that.

Well, unfortunately my husband Ross overheard, and of course, the second I got off the phone, he strolled into my office to make fun of me. “Oh, excuse me, Ms. Gal-VOW,” he said. “I didn’t realize, Ms. Gal-VOW!”

He doesn’t get it, though, because he has an easy British last name that starts with “Mac” that everyone knows how to spell. I know he was a little disappointed that I didn’t take it when we got married, but that’s what he gets for marrying a ball-busting feminist hag who happens to care about SEO. (“Liz MacKenzie” would be virtually un-Googleable, while I am almost the whole first page of search results for “Liz Galvao.”) I also wanted to make something out of a last name that has existed in impoverished obscurity for many generations, but, um. Check in with me about how I’m doing on that some other time, LOL.

The weirdest thing was that when I didn’t take Ross’s last name, his family didn’t care, but one of my aunts on my mother’s side got annoyed about it. “You marry a guy with a nice last name and you don’t even take it!” she complained.

“Galvao is a nice last name,” I said, which was met with a room full of silence. Too ethnic for everyone, got it.

Of course, when I asked Ross if he would ever consider taking my last name, the answer was no. “What if it was something really cool, like ‘Darkstar?’” I asked one time, and he rightfully made fun of me for that example for the rest of the night.

Ross has since said that I am forbidden to take his last name now. “You had your chance,” he says. “No take-backsies.” Men, am I right? He thinks he’s being so clever with his reverse-psychology bullshit. At least he can take pride in the fact that our cat is registered under the last name “MacKenzie” at the vet. I have to admit, Zadie MacKenzie is a very nice name.

- Newsletter recs! I have been reading a lot of great email newsletters lately. The newsletters I like to read best are more like short essays, or recommendations with the context of why the author is recommending them. I subscribe to very few of what I refer to as link dumps. I know people really enjoy them, but I like writing-y writing, ya know?

Here are some recommendations for those kinds of newsletters. I tried to share ones I haven’t mentioned a thousand times already. All of these are on Substack, which is whatever. Let’s go!

• Carey O’Donnell’s writing in Gay Doctor is so beautiful and raw and FUNNY and heartbreakingly honest, it makes me incredibly envious of how talented he is. His recent post about his relationship with fitness and sobriety and hiding 7-Eleven hot dogs from his husband was a real highlight. He is always just so damn good. I mean, look at this shit, from his post last week:

He also makes really funny videos:

• Ginny Hogan had a similarly real as hell piece of writing about sobriety in her newsletter Mutual recently, called “Celsius: A Eulogy.” As a sometimes-Celsius drinker (I got hooked on them when I worked at Funny Or Die and they were always stocked in the office fridge), I love that someone is calling out how insane these energy drinks are. They’re basically liquid cocaine. At the same time, I still love having one and getting all my chores done in an hour! Crank me up!! Ginny writes about how in her sobriety, she started to depend on Celsius in an unhealthy way, and it’s a great piece of writing that definitely has made me cut down on the “Celsii,” as she calls them.
  
  

• Ali Griffin Vingiano writes a popular newsletter about creativity and writing called Little Things, and she recently had a guest post from writer Alice Stanley Jr. about how she followed through on a new year’s resolution to brag more that I thought was wonderful and inspiring. We should all be bragging more, probably [insert meme of Saoirse Ronan saying, “Women—”].
  
  

• Seth Rubin wrote about coming-of-age films and the complex way in which their gender, as a non-binary person, allows them to identify, or not, with stories of girlhood and boyhood. I think I’ve recommended their newsletter Flannel before; if not, that was a tremendous oversight that I’m now correcting. Seth is also incredibly funny, and their review of Jeremy Renner’s concept album about getting hit by a snowplow made me almost spit-take about six times. So good.
  
  

• Mark Pagán, who I have the pleasure of knowing IRL, has expanded his podcast Other Men Need Help, an exploration of masculinity*, into a Substack called Other Men that I’ve really enjoyed reading! Some of my favorite posts: counting how many times women are referred to as “girls” on Love Is Blind, recapping the most humiliating moment of his professional career, and interviewing a Black veteran about the military and life in the mountains and how veterans are treated in the Black community. I loved this quote:

*This is a WILD oversimplification of Mark’s work in the interest of brevity, for which I hope he will forgive me.

• Samantha Irby is always a fucking gem. I miss her blog, but luckily she has a Substack now, where she recently wrote a deeply personal piece about her experience with OCD and also a blurb about her love of True Detective and also a recipe for the “green breakfast soup” she makes her wife. She also writes recaps of Judge Mathis which are very, very funny and somehow mostly end up being her making fun of herself. I like how she always deconstructs the plaintiff and defendant’s outfits.
  
  

• Charlotte Wilson has such an enjoyable way of writing about the things she’s watching and reading with just enough detail in her newsletter, I’m always excited when I get a new one. While I disagreed with her recent take on the True Detective finale (I loved it!! Call me easy to please!), I appreciate her point of view. I also appreciate that she rates everything she watches out of 5 points. Should I start doing that? I’m a Libra, so rating things is pretty torturous for me. How I was able to write music reviews with ratings for so many years, I’ll never know.
  
  

• Celisia Stanton’s newsletter Sincerely, Celisia has the same format week to week, but the contents are always different and related to a weekly theme. I think it’s a really fun idea. (The theme of my newsletter every week is “oversharing and overthinking everything… sometimes with recipes!”) I loved her issue on Groundhog’s Day. Her second-person account of what it would actually be like to be Punxsutawney Phil was very funny. I always find something to click on in her newsletter.

Alright pals, that should give you plenty of things to read until my next newsletter!

If you have a second, I’d love it if you’d like or comment on this post–just click this link to go to the post page.

Until next time—Ms. Gal-VAY-oh is signing off!

Love,

Liz

XOXO