Hi friends!

How are you? It’s been a minute! Last time I wrote to you, we were wrapping up 2024, and now we’re in the second week of a whole new year. I hope your 2025 is off to a good start. I hope you are beginning your year with gentleness and kindness to yourself, instead of judgment and punishment. Easier said than done, I know.

I was off work from December 19 to January 6, a glorious and very generous two and a half weeks of mid-day naps, questionable shower patterns, and eating and drinking godlessly (more on that later). I did not do any writing until January 2nd, when I opened a new Google doc to start drafting this here newsletter. It’s been lovely to have a break from my normal routine, although I am also excited to get back into it. I am very fortunate to work with great people, and I kind of missed them.

I am also writing this to you from my new Macbook Pro! When I flew to Maui over Thanksgiving, my stupid water bottle exploded in my backpack during the flight there (I HATE those dumb aluminum water bottles they sell at the airport! They never close right! I’m all for a more recyclable option, but figure out a proper closure, damnit!). My computer got soaked and never turned on again. 😢 Luckily, all my files are stored in the cloud, so I didn’t really lose anything, but it was a bit of a scramble to get a new computer, not to mention, expensive. My computer was about five years old, so it was getting a little creaky, but definitely not at a point where I was thinking about replacing it. Oh, well. I can’t lie, it IS nice to have a new one. The Sims 4 loads so much quicker on this laptop!

So, what have I been up to over the holidays? Well, our buddy Ben from New York flew out and we hung out with him for a week (he brought BAGELS!!!). We played lots of board games, including the Seafarers expansion of Catan, as well as Terraforming Mars, which took so goddamn long for Ben to explain to us how to play, I almost fell asleep. Ben is smarter than me in general (I hate to admit that about a cis man, but it’s true), and my husband Ross is very, very good at picking up new games and figuring out a winning strategy almost immediately. I am good at lots of things (remembering 90s pop lyrics! Giving friends overly long travel recommendations with too much detail! Being the most overdressed person at a party!), but I learn best by doing. For more complicated board games, I usually need to play at least one round of a game to fully understand it and develop a strategy. Shoutout to Odyssey Games in Pasadena where we picked up Terraforming Mars, a very cool local board game store and community. Support your local nerds, people!

We also went down to Palm Springs for a couple days after Christmas, which was lovely. The days were in the 70s and the nights were… colder, as they are in the desert, but every bar or restaurant with outdoor seating also had heaters. Of course, as a New Yorker, Ben was Mr. “It’s Not That Cold,” but Ross and I have thin Southern Californian blood now. The guys went golfing and then I dragged them to have drinks at the Trixie Motel, which were overpriced but strong, and the ambiance was top notch. I wore my Trixie-est outfit and was told by the bartender, “You definitely understood the assignment,” which made my night. It was definitely the pinkest place I’ve ever been in my life, an instant serotonin boost (pink is my favorite color). They played the kind of high-energy, basic-ass pop that my ass loves (think “SOS” by Rihanna). We left after one drink, because multiple rounds of $20 cocktails are not it, but I’m glad I got to see the place myself! Utterly charming! Highly recommend making a res there for drinks if you’re a Trixie fan.

My favorite place in Palm Springs is actually not hip at all, though. It’s Rick’s Restaurant, a diner that’s right on North Palm Canyon Drive, shortly after you get into town on the 111. You must go for brunch, because they have the best hash browns I’ve ever eaten. They’re crispy and greasy on the outside and soft and fluffy on the inside–just perfection. They also have cinnamon rolls as big as your head. They also have Cuban food? But I don’t know about any of that because I always just get an omelette (they come with hash browns and toast). Ross and I went the first time because it used to be located next door to the Days Inn where we were staying, and I think I’ve made it a point to go on every Palm Springs trip since then. Another bonus is that you can walk in like hot shit because you’ll probably be one of the youngest customers there (the clientele is mostly elderly gay couples). I love Rick’s!!!

We got back to L.A. in time to celebrate Ross’s birthday, which was a lot of fun. He requested doughnuts instead of a cake, so I got some from Donut Friend. We did an escape room in the afternoon (shoutout to our escape room expert friend Kara for the rec!), and even with four of us participating, we just barely escaped in time. Funny story about the escape room: I had booked us a different one originally, and wanted it to be a surprise for Ross, so I kept calling it an “activity,” although he pretty much figured out what it was immediately. Ross had previously only done two escape rooms in his life, and only one I wasn’t there for; well, guess which one I’d booked? Yep, the exact same one he’d done before without me! Luckily, they were able to rebook us for a different room at the same time, and all’s well that ends well.

We got dinner at Checker Hall and ordered a whole bunch of Mediterranean small plates. I love when you order so many dishes that the servers have to put your table together like a puzzle. Checker Hall is beautiful, and the food was so good! My favorite dishes were the Persian cucumbers with labneh, the whipped feta dip, and the roasted harissa carrots, which Ben said were the best carrots he’s ever had. They even had a live jazz trio and I didn’t mind! Usually I groan when I see that a restaurant has live music, because they’re normally so fucking loud you can’t even talk to each other, and of course, I didn’t go to the restaurant specifically to see the band. Am I a big grump for that? Do you all just light up when you see a band unexpectedly start setting up at a restaurant?

I also cooked a lot and watched a lot of movies over the break! Let’s get into that more:

- Cooking. For a big Christmas lunch, I made an appetizer of a baked brie with fig jam, a comically small kale salad with pecorino and breadcrumbs (I did not buy enough kale, whoops), lasagna bolognese, and a banana rum trifle for dessert. It was wonderfully indulgent, and thank goodness I don’t have any issues digesting dairy. I started both the lasagna and the trifle two days before I needed them, and while I know a three-day-long cooking project sounds terrible and ridiculous, I actually found it made the process much easier to break up the steps that way. I barely did any cooking on Christmas Day itself. It went like this:

Christmas Eve Eve:

- Make the condensed milk mixture for trifle, chill overnight in fridge

- Make the bolognese sauce, leave in fridge overnight to meld flavors

Christmas Eve:

- Whip the cream, fold in condensed milk mixture, and assemble the trifle; leave in fridge overnight for the ginger snaps to soak up the cream and get soft and perfect

- Make the bechamel and assemble the lasagna; leave in fridge overnight so it’s ready to go the next day

Christmas Day:

- Score brie, cover in fig jam, bake

- Whip up tiny salad real quick

- Bake & eat lasagna

- Eat trifle

Speaking of do-ahead cooking projects: this year, as last year, I made a strata for New Year’s Day using this recipe as a guide. I sauteed mushrooms, spinach, and some fresh rosemary with the onion-pancetta mixture to add some veggies to the dish. A strata is a baked Italian casserole with bread and eggs that sits overnight so the bread soaks up the eggs and becomes kind of like a savory bread pudding when you bake it the next morning. It’s also the dish Sarah Jessica Parker drops on the kitchen floor in The Family Stone. The hardest part of that recipe is waiting for it to bake in the morning, because it can take up to an hour, plus however long it takes your oven to preheat. I love a strata for New Year’s Day because you can make it the night before, when you’re sober, before you go out, and then you have a fabulous first meal of the year waiting for you in the morning.

As it turns out, I didn’t get too lit on New Year’s Eve anyway. Ross and I went to our friends’ combination housewarming/New Year’s Eve party at their new house in Pacoima, and hung out with them, some other friends, their baby (who I guess is also a friend? Kind of a pre-friend, I suppose), and their chihuahua mixes, some more nervous than others. It was nice, and pretty low-key. We left at 12:15 am, because we are in our late thirties.

I brought these brownies, which were incredibly easy to make and turned out well, but not perfect. I was looking for a super fudgy brownie recipe, and I think I overbaked them by just a hair. That is to say, the recipe specifies to underbake them a little so they stay super fudgy in the middle, and I think I baked them exactly to firmness. In the end, it really came down to a lack of confidence in myself as a baker, and in this new recipe I’d never tried before. Learn from my mistakes!!

A whole bunch of movie reviews, in no particular order

- A Different Man (for rent/buy on Prime Video). First of all, don’t listen to me talk about this wholly original, thought-provoking A24 movie, go watch the trailer, because it shows the story better than I ever could tell it. But basically, a struggling actor with a facial deformity undergoes an experimental procedure that turns him into Sebastian Stan… only to then watch a man with a similar facial condition (Adam Pearson) take the role he was born to play. It is so good, and weird, and incredibly darkly funny. There is one moment that involves an ambulance that was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a movie all year.

What I love about A Different Man is that it goes beyond easy “what makes you different is what makes you unique!” type cliches. It’s more complicated than that. We see the main character save a cat, then later abandon it. His medical condition didn’t make him a good person, and finding a “cure” for it doesn’t solve all his problems. It’s not a perfect movie–at times, it leans a little too far into body horror for my comfort, and not all the performances are created equal. Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan, however, are so good and so vulnerable. I am now a full-fledged Pearson Stan and a Stan Stan! Watching this movie felt like discovering a true gem. Check it out if this sounds at all interesting to you!

- Nightbitch (free on Hulu). Now I’m going to sound like a contrary Mary, because with this movie, I felt like it didn’t lean into body horror ENOUGH for my liking! Nightbitch is a real meditation on motherhood and feeling trapped as a SAHM and also a woman maybe turning into a dog?? I liked this movie a lot, because it’s feminist and weird and ugly and takes a real, unflinching look at the brutality and self-sacrifice of modern motherhood. Amy Adams is wonderful as the titular nightbitch. I also love it because her husband sucks, and I love banally shitty male characters that exist outside of Lifetime movies–so rare! My only complaint is that at some point, they kind of drop the turning-into-a-dog angle, and like, duh, I get it’s a metaphor, we all get that it’s a metaphor, but it’s made literal in such a fascinating way in the first half of the movie, I kind of wish they took it further in the end. If you saw the movie, what did you think?

- Longlegs (for rent/buy on Prime Video). I watched this on the plane ride back from Maui way back in early December. It intrigued me because I’m a big fan of horror, serial killer stories, and Nicolas Cage (say what you will about the man but he is an ENTERTAINER), and I remember it getting a lot of buzz when it first came out. I loved all the parallels to The Silence of the Lambs, a perfect movie, what with the story centering on a young female FBI agent investigating a serial killer and all. Overall, though, I was left a little underwhelmed, but excited to see what writer/director Osgood Perkins does next. It’s beautifully shot and had a hypnotizing vibe, but didn’t stick the landing for me. SPOILERS on the ending ahead, be warned! …I didn’t love the ending. It just went in a jarringly supernatural direction for me, and the fact that they took Nicolas Cage’s character out of the equation so suddenly was disappointing. If anything, I needed more Cage!

- Gladiator II a/k/a GladIIator (for rent/buy on Prime Video). The wild thing about this movie is that like 2/3 of it is beat-for-beat the exact same story as the first Gladiator movie (which is too gory for me but also features Russell Crowe at his hottest, a complicated watch). A guy gets captured by the Roman army and becomes a slave who’s forced to be a gladiator, the emperor sucks, you know the story. This new movie has Denzel Washington in it, though, which is nice. I haven’t seen a movie with him in it for a while. Anyway, I thought this movie was just okay, I wholeheartedly agree with Ross, who said at the end, “I just don’t get why they made this movie. Why now?” Why now indeed.

- Our Little Secret (Netflix). This is the third in Lindsay Lohan’s holiday comeback trilogy of made-for-Netflix movies, and it’s not bad! As far as chemistry, I think she had the most with her co-star in Irish Wish, but maybe that’s because the dude in Our Little Secret is Mr. Fitz from Pretty Little Liars, and he always creeped me out. Kristen Chenoweth is in this one and fantastic as LiLo’s boyfriend’s c*nty mom (in both the positive and negative sense of the word). Tim Meadows is also in it, yet they blow right past the opportunity to make a Mean Girls “he looks like my high school principal” joke like they did in Hot Frosty. Disappointing!!!

I think the thing about Lindsay Lohan is that, honestly? She has pretty limited comedic skills. I know that sounds odd since she’s done a lot of comedies, but she always has to play the “straight man” in them. Think about her playing Jamie Lee Curtis’s strict mom character in Freaky Friday. Even then, I think the best straight men are not merely rigid and serious, but ultimately have the flexibility to be pretty goofy. I always think of Jason Bateman in Arrested Development as sort of the perfect “straight man” example. He is so goddamn funny on that show! SPOILER for the LiLo movie, but there’s a scene in Our Little Secret where she accidentally gets super stoned, and I don’t think she gets silly enough with it! And no, I’m not going to go for some low hanging fruit joke about how if anyone should know how to act like they’re on drugs, it should be Lindsay Lohan! I would never do that! In short: a pretty stupid movie, but sometimes, you need one.

- Carry-On (Netflix). Speaking of Jason Bateman: he is in this action/thriller about a TSA agent trying to stop a terrible crime from happening at the airport. Flying gives me mad anxiety, but this movie did not, because most of the action happens at the airport and not on the plane itself. Even Snakes On a Plane was scarier to me, and I saw that movie drunk in a Times Square movie theater with a packed house that was hooting and hollering the whole time. Carry-On is a decent watch, but nowhere near the best plane action movie I have ever seen (which is Con Air, followed by Air Force One). It also begs the question: does ACAB include TSA? And if so, does it exclude Lil Rel Howery’s character in Get Out? I say yes and yes, what do you think?

- Y2K (in theaters?, for rent/buy on Prime Video). My company had a Movie Day in December where their employees in New York, the Bay, and L.A. all respectively got together and watched a movie at the theater. It was a lot of fun, and I’m super appreciative to get to work at a company that does cool shit like that. It was, however, impossible for us all to agree on a movie, and we almost saw Red One (thank GOD we didn’t—see below for my review of THAT piece of shit). I wanted to see Moana II, but the people with kids already had plans to see it with their kids, the musical theater people already had plans to see Wicked, the gladiator people already had plans to see GladIIator, etc. So, we ended up seeing Y2K, which, as a Millennial and a fan of horror, I was honestly pretty excited about! A nostalgia-heavy horror-comedy about technology going crazy and killing everyone on the eve of the year 2000? Yes please!

Wellllllll, let’s just say that when my coworker on the strategy team compiled everyone’s reviews of the movie (lol, gotta love the commitment to statistics on our team!), it averaged below a 5 out of 10. I don’t want to be mean, because it IS an indie movie, and I can appreciate that, but I just didn’t find it very funny. Things I liked: all the late 90s/early 00s pop culture references, the soundtrack, a key cameo from a figure of that era (no spoilers!), that Alicia Silverstone and Tim Heidecker play the main character’s parents. Things I didn’t like: the structure of the movie (it leaned very Superbad-y at the beginning but then took an odd turn), the fact that it made me feel extremely old, most of the humor. Again, not trying to be rude, but it was Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut, and I just am not really that familiar with him. I was also super sober watching it, and several of my coworkers said they would have enjoyed it more if they were stoned watching it, so there’s that. If you saw the movie, what did you think?

- Red One (free on Prime Video). This was so bad, I quit watching it about fifteen minutes in and went to bed. Who wants a buff Santa who does CrossFit? Ugh. Look, I have nothing against fitness people, my husband and many of our best friends do CrossFit, but Santa is canonically fat and jolly and loves cookies. Can we let the man live??? I don’t care what race he is as long as his tummy jiggles like a bowl of fuckin’ jelly!! Jesus!!

- A Complete Unknown (in theaters). My buddy Jason invited Ross and I to see this Bob Dylan biopic on the Sunday before I went back to work after winter break, and boy, did that help with the ultimate Sunday scaries! It’s directed by James Mangold, who directed Walk the Line, which I thought was great, so I figured he would probably do a pretty good job with this material. I liked it a lot! It’s rather unique for a biopic in that it covers a relatively small period of time in its subject’s life, starting from when Dylan first landed in New York City in 1961 and ending with his infamous electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. I liked that it didn’t start with “when I was just a little boy in Minnesota…” you know? I also liked that it featured SO much music, because the music is great! I like Bob Dylan well enough, but I never really went through a Dylan phase the way I went through a Beatles phase or a Queen phase or even a Doors phase. Most of what I know about him is what I learned from watching Don’t Look Back when I was studying film in college, which was that he’s kind of an asshole who really, really hates Donovan.

I didn’t learn a whole bunch more about him from this movie, because that’s just kind of the way Bob Dylan is, I suppose: intentionally opaque. And after watching this movie, I believe that it’s his right to be that way. I do have a new level of appreciation for his music, though, and what it meant at the time, how he combined folk music with beat poetry, essentially. Also, the fact that he was so fucking young (20-24?!!) when he wrote these songs and accomplished so much is wild. Sometimes I wonder if we can only really do groundbreaking work when we’re young and voracious for life, but then I think, no, that’s just ageism. David Bowie put out Black Star when he was 69, and that was fantastic. Anyway, go see this movie if you care about folk music or America in the 1960s at all! Timothee does a great Dylan impression. I also very much enjoyed Ed Norton as Pete Seeger. I’ve heard rumors that he’s a nightmare to work with, but I’ve always liked him (Ed Norton, not Pete Seeger. All I’ve ever heard about Pete Seeger was what an absolutely wonderful human being he was).

Okay friends, that’s it for now! Sorry this was so long, I had a lot to catch ya up on.

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Until next time—see you at the movies!!

Love,

Liz

XOXO