What I’ve been watching/reading/eating 😋

Hi friends!

How are you?? I am hanging in there. Today marks the start of Virgo season, which makes sense. Virgo is the perfect sign for back to school energy. Virgos love to get organized, get grounded, to tidy things up, to make a spreadsheet or a plan. I have not been digging into this energy much, I have to say. I have been going with the flow, not making plans.

Last weekend, at a friend’s suggestion, my husband and I met up with him at Echo Park Rising, a free festival in the Echo Park neighborhood of L.A. where lots of local businesses host free live music. It was fun to walk around and see shows at different places that weren’t necessarily set up to host shows–a sound bath at a climbing gym, a ranchera band at a lingerie store, an electric ukelele band in the back of a bookstore. (The last one was pretty good–check out Bloody Death Skull if you get the chance!)

One day next week, Ross and I are going to meet up at Disneyland with my mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and our niece and nephew, and I am so excited!! I haven’t been to Disneyland since before the pandemic, and I’ve never gone with kids before. I’m excited to have a Dole Whip and ride Space Mountain and hopefully the Haunted Mansion, too. If I can do those three things, I’ll be very happy. Most importantly, I hope the kids have a blast and that it is not nightmarishly hot in Anaheim.

I recently came up with a new idea for a script, the first I’ve had in quite a while. It’s actually kind of a sci-fi idea–well, sci-fi elements mixed with dark comedy, sort of like Eternal Sunshine or Severance. It’s the first great idea I’ve had in a long time. I truly thought the muse had fucked off and left me forever! Turns out, when you’re down, you just need to dig deeper.

Well, shall we get into what I’ve been watching/reading/eating?

What I’ve Been Watching:

- Weapons (in theaters). Two weekends ago, I went to see Weapons, the new movie by Zach Cregger, who wrote and directed Barbarian. No spoilers, but I had a blast at the cinema! Like Barbarian, it was scary but still had a lot of humor in it, which is always a fun kind of movie to experience with a crowd. What I loved about Barbarian was that every time you felt like you had a handle on what kind of movie it was, it changed things up on you. Weapons wasn’t quite as twisty/turny, but I enjoyed its narrative structure, which followed different characters in “chapters” like a novel. It also seemed like a movie that was probably a lot of fun to make, especially for the child actors.

I have to tell you, I am SO sick of seeing that same goddamn trailer for Caught Stealing, the new Aronofsky movie!! I feel like I’ve seen it before every movie I’ve seen in the theater in the past six months! I will be so relieved when that finally comes out and then I can watch something else while I’m housing my popcorn.

- Love Is Blind UK, season two (Netflix). This is my throw-on show for when Ross isn’t around and I just need something stupid to watch while I eat dinner or whatever, so I’m not caught up, but I do find British people to be generally pretty delightful, so I’ve been enjoying it. It’s fascinating to me how easily they all can pinpoint each other’s accents to specific locations, because I sure as shit can’t. “Oh you’re from London, you sound posh” “Oh you’re clearly from northern Scotland” what?!? I can barely tell the difference between an English and Australian accent, to be honest. I wonder if people outside the U.S. can tell the difference between different American regional accents, or if we all sound the same to them?

Anyway, this season is interesting, and I am learning things like: British people call flight attendants “cabin crew!” There’s a pretty miserable, nasty woman on the show, which is hilarious, because this series is supposed to be about winning people over with your personality. There’s also a guy who believes in “splenic awareness,” which is trusting what your spleen tells you. Right. He describes it as similar to “trusting your gut,” but I don’t think most people take that saying so literally. Anyway, it sounds like he’s in a cult of some kind… but at least it’s one I haven’t heard of before! It remains to be seen if I’ll hang around for the episodes after the pods. The pods are my favorite part.

- The Real Housewives of Orange County, season one million (Peacock, Bravo). I don’t know why I watch this show, about a group of terrible women who probably all voted for Trump, let’s be honest. I guess I enjoy the drama, and there aren’t any better Housewives seasons on right now. This season on Orange County, we have the pleasure of watching them fat-shame Jenn for an old photo in which she couldn’t have been more than a size 6. For the record, I don’t think it’s right to fat-shame ANYONE, of ANY size, but there’s a particular flavor of insidious about doing it to someone thin. Like, damn, you really can never be small enough for these people, huh? Bravo really fucked up with the amount of times they keep showing this photo and repeating Tamra (because of course it was Tamra) and others calling it a “fatty photo.” That’s super fucking triggering for anyone who’s struggled with an ED! Shame on Bravo! (I’ll probably keep watching, though, because nothing is on TV right now.)

What I’ve Been Reading:

- The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. This book is, in my opinion, a perfect summer mystery/thriller, set in the 1970s, about a wealthy family who owns a summer camp whose teenage daughter goes missing from that camp. However, the weird part is the same family’s young son also went missing 15 years prior and was never found. There’s class tension, summer camp vibes, and also there’s an escaped serial killer on the loose (sooo ‘70s!). It’s like 400 pages long and I read it in 2.5 days. Check it out if you think you’d enjoy reading about very rich people doing terrible things in the Adirondacks!

- Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also In an Actual Cult!) by Bethany Joy Lenz. I have had this memoir, which I originally got from Book of the Month Club, sitting around for a couple months, but I finally cracked it after listening to Bethany Joy Lenz (who just goes by “Joy”) talk about it on an episode of the podcast Trust Me. If you’re not familiar, Trust Me is a podcast where two hosts, who are cult survivors, interview other cult survivors and experts. It’s great! A not-so-recent episode I loved was the one about Girls Night In, the infamous secret Facebook group for only the coolest L.A. women (/sarcasm). Juicy!!

Anyway, Joy is perhaps best known for starring as Haley James Scott on One Tree Hill, a CW drama from the early 2000s, and more recently, starring in several Hallmark movies. While she was a young actress on One Tree Hill, she was also part of a super controlling Christian bible study group that also referred to itself as her “spiritual family.” She would get up early and shoot all week in North Carolina for One Tree Hill, then fly out to Idaho to spend the weekend with her spiritual family, then take the last flight home on Sundays to get back to North Carolina, and do it all over again. Madness! And of course, the group continued to ask for more and more of her time, energy, money, and loyalty, isolating her from her other friends and family. You know, the basic cult playbook.

Ross recently asked me if I thought I could ever be sucked into a cult. I am not religious and not a big “joiner,” but I think that pretty much everyone has had times of vulnerability in life when they would be susceptible to a cult, even if that time was just when you were a child. I think the closest that I ever came was in my early twenties when I fully bought into the UCB as a path to a future career in comedy. They didn’t isolate me from the people I loved, but I did spend thousands of dollars that I didn’t have on improv and sketch classes, believing in the value of their system. BoJack Horseman has a great episode that satirizes the UCB and other improv comedy schools as a full-blown cult, which I found pretty funny. 

If you, like me, are fascinated by these high-control groups, definitely check out Trust Me, and maybe check out Dinner for Vampires as well! I know the book’s subtitle leads with “life on a cult TV show,” but the main story is about life in the cult, not One Tree Hill.

One thing that is so interesting to me about Joy’s story is that in the book, she is always immediately connecting with other Christians, and always knows who’s Christian and who’s not, which I guess means she must’ve been talking about God and being Christian a lot? ‘Cause how else is she figuring out that her driver assigned by the studio or her hair and makeup people are also active Christians? People never talk about Christianity with me. The only time I ever find out is when I get into an Uber playing Christian rock, or when a friend gets married in a church and then you’re like ohhhhh. Okay. I think that’s very coastal liberal whatever, though, I hear that in small towns and the South people will always ask you what church you go to in small talk. I’m glad no one has ever asked me that, because I think my knee-jerk reaction would be to laugh, and that would be rude.

What I’ve Been Eating:

- Work has been quite busy for me lately, meaning some late nights, so I haven’t been able to cook much during the week. However, we stayed in two Saturdays ago, and I decided to make a big summer feast. The main event was baby back ribs I cooked in the slow cooker and finished in the oven, and they were perfect. Fall off the bone and dare I say, succulent. I made a bunch of sides to go with them, starting with the zucchini cornbread from Smitten Kitchen Keepers. I tried to find if she had posted that recipe online anywhere, but I think it’s only in the book, sorry–but what a book! I also made a potato salad from the Smitten Kitchen website that apparently originated from Roseanne Cash? Okay! I left out the pickles and eggs because I wanted to keep it super simple. 

And then, finally, I made a vegetarian succotash using this recipe from Serious Eats (left out the bacon). I also left out the roasted poblanos. The one time I tried to roast poblanos over my gas range for a recipe, I set off the fire alarm and my husband was annoyed, and honestly, I couldn’t blame him. It was one of those things that seemed like a great idea until I actually did it, and then I immediately realized it was stupid. After all, I don’t live in a chef’s kitchen with industrial strength range hoods and ventilation systems, I live in an apartment with not enough windows.

Anyway, succotash is such a great summer recipe, especially if you use fresh corn. I still remember the succotash I had at a friend’s wedding nearly a decade ago because it was so outstanding. It had avocado in it, which was smart. The one I made did not, because I didn’t plan far enough ahead (timing an avocado’s ripeness is a delicate matter), but it DID have edamame in it instead of lima beans, because the store didn’t have any, and that was what my Instacart shopper substituted. I thought that was a pretty good sub! I mean, they’re both beans, they’re green, they’re similar sizes. It was a pretty good succotash (still not as good as the one from that wedding, though)!

Finally, I saw these blueberry crumb bars featured in a recent post from Smitten Kitchen on Instagram and decided I needed to make them immediately. A shortbread crust, crunchy crumb topping, and gooey blueberry center? I was so in. I mixed the crust/crumb topping in my food processor, so they were super easy to make. They really nailed my craving for a summer berry-based dessert! The only problem was that the recipe made a full 9x13 tray of them, which was kind of a lot for our household of two adults. So be warned, maybe have a plan for the leftovers if you, too, have a small household.

Welp, friends, that’s it for now!

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Until next time—dig deeper!

Love,

Liz

XOXO