I did a “Things I Loved This Year” post for 2013, and here’s another one of sorts for this year. One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m consuming fewer and fewer things that I dislike. I think I’ve just gotten better at realizing what I like. Every book I read this year got at least three stars on Goodreads. I only saw a few new movies and didn’t hate the ones I did see. If I wasn’t getting into a show, I didn’t continue watching it—I stopped watching How to Get Away with Murder after five episodes and didn’t make it past the pilot of The Leftovers. (I did stick with Season 3 of Homeland to see how it ended, but didn’t continue with Season 4.)
Books
If I finish the book I’m currently reading by tomorrow, I’ll have read sixty books this year. I’m going to post more about the books of this past year in future posts, but some highlights were Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, and Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas. All YA, interestingly enough. Also, at book signings, I met both Ann M. Martin and Neil Patrick Harris!
Movies
You know, I haven’t seen that many movies yet. All the Oscar movies are coming out now, though, so I’m sure that will change over the next couple of months. So far, I’ve enjoyed Gone Girl and The Fault in Our Stars, both of which are based on books I’ve read.
TV Shows The Good Wife was a big highlight. So was Jane the Virgin, which is hilarious and adorable. Gina Rodriguez is just really sweet and relatable in the title role, and it reminds me a lot of Ugly Betty. I’ve recently started watching Community, too, and am enjoying it.
Theater LES MIS. Freaking fantastic. I also saw a production of Into the Woods that got me interested in the movie that just came out (haven’t seen the movie yet), and Finding Neverland when it was in Cambridge—I liked it but didn’t love it. My friends and I also saw both The Book of Mormon and The Lion King in Boston, both great.
Music
I never disliked her, but this year I’ve started to like Taylor Swift more than I anticipated. I think part of it is a backlash-to-the-backlash thing—I’ve never really understood why some people who don’t like her are so vicious towards her. If you don’t like her music, fine, but what has she, as a person, ever done that’s so bad? So I put a lot of energy into defending her, but it was really only this year that I started to like her music.
I also really enjoyed Ramin Karimloo’s solo CD. Speaking of which…
Celebrities
I still love Jon Hamm and Aaron Paul, but Ramin is one of my new favorites. And a late-breaking addition: Trevor Noah, the new Daily Show correspondent, whom I can already tell I’m going to love.
Food
I discovered that almond butter fudge—really just almond butter mixed with coconut oil and frozen—is awesome and healthier than most other desserts. I also started making this awesome cinnamon-apple smoothie.
I bought a Roku a little over a year ago and that was a really good decision. I hate watching TV on my laptop (I know, what a terrible problem), so streaming things on my TV was a welcome change. I joined Netflix, have sporadically paid for Hulu Plus, and bought whatever I couldn’t get anywhere else on Amazon Instant Video.
And thus began a dangerous new era of binge watching. I made a list of shows I hadn’t yet seen but wanted to and still have a lot more I want to see. But here are the shows I’ve watched since the advent of the Roku:
Parks and Recreation
I love it and I like it. I can’t believe I wasn’t already watching this show. This show is wonderful, and not just because Amy Poehler is hilarious. (One of my biggest regrets about college is that I didn’t see Amy, a fellow BC alum, when she came to campus my senior year—I’m not a huge SNL fan and at the time I didn’t really know who she was.)
I’m glad I stuck with it, because the first season actually isn’t that great. It’s created by the same people who did The Office, and I think at the beginning the shows were a bit too similar. Leslie kind of comes off as a ditz in Season 1, but as the show goes on it’s clearer that she actually is very smart and capable—she’s just a bit naïve and doesn’t always go about things the right way. But it starts to hit its stride in Season 2, and with the addition of a couple of new characters, Season 3 becomes even better.
It’s not only funny but also really upbeat, happy, and sweet—the constant making fun of Jerry notwithstanding (it’s okay, apparently, because he has a great home life and a wife played by Christie Brinkley), the characters are all nice people. I am not ashamed to say I cried when Ben and Leslie got engaged and then again when they got married. Rashida Jones has left the show now, but I really loved Leslie and Ann’s friendship. There’s one episode where Mark, Leslie’s ex-fling she still has feelings for, asks Ann out. Ann says no out of respect for Leslie and tells Leslie about it in the interest of honesty. Leslie is grateful, but eventually tells Ann that she can date Mark if she wants to. It’s exactly the right way to handle a situation like this, but I can’t remember any other show doing it—most shows would have turned it into a catfight. Ron Swanson, too, aside from being hysterical, is unique among TV characters for being a hyper-masculine, meat-loving Libertarian who also respects and appreciates strong women. Other shows could take lessons from the way Parks and Rec does feminism.
Plus, it gave us Lil Sebastian and his memorial song, Galentine’s Day, and “Treat yo’ self.” And also, much like me, Leslie Knope has a special love for waffles with lots of whipped cream on top. I didn’t realize until I saw this show how much I was needing a waffles-and-whipped-cream-loving character in my life.
The X-Files
I didn’t watch the whole show, just some of my favorite episodes out of order. It does hold up, I have to say. Speaking of Gillian Anderson…
The Fall
I love her, so I was excited for this British show about a serial killer in Belfast. Gillian stars as the detective trying to solve the case. Unfortunately, the first two episodes just didn’t draw me in, so I didn’t watch the rest.
Moone Boy
I heard of this show after reading this Slate article about it, and it piqued my interest right away. Chris O’Dowd, Ireland, feminism—all things I like. It’s a cute family sitcom set in Ireland in the late eighties/early nineties and while it’s not something that would ever become an obsession, it’s enjoyable and, with only six episodes per season, goes by quickly.
Orange Is the New Black
I’d heard so many good things about this show, and in anticipation of seeing it, I read the memoir it’s based on. I wonder if I would have liked it more if I hadn’t read it, because after seeing the first season (still haven’t seen the second and I’m not sure if I will), I came to the conclusion that I like the idea of this show better than the show itself. It’s all about women, it tells a lot of interesting and diverse stories, it sheds light on America’s incredibly flawed prison system, and the acting is universally fantastic. And yet…it doesn’t do it for me. Maybe it’s because I had read the book and was bugged by how many things had been changed for dramatic purposes and how both Piper and Larry come off on the show—Piper Chapman is really bratty, while the real Piper doesn’t come across that way to me at all, and all you have to do is read this article by Larry Smith to see how different he is from Larry Bloom. There are also a lot of details that are inaccurate—Piper should be in a minimum security federal prison, which means she’d never be incarcerated with someone in for violent crime, like Pennsatucky. But the main reason I can’t get into it, I think, is that as interesting as all the characters and their stories are, there’s no one I connect to personally and nothing I can really relate to. I think the one time I had a flash of recognition was when Piper tries to explain how people misinterpret “The Road Less Traveled” to blank stares– that’s totally the kind of thing I would do. But– and I do realize this says more about me than about the show– I had a really hard time relating to virtually anything else that happens.
Breaking Bad
Wow. I don’t like Family Guy, but this clip here? There’s a lot of truth to it.
It only took me about two-and-a-half weeks to finish this show. I kept finding myself thinking, “Okay, I’ve got this much time…how many episodes of Breaking Bad can I get in?” And when it was over, all I wanted to do was talk about it and tell everyone else to watch it. It’s like a fifty-hour movie. Previously, I knew the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, from when he used to write for The X-Files, and he was famous in the XF fandom for his attention to continuity as well as how he always snuck references to his girlfriend Holly into episodes. He does both of those things on Breaking Bad, too—lots of little things you’ve forgotten about come back later and turn out to be important, and Holly references get in here, too!
The acting is just incredible. Bryan Cranston does an amazing job keeping your attention as a regular guy becoming increasingly evil—even when you can’t sympathize with him anymore, you still want to know what will happen to him. But Aaron Paul as his sidekick Jesse Pinkman is my favorite part of the show. Even when he does terrible things, Jesse quite never loses his humanity, and he’s the character I remember most. My second-favorite character, though, is Skyler, a character a lot of people inexplicably hate. I agree with everything Anna Gunn wrote in her New York Times op-ed—I’ll give you that she’s a little annoying in the pilot, before she actually has a good reason to be mad, but after that, I completely understand why she does everything she does, and nothing she does is as bad as what Walt and Jesse do.
Seriously. I haven’t seen The Wire yet, but I do feel compelled to recommend Breaking Bad to everyone I know.
House of Cards
…I don’t like this show. At all. I think I’m the only one. I saw the first three episodes and could not get into it. I’m fine with unlikeable characters (I did just rave over Breaking Bad, after all), but from what I can tell, there’s not a single character with even one redeeming quality on this show. It’s just way too cynical for me, although it’s not hard to believe that there are people this awful in Washington. What I have the hardest time believing, though, is that Frank is a Democrat from South Carolina.
I have seen a gif of the death at the beginning of Season 2, though, and I did enjoy that. But that’s it.
Veep
While I’d never call this a favorite, it is very funny in a cringe-y way. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is fantastic as the incredibly narcissistic vice president and the rest of the cast is great, too. Now that I’m thinking about it, maybe I’d like House of Cards if it was rewritten as a comedy.
Veronica Mars
Rewatched in anticipation of the movie that came out in March. Upon rewatch, it was even better than I remembered. You should see it if you haven’t and rewatch it if you have. And also read the Snark Squad recaps of it.
True Detective
I don’t think it quite lived up to the hype, but this was definitely worth a watch. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are both great, and while I spent most of the show expecting a big twist that never came, I did end up finding the ending satisfying. Random side note: it takes place in Louisiana, but Woody Harrelson’s character is named Marty Hart—I REALLY think they should have saved that name for a show set in Boston.
Louie
I mentioned in a previous post that I don’t like stand-up comedy. Well, there’s always an exception—I’ve found that I actually do enjoy Louis CK’s standup a lot. His show, on the other hand? Not my thing. I saw a few episodes, including some that were supposed to be among the best ones, and I just did not find them funny.
The Americans
Is this the kind of thing that gets better after the pilot? If so, let me know, because although I’d heard that this was a great show, I saw the pilot and was not impressed. If you’re going to make me care about undercover Soviet spies in the 80s, you need to make them way more interesting characters than they are in this episode.
Homeland
Seasons 1 and 2 are fantastic. Season 3, on the other hand?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9gC1GiSDDA
Season 1, especially, is fast-paced and unpredictable and features fantastic acting (and an epic cryface) from Claire Danes and excellent work from Damien Lewis and Mandy Patinkin as well. Season 2 is almost as good. In Season 3, on the other hand, the lack of new ideas once the initial premise dried up becomes sadly clear, and I’m not even watching Season 4. Also, Dana Brody, the daughter of the Damien Lewis character, might be my least favorite character in the history of TV. She’s that annoying. I kept wishing SHE’D get blown up by a terrorist.
A Young Doctor’s Notebook
Jon Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe.
I repeat, JON HAMM AND DANIEL RADCLIFFE.
That’s all you need to know.
The Good Wife
Note to self: never start watching a network drama so late in the game ever again. This is currently in its sixth season, and since it’s a drama on CBS, it’s 22 hour-long episodes in a season. So it took forever for me to get caught up with this one, but it was totally worth it.
It’s funny, because while I think this is one of the best shows on TV right now, it goes against all of the popular wisdom about what works in this day and age. It’s on a major network rather than cable, it’s got a lead character who’s a good person rather than an antihero, and while it’s basically a serial drama, because it deals with court cases, it has elements of a procedural. But it does what it does incredibly well. Shows like Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Mad Men,Dexter, etc. all have terrible people at the center of them, but the titular good wife, Alicia Florrick, has quickly become one of my favorite characters because she’s refreshingly likeable without being Mary Sue-ish. The title is kind of ironic—she’s cast in the role of “the good wife” after her husband, a state’s attorney in Chicago, is jailed following a corruption and prostitution scandal and, after thirteen years out of the workforce raising her two kids, she has to go back to work as a lawyer. I can’t be the only one who’s seen real-life political sex scandals play out and been infuriated at how the wives are always forced to stand there supporting the husbands who’ve betrayed them, but Alicia is anything but a passive, wronged wife. She’s smart, excellent at her job, and a great mother to her two teenagers, but she also has a tendency to stress-drink red wine and has a penchant for comebacks like, “Die choking on your own blood, please.” And while you might not want her to remain married to her husband, their relationship is clearly very complicated and not as black and white as staying vs. leaving.
Alicia is far from the only appealing character on the show, too. I’m particular fond of Kalinda, the somewhat mysterious and occasionally violent in-house investigator at Alicia’s firm. Aside from the other lawyers at the firm, all appealing characters in their own right, the show has a fantastic lineup of recurring characters who play lawyers they go up against. Michael J. Fox is especially memorable as a shady but oddly charismatic lawyer, and I would totally watch a spinoff about Elsbeth Tascioni, a kooky attorney whom Carrie Preston won a Best Guest Actress Emmy for playing. Mamie Gummer, Rita Wilson, Matthew Perry, and Martha Plimpton have all had great guest roles. I also really like Alicia’s kids, who are written as much more well-rounded characters than dramas focusing on adults typically write teenagers—Homeland and Nashville should take lessons from The Good Wife’s writers.
A lot’s been happening with me recently, and I thought I’d take a minute to recount it here.
If I’m being honest, I have to admit that lately I’ve felt really, really lonely. It seems like it’s been weeks since I had a real, honest conversation with someone.
So for now, I’ll write about some of the good things that have been happening.
First, I bought a car!
Even though I’m thirty, this is actually the first car I’ve ever owned. I had a car as a teenager, but it was only “mine” for a year, since it became my sister’s after I went to college. I also don’t really enjoy driving and don’t need to drive to get to most places I need to go. But sometimes I do need to get out of the city and I was sick of depending on other people for rides. So now I have this car! I mostly just drive to chorus every week and I drove to Marblehead a few weeks ago to meet my cousin’s cute new baby. But it’s nice having the option to drive places if I have to.
Second, I finished my fourth half-marathon!
Even writing that is weird. How did I become the kind of person who does four half-marathons? I still do not think of myself as a runner. I’m not an athlete and I’m actually kind of lazy about exercise most of the time. And yet…I just did this fourth half-marathon (the Bay State Half Marathon in Lowell) and got a really good time for me. This is a really flat course (there’s a marathon at the same time, and since it’s so flat, people use it to qualify for Boston- even their advertisements say so) and the weather was perfect and autumn-y, so that’s part of where the good time came from. But I also just feel faster, and while it might be awhile before I do another half, I kind of want to try again and maybe break two hours. It feels possible!
Third, I’ve had a couple of fun experiences at book signings lately. The first one was with none other than Neil Patrick Harris! He was doing a signing of his new memoir at Brookline Booksmith, so I got a ticket. None of my friends ended up going, but I made friends with the people around me in line. (Although two of them, who actually ended up being pretty cool once I talked to them, started off their time in line having this really graphic conversation about how someone they knew had an infection and I was dying to say, “Guys, I JUST ATE.”) They were hurrying everyone through the HUGE line as quickly as they could, so there wasn’t time to take a picture with him, but my new line-friends and I took each other’s pictures and sent them to each other.
I had all these things I was going to say to NPH, like, “Congratulations on the Oscars! Are you going for a hosting EGOT?” (They’d just announced the day before that he was going to be the Oscar host.) Or, “Will you sing ‘The Confrontation’ with me?” But they all flew out of my head and I just ended up saying something like, “Thank you for being here!” and that I liked what I’d read of the book while standing in line. So I don’t think I left much of an impression on NPH, but I’m glad I went.
The other book signing experience was last weekend at the Boston Book Festival. You remember my post about the book series I loved as a kid? Well, I was really excited when I learned that Ann M. Martin, the creator of The Baby-Sitters Club, would be there. So of course I went to her panel and got her autograph and a picture with her afterwards! Ten-year-old Katie is so jealous of thirty-year-old Katie. (I met some cool people in that line, too. Lots of interesting people to meet at book signings.)
I always try to do NaNoWriMo and never succeed. I do have a new idea this year, though, so we’ll see how I do. Some writing completed is always better than nothing, after all. You can friend me there if you want—purebrightfire is my name there.
This is going to be a little more involved than your average Playlist of the Moment post, so bear with me here.
I mentioned in the previous post that I’d be guest-posting a recap of The O.C. on Snark Squad. Voila. Writing it was a lot of fun, and both that and just reading Snark Squad’s O.C. posts in general made a bit nostalgic, so I’ve been re-watching some episodes of the show that I have on DVD.
I was first introduced to the show my senior year of college by my roommate Steph. That was Season 3, and I caught up with the previous seasons with Steph’s DVDs and bonded with my roommates over the show.
If you’ve never seen it, here’s the Reader’s Digest version: teenager Ryan Atwood, from Chino, California, gets arrested after he and his brother steal a car. Shortly thereafter, Ryan’s mother abandons him, so he calls his public defender, Sandy Cohen. Sandy lives in Orange County with his son Seth, who’s Ryan’s age, and his wife Kirsten, a rich real estate developer whose father owns most of the O.C. By the end of the third episode, the Cohens have become Ryan’s legal guardians. Over four seasons, we see all kinds of soap opera drama unfolding, particularly with Ryan and Seth’s love lives (Ryan has a tumultuous relationship with their drama queen next-door neighbor, Marissa, while Seth’s long-term crush on Marissa’s best friend Summer eventually turns into something real), but it’s also about family. It’s one of the only teen shows where the parents are not only a huge part of the show but also really good parents. You don’t have to be a poor kid from Chino with a neglectful, drunk mother to want Sandy and Kirsten Cohen to adopt you- and although I think the network intended it to be more of a Dawson’s Creek-esque teen relationship drama, the most interesting part of the show for me was always Ryan’s relationship with the Cohens. The moments that moved me the most and that were the most memorable for me were always about the love between this tough, fish-out-of-water kid and his adoptive family. This article explains everything really well.
The O.C. is kind of the perfect show for a site like Snark Squad or the late, sometimes great Television Without Pity because there is plenty to snark on (the episode I just recapped had a character faking a miscarriage and another character having a ridiculous screaming meltdown) BUT it’s also genuinely enjoyable most of the time. I feel like most statements you could make about The O.C. have a BUT in the middle of them. It’s a teenage drama BUT it’s also about the parents and the rest of the family. It’s a trashy nighttime soap BUT it also has a lot of moments that are truly moving. It’s kind of like Dawson’s Creek BUT the characters are a zillion times more likeable- a lot of characters on The O.C. start off as villains and gradually become more three-dimensional.
During the first year I blogged, The O.C. was in its final season, and although ratings had dropped, the show was having a series of fantastic episodes. You might recall theseposts, where I tried to convince people to watch it so it wouldn’t get canceled. I was unsuccessful, unfortunately, but falling headlong into an obsession with a show was exactly what I needed during that crazy first year out of college. (I was living with Christiana Krump at the time, and I’m pretty sure at some point she threatened to fake-divorce me from our fake marriage over The O.C.)
Anyway! Another great thing about The O.C. was its music. It introduced me to a lot of awesome songs that to this day are among my most-played. So here’s my playlist with some of my favorite songs that have been played on the show. Some highlights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjHvJE1XU7E
Alexi Murdoch, “Orange Sky.” I can’t remember if I knew this song before I heard it on the show or not, but either way, I adore it. It’s so soothing I swear it lowers my blood pressure. “In your love, my salvation lies in your love.”
Patrick Park, “Something Pretty.” Aptly titled. “And I’ve known ugliness, now show me something pretty.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBlAdApfK9U
Placebo, “Running Up That Hill.” This show also had a lot of great covers- in fact, one of their six soundtrack albums is nothing but covers. This one, of a Kate Bush song, I like just as much, if not more than, the original.
Here’s the playlist. It’s not comprehensive, but it is a bunch of songs I like that were on the show. Welcome to my O.C. Playlist, bitch!
It’s been awhile since I did a post about other blogs, so time to remedy that! It’s weird looking at these twoother posts I made about other blogs- I have the hardest time remembering that there was a time when I liked Jezebel, which is now one of my least favorite places on the web. There are some other blogs I mentioned that I don’t read anymore or that are defunct, so here’s an updated list of blogs I’m loving lately:
Written by Cassie Paton, a journalism student in LA who has a wonderful writing style and a great personality. She has a “Beer with a Blogger” series, which I will do my best to partake in if I’m ever in LA!
Karie doesn’t update as often as she used to, but you should absolutely follow her and catch up with her archives. She started the blog after her husband was wounded by an IED in Iraq and continued it after he died of an overdose of his pain medication. She’s been through more pain at age 29 than anyone should ever have to, but it’s hard not to be inspired by how she’s persevered and thrived in the face of unimaginable loss. She’s a fantastic writer and she’s currently working on a memoir, which I would love to read!
Kirsti, aka Melbourne on my Mind, is a blogger whose posts I always look forward to. She’s Australian, a bibliophile (I’m a pretty voracious reader, but Kirsti reads over a hundred books per year!), and completely adorable. When I read her, I just think, Man, I wish I was in Australia hanging out with her right now.
A new-ish blog that took off very quickly. The author, Katherine Fritz, is a theatrical costume designer in Philadelphia, and she hooked me with this post. She’s hilarious and culturally relevant and all-around awesome. She also writes Ladypockets, an awesome spoof on how the media covers women and fashion.
Ally, who lives with her wife in Tennessee and manages a bar, is hilarious and claims to be “personally responsible for how dirty the South is.” She’s a Sox fan, too, so I hope she’s also responsible for recruiting more fans. After this past Sox season, we might need them.
I’ve enjoyed Lorraine (which is actually a pseudonym) ever since I joined 20sb. Her writing can crack me up or break my heart and always leaves me wishing we could hang out.
Emily is so enthusiastic about everything she loves, and it’s contagious. Like me, she loves books, writing, musical theater, cute dogs (especially hers, Bandit), and Disney movies, and her posts always make me smile.
The girl from Matilda, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Miracle on 34th Street eventually quit acting, grew up, and started a blog. And from what I can tell, she’s a pretty smart, cool person.
I did recommend this site back when it was still called Childhood Trauma and mostly focused on the book series you read as a kid. Now they’ve expanded their focus- they did a post on each chapter of 50 Shades of Grey and its sequels and are also covering several TV shows, past and present. They’ve already snarked through Joss Whedon’s shows and are currently doing The O.C., Dawson’s Creek, Veronica Mars, Orphan Black, and How to Get Away with Murder, among others. It reminds me of all the best things about the dearly departed Television Without Pity. The previously mentioned Lorraine and Kirsti, as well as Sweeney and Sara, whom I included in the older post, are among the Snark Ladies. And I’m super excited that I’ll have a guest post on an O.C. episode up on Snark Squad next week!
I love this blog for how diverse and interesting it is. The author, Sarah Von Bargen, writes about all kinds of things. Tips on traveling to different countries. Interviews with people who’ve experienced unusual things. Connecting people who are looking for a favor or have a favor to offer through her “Network of Nice.” Recipes that go along with books. The new things she’s trying to do. Many different topics, but always enjoyable and always fun.
Welcome to Pure Bright Fire! It’s taken me a bit longer than I anticipated to make some of the changes I wanted to, but if you got here by trying to visit Struggling Single Twenty-Something or if this showed up in your reader’s feeds, then yea! You are now on my new blog, Pure Bright Fire!
I’m still trying to get everything settled here and make it look prettier and what not, but for now, join me as I blog through my thirties!
Last week, I took a long weekend in New York for a little solo vacation. Aside from forgetting my phone charger and having to buy another one, it was a very successful trip. No hurricanes and I didn’t forget my pants! I also went to Ellen’s Stardust Diner, where the waitstaff sings to you while you eat, went to Coney Island on Saturday and rode the Cyclone, had some awesome pizza and garlic knots, and went to Central Park, where I went to the zoo and found the sea lions. (Ten years ago, on my pre-GPS first trip to NYC, Christiana Krump and I wandered around the park forever trying to find the zoo, specifically the sea lions, and never did. Mission finally accomplished!)
But none of that is the reason why I went there.
If you know me or have been reading this blog for awhile, you know of my love for and obsession with Les Miserables (and if you’re new, here’s my 3,500-word explanation of why I love it so much), so of course I had to go see it when I heard it was going back on Broadway. And I got even more excited when I heard how amazing Ramin Karimloo, who plays Jean Valjean, is. Listen to him here, singing “Bring Him Home” on Katie Couric’s show.
So on Friday (the 20th), I took the bus down and went to see the show. And Oh. My. God.
I’ve seen Les Mis in Boston a few times, but this was the first time I’d seen it on Broadway. I can say definitively that this was the best production I’ve ever seen, and unquestionably the best portrayal of Valjean. Ramin’s rendition of “Bring Him Home” brought me to tears—and that’s not even my favorite song from Les Mis! I thought that performance on Katie was good, but multiply that times a zillion awesomes and that’s how he sounded in person. I’ve never heard an audience applaud that long after a song not at the end of an act. And of course I was crying again a bit later during the finale. The cast was just wonderful—Caissie Levy, who played Fantine, was particularly impressive. Immediately, I went into my “Les Mis high,” a phenomenon affecting…well, just me, that will put me into an incredibly good mood for about a week after seeing Les Mis onstage. I talked about this a bit in this post, but while I don’t really like concerts and have never gotten the high from live music that so many people seem to, I do get that from musical theater, and that high is much stronger from Les Mis than from any other show.
I wanted to meet the cast at the stage door afterwards, but I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t until Sunday that I read online that at this theater, the entrance is on 45th street but the stage door is on 46thstreet. So on Sunday, I grabbed my program and went back to the stage door after the matinee show. I met most of the cast and got their autographs and it was AWESOME! I also got a teeny glimpse of Idina Menzel, aka the wickedly talented Adele Dazeem, since the If/Then stage door was right next door.
Then came the moment I’d been waiting for—Ramin came out and signed my autograph and I told him how incredible he was. Then I asked if I could take a picture with him and he took this one of us.
HOT VALJEAN HAS TOUCHED MY PHONE, YOU GUYS.
The whole trip was fun, but man…this musical.
Sometimes it’s nice to have things to obsess over. It makes me feel alive to have so much passion about something, and my love for this show is now over ten years old. I love it even more now than I did back then, and I hope that never changes.
I’ll do another post about the events of last year, and I’m going to do some more substantial posts later on books, movies, and TV, at least, but I wanted to do this post on some of the things that I enjoyed the most this year. Without further ado:
Books
October was my book month. Two books I’d been anticipating for a long time were published that month—Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Halfbook and The Disaster Artist, a book about the making of The Room by Greg Sestero, who played Mark. I also attended the Boston Book Festival, where I had conversations with J. Courtney Sullivan, Tom Perrotta, and Hallie Ephron. I read many other wonderful books throughout the year, and I’ll blog about them more in a future entry, but some highlights include John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied, J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.
Movies
The best movie I saw for the first time this year actually came out twenty years ago—Schindler’s List. I don’t know how I made it to this year without ever having seen this movie. And…wow. I have such a hard time talking about this movie because I’m not sure I can in a way that does it justice. It completely deserves the reputation it has—I will say that. And the very end has me in tears every time. (I’ve seen it quite a few times since I first saw it in August, most recently last night at Erin’s. Yep, our super-fun movie night was with a three-hour movie about the Holocaust.) It also motivated me to learn more about the real story behind it, so I’ve now read several books about Oscar Schindler and the Jews on the list- so many that I could tell where writers got their sources from. And there’s so much more I want to say about this movie that I’m not sure how to say, but just know that it profoundly affected me.
Future entry coming about the movies that actually came out in 2013.
TV
The two TV shows I caught up with this year that I loved the most could not be more opposite. Parks and Recreation is this happy, upbeat show about nice people doing good things. Breaking Bad is a dark, tense show about an increasingly evil guy doing increasingly terrible things. They’re at opposite ends of this TV mood scale, but I loved them both so much- Parks and Rec because it’s funny and sweet and I enjoy all the characters, Breaking Bad because it’s incredibly well-written and acted and basically a masterpiece. (Yes, I’ve seen this clip.)
I also started watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report regularly for the first time. The week of the marathon bombing, I desperately needed something to make me laugh. Previously, I’d only watched these shows sporadically, but after that week I put them both on my DVR. They keep me sane.
Music
I didn’t listen to much new music this year. I did listen to a LOT of U2. I’ve always liked them, but over the summer I started listening to them kind of obsessively and discovered some songs I hadn’t heard before or re-discovered songs I hadn’t listened to enough. As for new music, I enjoyed Sara Bareilles’s The Blessed Unrest, especially her song “I Choose You.”
Theater
Aside from the very welcome news that Les Miserables is coming back to Broadway next year, there was a lot of good theater in my life this year. I traveled to New York to see Lucky Guy on Broadway, which was wonderful and moving and…there’s so much I could say about it and maybe I will in a future post. I saw Wicked for the second time. I saw a local production of Les Mis. I also saw a great play in the fall called The Power of Duff.
Technology
Two devices have massively improved my life this year. I bought a Roku, allowing me to stream Netflix and Hulu on my TV, and it’s been fantastic. (Future post about everything I’ve been watching via Roku.) I also finally caved and got my first smartphone, which was a good decision. I’d always been afraid I’d end up spending too much time online if I had the Internet on my phone, but that hasn’t really happened. Plus, now I know when the bus is coming.
Celebrities
My two biggest celebrity crushes this year are both guys on AMC shows- Jon Hamm and Aaron Paul. It’s kind of interesting- with guys in real life, I’ve never been attracted to good-looking jerks, and I realized this year that even with celebrities, there’s a personality element present with everyone I like. Jon Hamm, I am convinced, is a perfect human being. I could look at him all day, and I think it’s a travesty that he doesn’t have an Emmy yet. But even if, for some strange reason, you’re not into his looks or his acting, you have to love him after this. And this. And this.
Aaron Paul (who does have two well-deserved Emmys), is possibly the most adorable person on the planet. I love him on Breaking Bad, where he played one of my favorite TV characters of all time, but he seems like such a sweet person, too. Read this. And this. And watch this clip of him on The Price Is Right before he was famous, because it’s hilarious. And look at his Twitter and his Instagram, from which I have learned that he really loves his wife and he really loves pizza.
Food
When Pigs Fly bread is the best kind of bread, and it’s awesome when you toast it and spread avocado on it.
Remember that if you take nothing else away from this post.
Despite me not posting until the last day of the month, a lot happened in the month of May. Much of it was good, and I’ll get to that later, but one really terrible thing happened right before Memorial Day. I haven’t written about it yet because I didn’t quite know how, but I don’t want to gloss over it, either.
My Uncle Vinnie, who was my dad’s older brother, died suddenly the Thursday before Memorial Day. He was sixty-six, and it was completely unexpected. He’d been married to my aunt for thirty-two years, and my cousins who just lost their dad are thirty and twenty-seven.
It’s horrible that someone can just be gone so suddenly- someone who had so much life left and so much left to do. It scares me that people from my parents’ generation are dying. He was a really great guy, and it hasn’t quite hit me yet that he’s gone.
(Yeah, yeah, Les Mis again. For those of you reading this on Google Reader, pop over to my blog—I’ve actually started an “obsessing over Les Mis” tag.)
I think most popular musicals have one underrated song—the one that, when you first hear it, makes you wonder why you haven’t heard it before. For Wicked, it’s “The Wizard and I.” For Rent, it’s “Santa Fe.” And for Les Mis, it’s “Who Am I?”
This song comes at a point in the musical where Jean Valjean has learned that another man has been arrested and brought to court for his own crimes. In the song, he ponders what to do—should he say nothing, condemning an innocent man but also ensuring that the lives of the workers in the factory he oversees are not upset and that he will be able to care for Fantine’s daughter when she dies? Or should he go to court to set the man free, remembering the lesson he was taught years ago that set him on the path to reforming his life?
I love this song because it succinctly captures a moral dilemma without sacrificing the complexity of it. Valjean struggles with his identity—is he the mayor and factory owner responsible for the employment of many workers, or is he still the convict with the prison number 24601? Is he someone who can abandon those who depend on him? Is he someone who can let an innocent man suffer for his own crimes? Is he still the man he became after making the promise to the bishop years ago? Is he someone who can face the consequences of whatever decision he makes?
I wish I could find a good YouTube clip of the staging of this song. It starts out with Jean Valjean singing alone on a dark stage, and as it crecendos into the line, “Who am I? I’m Jean Valjean!” the courtroom where the innocent man is on trial appears behind him. When he gets to the last line, “Who am I? 2-4-6-0-1!”* he reveals his prison tattoo. But the brilliant Colm Wilkinson’s version here, at the 10th anniversary concert, is excellent.
