Shan't We Tell The Vicar?: Recent Episodes
Mara Wilson
Hello again! It’s been a while. Sorry for not updating, I was prepping for surgery, then I was recovering from surgery, which took quite a while. I do not recommend having endometriosis!
Giant birds are basically dinosaurs, and as cool as they may be in the museum, they’re not something you want to be around in real life. Although I remember seeing a Twilight Zone episode where some kind of mad scientist with a pet parrot decided to make all the “evil people of the world” two feet tall but then, get this, at the end of the episode, he also becomes two feet tall!!! Or maybe it’s just him that becomes two feet tall? They never explained that, nor did they explain how he managed to shrink everybody “evil” down to two feet tall. Anyway, at the end, his pet bird TOWERS over him, and he’s shown being terrified, but I just laughed and laughed. A domesticated parrot is just not that scary, even when big. I was probably about nine, and just a little over four feet tall, so I was a bit underwhelmed by that twist in general. Anna was a toddler at the time and probably only a little over two feet tall, and she still managed to break into the fridge to grab a block of solid cheddar cheese she’d leave little bites in. I told my brother Jon how dumb I thought it was, and he pointed out that this had been made in the early ‘60s, and “People were simpler back then.” Maybe that’s what people think now, when they look at how shocked we were at the ending of The Sixth Sense. (Jon has always said that he saw that twist coming.)
Anyway, surgical recovery has meant I’ve had a lot of time to think about animals that scare me. I didn’t think I would develop any fears as an adult, or if I did, they would be standard adult fears like losing people I love or forgetting to pay my taxes. I didn’t expect I would become afraid of moose. But I did. They’re terrifying to me. Any videos I see of them scare me so much. They’re huge! Though I guess it’s mostly because they’re unfamiliar to me. If I had grown up in Alaska or Maine or rural Canada, I’d probably have seen a moose or two, and I’d probably still find them a bit intimidating, but not break-into-a-cold-sweat scary. I’d probably live in a town that had some kind of local candy or pastry in the shape of a moose, and there’d be little moose fobs they’d sell to put on your keyring or something.
It’s all relative. I mean, Australia has some of the most terrifying animals in the world, but I’ve never met an Australian who was bothered about any of them. They pretty much only have horror stories about magpies in swooping season. But if you mention bears to some Australians, their eyes will get large and they’ll shake their head, like they can’t think of anything more frightening. I’m not especially afraid of bears. I wouldn’t want to be followed by one in a forest, but I know what they look like and what they’re capable of. Moose, or box jellyfish? Yeah, I have no idea what they’re capable of.
There’s really only one kind of animal that I find scarier than moose these days, and it’s… well, I was going to say one kind of sea animal, but actually, there are many sea animals that terrify me. This may be controversial, but I kind of hate the ocean. I went on a few cruises as a kid, but now I have repeat nightmares where I’m trapped in the middle of the ocean. It’s a strange, surreal place, and the life down there is probably the closest we get to extraterrestrial on this planet. There’s all kinds of weird things down there that creep me out, like anglerfish and hagfish, but I’m not above a simple fear of sharks. I still haven’t seen Jaws, and even reading the Wikipedia synopsis scares me.
Objectively speaking, though, sharks are nowhere near as scary as dolphins. Dolphins are smart as hell, and can beat the st out of a shark. I remember learning this when I was eight years old and doing a project on blue whales (we had to choose an ocean animal, and while blue whales are unsettlingly huge, I liked that they were referred to in every single book as “gentle giants”), and being startled by such a cute animal’s violence. This was around that time in the ‘90s when dolphins were the cool animal. Remember Vivica A. Fox getting proposed to with a dolphin ring in Independence Day? Axl Rose swimming with dolphins in that one terrible music video? Free Willy, and the Flipper remakes? In the’90s, every horse girl was also a dolphin girl. Hell, I was a dolphin girl for a while: I saw Free Willy* with my friends on my sixth birthday. I even fed dolphins in the Bahamas during one of the aforementioned cruises! I had to hold a tiny fish in my mouth so the dolphin would grab it, which was disgusting, but still kind of cool. Dolphins were all over t-shirts and Lisa Frank binders, but eventually people caught on to the fact that like most other intelligent species on this planet, dolphins are also huge a***s. And orcas are even more terrifying, they’re basically just three bottlenose dolphins in one.
It really isn’t fair to judge other animals by human standards. But is it more fair to judge them by our standards when they are as smart or smarter than we are? Still probably not. I still find dolphins beautiful and majestic on some level, and am far more terrified of orcas, but I think if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone.
Also, do you know what orcas have been known to eat? That’s right, moose!
Fake BBC Show Of the Week: Mum’s Moggies
Stuff I Did Recently: I had a blast at ‘90s Con in Hartford! I got to hang out with some old friends, make some new ones, meet some lovely fans, and just generally have a wonderful time! I hope I can come back next year!
I’m also happy to announce that a wonderful YA book I narrated, One For All by Lillie Lainoff, is out now! You can get the audiobook on Libro.fm or on Audible, it’s a gender-swapped retelling of Three Musketeers, and there’s a character with POTS! I was honored to record this book!
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Another installment of my embarrassing stories, told through audio.
One of the girls I used to nanny for graduated from college last month. She’s now headed to grad school. I’m really trying not to let this make me feel old. I’m trying to remind myself that she was already in middle school when I met her, and I was mostly there for her younger siblings. I guess that isn’t really nannying, and not really babysitting — none of them were babies. Caregiving?
Anyway, I’d like to think I was good at it. I know that once a month, I wasn’t: I had no interest in playing soccer in the hallway or walking to the park, I would keep suggesting activities that were very low-key and didn’t involve much movement and involved lots of Double Stuf Oreos. But most of the time, I was good. We played games and talked and I sang songs to the girls before they went to sleep (their brother wouldn’t stand for such things.) I wanted to be the kind of adult that had answers to kids’ questions. Usually, though, it was me asking the questions, and me leading the lessons, even when they weren’t particularly interested. Once I noticed Holden, the middle child, had given himself the name “H-Bomb” on a multiplayer game, and asked him if he knew what that meant. We got into talking about the Cold War, and I ending up trying to explain communism to him.
“That’s gross,” he said, when I was done. I had expected “That’s a dumb idea” or maybe, “That’s a good idea,” but I had not expected to hear the word “gross.” I was baffled until I realized he had taken the “sharing” part literally. As if the Communist Party were an actual party where strangers shared toothbrushes and double-dipped their chips.
Sometimes I just made dumb mistakes, though. Like all kids, they were big into whatever was on the radio at the time, and I spent a lot of time worrying about what their mom wouldn’t want them to hear. Every other song in the early 2010s was built around some terrible, belabored double entendre — “Peacock”, “Whistle”, “Animals”, all of that. One day Holden wouldn’t stop singing The Wanted’s “Glad You Came" and I told him to stop, because it wasn’t appropriate.
“What’s inappropriate about ‘I’m glad you came’?” he said, all innocence, and I couldn’t come up with an answer. S**t, I thought. I’d just inadvertently taught a nine-year-old euphemism. (It could have been worse. At my job teaching kids to wall paint in public schools, one of the middle schoolers had put a piece of painter’s tape on his chin and yelled, “Look! I have a flavor-saver!” And before I could think, I said “What’s that?” One of the high schoolers laughed at me.)
Probably the thing I’m proudest of, though not without a twinge of guilt, is the phrase I taught the youngest daughter. She, like her older siblings, was very smart, but she had a wry, dark sense of humor from a young age. She once asked me, “How do you be goth? I want to be goth!” She also said being the youngest “rocks, because I’ll be the last to die!” She spoke little a little adult, and could tell when adults were talking down to her, and hated it. That’s why I taught her to tell them, “Don’t be so condescending.”
Is this the best thing I did as a babysitter, or the worst? I’m still not sure.
Stuff I Did This Month: Yes, sorry, it’s been a month. First of all, I appeared in Newfest Pride’s all LGBTQ table read of Legally Blonde! I played two VERY different characters.
I talked about mental health and mental illness on Adult ISH, Merk and Nyge were FANTASTIC hosts, and listened to me talk about how medication changed the way I perceive time. I also got to give out advice with Matt Braunger on This Might Help, and we talked about the benefits of playing a character much smarter — or much stupider — than you are.
Fake BBC Show of the Week: Nan’s at Bingo (also, please enjoy this weird list of Bingo nicknames)
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Another installment of my anecdotes told aurally!
My friends Anna Drezen and Andrew Farmer talked about the concept of the “Party Villain” on their podcast: it’s the person who, knowingly or unknowingly, brings down the mood of the party and makes everyone uncomfortable. I think there’s such a thing as the Class Villain, too. They throw off the rhythm and the mood of the classroom, and everyone shifts uncomfortably and makes panicked eye contact when the instructor calls on them. Are they going to mention the Rothschilds controlling everything again? Are they going to name-drop Truffaut for no reason, again? Are they going to snort and say, “Excuse me, what?” and “Yeah, right!” after every single break in the Sociology professor’s lecture again?
Class villains aren’t just annoying, they’re reckless. And I’ll admit I’ve been the class villain before. Probably most in high school, though high school students get a little leeway, I think, because everyone is annoying and reckless then. But I was definitely the villain of ninth grade English.
Mr. Parker was my teacher. I’d been worried I would get the very strict Mr. Campbell, who made his students memorize lists of Greek and Latin roots, and measured essay margins with a ruler. Instead, I got self-described “sensitive man” Mr. Parker, who gave us Meyers-Briggs tests on our first week, let us write short stories, and had us bring in song lyrics to analyze (I think I did Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So”, which is a pretty straightforward song about alcoholism, and I remember pitying the flustered girl who chose a Bjork song). We talked about poetry and psychology, and I wrote a paper on a biography of Sigmund Freud that he put up on his wall as a “nearly perfect” paper.
It should have been a great experience for me, but it wasn’t. I really liked Mr. Parker, but the feeling was not mutual. If anything, he seemed a little scared of me. I was loud and obnoxious, constantly blurting things out and making snide comments. My friend Lana and I were constantly passing notes, and Steven and I were constantly getting into arguments. I monopolized every class discussion and constantly went off-topic (that’s when Steven started calling me “Tangent Woman”). I even got into a fight with my best friend Melissa at one point. Everyone in that class was annoyed with me.
But every villain has a backstory. Fourteen was a hard year for me, and I was acting out. I had lost my grandfather, gained a new stepmother, and moved in the same year. Puberty had brought my film career, one of the few constants in my life, to a screeching halt. My friend group and splintered, and I was struggling with my mental health and sexuality. You’d think that with my constant fidgeting, writing romantic short stories about girls saving each other’s lives, and sometimes having to leave class early so I could go to psychiatrist appointments, he might have gathered that I was going through some stuff. But Mr. Parker never asked what was going on. Sometimes he even made snide comments back at me, like this was The Breakfast Club and I was the John Bender to his Principal Vernon. Finally, when I interrupted a fellow student’s analysis of an optical illusion to say I thought it looked like Elvis, Mr. Parker took me outside and said, “Has anyone ever told you that you rub them the wrong way?”
That hit me hard. By ninth grade, I’d been called all kinds of names, and had all kinds of teachers insult me, but something about this hit me hard. If he had called me a brat, I could have written him off. If he had just told me I needed to behave better, I would have listened. What he had told felt personal, and damning. It not only meant that he didn’t like me, but that there was nothing I could do about it, that I was beyond hope. I stayed outside of class for the rest of the period, sobbing.
I don’t know if I behaved better in Mr. Parker’s class after that, but I never saw him the same way. Still, I kept my grades up, and I do remember asking if I could give him a hug on the last day. He agreed, but when he hugged me, he said, “Well, Mara, you kept me on my toes.”
Villainy is relative. Mr. Parker saw me as Judd Nelson when I was really Ally Sheedy (although isn’t the whole point that they are all a little Ally and all a little Judd?) I saw the woman in my sketch class as the villain, but she had tons of friends. I never saw her again, and no one has told me, before or since, that I “rub them the wrong way.” Not in those words. Maybe I should have had Mr. Campbell after all. Although Mr. Parker did teach me something very important: the “sensitive” ones can be the most insensitive.
Stuff I Did Recently: I talked about cicadas, turtles, coral, and the invertebrate I’m most creeped out by on Creature Feature! And speaking of my teenage self, I also recorded the 100th episode of Come On Fhqwhpods, a podcast about my adolescent obsession, Homestar Runner! It will be out soon!
Fake BBC Show of the Week: All Out of Ice Lollies
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Another installment of my embarrassing stories, told through audio!
Probably the day that I noticed something was up was when we had to demonstrate that the best way to listen was “to be like a ball, not a sponge or a wall” and I noticed my scene partner, who had recently been suspended for getting caught smoking, wasn’t taking it as seriously as I was. I think I might have thought he was just there for the food, which was usually better than the dining hall’s food. We also got caffeinated sodas, which were all but banned on campus, since we were living at high altitude and dehydration was taken very seriously.
There were definitely a few others who were as devoted as I was to Peer Counselors — or “Peer Ears,” as we called it. One was Jamie, the valedictorian, another was an opera singing major named Ashley who later came back to the school to work as an administrator, another was an interdisciplinary arts student from Japan who designed our club hoodies. One of them said “Our Ears Don’t Talk. They’re Here to Listen!” and the other said “We Listen to the Voice of Your Heart.” I wore mine at least once a week, but the thing is, I don’t think anybody ever once came to me for advice. Sometimes my friends would confide in me, but that was about it.
Not that we could ever even keep secrets at boarding school, anyway. Everyone gossiped at boarding school. At my public high school, if you asked someone what was going on with so-and-so, or why someone broke up with someone, you’d get told to mind your own business. But at Idyllwild, we all gossiped about everyone and everything. Maybe it was just because I had more friends there, but I think it was because we all lived together and we were all going to find out about everything, anyway. We knew when teachers were pregnant long before they announced it, we knew who secretly smoked or drank, who was cheating on whom. There just weren’t enough places to hide.
It was still nice to have a place to open up, though. Our school psychologist was a great guy, and I learned a lot about people I’d never really understood or never thought I could be friends with. We mostly talked about personal experiences with mental health and mental illness, but sometimes we’d submit anonymous suggestions for topics. One day the school psychologist announced that we would be talking about sex and relationships, and the girl whose suggestion it was immediately got flustered and said it was her idea, but that she hadn’t really thought we should talk about sex, she’d meant it as a joke. This was the same girl who wore a Neopets shirt sometimes, and when I asked her about it, always said, “Oh, I don’t know what it means, I got it at a thrift store.” Ironically cutesy T-shirts were something of a fad in those days, so it took me years to realize she had actually lied. I wonder what she would have said if I’d told her that I also played Neopets.
This is what I think about when people talk about having had sex in high school, by the way. I think about how I had Peer Ears and Neopets instead.
Stuff I Did This Week—uh, Month: Wow, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? There’s been a lot! First of all, if you missed it, I had a piece in The New York Times about Britney Spears and growing up in the public eye. Then I did interviews with NPR Weekend Edition and Christiane Amanpour about that article!
I also got to surprise Daisy Ridley, who is absolutely adorable and a HUGE fan of Matilda, on Comedy Central’s Stir Crazy!
On the podcast front, I was on Out with Suzi Ruffell, who was absolutely lovely. I’m also going to be on the fantastic American Hysteria (talking about my life and my article and moral panics) and the equally fantastic Low Culture Boil podcast (talking about groupie memoirs?!) very soon!
Fake BBC Show of the Week: Stuff It, Simon! (From the people who brought you Up Your Arse, Alistair!)
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Another installment of my embarrassing stories, told through audio!
I guess you have to understand that when I was a child, I made up stories about everything and everyone. Every single time we went out to a restaurant, I would start up a little silverware melodrama: my fork was the leading man, my spoon the leading lady, and my knife was, of course, the villain. If I had a salad fork and soup spoon, they would be the wisecracking sidekicks who eventually fell in love. I don’t know if all kids do this, or if this is some fringe benefit of OCD or synesthesia, but I was really good at assigning personalities to inanimate objects.
The Solitaire story was that the King of Hearts, while maybe not evil, was an obnoxious oaf, dumb enough to scratch the back of his head with a sword, and definitely not worthy of the smart, sexy Queen of Hearts. So she spent all her time with the sweet, beautiful Queen of Clubs, whose husband was mostly just boring. The Queen of Hearts liked to hang around to offer a sympathetic ear — or maybe bosom? — whenever the Queen of Clubs had to be paired up with the King of Hearts to make a black on red solitaire pattern. It was as if the game itself was an event, a ball or a banquet, where they all were forced to socialize with each other, and the two Queens kept running off together to gossip, and call each other “babe” and “sweetheart” and, I don’t know, sit on each other’s laps? Cuddle or something? They never kissed, I was way too shy to make them kiss. I barely even made my Barbie dolls kiss, and they NEVER had sex. Not that Barbie sex is anything more than just bumping plastic, but I was a bit of a preteen prude.
I think that’s why I never really wrote fanfiction. Maybe I was also worried I’d be accused of plagiarism? I was very afraid of getting in trouble as a child. I did write a lot of stories that read a lot like whatever book I was reading at the time — first Beverly Cleary, then Bruce Coville, then in my early teens stories very much like the books of Louise Rennison or Gretel Killeen — but never actual fanfiction. I’m not sure I even knew it was a thing until my friends started doing it, and started recommending stories to me.
There’s been a lot of fanfic discourse lately. I’m pretty pro-fanfiction: one of my dreams has always been to create something that people write fanfiction about. I think the only thing I feel a little weird about is Real Person Fanfic, but I feel like most of the time that isn’t harmful. How many thousands of young girls (and probably boys and NB kids, too) wrote stories about dating someone from One Direction or Backstreet Boys or The Beatles? Someone wrote RPF about me once, and sent it to me, but it was a very young girl writing it, and it was actually a very sweet piece about the two of us meeting randomly in Central Park and having a nice conversation. I also I think she wrote that I saved someone from getting mugged? And she described me as “tall,” which I very much am not, but she didn’t know that, and I will let her take creative liberties there.
Honestly, I’m amazed that anyone’s getting any creative writing done at all right now. I thought it was hard to write last year, but this year hasn’t been any easier, at least not in America. I’ve been writing a piece for my Things That Gave Me Nightmares When I Was A Kid series, but it’s very heavy on the idea of dystopia, and uh, things have been a little more dystopian than I was expecting. So I’m gonna come back to that, I think. My next piece (for subscribers) is going to be about my middle school crush and Ben Folds, something that probably at least a few of you can relate to.
And maybe I actually should write a story about two queens sneaking off together to have an affair. The Favourite and Bridgerton were hits, people are loving anachronistic gay stories about royalty. Maybe I was just ahead of my time!
Stuff I Did This Week: I had a great time talking about movies and crushes and which TV Show has the most characters I’m attracted to on the Tasteless podcast! Listen here!
Also, I’m still doing videos on Cameo, and they’re a lot of fun! If you know a fan of Matilda, Night Vale, Big Hero 6, etc. who would like a video from me, I’d be happy to give them a shout-out, tell them a story, sing them a song, show them my cats.
Fake BBC Show of the Week: The Fens are Burning
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New installment of my spoken series of embarrassing stories! Usually I do these late at night, but you get this one a little earlier!
At the time, we thought her parody was the funniest thing we’d ever heard, especially when she added a third line, “It hurts when I pass gas.” (Rachael was hilarious, and does really cool art and theater stuff in New Mexico now.) My dad also had a version that made us laugh when we were little, “Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made it out of clay; dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I dropped it — oy vey!” My dad’s not Jewish, himself, but he loves Dad Jokes and Yiddishisms. My brothers and sister and I also loved Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah Song, and I used to DREAM of being notable enough to be listed in it. Never saw the movie based on it, though. I actually read a great article today about why there aren’t many Hanukkah movies, and I think it explains American Jews’ connection to even not-great depictions of Hanukkah in media, like Eight Crazy Nights and The Hebrew Hammer. Honestly, a Rosh Hashanah or Passover movie would probably be a better idea. Or Purim, which is kind of like Halloween, but even drunker.
The thing about Hanukkah (Chanuka? Hannukah? Whatever, they’re all technically correct, I’ve even seen it spelled with an “x”) is that it’s eight nights long, and unlike the other long Jewish holidays, you’re not commanded to do much more than light candles. So it’s kind of easy to forget it’s even a holiday, and usually around the fourth or fifth day, I do. Last night around nine I leapt out of the shower with shampoo in my hair to yell to Anna, “We forgot to light the candles!” “Oh s**t!” she yelled back, and as soon as I’d rinsed out my hair and grabbed a towel, we set up the menorah.
I think it was a little easier to remember when we were getting presents every night. In our family, usually the big presents would be on the first or second night, and then if we got anything at all on the other days, they’d be practical or kind of nonsensical. First or second day presents were things like computer games or CDs we really wanted — No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom was a big one, as was They Might Be Giants’s live album Severe Tire Damage, which probably says a lot about eleven-year-old me — and then fifth or sixth day would be socks or hair ties. I do remember getting a brand-name virtual pet the first night one year, then on the sixth day, getting a very cheap knock-off virtual pet. I loved them both, of course, but one lasted far longer than the other.
Actually, I think the brand-name virtual pet might not have been a pet at all, but a Nano Baby. Those things are kind of lost to time now, and all I could find as far as articles on them was this one from a Mormon newspaper. Basically, instead of a dog or cat, you were entrusted with a virtual child. You saw a mother and father with a heart between them, then an ambulance, then a doctor’s face, then a baby was born, and you had to take care of it. It sounds bizarre, but I am not making this up, you can see it for yourself! If you didn’t take care of the baby, the parents would show up and be angry with you, but if you took good care of it, the parents would eventually come to get them anyway and… be happy with you? I guess you were something of a nanny. I remember my actual nanny at the time looking bewildered when I explained how it worked to her, and saying, “What is this? Losing Isaiah?”
I think the Nano Baby still pooped on the floor like a Tamagotchi would, too. And now we’ve come back to the scatological, again. Happy Hanukkah!
Stuff I Did This Week: I’m working with Miry’s List again, to help resettling refugee families get what they need to make their houses into homes! You can go here to buy a housewarming gift for the Sofizada family, who just arrived from Afghanistan with two small children, and unfortunately had to leave the father of the family back in Afghanistan temporarily. I just bought them a rug! Please help them out!
I also have been helping out some friends who do mutual aid for unhoused neighbors here in L.A., and they could use some help, as well! They need food, in particular, as well as blankets and cold weather supplies (it can get cold at night in L.A.). I bought some jerky and tuna and can’t wait for my neighbors to get them!
Also, in case you missed it, I have a Cameo! If you have family or friends who like my movies or V/O or writing, you can gift them a message from me! Or just give one to yourself! I’m also happy to include a cameo from one of my cats inside that Cameo. I’m totally serious.
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WELCOME BACK TO MIDNIGHT CONFESSIONS! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Last week in New York, I met up with the kids I used to nanny, the ones who reintroduced me to the word “babyish.” Well, with two of the three: one, who is in college, was on a trip to Washington D.C. Two of them are actually in college now, and the youngest is in high school. This is terrifying to me, but they all grew up to be great, so I’m happy with that, at least.
Until she said so, I’d never once thought of bangs as a childish thing. Bangs were kind of my trademark growing up—hell, they kind of still are! I remember insisting on getting my hair cut into a bob when I was about nine or ten. I was going through an angsty phase, and since I’d had shoulder-length hair all through my childhood, I thought a big haircut would put some distance between me and my past. I wanted to symbolize that I, Mara, was growing up, and was my own person. But it never occurred to me to cut my bangs. In fact, a year or two later a hairstylist on a Made-For-TV movie I was working on suggested we thin out my bangs a little because they thought it would suit the character, and just the thought gave me a panic attack.
I didn’t like change, but I also desperately wanted to grow up. I wonder, are there kids who really like being kids? Who appreciate childhood for what it is? I feel like every kid I knew as a kid wanted to grow up, or at the very least, be a teenager. I couldn’t wait to live a grown-up life, or at least what I understood to be a grown-up life. The only thing I wasn’t looking forward to was having to stand in line for things. (Waiting with your parents at the bank when you’re a kid is agony.)
Funnily enough, the kids I knew who acted the most “adult” (myself included) usually acted out in the silliest, most immature ways when we hit puberty. Think of all the serious children you knew who turned into total geeks as they grew up, the kind of adults who would wear Genius at Work shirts but spend all of our time watching children’s cartoon shows. I went from being a well-behaved, serious child who read Reader’s Digest for fun, to a middle-schooler making lists of “ways to annoy people,” and a teenager who thought there was nothing funnier than just yelling the word “kumquat,” to, well, me. Is it OK to be childish once your appearance is no longer childish? Or did we just realize what we had been so quick to give up?
Still, I like being an adult. Except when I’ve been crying and need new eyeliner at Sephora, and get recognized. Yes, that did actually happen. I have said it before and will say it again, if you’re ever a minor public figure, you won’t ever get recognized when you’re looking and feeling good, you will get recognized only when you are looking and feeling your absolute worst.
Stuff I Did This Week: Tonight I’m monologuing with JV Improv at UCB Franklin for #ThrowbackFriday! I’ll be talking about my experiences at the Golden Globes… as a seven-year-old.
Also, my episode of As Me with Sinead is going up soon! Sinead Burke is a wonderful interviewer and person, and talking with her was a delight.
Fake BBC Show of the Week: A Jaunt Into the Sea (And everyone’s seen this about English Murder Villages, right? Maureen Johnson is a genius.)
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Be a shame if they were… like that with everybody!
I suppose this is my fault for being attracted to upbeat, cheerful, friendly people, and not sad broody types. I do feel like some people take too much pride in telling you someone doesn’t have a crush on you, though. I don’t know if they understand the implications, the line you add on in your head: “They don’t have a crush on you…because who would have a crush on you, you weirdo?”
When I was in a writing group with my friends about ten years ago, I mentioned to my friend Mark that his roommate Adrian had been Facebook messaging me a lot, and I was thinking maybe he liked me. The next writer’s group meeting, Mark announced in front of everyone, “I asked Adrian and he said he never flirted with you and doesn’t have a crush on you at all.” Probably the most embarrassing part of this was that I really didn’t have a crush on Adrian (I just wanted the confidence boost), but I actually did have a bit of a crush on Mark.
I used to have a lot more crushes, but I don’t have so many, anymore. I think now I tend to see people as much more human and don’t put them up on pedestals. In fact, I had to create a Pinterest board of crushes to remind myself of the famous people I have crushes on — and even then, some of them I’ve met and have since sort of lost my crushes on, now that I know them as real people. But I guess these are kind of unique problems to have.
I wish I could tell my younger self that most relationships don’t come from crushes. And when they do, the relationships usually don’t last very long, because they’re built on unrealistic expectations and what you wish the other person was, rather than what they actually are. This is why I don’t believe in being in love with someone you’ve never met, or someone you don’t have any kind of interpersonal relationship with. You’ve basically just created a very elaborate real person fanfic in your head.
(Interestingly, someone sent me a real person fanfic they wrote about me, once, and it was actually very nice! I don’t go looking for that kind of thing because it can very quickly get disturbing, but this story was very sweet and not creepy. In it, I stopped a mugger in Central Park and was also described as “tall,” so I got to live out two dreams of mine. But please don’t send me any other real person fanfics about me, if there even are any. In general, any gross or mean thing about me — that isn’t legitimate constructive criticism — just isn’t worth my time.)
I also wish I could tell my younger self that people will have crushes on me one day. But then I’d also have to tell her the truth, that those people’s crushes will also fade when people get to know me better. The knife cuts both ways. Or crushes both ways. Ehh, you can use a knife to crush things. You know what I mean.
Stuff I Did This Week: My episode of Let’s Talk about Cats went up! It’s a newer podcast, full of talk about cats, tea, and games — I mean, this is everything I want in a podcast! I explained how I have two and a half cats, and we played a game where I tried to guess whether a BBC show was real or fake. Want to know how I did? Listen!
Also, I saw Knives Out! My friend and I went to the premiere last night and GAH IT WAS AMAZING, just like I knew it would be! Definitely go see it when it comes out! I LOVE Rian Johnson’s movies (and TV episodes, too — best episodes of Breaking Bad, for sure) so much, and I had the pleasure of meeting him in person last night. Both he and the genius goddess that is Karina Longworth (of You Must Remember This) were incredibly kind and funny and friendly. Isn’t it nice when talented people are also good people?
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Another installment of my audio confessions!
My voice is one of my few personal attributes about which I feel unequivocally good. I really like my voice! I’ve always felt like I could a lot with it. Although sometimes I get asked to do voice-over for a preteen or teenage role, and then I’m a bit lost —I didn’t even sound like a teenager when I was a teenager! I’ve had a voice like Bea Arthur (if she were doing a cover of Moon Unit Zappa’s part in “Valley Girl”) since I was eleven.
I’ve been told by other people that I have a great voice, too, but I do wonder sometimes if my hybrid New York/Valley Girl dialect diminishes things. A few weeks ago I asked people on Twitter what they thought the sexiest English-language accents were. Nobody said New York or Valley Girl. Most people said Irish, which I could definitely understand, though I personally said Scottish and New Zealand were my favorites. The Kiwis fell all over themselves to insist that their accent wasn’t pleasant at all, and the Scottish response was basically just “Damn right, we’re sexy!” (Apparently people in the UK agree, it comes up on polls as the best or sexiest accent all the time — although surprisingly, it’s often tied with the Geordie dialect. I only learned that Geordie was a thing like a month ago.)
A few people said Southern U.S. (especially Louisiana), but aside from, that pretty much nobody said any other American accents. Northeast accents aren’t considered attractive, Midwest and Pacific Northwest accents aren’t even known about outside of the US, and our baseline General American dialect seems to be considered about as exciting as water. Maybe because it’s all over TV, so we’re used to it? Although honestly, most of the TV and films I watched growing up were made in Canada. One of my favorite games to play when I was watching movies as a teenager (especially when something was set in “New York” but very obviously filmed in Toronto or Vancouver) was “Spot the Canadian.” When Ellen Page asked Jason Bateman why yuppies loved “herbs” so much in Juno I all but stood up in the theater and yelled “CANADIAN SPOTTED!” Not that it’s a bad thing; as I’ve mentioned on here before, nothing makes me feel closer to an actor than an accent slip. I heard Sarah Snook say pronounce “been” like “bean” the other day on Succession and my heart fluttered a little.
But please don’t tell anyone I’ve been watching Succession, or I will be legally obligated to tweet about it. (Probably something about how I want the theme as my ringtone. Who even uses ringtones anymore?)
Stuff I Did This Week: I was on the podcast Coming Out with Lauren and Nicole! They were so wonderful, welcoming and funny. I talked about imposter syndrome, myths about bisexuality, and which world-famous actress that I worked with as a child was my first big crush.
I also did an interview with the International OCD Foundation about facing fears, and discussed one very specific one I am facing right now!
Coming up soon, I will be performing a very personal true story on RISK! at Dynasty Typewriter in LA on October 24th! It’s a great show, one I’ve always loved doing, and I can’t wait to do again. Get your tickets now!
I’m also going to be on the Wrestlesplania podcast! I recorded this with my good friend Rachel Millman, and I cannot wait for it to come out!
Fake BBC Show Title of the Week: Let’s Fetishize the Geordie Accent
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Another installment of my late-night confessions!
Sometimes litter tells a story. Once I saw a bunch of men’s clothes and belongings that had very clearly been thrown from a window, and knew that someone had just been broken up with. Sometimes it’s a story you’d rather not know, like the time I saw a condom on the floor of a McDonald’s in Toronto.
I’m not sure what this story was, though I’d like to think it was a child’s birthday party. The sunscreen was from a responsible parent, the Topo Chico seltzer from someone trying not to drink too much at a kid’s birthday party, candy for the kids. I feel like birthday parties, for kids, are all about getting a sugar fix: one girl I knew growing up even wrote on her tenth birthday invitations “Come if you like Sandy Candy!”
Sandy Candy was basically just Pixy Stix, but for some reason, it was huge at the time. (I was reflecting on how much Beverly Cleary got right about childhood today, and this is one example: Ramona and Beezus always have strange food-related “fads” at their school—gummy bears, hard-boiled eggs, putting a banana sticker on your forehead.) There was also Raven’s Revenge, which was basically just goth Pixy Stix. I somehow remember there being a scary-looking raven on the label? But maybe I was just a gothy kid.
It was definitely a sign of strength to be able to withstand a sour or spicy candy, especially ones with disturbing names, like Warheads or Atomic Fireballs. Although someone in my second grade class once got in trouble for bringing Lucas candy, a Mexican tamarind-and-chilies powdered candy, to school. It was a bit too spicy for some of the white kids in our second grade, I guess, and our teachers actually took it as an opportunity to talk to us about… drugs? I guess the message was “never put something in your mouth without knowing what it is,” but when I look back on it as an adult it feels a little racist. You probably shouldn’t eat Lucas candy nowadays, though: I just learned that many varieties of it have been found contaminated with lead.
Anyway, if anybody wants to have a sunscreen, seltzer, and sour patch kids party, hit me up. It may be a little late in the year for it, but there’s always next summer. And don’t litter!
Stuff I Did This Week: My essay about an Akira Kurosawa movie that changed how I saw Shakespeare forever went up on Talkhouse Film! If you’ve never seen a Kurosawa movie, I can’t recommend him enough: he really was a master, and his work is very accessible.
Also, there was a really great episode of Passenger List this week, and you should definitely listen to it, not only because one of my FAVORITE PERFORMERS EVER guest stars on it, but also because it leads very nicely into next week’s episode, which was written by someone you know and love! Or at least know and like enough to get a newsletter from! If you haven’t listened to the first few episodes, though, don’t ruin it for yourself, go back and listen from the beginning!
Fake BBC Show of the Week: Mrs Crimble’s Christmas Sweetshop
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Another installment of my audio confessions!
OK, it wasn’t actually last night, but I did The Secret Society of the Sisterhood this past week, and it went great! The audience there is always so lovely. I was a bit nervous about telling the story I told, but they made me feel so comfortable and accepted.
Do people really do the “picture the audience in their underwear/naked” thing when they have stage fright? I’ve never tried it, even when I’ve been really nervous. I can’t imagine it making me feel any less uncomfortable. And I did have stage fright as a kid! Not when I was very young, but it kicked in around nine or ten, once I was finally old enough to care about what other people thought of me. Then I took improv classes and did plays and sang in choirs and eventually I felt more comfortable on a stage than anywhere else.
As for flirting, well, just like being onstage, sometimes you feel it and sometimes you don’t. Not only am I bad at flirting, but I feel like people around me aren’t good at conveying whether or not they’re flirting with me. This was especially true in my early twenties: I once asked a friend I had a slight crush on, whom I’d been hanging out with one-on-one in very date-y ways, if he was interested in me. He moved his head back and forth for a few seconds, as if he were mulling it over, then responded, “I’d say no.”
It’s still one of my favorite ways I was rejected. (Another friend said it sounded like a “30 Rock cold open,” and it kind of did!) A few years later I called him on it, and he apologized, saying he was trying to turn me down in the most polite way he could. “Well, you failed there,” I said, and we both laughed.
Flirting, I think, is heavily dependent on local culture. I’ve learned a lot about this from traveling. Australians greet you with a hug and a drink and make you feel like they’re your best friend, so it can feel like it’d hard to discern whether or not they’re actually into you — but I’ve learned that when they are, you’ll know. Most Canadians and Scandinavians, in my experience, tend to try to be polite and not draw too much attention to themselves, so you can usually tell when they’re trying a little harder to get your eye. In Italy, it felt like I was never not being flirted with, my Spanish was too bad to tell whether or not anybody was flirting with me in Mexico, and I’ve never been there, but I already know that absolutely nobody would be interested in me in France. Without a doubt, though, there is no worse place to try to flirt than England.
I grew up in a time when a lot of American girls had crushes on British actors and singers, and would talk about how they’d love to have a cute English boyfriend. That was incredibly dumb of us. Not only are English men the same as men everywhere (many are great, a lot aren’t great, most are somewhere in the middle), but there is absolutely no way to tell if an English person, of any gender, is interested in you. They don’t talk about their feelings, they don’t know how to accept compliments, they’re not physical even when given consent. Asking an English person to just tell you whether or not they “fancy” you would be akin to suddenly punching them in the stomach. It’s extremely hard to try to flirt there when you don’t drink, and of course, even harder when you’re a woman trying to flirt with other women. Maybe it’s different in Ireland or Scotland, but you’re never getting past that stiff upper lip in England. Do yourself a favor and see if there are any cute Australians around, instead.
Anyway, the show I did went really well, and in the near future, I hope to both do more storytelling shows, and visit New Zealand. (I have no ideas how Kiwis flirt, but I intend to learn.)
Stuff I Did This Week: Oh man! I have not one, but TWO big announcements! First of all, the Faceless Old Woman is getting her own book! Pre-order it now, I’ve just started reading an advance copy, and it’s wonderful. I am so grateful to Joseph and Jeffrey for this; she is one of my favorite characters I’ve ever played, and yes, I will be reading the audiobook!
Also, the podcast radio drama I worked on, Passenger List, is out! You can listen to the first two episodes now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and more will be coming out soon. The episode I wrote is further down the line, but in the meantime, follow along with the mystery of what happened to Flight 702! You’ll also get to hear some really amazing voice actors, many of whom I cannot believe I got to write for — Kelly Marie Tran! Rob Benedict! Colin Morgan! Queen Patti Lupone! It’s amazing.
Fake BBC Show of the Week: Great Britain’s Worst Flirts (Might just be an extended overhead shot of all of England)
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A new installment of my weird and embarrassing audio confessions.
I never went to a “normal” summer camp. When I was nine I almost went to a Girl Scout summer camp with some of my friends, but I think we all lost interest after we found out there weren’t any actual tents or cabins, just “outdoor sleeping platforms.” I would have been way too afraid of getting malaria from mosquitos to go. Apparently, they’ve since built A-frame cabins.
The summer camps I went to were all “specialized”: first I went to an aviation camp, sort of like Space Camp, but about aviation. My dad had been a pilot and we’d had a lot of fun talking about airplanes together, so it seemed like a natural fit. But it was on an Air Force base and got a little too militaristic for me my second year. That’s when a former fighter pilot came in to talk about his job (and to complain about the inaccuracies in Top Gun — “Goose wouldn’t have died! He would have gone right through the glass! For all we know, Goose is still alive!”), and told us that if we wanted his job we’d just have to “accept” that at some point we’d probably end up killing civilians as well as “the enemy.”
That’s when I decided being a pilot was not for me; I very much did not want to kill anyone. Commercial piloting seemed out, too: I had terrible motion sickness, and my favorite part of camp was not the super cool, high-tech flight simulators, but outdoor survival skills. (Here’s a tip: if you’re ever in the woods, look for clustered berries, like blackberries or raspberries, they’re always safe to eat. Blue or black berries are safe about 85% of the time, but stay the hell away from white and red berries.)
Then, of course, there was theater camp. This was much more my speed. Though it got a little weird there, too: my first summer session at Idyllwild Arts, I was not in something kid-friendly like Guys and Dolls or You Can’t Take it With You, but an adaptation of a book called I Never Saw Another Butterfly, about the children who lived in the Holocaust-era ghetto, Terezin. Lots of parents drove up at the end of the session to see their mostly Jewish children perform dark poetry in striped uniforms with yellow stars.
My second session started with my new roommates asking me “Are you into slash fanfiction?” and ended with us all crying over the Queer as Folk season one finale. Somewhere in-between, two of them burst into our room right before lights-out, gleefully shrieking “We just paid two boys to kiss!” (They, and the boys, assured me it was all in fun and no one had felt pressured.)
Finally, before my senior year of high school I did a summer Shakespeare intensive near my aunt’s house in rural Pennsylvania, a place my parents would ship me and my sister off to in the summer because, 1) our aunt and uncle were way more fun to be around, and 2) they figured we wouldn’t get in trouble out in Amish Country. I was lucky enough to get the part of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and felt right at home with a group of fifteen girls and two boys who played the drinking game Kings with non-alcoholic drinks, and drove around Lancaster County yelling along to Tenacious D songs.
Like I said, the 2000s were a weird time to be a teenager.
Stuff I Did This Week: My episode of OCD Stories is now up! Also, I started a public Instagram! It’s @MaraNotLikeSarah.
Fake BBC Show Title of the Week: A Smattering
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New audio confession!
I’ve watched Fleabag I don’t know how many times and I have to remind myself that yes, we’re all jealous of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but no, we can’t all be Phoebe Waller-Bridge. We don’t all get to be the outliers, and that’s OK. (This also means we don’t have to date Martin McDonagh. The Pillowman was great, but he seems like… a lot to deal with.)
I think it’s a bit like what Dorian Corey said: “You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better to just enjoy it. Pay your dues, and enjoy it.”
Of course, this could all just be sour grapes. But I’ll maintain that sour grapes is a great coping mechanism.
Stuff I Did This Week: Recorded an episode of The OCD Stories, which will be up this coming Sunday! I had a great time talking with Stuart Ralph both at OCD Con and this past week. He’s not only very interesting, but very respectful, which is of utmost importance when you’re talking to people about their mental health histories, and sadly, not always the case.
Also, as I mentioned last time, Philosophy Tube did a charity Shakespeare stream to raise money for Samaritans (a UK mental health charity and suicide hotline), and I got to participate! It was so much fun! First I got to read Lady MacBeth, a character I’ve always had fun with (I used to do her “screw your courage to the sticking place” monologue for high school and college auditions—I was an intense and pretentious teenager, OK?), and Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, who I’ve always loved. (Man, that character is dirtier than I remembered; good on Natalie Wynn for going along with it.) They raised over $120,000!
Fake BBC Show of the Week: This Will Get Psychosexual Very Quickly (OK, that’s really more of a Sky or ITV thing, but so are a lot of my titles)
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New episode of my embarrassing audio admissions!
I’ve only learned how to dress myself appropriately in the past few years. I used to get Delia’s catalogs back in middle school, folding down the corners when I saw a “cute” khaki skirt or blue tankini, but I never actually bought anything. Actually, I remember my dad flipping through the catalog once, too, and saying “They have some nice stuff. Maybe you should order from there!” But I think I was too scared to branch out. I just wanted to play it safe, to wear my Mervyn’s shorts and my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups t-shirt.
Funny story about that shirt, I got it while filming Thomas and the Magic Railroad in Pennsylvania, after I met some extras who worked for Hershey’s Chocolate. After I told them how much I loved Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, they came back the next day and filled my trailer with Hershey gear, and enough chocolate to last for months. (I think that was also the same day we were filming on a train through Amish country, and two young Amish children, a boy and a girl, came up to watch. They didn’t say anything, just stared. I hope it didn’t scare them, and I’m glad it was just a kids’ movie they were seeing being made and not anything scary or violent.)
I loved that Reese’s shirt, and wore it all the time, until the day in eighth grade a strange boy with mean eyes made a grabby hand motion at bust level and said “‘Reese’s Cups,’ huh?” Middle school boys ruin everything.
Well, it needed to be retired at some point, I suppose. By that time, my dad had remarried, and my stepmother was more than willing to take me shopping for cute clothes. I branched out ever so slightly, but usually I just ended up wearing her hand-me-downs, especially to drama and choir rehearsals—lots of stretch pants and oversize t-shirts and track suits. A boarding school frenemy told me I dressed like a “forty-year-old lesbian,” and that became my nickname.
Funny that now I’m only eight years away and maybe two Kinsey numbers away from being an actual forty-year-old lesbian, and now I’m getting advertisements for the kinds of clothes I should have been wearing back when that was my nickname. I suppose it could have been worse, I could be getting ads appropriate for my other high school nicknames: “The Virgin Mara,” and the one I got at theater camp because I was the only one in my room who wouldn’t admit to having crushes on girls, was “The Token Straight Girl.”
Some nicknames age better than others.
(And now I want peanut butter cups.)
Stuff I Did This Week: Got the news that tickets for a live show I will be on this September 11th, The Secret Society of the Sisterhood, are now on sale! I did this show a year and a half ago and I absolutely loved it, and can’t wait to do it again. The lineup is fantastic, too — I’m so happy to be sharing the stage with the fantastic Cameron Esposito and Akilah Hughes, who I know and love, but also Jackie Fuchs and Kay Hanley? Amazing! If you’ll be in LA, get a ticket!
Fake BBC Show of the Week: Brekkie with Berrycloth
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A new installment of my audio series of embarrassing thoughts!
Anyone else have the kind of self-confidence that bounces around like this? It sounds unhealthy, but I think probably a lot of us do this, go from low to high and back again. I figure as long as we can recognize it, and laugh about it, it’s probably fine. I’ve always been of the opinion that you don’t need to be your own best friend, but you do need to be on decent working terms with yourself. You are your own best co-worker.
I really do love Lea Salonga. I love a lot of Broadway actresses, but I think she means a lot to me because of my Filipino stepfamily: she’s considered even more of a national treasure in the Philippines. I found this video of her auditioning for Miss Saigon at 17, and it’s spellbinding. (Anna and I are in a hotel room right now, and she said, “Oh, turn it up! I love this video!”) Yes, I was a child actor, too, but I can’t imagine the kind of talent and drive needed to be that professional a stage actor and singer so young. She has such a pure, beautiful voice. I mean, come on, she’s not just a Disney princess, she’s a Disney princess two times over.
Regarding the title… Get it? Like what my confidence in myself does? Like A Whole New World? Maybe it made more sense in my head. Great, now I’ve lost my confidence again.
Stuff I Did This Week: Came back to the US from London (subscriber post about that incoming!), slept through my jetlag, and then went to New York to meet the winning family of the Matilda 30 Sweepstakes! Anna and I got to have tea with a lovely couple and their two adorable children who’d come to NYC all the way from Essex, UK! It was a true delight.
Fake BBC Show of the Week: Hardboiled, Sweets (How this isn’t a very sexist detective show from the ‘70s about a detective and his femme fatale sidekick “Sweets” is beyond me. Maybe that’s more of an American thing?)
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Another installment of my audio confessions!
I do realize that no monsters, even just for a while, would make it an entirely different show, but you know what? I like realistic teen dramas. I like when people can find the highs and lows in the everyday. Sure, I love a good monster story, too, but sometimes I just want regular kid stuff, with less peril.
This might just be me, though. When I got to the end of the first Harry Potter book as a twelve-year-old, I read the summary for Chamber of Secrets and initially thought, “Does there have to be an ancient curse? Can’t they just have a normal year at school?” I probably was a very boring twelve-year-old, but isn’t magic school exciting enough on its own?
Probably not. One of the cardinal rules of character-driven writing is you’re supposed to focus on the most interesting thing that ever happened to them. It’s much less interesting for kids to have a normal year at school after they’ve fought monsters. Maybe I should see if there’s an edited version, like very strict Christians and Mormons used to have of R-rated movies? Where they just hang around talking and drinking slurpees and Eleven’s nose only bleeds because she tried to make the Eggos come out of the toaster more quickly?
Stuff I Did This Week: I was honored to give the keynote speech at the International OCD Foundation’s annual conference! The IOCDF has given so much hope to so many people with OCD, as well as their friends and family. Sharing my story with such a warm, welcoming, and understanding crowd was truly a privilege. It was also a lot of fun — I might just have to write a subscribers’ post about some of my favorite moments.
I also listed my favorite (or in this case, “favourite”) podcasts for the CBC’s Podcast Playlist! I listen to so many that they actually had to make ANOTHER list of my other favorites. Ever wondered what I listen to? Here’s your chance to find out!
Fake BBC Show of the Week: You Are a Fishmonger
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A new installment of my late-night audio confessions!
Whoa-oh-OH-oh! Music aside, they’re both pretty obnoxious band names. Putting punctuation in your band name so it looks like people are saying “I don’t like fun.” when they dislike your band? Yeah, that’s annoying. (Although, I think by a lot of people’s standards, I don’t really like fun. I’m extremely risk-averse and very bad at enjoying things in the moment. Maybe it’s genetic: someone once told me there’s no word for “fun” in Russian.)
It reminds me of when I was in fourth grade and was really frustrated with my teacher’s insistence that my oral book report have an opening line that “grabbed their attention.” “Hey Dad, how’s this for an opener,” I said to him, “‘FIRE! Just kidding, but now that I have your attention, let me tell you about Ribsy by Beverly Cleary!’”
My dad was taken aback for a second, then, being the champion understater that he is, told me, “Well, that’s not exactly great literature.”
He was right. Instead, I opened by asking if anyone had anyone had ever heard of a dog “talking” on the phone, after a scene where the lost dog was found by a family who recognized him from the signs, called his owner, and let the dog bark over the phone. But I don’t think I did a very good job of explaining it, because when I asked if there were any questions, one kid immediately raised his hand and said, “When in the book does the dog learn how to talk?”
Talking dogs. Now that’s fun.
Fake BBC Show of the Week: Twizzled!
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Another installment of my embarrassing audio stories!
Driving is SCARY, you guys. It didn’t seem that scary when I was first learning as a teenager, but became increasingly more terrifying in the subsequent years I spent not driving. And I saw a lot of scary things on the subway: once I nodded off after a long day at Publicolor (I had an uncanny ability to fall asleep on the train and still wake up at the right stop), and woke up a few stops before home because I felt like I was being shoved. It turns out a guy sitting across from the guy next to me took offense to something he’d said, and decided to beat the crap out of him. I felt like I was being shoved because the guy next to me was getting pummeled.
What did I do? What everyone else did: stood up, and got as far away from the two fighters as we could until the next stop, when the conductor threw the instigator off the train. The other guy spit a mouthful of blood onto the floor and paced back and forth, high on adrenaline, yelling “Fk! Fk!” over and over again. The rest of us simply got off the train car, moved to the next train car down, and continued our ride as usual.
Still, driving is scarier. I know it’s fallacious to assume something “unnatural” is dangerous, but I do think piloting a two-ton machine is a dangerous, unnatural thing, and we completely take it for granted. I also think it’s easier to learn how to do it when you’re a teenager, because your own mortality is beyond your comprehension. Unless you’re a goth, and even then, you’re only thinking about danger and mortality in an abstract, poetic sense.
Anyway, I never got my license, and never had a goth phase, but I guess it’s never too late for either. And apparently, it’s never too late for acne. Sigh.
Fake BBC Show of the Week: Three Days To the Jumble Sale!
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Another embarrassing story told through audio!
I told Anna what my friends said about this, and she said, “Oh yeah, I’ve thought a lot about this, and I decided that if you were a murderer, you’d be the type to like, leave clues behind.”
I said, “Hold up, you’ve ‘thought a lot about this’?”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “I think of what ‘Bad Mara’ would be like.”
“So… do you also think of what you’d be like as a murderer?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t be a murderer!” She said, as if I were the stupidest person alive. “I’d be a con artist!”
I have my doubts about that. I think she’s more likely to start running a really boring cult. Probably completely unintentionally.
Stuff I Did This Week: I went to Autostraddle’s A-Camp for the third time! I taught a storytelling workshop, led a musical theater singalong, and made a lot of new friends!
Also, the American Humanist Association gave me the 2019 LGBTQ Humanist Award!
Fake BBC Show Title of the Week: The Blood Pudding Murders (yeah, I know it’s a totally innocuous food, but it still sounds sinister.)
And a reminder, you will get more stuff if you…
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New embarrassing audio story!
Don’t pretend like you weren’t psyched when all those pretty insulated water bottles came out a few years. My brother let me borrow his on a car trip from Pennsylvania to South Carolina for a cousin’s wedding, which was something like nine hours, and my tea stayed hot the whole time! That’s amazing! We also listened to the whole of You Must Remember This’s series on Charles Manson’s Hollywood, which probably says a lot about our family.
OK, maybe you weren’t that psyched when those water bottles came out. You should definitely listen to You Must Remember This, though.
Stuff I Did This Week: You should ALSO listen to the Mortal Podkast episode I did with Ben Mekler!
Fake BBC Show Title of the Week: Flicking the V’s (I just realized this one actually sounds much dirtier in American English)
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It’s time again for an embarrassing story told through audio!
This installment is a demonstration of two of my deepest-held beliefs: the appeal of something dramatic, and over-the-top is universal. Morrissey (unfortunately) filled that void for some of us for a while, with his maudlin silliness, but everybody has some kind of spectacle that they love. It’s musicals for me, but it’s pro-wrestling or heavy metal or breakdancing for someone else. It’s catharsis!
Also, everyone I know entering their thirties is now dealing with some kind of chronic illness or pain. That’s a much more depressing thing to think about, but it’s true, at least amongst my friends. I feel like 30th birthday cards should say “Happy Birthday! Remember to do your physical therapy exercises even on days your back doesn’t hurt!” We laugh because it hurts—literally. Catharsis! (Catharsis! would be a good name for a musical.)
Stuff I Did This Week: Celebrated the release of season two of Big Hero 6: The Series! It’s an awesome, adorable show, and you can watch it on the Disney Channel, DisneyNow, or on Hulu! Playing Liv Amara has been a dream come true: who doesn’t want to grow up to be a Disney Villain?
I also recorded an episode of Mortal Podkast with Ben Mekler, which should be up soon! Fun fact: I have never owned a game console in my life (parents wouldn’t allow it, so PC gaming — and, um, something that rhymes with shmemulators — were more my speed), and Mortal Kombat was completely beyond my ken. We talked about Mortal Kombat lore, which is WAY more in-depth than I thought, but also about musicals.
Speaking of which, I saw LES MISERABLES ON STAGE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE! Yes, I cried a little. If you’re in LA, it’s playing at the Pantages for the next few weeks, and you should see it! I loved it, and so did Jenny Jaffe, who came with me and has seen it something like ten times, so that says a lot!
Fake BBC Show Title of the Week: Doing Poorly
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New installment in the audio segment in which I share embarrassing thoughts and anecdotes.
Ra-ra-Rasputin! I heard it in a ContraPoints video a few weeks ago and it’s been in my head ever since. How did I not know about this song until now? It’s got everything I love: Russian history! Mysticism! Cheesy ‘70s slang! Awkward sexual metaphors! Disco! “Oh, those Russians…”
My voice is raspy in this one because I, once again, got strep throat! I’m basically Beth in Little Women at this point.
Stuff I Did This Week: Night Vale Presents at the Largo was amazing. I love the Faceless Old Woman so much, and I love what Joseph and Jeffrey have written for her. This was a particularly scary one, and my voice sounding like Mercedes McCambridge as the demon in The Exorcist probably only added to that. (Turns out she was inspired by her bouts with bronchitis!) Thanks to everyone who came!
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Hello! Here is another embarrassing story, told out loud!
You have to keep in mind this was 2009 or 2010, when the obnoxious hipper-than-thou craft beer and hard liquor culture was huge in the East Village and Brooklyn. It was cool to be a food or alcohol snob. Unless you wanted to enjoy something ironically (remember when Pabst Blue Ribbon was a hipster staple?) you were going to be judged for your tastes. And I was.
I don’t drink much at all anymore — it messes with my already messed-up blood pressure — but I have sort of acclimated myself to particular tastes in the past few years. Now I love dark chocolate, I like cooked kale and miso soup, and I can tolerate arugula and coffee. I can even stand the tiniest bit of cilantro! Maybe some of my extra tastebuds have been killed off? If they have, I couldn’t be happier about it.
I just got back from the Midwest, and will be posting later this week about some weird happenings I experienced there. It is likely to be a Subscribers Only post, though. So, you know what that means!
Fake BBC Show Title of the Week: Into the Cooker With It! (Synopsis: a cooking show done in less than twenty minutes)
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Another installment of my audio recordings of funny or embarrassing anecdotes.
It’s springtime now! The Santa Ana winds are blowing! I was recording a video today and my hair was in my face the whole time.
I’m not sure what my favorite season is. I like winter, but winter clearly does not like me back, and I feel like you get called basic for saying summer or Fall these days. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never had a real spring, the ones you see in movies. LA’s springs are just a prelude to summer, and my last few years in New York, we skipped spring went right from disgusting winters to disgusting summers. There might have been one or two when I was in college? Or maybe spring is just overrated. ALL SEASONS SUCK. There, I said it.
Fake BBC Show Title of the Week: May, Dismayed! (She really does seem to be these days, doesn’t she?)
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Further adventures in me discussing stories from my life in the wee hours! This one’s a bit delayed because I just finally got my voice back after a case of strep throat. (I once made a poll asking people where they think they’d be if they had been born hundreds of years earlier. After yet another bout with strep, I’m pretty sure my answer is “dead of scarlet fever.”)
Anyway, I looked up “jumpsuit” on Twitter earlier and there were hundreds of people making this joke JUST IN THE LAST DAY. Also, Anna recently told me “I actually don’t really like it when dresses have pockets” and I have never understood her less.
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New posts later this week; New York was very busy and L.A. has been even busier. In the meantime, another late-night audio confession!
There were even signs up at the end of the year that said “We don’t care, just please return what you took” and I was like “HELL NO I PAID WAY TOO MUCH TO DO THAT”
Of course, knowing my alma mater, if they somehow catch wind of this, they’d probably send me a bill.
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Another installment of my new spoken feature! I feel that I owe apologies for two things this time:
The sound quality. It’s the dishwasher, which I was trying to run before I left for New York. I think there’s a part of me that believes that’s when you’re supposed to run appliances late at night? I was a child of the Flex Your Power movement.
This is more of a Midnight Opinion than a Midnight Confession. It also doesn’t tie in with any catchy ‘60s Sunshine pop songs. (Also, look at this list of Sunshine pop band names! I could feel my insulin spike just reading them.)
All that aside, I stand by this opinion. How bad was that book? So bad that I, a teenager with latent homosexual inclinations who actually went to boarding school, still hated it.
Fake BBC Show Title of the Week: Gettin’ Your Round In
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Another installment of my new spoken feature in which I share brief (and often embarrassing) anecdotes.
I guess this was a bit like Hipster Puppies. Man, remember when we were content just to make fun of hipsters all day long? Those were the days. (Actually, there were wars going on and we were in a really bad recession at the time, so they weren’t.)
Also I JUST now realized my inadvertent pun with “towed.” Oh well.
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Another installment of my new audio feature in which I share brief (and often embarrassing) anecdotes.
They came out way too thin and crispy. I’m sorry I could have gotten you in trouble, Jessica.
This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at mara.substack.com/subscribe
A new audio feature in which I share brief (and often embarrassing) anecdotes.
Yes, I’m still watching The Sopranos.
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