“You’re totally gay for Anne Boleyn,” a friend once said to me. They’re right. Guilty as charged. I’m straight and married to a man, but Anne Boleyn is my posthumous hall pass.

Tudor-fandom and all-things Anne bit me around 2008. I’m rather ashamed to report that it was due to a personal infatuation with The Other Boleyn Girl (the book) and The Tudors (the TV show). The film adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl is wretched but The Tudors was compulsively watchable, especially for Natalie Dormer’s performance as one of the more exquisite, bombastic Anne Boleyns. She’s one of many to take on the role, and indeed, you don’t step into Anne’s shoes unless you’re the type of person who can handle what’s coming.

God save the queen… from all her haters

At the time of her execution on May 19, 1536, Anne Boleyn had been Queen of England for just 1,064 days. Surrounded by controversy and drama, her reign was unpopular among the English people. When she and King Henry VIII married in secret on Nov. 14, 1532, Anne quickly became pregnant with the future Queen Elizabeth I, and Henry became a bigamist, seeing as he was already married to Queen Catherine of Aragon. Efforts to remove Queen Catherine had been ongoing for the last eight years, causing Anne’s reputation to take the brunt of the blame for the actions taken against the disgraced queen. During her thousand-day reign, she failed to produce Henry’s much-hoped for son, and was overthrown in a plot, accused of adultery and witchcraft, when the king decided that this queen, too, needed to be disposed of.

Though she was reviled by many of her contemporaries, Anne’s memory has expanded to legendary heights. In the Victorian age, she came to be seen as more of a victim than an active aggressor in the deadly English renaissance game of thrones. Today, she enjoys a happy status as a well-loved icon: she’s the subject of books, films, TV shows, fan sites, and an internationally touring musical (more below), where Anne sings the words “LOL. Say oh well. Or go to hell.” You can find her face printed on T-shirts, stickers, totebags, and coffee mugs. The popular merch site TeePublic sells a T-shirt that says “Anne Boleyn is my BFF.”

On celluloid, she’s been portrayed by a variety of different actresses, starting in the silent era. In 1933, the British-Indian actress Merle Oberon portrayed Anne in The Private Life of Henry the VIII — a short but powerful performance. Then, nearly a century later, Anne was played in British Channel 5’s Anne Boleyn miniseries by Jodie Turner-Smith: a Black actress who brought a fresh take on the role, equal parts sass and severity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was racist backlash online from haters whining that Anne was white and therefore should be played by a white actress. I see the same thing happening now, over the casting of trans-actress and singer Dylan Mulvaney, who is currently wearing the gilded-B around her neck as Anne in the Broadway musical Six.

I don’t want to link to the transphobes, but suffice it to say, their complaints are similar to those lodged against Turner-Smith. She’s not the same as Anne was. This isn’t right. Although casting svelte, hunky Jonathan Rhys Meyers to play Henry VIII at his most corpulent is just fine, casting these women as Anne certainly isn’t!

Interestingly, it feels like some of the same criticism Anne herself faced. A religious outsider, she brought more than just marital discord to the English throne. At her father’s insistence, Anne and her older sister, Mary, had been educated as girls overseas, first at the court of Margaret of Austria, then later at the French court, where they served as maids of honor to Queens Mary and Claude. This was highly unusual for young women at the time, and it allowed Anne the extraordinary opportunity to become enriched in the emerging doctrines of religious reformation, which was sweeping Europe at a fever pitch. When she returned to England in 1522 as a young woman, she must have been full of ideas and ambitions. It wasn’t until 1526 that her relationship with the king began, and she was able to bend his ear in the direction of reformation. She gave him a copy of William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man—a book that argued kings had superior authority to popes—and effectively kicked off the great schism of the English Reformation.

The English, who by then were beholden to the church in Rome and its Catholic traditions, were not pleased with these new developments. In 1531, a mob of eight thousand women chased Anne over a river, threatening to kill her. When she really was killed by the swordsman in 1536, her execution was received with a mixture of relief and trepidation. The people were glad to be rid of her, but they were also leery of the new precedent that was being set. She was the first English Queen to be executed, and she wouldn’t be the last.

By playing Anne in Six—a musical I call Hamilton’s punk-rock little sister—Dylan Mulvaney has drawn a lot of public ire. Sadly, she’s not unaccustomed to this: notoriously, in 2023, a boycott to Bud Light was drummed up after Mulvaney appeared in an Instagram video promotion of the beer, which included aluminum cans with her face on it. Hot-tub milk-drinker Kid Rock retaliated by posting a video of himself shooting cans of Bud Light with a military-grade weapon. Mulvaney later said that she had “been scared to leave my house, and I have been ridiculed in public, I have been followed,” and felt that Bud Light’s lack of support was itself worse than the backlash. “For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse in my opinion than not hiring a trans person at all because it gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want,” she went on, ​​“[a]nd the hate doesn’t end with me, it has serious and grave consequences for the rest of our community.”

After she was cast in Six, Mulvaney acknowledged that she shared some characteristics with the queen. “I think some people might consider me to be a slightly polarizing woman,” she said in an interview with Broadway.com. “I think there’s something really beautiful about getting to embody this woman who was a little bit ahead of her time and a lot misunderstood. She wanted to feel powerful, she wanted to have a voice, and that got her into some not-so-great situations. I’m hoping that I can take what I’ve been through these past few years and bring it into the character.”

Like Anne’s reformation in Europe, Mulvaney, too, transformed. Starting in 2022, she began filming her gender transition on TikTok, causing viral ripples that gained her millions of followers and untold influence. She emerged the woman she was always meant to be: the same girl who had told her mom, at age four, that she thought God had made a mistake, by accidentally putting a little girl in a little boy’s body. She has also indicated that she still, in some ways, believes in Catholicism, despite its opposition to LGBTQ rights. This is another thing she has in common with Anne—although she had lived her adult life as a vocal reformer, Anne went to her grave a good Catholic, giving her last confession to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and taking communion before her execution.

From the look and sound of things, Mulvaney is crushing as Anne. She may as well be wearing Anne’s personal mottos on her flared, green sleeve: “Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne,” and “La Plus Heureuse.” Respectively, these translate to, “Let Them Grumble, This is How It’s Going To Be,” and “The Most Happy.” I hope she cares not a whit what any of her detractors think when she’s up there onstage, belting her head off.

LOL. Say oh well. Or go to hell.

Like many Americans, I am fat.

I’ve been overweight the majority of my adult life. It started when I was in middle school, and pretty much hasn’t changed. I was a thin, scrawny child, but when I hit puberty, that’s when the fat rolled in to town. I’m 41 and realize now, of course, that this is all natural: it’s the process of a girl’s body becoming a woman’s. Chests plump out, and hips and butts suddenly appear. It takes fat—and lots of it—to make these things.

I guess I have what you’d call an “apple” body shape. I’m short like my mom—just a little under 5’1”—but I’m stocky like my dad, who’s six feet tall and kind of looks like Hank Hill, with a big, protruding belly and no ass to speak of. I’m very top-heavy—picture a nearly-empty toothpaste tube, with all the goo rolled up to the top of the cap. I have a full, moon-like face, with thick, meaty tits; my ribcage is wide, and my belly is soft and cylindrical, draping down over my waist like a wet beach towel. My thickness cuts off almost abruptly at my waist, and I have thin, muscular legs. Like my dad, my ass is flat, and for all-intents-and-purposes, missing in action.

This is the body I have. I’ve never been destined for Playmate of the Year. It’s just what I look like, and without several thousand dollars of disposable income and an objective desire to mutilate myself, it’s what I’m stuck looking like.

As they say and they say, it is what it is. It’s what I was meant to grow into. Could I stand to lose a few pounds? Sure. But I’m hardly in a health crisis, my doctors aren’t concerned, and quite frankly, I’m happy with my body these days. Why wouldn’t I be? It’s gotten me through a major surgery (more on that later), and too many injuries—and pleasures—to count.

My mother does not like her body. She never has. She’s turning 80 this year, and still carries childhood trauma from being a chubby kid who was bullied. When my adolescent body began developing, she put me on several diets, and took away things I loved, like soda and pizza. She lamented my new body often and frequently within my earshot, if not directly to me in the form of commands. “Suck it in,” she’d warn under her breath, pinching my stomach with her bony fingers. “People can see.” My mother, tiny as a mouse, not even five feet tall, barely clearing 100 pounds, was an anxious wreck about many things, but seemed to fear fat above all. She made sure our pantry was stocked with low-and-fat-free versions of everything—the bland, tasteless iterations of paper factory food that carried the brand label but lacked any semblance of flavor.

No matter what she did, she hated her body. With guidance and determination, she taught me to hate mine, too. I went to school every week wrapped in extra-large T-shirts, oversized sweatshirts or baggy jeans, trying to hide the monstrous figure growing around me. (Do a lot of teenage girls do this? One of my friends said this was her “I want to be a tent” phase).

By high school, though, I made one small attempt to reclaim pride over my appearance. In my junior year, with the help of a talented friend named Amy and a bottle of Manic Panic, I dyed my hair hot pink. This was 2002, and The Osbournes had just been released on MTV. Because my face is full and my hair was eccentric, people started telling me that I looked like Kelly Osbourne. Particularly after she released her cover of Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.”

I watched The Osbournes, and I loved Kelly’s punk aesthetic. I didn’t mind the comparison, although my dad, a stuffy, no-nonsense attorney, could not resemble Ozzy Osbourne less if he were wearing an Ozzy Osbourne Halloween costume. (For one thing, my dad hates swear words. Especially on TV).

These days, Kelly and I don’t look much alike. My hair is no longer pink, and neither is hers. We’re both 41—in fact, she’s just about three weeks younger than I am. When she was a kid like me, the media liked to pick on her, because she had the audacity to become a public figure with a Romanesque body. She underwent gastric sleeve surgery in 2020 and lost 85 pounds, but now faces criticism for being too thin, particularly after her appearance at the 2026 Brit Awards alongside her mother, Sharon. Last year, she spoke at a health summit, where she stated, “I have been a drug addict, an alcoholic… I’ve been a complete mess, disrespectful to people, horrible—but I got more shit for being fat than I did for anything else. It’s insane.”

Fortunately, I’ve never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but I can relate to her words. Being too fat or too skinny or too short or too anything other than exactly the thing you’re supposed to be. The impossible-to-achieve body. Fighting against genetics and hunger and advertising and just life in general.

I’m still raw in this emotional space. My mother was recently in the hospital after a terrible fall, and I took an emergency flight up to Michigan so I could help my elderly parents in their hour of need. The next four days were spent in a tornado of assistance, running back and forth from their house to the hospital, then to the rehab where my mother was released to learn how to walk again. Two days into my visit, a pipe burst in their house, causing the ceiling over the basement to start leaking water. The city told us they couldn’t come out to shut off the water for three days. I helped my 75-year-old dad put buckets down and mop up the mess. We lugged the fridge across the kitchen. I tore apart the house, searching for my mother’s lost wrap-around booklight.

Four days into my visit, my father, the retired attorney, sent a text message to my mom. He included me in the thread, though he didn’t mean to. In the message, he complained to my mom that he thought I was too overweight and “tired easily.” My mom replied that she agreed with him. She said that I had lost a bunch of weight when I was sick with diverticulitis, a disease that ravaged my colon and caused me to have colo-rectal surgery in 2023, but bemoaned the fact that I had gained it all back. I should take an exercise class, she asserted. “I hate seeing her with that roll in her middle.”

This, from my own family, at the beginning of Women’s History Month.

I left my father’s house in a rage. I told him I was going home to my husband, where I was loved and respected. I told him that if mom hated seeing me the way I am, she didn’t have to see me anymore. I rebooked my flight back to Austin the next day, got a hotel by the airport, and called an Uber to come pick me up. Sometimes, being an adult is wonderful. I blocked both of their phone numbers, and have not spoken with them since.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve gone no-contact with my family; I don’t know if it will be the last. What I do know is that I deserve to be treated with respect. I am in the middle of doing the hard work of forgiveness, and that’s part of why I’m writing this story. My parents are both baby boomers—they’ve been groomed all their long lives to see women in this degrading manner. I almost have to forgive them, because they never really stood a chance. I feel heartbroken for my mom who, at 80, still expresses concern over her imaginary “thunder thighs.” They’re brilliant in some ways, and ever-so childlike and simple in others. Isn’t that true of all our parents? They mixed their DNA, and then hated the result.

I wish they could realize that we’ve all been subjecting ourselves to decades of a beauty standard dictated by a cabal of pedophiles. This has been made abundantly clear by the partial release of the Epstein files. Men who want to have sex with teenagers have been using the media to brainwash us all into fetishizing youth. (Jameela Jamil wrote about this and it’s one of my favorite essays ever).

Neither of my parents are doctors. I’m not one, either, so I don’t feel as though I can rightfully judge what’s going on with Kelly Osbourne—or anyone else’s fucking body—these days. I do know that she is mourning the loss of her father, who she said was her best friend. Maybe we should just consider, you know, trusting women? Trusting our intelligence, and our ability to manage our own bodies. Stop trying to lock us into conservatorships whenever we fuck up. Quit acting like a few extra pounds calls for an intervention. If you’re not a doctor or a medical professional, please shut the fuck up about someone’s appearance or perceived condition. This is one of my many, many wishes for society.

Our pink hair is gone. But I still feel a lot like Kelly Osbourne.

More importantly, it’s the story of how my family became whole. It’s the story of how I became a “mom.” Put a pin in “mom.”

But before we get to the part that’s all warm and goes squish, we gotta talk about the dead cats, and my diseased colon. Yes, the Hallmark Channel is interested.

Now, I’m not really prone to exaggeration, but this is the miracle that saved my life. And here’s the thing about miracles: before they’re miraculous, they’re messy. For example, take the Book of Exodus: Moses parted the Red Sea, and led the Israelites to freedom. However, before reaching the Promised Land, you gotta assume God’s Chosen were trekking past sky-high sea walls… filled with floating dead fish. Worst. Aquarium day. Ever.

My voyage through rotting fish corpses began in 2010, when I moved to Austin. And I didn’t come here alone: I came with a used mattress from Craigslist, big dreams of being a comedy writer, and by the side of this comedy nerd, childless cat lady, was her Maine Coon—Michael Ian Cat. We left Detroit, and were ready to take on the world. (Or ruin it, according to people who hump couches).

I adopted Mikey in late 2008. One of my coworkers had a friend whose mother had found a box of four kittens, along with momma cat, abandoned on the side of the road. My coworker adopted Mikey’s sister, and named her ‘Raz.’ As they say, Mikey chose me: he ran right up to me and licked my face. After that, we were barely apart. Maine Coons love to cuddle, and Mikey didn’t cuddle so much as flatten. He’s the only cat I’ve ever known to run up to complete strangers and just throw his body at them. He loved being on top of people. When my brother moved to Austin in 2016, he stayed on my couch for a couple weeks, and woke up complaining of a “giant weight on my chest.” I had to warn non-cat people in advance to come over at their own risk.

Why Austin? I get asked this question on a regular basis. Not every day, but every time I meet someone new, certainly. I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, a plain white girl in a plain white town. I am 5’1”, the tallest woman in my family, on my mother’s side, at least. My mother, a doctor of English, is about to turn 80. She was 4’11” throughout my entire childhood, though the dual curses of osteoporosis and scoliosis have rendered her even smaller with time. She didn’t much care for dogs, because, well, dogs can be intimidating to us shorties (I speak only for myself, as I’m sure there are plenty of vertically-challenged dog-lovers out there). Therefore, we always had cats when I was growing up; from the moment I hit adulthood, I couldn’t imagine not having one of my own. I also couldn’t imagine not having a big life—I wanted to be like the people I saw on TV, hilarious shorties like Cheri Oteri and Amy Sedaris. I wanted to be like the writers in Spin magazine, too, with their endless knack for witty repartee around all things pop culture. I knew from a young age that I was going to pick a city to call My Town once I became an adult. Austin, with its melting-pot nature and its lively street performers and its hyper-fixation on tacos won out. In 2010, I rented a one-bedroom for $650 (cute, right?) and Mikey and I became Austinites.

Remember, I don’t exaggerate, so I can honestly say that, until 2021, when I met my partner, Mikey was the love of my life. Pets eagerly fill the companionship void: I think anyone who’s ever had a close relationship with one gets that. Ruben, my now-husband, moved in with us over the summer of 2022; I didn’t know it at the time, but Mikey was dying of cancer. And what’s really fucked up is, at the same time he got sick, I got sick, too. He had cancer, I had diverticulitis—after 14 years of being fat and chonky together, I lost 60 pounds in a year, and then, the day before Thanksgiving (a day where we celebrate fat and chonky), Mikey died, laying next to me on our living room couch.

We called in a vet for a last-minute at-home euthanasia. It’s ironic that we’ve made death delivery on-demand, but there’s still no Door Dashing your way into the Acceptance stage of grief.

So, he died, but I was still here, and still sick. So sick that I went to the ER six times in 2023, including when I had finally had colon surgery in August. But here’s the thing: when I wasn’t getting my loyalty rewards card stamped at the local hospital, I fed cats. Neighborhood cats. We had extra food left behind, and I needed something to do to take my mind off the pain, and the sorrow. Also, our neighborhood is positively overrun with stray cats. It’s like they’ve taken the concept of Austin’s bat bridge and made our street the cat-version.

Then, Gingersnap showed up. She was small, orange, full of piss and vinegar. And by the time we got through with her, she was full of turkey, too. She hung around for several weeks, taking deli turkey slices and dried kibble from us. We thought she was a boy, at first—most ginger cats are, so it was a natural assumption. We were proven wrong, however, when Gingersnap came over one day, and brought her whole family along with her. Imagine my surprise, when I pulled up into our driveway, to see Little Ginger and two Speckle Twins wrestling in our flowerbed.

We’d become a house of porch kittens!

We got to work trapping them. Our efforts grew especially urgent when the family suddenly disappeared for several days, and then reemerged with Little Ginger nowhere in sight. We assumed the worst. I generally advocate to preserve nature, but nature… kinda sucks sometimes? Anything could have happened to him. With traps from the Humane Society, we caught Gingersnap and the Speckle Twins, then brought them into our home. One morning before work, I took Ginger in to get spayed at a low-cost clinic, and they told me she was pregnant again. Three days later, after she recovered from her surgery, we hung onto the Speckle Twins, but let her back outside. As much as nature can suck, she thought our house sucked more, and really didn’t want to be there. But I’m glad we let her out—within minutes, like a little orange, yowling apparition, her ginger son, missing for a week at that point, popped up from across the street. Cancel the amber alert! (Ginger alert). I was crying. Ruben was crying. The cats were crying for more turkey, but our cry chorus arose all the same.

We trapped Little Ginger that day, and brought him into the house. Two weeks later, I went outside to feed Ginger, and found her deceased, lying in the little cat bed we’d bought her from Target. She had no injuries and didn’t look sick—she simply went to sleep on our porch, and didn’t wake up. We never found out what happened to her. We buried her in our backyard, giving her a headstone and a small ceremony. I still choke up when I think of her.

For an Austin street cat, her life was rather remarkable. I mean, she got to have a legal abortion in Texas. Talk about pussy power, right? After she died, Ruben said that, even though she lost her life, she saved three. I said, no baby. Five.

Told you Hallmark was on board.

And that’s the story of how I became a cat mom, and how we went from being together, to five-gether. If you enjoyed that joke, it’s a joke I repurposed from an MTV TV movie starring Kevin Farley, thank you.

The first thing you notice about the 1996 crime drama Fargo is the snow. Thick and white and garish, it fills up the entire screen, as a raging blizzard might a square, Midwestern windowpane. The camera’s wide shots depict a flat, monotonous tundra, frozen and tree-less, lacking any signs of civilization. The snow is more than a setting: it’s practically the lead character, dictating the terms by which all the other characters make their moves. It blankets the land in a distinctive void flush, marred only by the occasional zig-zag of tire tracks or crimson spatter.

This same land, some 1,200 miles south of the Arctic Circle, once belonged to both the Dakota and Anishinaabe people, until it was seized and settled by Europeans in the eighteenth century. Today, more Swedish-Americans live in Minnesota than any other American state, with approximately one-in-ten citizens claiming Swedish ancestry. America’s largest population of Somali immigrants, who began arriving in the late ‘90s to escape a civil war at home, live here, too. Why Minnesota? Abundant factory jobs, but also, something called martisoor.

The Somali refugees who settled in Minneapolis and St. Paul were also attracted by the fact that Minnesota was known for martisoor, which translates to “hospitality” in Somali. [Minnesota author Ahmed Ismail] Yusuf said the state’s ‘liberal attitude and social behavior’ mirrored the immigrants’ own values.

There’s no consensus on where the term Minnesota nice originated, but it was first printed by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 1986. There’s no consensus on its exact definition, either, yet Minnesotans generally concur that it covers a broad social umbrella of applied politeness, a disposition inclined towards affability, and an overall aversion to conflict. Passive-aggressiveness is a known side-effect. On the surface, this seems an odd choice of backdrop for a lurid crime story—particularly one distinguished by its graphic use of violence, considered cutting-edge at the time of its release. It was a cinematic risk that produced one of the most celebrated, iconic films of all-time: a dark, flyover noir about a hapless used car salesman (William H. Macy) who hires two thugs to kidnap his wife in order to extort his wealthy father-in-law. Everybody talks with heavy Minnesotan accents; absolutely nothing goes according to plan.

“Films like ‘Fargo’ are why I love the movies.” Roger Ebert closed out his four-star review of Fargo, practically a love letter, this way. On At the Movies with Gene Siskel, the two men raved about the film, their hands flying through the air like two frantic orchestra conductors as they gushed and gushed. They were as giddy about Fargo as it was possible for two grown men to be giddy about anything.

Though he correctly predicted that Frances McDormand, who starred as Police Chief Marge Gunderson, would cinch an Oscar nomination for Best Actress (she ended up winning), Ebert was mistaken in his assertion that the film was “based on a true story.” It wasn’t his fault: the film’s opening title card states, “this is a true story.” The text goes on further: “The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” When Fargo hit theaters in 1996, it would have been difficult for Ebert or anyone else who saw the movie to know that Joel and Ethan Coen, the film-making brothers and Minneapolis natives, were lying. It seems, just to see if they could get away with it. In Minnesota Nice, a short documentary about the making of Fargo, Macy recounts asking the Coens for more details about the real case the movie was based on. When they told him the whole thing was just made up, he pushed back on the concept. “Guys, it says at the beginning of the script, ‘based on a true story.’ They said well, it’s not. I said, you can’t do that. Because you’re saying something and it’s not true.”

I may or may not have snorted when I heard him say that. Naturally, you can say something, anything, even if it’s not true, though you may expect to face consequences. This is what the actress Felicity Huffman, Macy’s wife, found out in 2019, when she was arrested at gunpoint by federal agents. She later served eleven days in jail after pleading guilty to charges that she had fraudulently arranged for her daughter’s SAT scores to be doctored. Of course, when Macy was filming Fargo, he likely had no inclination that his family would be swept up in the “Operation: Varsity Blues” scandal twenty-four years later. And nobody could have predicted that thousands of Somali families, who lived and worked in the greater Minneapolis area alongside Fargo cast and crew members, would one day see federal agents drawing guns on them, too.

Apart from one errant transfer at the St. Paul airport, I have never been to Minnesota. And until last month, I had never seen Fargo, either. Firstly, yes, I know this makes me a bad Michigander, and no, you can’t send me your medical bills for the seventy-nine heart attacks you had after reading the sentence, “I had never seen Fargo.” I mean, I’m sorry? But not really. I have seen it now, twice, and it was fucking fantastic. In fact, I’m glad I saw it today, as a forty-one-year-old, and not twenty years ago when I would’ve been too young and stupid to appreciate it.

Because, okay, here’s the thing: Fargo is like a legend from my life. I’ll explain, because yes, even I can see how strange it is to have voluntarily abstained myself from this film, seeing as I’m the type of person who finds nothing wrong with quoting Roger Ebert in every one of my Substack posts. The reason I am an Ebert obsessive is because my mom was an Ebert obsessive. In the Detroit area, At The Movies aired on Sunday mornings, and we used to watch it every week while getting ready for church. Siskel and Ebert and their thumb-ranking system is how I found out about contemporary movies long before I ever saw them. And for some reason, the release of Fargo planted itself in my prepubescent brain and stayed there. It must have been because of all the adult enthusiasm. First the guys saw it and raved, then my mom did, too. When Fargo was released, I would’ve been eleven, and remember being confused over all the hype surrounding a pregnant police chief. “Well, what did she have, a boy or a girl?” I asked my mom, assuming this was the most important thing. “That’s not the point,” she replied, sighing. She seemed exasperated by such a pedestrian question. I didn’t get it, but I wasn’t allowed to see it, either. Now that I’ve seen it, not letting me see it as a child was probably the right call.

However, it’s certainly safe to say that I’ve aged well into the R-rated demographic. At any point in my adult life, I’ve had ample opportunity to sit down and watch this movie; yet, I chose not to. Why? Just… fear, I think. Not necessarily the fear of being scarred by something gruesome, but more so the fear of failure. Failure to, well, get it. The fear of being too unsophisticated or uncouth or base to comprehend what I’ve been told for two decades is a masterpiece. I think that, truly, I am more afraid of my own ability to appreciate art, to appreciate reality, as it was meant to be appreciated, than I am the sight of a foot sticking out of a wood chipper.

As I write this, another crime story is unfolding in the streets of Minneapolis. While contemplating Fargo’s premise, it was impossible not to think of this—to think of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Liam Ramos, Keith Porter, Jr., and everyone else who has fallen victim to the hands of federal agents this year. I thought about them as I watched one of the criminals in the movie shoot an innocent man in the back, and I thought about them again when I read that the “true story” aspect was all made up to spin a false narrative. The Coens wanted us to believe that their story was true; today, the United States government wants us to believe that the story we can all see is false.

Yes, Fargo is great. It’s as good as they say, maybe even a little better. I watched it when I was finally ready to. What changed for me was mainly two things: the love and encouragement of my partner, and an individual desire for firsthand experience. Because you see, as I get older and the structure of society continues to shift in ways that defy expectation, I find myself growing weary of taking someone else’s word for it. Even someone as venerable as Ebert. Much like Minnesotans, I’m naturally avoidant; these, however, are not times to be avoided. In Fargo, we see the bad guys get their comeuppances, but not without racking up a considerable body count. The troubling question remains deliberately unanswered—what’s all this violence for? A suitcase of money buried in the snow? Officer Marge puts it quite succinctly at the end of the film, as she drives off with one of the killers in custody.

“There’s more to life than a little money. Don’t you know that? And here you are. And it’s a beautiful day. I just don’t understand it.”

I just don’t understand it. I feel these words in my bones. In my very soul. Oh that I could take a man like Elon Musk or Larry Ellison, look him square in the eyes and shake him by the shoulders, delivering these fiery words directly into whatever soul remains. Or the woman from Maine who, on election night 2024, stared blankly into a local news crew’s camera, her words all but a shrug: “My life was better under President Trump. Things were more affordable.”

There’s more to life than a little money. I just don’t understand it.

(Okay, I have one more question: What happened to Macy’s son in the movie, Scotty? His dad’s arrested and his mom’s dead. My theory is that he got adopted by a nice family, and grew up to become Scotty from the movie Eurotrip. He didn’t know about his dad’s crimes, and didn’t know about his girlfriend’s infidelity. Poor guy.)

At Valerie’s side was Katie Felton, an Austin transplant from Orange County, by way of NYC. She was the teaching assistant, and got to perform in the showcase as well. I can still recall her material today—so deadpan, self-effacing, and utterly fucking hilarious. Katie, too, had taken her first stand-up class earlier that year, but she was far from finished with comedy. With a combination of perseverance and raw talent, she made herself into a unique face in the Austin comedy scene, performing regularly in stand-up shows and teaching comedy classes of her own, including Stand-Up 201, which teaches open mic hosting, and Stand-Up 301, a class that revolves around different comedy styles. (Worth noting that Stand-Up 201 was also accompanied by an open mic, which Katie and her students hosted every Monday at the Front Page in Austin. The mic is currently on hiatus, but hopefully will be returning soon!)

As you might imagine, Katie boasts quite the comedy résumé. Her lip-syncing stand-up showcase, Lip-Shtick Battle (exactly as amazing as it sounds), is an Austin fixture, and, along with fellow stand-up Austen Silver, she hosts the monthly show Quackin’ Jokes at Captain Quackenbush’s Coffeehouse and Bakery. Last year, she was a semi-finalist in the Funniest Person in Austin competition, and this past September, she beat out hundreds of ATX stand-up hopefuls and made it all the way to the FPIA finals.

These days, you can find Katie rocking the mic at comedy stages all over Austin. When she’s not busy opening up for bigwig comedians like Melissa Villasenor and Jared Freid, she’s hosting her podcast on Instagram, 3 Minutes With Katie. And, just recently, she’s been announced as the headliner of her very own show: Live at Coldtowne with Katie Felton.

We’ve known each other for a few years, and I’ve been lucky enough to take both Stand-Up 201 and 301 with her. I can say in all honesty that it’s been a privilege to watch her incredible career arc, and I was grateful that she decided to drop by my little Substack to chat (on my birthday!) about her comedy inspirations, the challenges of the Austin scene, and why Robin Williams is still the absolute best.

Follow Katie:

IG: @kabbagepatchkatie

Podcast: @3minswithkatie

Threads: @kabbagepatchkatie

Showcase: @lipshtickbattle

Classes: merlin-works.com

Growing up on the other side of the mitten-shaped state was Jena Tiller, who became my roommate in 2008. We lived together in a cozy East Lansing apartment, surrounded by trees and rowdy Michigan State undergrads. The roommate connection came about because of a Craigslist ad which, instead of murder, has resulted in almost 20 years of friendship. Jena and I quickly discovered we had much more than living quarters in common. We were the same age, lifelong Michiganders who played clarinet in high school, and both attended multiple summer sessions at the same place, Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, without somehow crossing paths. We spent weeknights up way too late watching Adult Swim and making Taco Bell runs, scarfing down chicken quesadillas while bonding over our shared interests in music and comedy. Bizarrely, we found out that we’d even attended the same Green Day show at Cobo Hall in Detroit on Nov. 6, 2004—four days after George W. Bush was reelected president. (The band opened with “American Idiot,” followed by Billy Joe opining, “this song has extra fucking meaning now!”)

In 2010, I moved to Austin, Texas, but Jena and I never lost touch. Like me, she’d spent her younger years feeling like a bit of an outcast—a quiet and reserved kid from a big family whose perspective always seemed to clash with the conservative backdrop of rural western Michigan. Even among her three siblings, Jena told me that she never really seemed to fit in. Then, she discovered Green Day as a teenager, and in classic rock-‘n’-roll-saved-my-life fashion, found her people. And her people were punk.

Something important to know about Jena is that, yes, while she’s a dyed-in-the-wool punk rocker, she’s also a talented multi-instrumentalist. Hailing from Kalamazoo, Michigan, her all-female band, Sierra Miffed, made their smash debut on the scene in 2023. (Ironically, the same year that its namesake, Sierra Mist, was discontinued). As lead singer and guitarist, Jena drives the trio straight to the top of its power-chord pedestal, and indeed, her musical chops have been long in the making. She started playing guitar at 15 (“Once I learned power chords, that was all I needed”), but has also played drums, piano, oboe, trumpet, and, of course, clarinet. In fact, she was so proficient with clarinet that she was the first chair section leader her entire high school career. Yet, she’d long had ambitions to start her own punk band; an all-girl band, in particular. We’d been exposed to the same media as kids: the same scathing, haughty coverage of female-fronted bands. We looked up to women like Courtney Love and Shirley Manson for presenting a feminist message that called out to us. So, when Jena was introduced to Katy May by mutual friend Jake Simmons—of Jake Simmons and the Little Ghosts—the two women started practicing together in earnest, with Katy on drums and Jena on guitar. Later joined by bassist Tobi Larmee, they began playing at bars, venues, and clubs all over western Michigan. In 2024, they released their demo on Band Camp, and, just this past March, got to open up for ska legends Mustard Plug at Bell’s Brewery.

Fuck, I could not be prouder. That’s my girl up there!

On Nov. 13, you can catch Jena and Sierra Miffed bringing the house down at The Dormouse Theatre in Kalamazoo, as the opening act for a screening of the cult film Nowhere, and next year, Jena has big plans for the band. Check out our interview below, where we got to chat about 90s media, anxiety problems, and Simpsons trivia.

(Note: the Texas punk band Radioactivity is mentioned, so they deserve a quick shout out!)

Follow Sierra Miffed:

IG: @sierramiffed

Facebook: Sierra Miffed

Band Camp: Sierra Miffed

If you’re like me and you’re old, you can remember the days after 9/11, when irony was declared dead.

This was a very sad, confusing time. I adored media fixtures like The Onion and The Daily Show, worrying that they’d fail to continue producing their irony-rich content.

It’s unclear where the rumor of irony’s demise began. It could have originated with Time contributor Roger Rosenblatt, who wrote on Sept. 24, 2001, “One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony.” Or possibly, the culprit was Vanity Fair’s editor Graydon Carter, who beat Rosenblatt to the declaration by six days, stating on Sept. 18, 2001, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.”

It doesn’t really matter whose idea it was, because it never happened. The casualties of 9/11 are known, and continue to be discovered even now. Irony is not and never was among them.

After the towers fell and the country reeled, the bodies were counted. Vengeance was swiftly drawn up and executed. Comedy slowly crept back into the mainstream. Will Ferrell appeared on Saturday Night Live and shook his hairy ass in an American flag thong. On Sept. 26, The Onion published its first issue after the attacks, boasting headlines like, “Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell,” and, “Hugging Up 76,000 Percent.” At Jon Stewart’s Daily Show—teenage me’s favorite thing in the world—the host memorably choked back tears, reflecting with a somber pathos that seemed to tidily sum up everything that had happened. As a child, he said, he’d been dramatically impacted by the assassination of Martin Luther King, but only because he remembered sitting under his desk with the lights off at school, eating cottage cheese. How all these things are connected, I couldn’t say, but Stewart’s message resonated emphatically. He said his show would change, and it did, repeatedly taking the Bush administration to task and receiving two Peabody Awards for its election coverage. By the time Stewart left the show as host in 2015, 21% of Americans aged 18-29 reported getting their news from satire sources like The Daily Show.

I certainly did. Jon Stewart was my high school crush. I graduated in 2003, and spent most of my junior and senior years obsessing over The Daily Show. When I was 19, I even managed to arrange a trip to New York City with three of my friends to see a taping of the show in person. I wish I could remember more about the experience. Sarah Vowell was the guest. I definitely remember reacting like I was 13 and going to a Backstreet Boys concert.

And actually, I got to go to one of those, too. A Backstreet Boys concert. The pre-teen version of me was a little more conventional with her celebrity crushes. I am a child of the 90s, and I enjoy talking about them at length. Pop groups and boy bands—Backstreet, in particular—easily sauntered into my adolescent algorithm. How could I help myself? Those beats, those ballads, those rainy, shirtless music videos. What underdeveloped, preadolescent brain was capable of resisting? I was directly in the path of targeted marketing and powerless to stop it.

For a while, anyway. I got older, and my interests evolved. By the time I reached high school, my bedroom walls were plastered with photos of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. (Thank you, TV Guide). I was a wannabe teenage leftist growing up under the leadership of George W. Bush, and I was transfixed by The Daily Show. I taped it on VHS every night, feverishly devouring each episode the next day. Jon Stewart didn’t have to take his shirt off and sing in the rain to get my attention. I wished more than anything I could be friends with him and his ragtag cast of correspondents. When he hosted Saturday Night Live in March 2002, I taped the episode and re-watched it so many times that I recently showed it to my husband on Peacock and then completely ruined it by saying the punchlines before the actors did.

One sketch is a parody of MTV’s Total Request Live, one of the most watched shows on TV at the time. Jimmy Fallon played host Carson Daly, and Stewart played his guest “Lou Pearlstein.” The character was a spoof of Lou Pearlman, the former manager of both Backstreet Boys and *Nsync. Stewart was barely recognizable in absurdly large dork glasses and grandpa pants stuffed with corpulent padding. Rasping in a nebbish lisp that has little resemblance to the real Pearlman, who spoke more like a personal injury attorney in a television ad, Stewart gleefully introduces his latest boy band project while barely keeping his hands off Jimmy’s butt. Since all his previous bands have left him—he’s got a bit of an embezzlement problem, he admits—he’s been forced to play the role of mad scientist and create this band on the molecular level. He then brings out the product of his demented experiment: the boy band “Agar,” and its members Kyle, the shy one; Chadddd, the cute one (yes, he spells his name with four D’s); Greg, who is the bad boy, but also allergic to light; Jeremy, the, well, deformed one, who has lobster claws for hands and actual gills on his neck; and finally, the baby of the group, Assface. If you’re picturing an ass for a face, this is exactly what Assface looks like. His mouth is an anus. He sings out of his butthole.

They sing their ballad. Greg brings the edge with a rap, but withers under the glare of the spotlight. Jeremy takes the mic in his lobster claw, steady as he can, singing a few melancholic lines before begging a girl, any girl, to put him out of his misery. Assface break dances and leaks green liquid onto the floor out of his mouth/anus.

The audience looks on in disgust while clapping in tepid confusion. This formula, frankly, is fucked. Imagine a bad boy, allergic to light. So, glow-in-the-dark condoms are off the table?

I told you my Stewart obsession was next level. And really, kind of neat that it bisected with my waning Backstreet infatuation. As I watched and re-watched and watched again and again Stewart’s SNL episode, Pearlman himself was fending off legal challenges from the groups he had established and then famously exploited. He would later be convicted for one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history and die in prison, a lifelong conman and suspected insurance fraudster who stole from celebrities and veterans and the working class alike.

As a kid, I knew something of Pearlman’s notoriety – my friends and I recognized him mostly as the somewhat creepy fat dude who hung around the BSB guys in pictures and videos, making Stewart’s SNL portrayal accurate in that regard. We watched MTV, and when BSB, then *Nsync pursued legal action against Pearlman, the news was brought to our attention, if not fully comprehended. I couldn’t have really understood the nature of fraud back then, and never could have known I’d grow up to investigate insurance fraud for a living.

Now, on the subject of bad boys, I must make an awkward admission. It’s a really bad one and it involves a really bad boy. (Not bad like Pearlman, but bad enough). Even as I type this, my armpits are beginning to dampen. This is not the type of disclosure that any self-respecting liberal would like to find themselves in the position of making.

Along with Jon Stewart, I became a fan of—sigh—Bill Maher.

(Ok, you can stop booing, now. This isn’t The Princess Bride. Do I look like Robin Wright to you?)

Here’s how I think it happened: I discovered Maher’s old show, Politically Incorrect, when I was about 12. At a time when The Daily Show was still hosted by Craig Kilbourne and my favorite Backstreet Boy was Brian Littrell. I don’t remember how I started watching it, but an educated guess is that it was an accident. When Andy Samberg appeared on Dana Carvey and David Spade’s podcast, Fly on the Wall, he said that his SNL fandom began by fluke when he’d sneak into his family’s TV room to watch the then-WWF’s Saturday Night’s Main Event, which was only on once a month. When it wasn’t on, he’d end up watching SNL instead. I feel as though something similar to this must have happened to me, but with Maher’s show. Politically Incorrect aired on ABC, weeknights at 11:30 pm Eastern Time. I was a pre-teen babysitter, and in the habit of staying up well past my bedtime on weekends, sometimes including Fridays. I frequently watched a kid with cerebral palsy—a sweet little uproarious punk who asked me what a “virgin” was after we watched Hocus Pocus on Halloween. We’d color together, play Wishbone learning games on CD-ROM, and then tune into the Wonderful World of Disney on ABC before their bedtime. After hours, ABC was no longer family friendly, and I kept watching.

If Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher seems like a bizarre viewing choice for an adolescent girl in the 90s, well, I guess I was a bizarre adolescent girl in the 90s. Or maybe not that bizarre. My parents were news junkies. From the earliest I could remember, the news was talking to us in the background, like our family soundtrack: NPR or WXYZ Detroit or the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, they played during clock alarms and car rides and dinners and bedtimes. The Gulf War is the first major news event that I can remember, and Saddam Hussein is the first boogie man I recall being terrified of.

The thing about Politically Incorrect is that it was ostensibly a news show—it was a panel-debate show featuring four guests each night. But these weren’t the boring talking heads from the regular news who put me to sleep, when they weren’t scaring the shit out of me. In fact, I recognized, and liked, many of these panelists already: Dean Cain from Lois and Clark, Chris Farley and Rachael Leigh Cook, even the cast of Boy Meets World.

I was arrested by the algorithm again. It was the news, but like, a punk rock version of the news.

I didn’t know who Maher was; I just knew I was angsty and restless, growing up in a churchgoing household. I was quickly captivated by what he had to say. He was the first one I can remember to tell me that I didn’t have to believe in the teachings of the Bible to be a good person. He talked about animal rights and not eating meat. He brought on guests who challenged my perceptions of culture and society. I recognized the comedian Margaret Cho from her sitcom All American Girl, and was incensed when she came on the show and said that most health insurance companies will cover Viagra, but not birth control. Indeed, people like Dan Savage, bell hooks, and John Waters were all put on my radar because of Politically Incorrect. If you’re wondering, no, rest assured that I never covered my bedroom walls with pictures of Maher. Yet, both his show and Stewart’s were telling me things that I failed to learn at school and home.

Then, my junior year, 9/11 happened. Irony, along with 2,977 victims, was declared dead. One of these was Barbara Olson—an attorney and conservative political commentator whose husband, Ted, went on to serve as solicitor general under George W. Bush. (And later argued for marriage equality before the Supreme Court). A passenger on hijacked American Airlines flight 77, Olson was killed when the plane crashed into the Pentagon. She had been flying to Los Angeles to film an appearance on Politically Incorrect. In the week that followed, Maher kept an empty chair on his set, to honor her memory.

(My old idols, the Backstreet Boys, also lost someone in their orbit on 9/11. Their set carpenter, Danny Lee, was taking a small hiatus from their tour to fly back to Los Angeles as well, where his second daughter was due to be born. He perished on American Airlines flight 11 when it struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Two days later, his daughter Allison Danielle was delivered via C-section. At a show in Toronto on Sept. 12, the Backstreet Boys called for a moment of silence onstage).

Though Maher and Stewart could have reasonably been considered peers at this time, Maher’s first episode back on air after the tragedy was markedly different from Stewart’s. Politically Incorrect returned to ABC on Sept. 17, with guests Arianna Huffington and Dinesh D’Souza. While discussing the attacks and the response from the Bush administration, D’Souza said that the president was wrong to characterize the hijackers as “cowards.” “Not true,” he asserted, ‘’Look at what they did. You have a whole bunch of guys who were willing to give their life; none of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete. These are warriors.’‘

Without hesitation, Maher responded: “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”

The remarks were quickly construed as gauche and aggressively un-American. Dan Patrick, a right-wing radio goon who later became the lieutenant governor of Texas, launched a pressure campaign to get advertisers to drop Maher’s show. Ratings faltered, and in May, 2002, ABC announced that it was canceling Politically Incorrect and replacing it with a new show, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. Maher moved his schtick over to HBO and created Real Time with Bill Maher, an ongoing panel debate show that’s exactly like Politically Incorrect except with a better budget. Kimmel went on to become one of the longest-serving late-night hosts in history, and then made greater history on Sept. 17, 2025, when the FCC pressured ABC and its parent company Disney to suspend his show over remarks he made about Charlie Kirk’s assassination – 24 years to the day after Maher had made his remarks about 9/11 on Politically Incorrect.

Now, despite these incredible coincidences, Kimmel and Maher are themselves pointedly on two different sides of a complex comedy divide. A simplistic labeling system could be “woke” and “anti-woke” but this seems too reductive a way to understand what’s going on. You might refer to the videos of the anonymous creator Elephant Graveyard on YouTube, or any and all of Marc Maron’s recent work. (Always a solid reference point for anything). Indeed, over the years, the quality of Maher’s work has notably begun to dip, especially as he snuggles up to the worst of modern society’s prominent conspiracy theorists. I haven’t kept up with his show much in recent years, though I confess that I followed him perhaps well beyond his acceptable expiration date.

Why? “Watch John Oliver’s show,” people have said to me. “It’s much better than Maher’s show.” And certainly, I have. Of course I fondly remember Oliver from his Daily Show days. Last Week Tonight is a fantastic show, and I have no problem with it. It’s just that… the format doesn’t, I guess, tickle my fancy. One single guy does a monologue, while a series of marginally funny memes rotate in the background. It does nothing for me. I’m really sorry, fellow leftists. It’s not John Oliver’s fault that I am a Neanderthal.

I just happen to like the variety of ideas and discussion on Maher’s show better. Even the shitty, pernicious ideas help stimulate me in a way that the echo chamber of a show like Oliver’s doesn’t. Sometimes, I want to hear a debate on topics that I haven’t fully grasped yet. It helps stabilize a personal creed that hasn’t always felt so steady; I feel as though it’s important to hear concepts that sound and feel wrong to you, so you can navigate through your own belief system, and check in with yourself and where you stand every so often.

I want to say that I’ve maintained a similar allegiance to Stewart through the years, but I haven’t as consistently as I have with Maher. I’m worried I have more in common with Maher than Stewart—a married, well-respected father who I can’t imagine has handled a bong in quite some time. During my 20s, I had a steady gig as a journalist, and even had the opportunity to interview Maher. As you can imagine, for a 25-year-old working at a small-time weekly newspaper, this was quite a big fish. (I’d tell you about it, but the interview is here, and there’s literally nothing wrong with cross-self-promotion). The purpose of the interview was to promote his standup show in Detroit, but we ended up chatting about Maher’s recent documentary Religulous at length, too. Honestly, it’s still one of my favorite films. I went to see it when I lived in East Lansing, Michigan, with my roommate at the time; we were the only two people in the movie theater who didn’t start whooping when Maher interviewed a man from Jews For Jesus who said he’d become a believer in Christ at Michigan State University, which is in East Lansing. I could almost feel Maher rolling his eyes along with me—like, bunch of dumb jocks, am I right?

Then, on March 31, 2025, Bill Maher, a fierce and longtime critic of President Donald Trump, went to the White House and had dinner with him. It was the first invitation of its kind for the comedian, whose political talk show career had by then spanned five administrations—presidents Democrat and Republican, all usually displeasing to Maher. The invitation came at the behest of Kid Rock, the toilet paper stuck to the shoe of the 90s and mutual friend to both Maher and the president. Maher left the dinner with a glowing impression of Trump, reporting that his private persona differed greatly from the misogynistic and boorish pig that he presented himself as in public. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Maher received significant backlash for this, including from Seinfeld creator Larry David, who compared Maher to a spineless supplicant in Nazi Germany.

I found little about Maher resonated with me after that. I thought of the time when the comedian Jen Kirkman told me in an interview, “we need better role models than him now.” She wasn’t talking about Bill Maher, but Bill Cosby. Maher is guilty of fraternizing with and platforming the far right; Cosby of drugging and assaulting more than 60 women. I don’t think Maher is a monster like Cosby surely is, but I wondered how much further justification my fandom could withstand.

Comedy in 2025 has become fractured along political lines. Like Pepsi and Coke, I guess, if Coke were spiked with arsenic. I might use the 90s boy band wars as a metaphor, if I wanted to invoke lighter, less turbulent times, and naturally I do, so here we go.

There is a formula for a successful boy band, and it has nothing to do with test tubes, petri dishes, or singing buttholes. The formula is as follows: one heartthrob; one shy guy; one reassuring older brother; one cutie pa-tootie; and one BAD BOY. This formula is patented by the Great Bob Buss, manager of 2ge+her—a parody boy band that had a movie and TV show on MTV in 2000. (Buss himself is somewhat based on Pearlman, though he manages to keep his sticky fingers to himself).

So, for fun, let’s imagine we’re building a boy band of modern late night hosts. I think the lineup would have to be this: Stephen Colbert is the heartthrob, Seth Meyers is the shy guy, Jimmy Kimmel is the reassuring older brother, Jimmy Fallon is the cutie pa-tootie, and Bill Maher is the BAD BOY. Definitely the BAD BOY.

For some context, perhaps I should tell you more about the much-parodied Pearlman, too. The one who really pioneered the boy band formula. He was born in Queens, and started his first company there, a blimp business called Airship Enterprises Ltd. Though Pearlman was raised Jewish, he sought guidance and mentorship from Theodor Wüllenkemper, a German aviation entrepreneur who trained with the Luftwaffe in 1943. His first cousin, Art Garfunkel, does not appear to have been particularly close to him, but nonetheless, Pearlman used his music industry family connections to great effect. He claimed to have met the New Kids on the Block after leasing a private plane to them, and got the idea to start managing bands instead of blimps. Relocating to Orlando in 1991, the rest is kinda history: first he founded Backstreet, then *Nsync. (“We have Coke, and someone’s going to do Pepsi,” he famously said, “it might as well be us.” He said “us” but surely meant “me”). Both bands pursued legal action against him, accusing him of gross financial mismanagement and fraud. Though he continued to have some career successes, like the reality show Making the Band, he would more or less spend the rest of his life dogged by scandals and felonies, including multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. Before his fall from grace, he’d been affectionately called “Big Poppa” by the bands he managed, as well as written a book, Bands, Brands, and Billions.

Pearlman is long dead, but contemplating his biography brought to mind another individual. This person, still living, was also born in Queens, and entered the business world early. His mentor, though not a member of the Nazi party, had the personality of one. In 1985, he pulled up stakes and moved shop to Palm Beach, Florida. He also wrote a book about business, and later hosted a reality show, where the contestants, just like on Making the Band, vied for his approval. The entirety of his career was and has been clouded by suspicions of financial mismanagement and professional misconduct. Both he and Pearlman share convict status; while Pearlman’s sycophants called him “Poppa,” this guy’s fanbase likes to refer to him as “daddy.”

Do I really need to spell it out? You know EXACTLY who I’m talking about.

When Maher had dinner with Trump and Bob Ritchie (Kid Rock’s name, as it appears on IRS forms), he probably wasn’t aware of all the dinners that Brian Littrell, Kevin Richardson, Howard Dorough, AJ McLean, and Nick Carter had with Lou Pearlman. And they were lavish dinners—the Boys were thoroughly wined and dined, love-bombed right into willing submission. The members of *Nsync recounted having dinner with Pearlman as well, where they were each presented with a check for $10,000 to celebrate millions of albums sold: an amount roughly equivalent to one-seventh of my salary as a claims adjuster. The Boys were paying for all their dinners out of pocket, but didn’t find that out until later, when paltry paychecks prompted contract reviews. The singers, all in their early-20s or younger, quickly pieced together the rouse, and fought back. Maher, who is nearly five-times older than the popstars were, seems to have mistook the private charms of a well-practiced-conman for a promise of something special. It’s interesting, given that he employs on his writing staff an individual named Matt Gunn, who is related to Brian and Mark Gunn, the creators of MTV’s 2ge+her. Maher is closer to boy band land than he may have realized; his next steps could depend on the whims of the mogul who has power to remove you from the lineup.

Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?

When he died on December 18, 1997, Chris Farley had appeared as an actor in ten films. Chronologically, these are: Wayne’s World, Coneheads, Wayne’s World 2, Airheads, Billy Madison, Tommy Boy, Black Sheep, Beverly Hills Ninja, Almost Heroes, and Dirty Work. I’ve seen all of them, some multiple times – Tommy Boy remains the undisputed best, though Farley’s work in Coneheads can be described as underrated.

Now, picture this: what if Netflix, looking to duplicate the success of Happy Gilmore 2, announced its next nostalgic sequel: Tommy Boy 2. The film would be a heartwarming family comedy that pays affectionate tribute to the original. It stars David Spade, Julie Warner, Bo Derek, Dan Aykroyd, Rob Lowe (credited this time), and… Chris Farley. Or rather, AI Chris Farley. Because we can do that now. If we want to, we can make a brand new movie in 2025 starring Chris Farley. Let’s assume that Farley’s family, friends, and colleagues all approve, and AI Farley is expected to be a flawless rendition of the flesh-and-blood man, complete with acrobatic antics and full-volume exclamations.

Would you watch this movie?

I’m not saying I would or I wouldn’t. In fact, I don’t know if I would or wouldn’t. From an ethical perspective, I’d like to think I’d staunchly refuse, writing it off as an unprincipled cash grab. However, it’s very possible that I would end up caving to temptation, secretly watching the hypothetical Tommy Boy 2 out of sheer curiosity. What scares me about this premise is what scares anyone about AI: not, what if the movie was poor, lacking, and disappointing, but what if it was incredibly good? What if it were better than the original?

It doesn’t feel comfortable to consider this. If Tommy Boy 2 and AI Farley are just as good or better than their predecessors, that means once-in-a-generation artists like Farley aren’t necessary to society, other than to have their looks and mannerisms stolen by corporations. An authentic, winsome story like Tommy Boy, with all its zeitgeist staying power, can be algorithmically programmed, based on a compilation of data. A billion-dollar company like Paramount can toss a bunch of numbers into a generator, then rake in another cool million or two with a movie that costs them virtually nothing to produce.

This threat is well-known – it’s the very thing both SAG-AFTRA and the WGA were striking against in 2023. Farley himself never had to face the threat of AI replacement, and I doubt he, or Candy, or Belushi, could have imagined it. However, at the time of his death, Farley was busy recording dialogue for the first Shrek movie. After a handful of poorly received films, he was preparing to transform his career by stepping into the role of a computer-generated character. Interestingly, he had some sense of where the industry was headed.

I couldn’t help myself. I’m kind of a fantasist with a passion for alternative histories. I’ve loved Farley since childhood, and still carry a stubborn torch for him, even as the long march through middle age begins. There’s a biopic about him in the works; I can’t be the only one still nursing this level of affection. I started mentally casting Farley in other parts he never got to play, both real and made up. I had the idea to write a piece titled “The Lost Roles of Chris Farley.” I got about halfway through, then realized it might be a good idea to google it. Of course, Vulture already wrote about the exact same subject (with the exact same title) quite some time ago. I felt like Chris Farley on The Chris Farley Show when he asked Paul McCartney, “so, do you remember when you were in the Beatles?”

Instead of punching myself in the head and screaming “idiot!” I decided to update the concept. Vulture’s piece was part of a “Lost Roles Of…” series, and was published in 2012. Back then, it was somewhat well-known that Farley had been a contender for the lead in The Cable Guy, but, 13 years ago, AI wasn’t on the radar for the entertainment industry, and it would have been harder to write about Farley as though he could be retroactively cast in the same version of the same movie.

Below, I’ve compiled a list of parts that Farley never got to play. Some of these were for contractual reasons, others because he didn’t live to see them completed. In two cases, I have straight-up invented parts that I would have liked to see him play, if he were alive in 2025. Is this weird? Well, I just miss Farley, feel icky about AI, but still wish I could see him in more stuff.

Lay off me; I’m starving.

The Cable Guy

The Cable Guy is one of my partner’s favorite movies. I’d never seen it before, so we watched it on Tubi. I clocked the irony of watching a movie about cable on a streaming service.

Before watching it, though, I read about it. Roger Ebert’s review of The Cable Guy opens this way: “We want to like Jim Carrey. A movie that makes us dislike him is a tragic mistake.” Ebert was never particularly kind to Farley – he gave Tommy Boy one measly star – so perhaps it’s good that this part went to Jim Carrey. Cruel critical reception hounded Farley throughout his professional life, tugging at his insecurities like a sharp, relentless seam-ripper.

Of course, the reason Farley ultimately didn’t take the role in The Cable Guy was because of Black Sheep, which bombed even harder with the critics. When he agreed to do Tommy Boy, he signed a two-picture deal with Paramount, which the company (not exactly known for its leniency towards artists) decided to exercise, rather than letting him film The Cable Guy for Columbia. But filming Black Sheep was a very different experience from Tommy Boy, and the end product lacked the spirit and heart that made his first film so compelling. Chris hated the movie: after three years of sobriety, he relapsed during an early screening of Black Sheep, devastated with the film’s final cut. (Ebert’s review partner, Gene Siskel, also hated it, famously walking out of the screening. He was savage in his review, calling Farley a terrible, unfunny actor. Worst of all, he said Farley was no John Candy or John Belushi, two men Farley idolized).

In David Spade’s memoir, Almost Interesting, he describes moving forward with Black Sheep as a business decision he essentially greenlit himself, after giving script approval. Paramount was thirsty for another Farley-Spade buddy project, and Black Sheep seemed on track to be just that. When the critics lambasted it and Farley lamented it, he fell back on using and struggled to recover his footing in Hollywood.

Imagine if he’d taken The Cable Guy – itself a kind of black sheep among ‘90s comedies. The twisted final script was extensively rewritten by Judd Apatow, but the first version was more like a road-trip movie, with the Cable Guy character acting as a jovial, enthusiastic foil to Matthew Broderick’s dumpy, unremarkable Steven. Chris is typically remembered as a performer whose juvenile nature radiates childlike innocence, but here’s a thought: who’s to say the Farley version wouldn’t have been rewritten the same way Carrey’s was? Farley and Carrey have a lot of the same comedy DNA. Occasionally, if I’m daydreaming and happen to think about the scene from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective when Ace wears the ballet tutu and prances around the mental facility, my brain sometimes misfires and accidentally inserts Farley in place of Carrey. Despite being the lovable goofball he surely was, Farley no doubt had a comedic dark side. I wish we could have seen him embrace it more often. Think about it: The Motivational Speaker, better known as Matt Foley, is essentially a worthless loser who threatens his clients with something that sure sounds like forcible squatting. And who knows what his issues with women are (three divorces is a lot). He’s not all that dissimilar from Carrey’s Cable Guy.

Would Farley have enjoyed playing the villain, though? Been comfortable playing a character whose sole purpose was to be hated? That, I can’t be sure about. Here’s what could have softened the rough edges: if the world needed another Farley-Spade pair-up, why not cast Spade in Matthew Broderick’s role? Pairing them as adversaries instead of friends would have been a cinematic risk with potential for payoff. It would have shown their range and viability as a comedy duo who can slip into any scenario that requires them to tap into their unique sensibilities. It would have challenged the viewer’s concept of what the two could do together on screen. It would have flipped their incredible chemistry on its head and created something of peculiar interest. Can’t you see it? It’s like two Spade and Farley characters on SNL, transported into a distorted, long-form Ben Stiller Show sketch.

Incidentally, in an amicable split, Ebert gave The Cable Guy thumbs down, but Siskel gave it thumbs up. As for my review, I liked it well enough – Janeane Garofalo is the best serving wench I’ve ever seen – though like many, found the film’s latter third more disturbing than entertaining. The lost possibility of the Farley/Spade version remains tantalizing; a scrambled signal short-circuited out of existence.

Kingpin

Well, The Cable Guy is a favorite movie of my partner’s, and Kingpin is a favorite of mine. I saw it as a kid and never stopped loving it. I own the goddamn DVD. I watched it with my family during Christmas vacation, and vividly remember turning around to see my conservative-as-hell grandma laughing her ass off at the scene where Woody Harrelson accidentally drinks bull semen.

According to the oral history on Fast Company, Kingpin is considered The Farrelly Brothers’ best movie. Ebert agreed, giving the film three-and-a-half stars, and calling it, “... a very funny movie, and sometimes even funnier than that.” It was a bizarro comedy about bowling that came out in the mid-90s, and for my money, is better than The Big Lebowski.

If he had been cast, Farley would have played Ishmael: the naive Amish bowler who becomes Harrelson’s protege. As with The Cable Guy, he was locked into his contract with Paramount, and required to film Black Sheep instead. It’s a shame, because I can definitely see Farley hamming it up in Amish garb. He would have made a fantastic fish-out-of-water, flailing around loutishly among the English.

But – and this is a somber but – I think this movie is just about perfect as-is. Instead of Farley, Ishmael is played by Randy Quaid, and I really wouldn’t want it any other way. I watched the DVD with the audio-commentary on, because I was curious to see if the Farrelly Brothers would say anything about Farley, but his name didn’t come up. (Fun fact though: Woody Harrelson is a terrible bowler). In the oral history, Peter Farrelly says, “... as much as we wanted Chris Farley, I can’t imagine that movie with anyone but Randy Quaid. He was sensational,” and I love Chris but I must concur.

Now, here’s an interesting twist: Jim Carrey nearly played Ernie McCracken. Ernie McCracken, the oil-slick hustler antagonist who practically oozes sleaze. It’s a bit of alternative casting that makes my head threaten to explode. It makes a certain kind of sense, given that Carrey and the Farrellys had just teamed up to tremendous success on Dumb and Dumber, but this part is played to sickening perfection by Bill Murray. While Jim Carrey could no doubt have contorted his outré features as necessary for “Big Ern’s” many extraordinary bowling scenes, just like with Quaid, this movie is made by Murray for me. (Also, how good of a bowler is Carrey? Bill Murray apparently nailed all three of the strikes his character needed to get in the climactic scene, and the extras went wild for real.)

Indeed, I find myself struggling to dismantle the cast of Kingpin and reconstruct some fantasy version of what could have been, just because I’m so devoted to the final product. I feel as though I’m of two minds here: both that Farley could be a charming version of Ishmael that I can easily close my eyes and visualize, but also that I have absolutely no desire to replace any member of the cast because I don’t want to mess with cinematic excellence.

Though, here’s a final thought – if Farley had been in this movie, it may have helped him bridge the gap towards the meatier, more dramatic roles that he was seeking. The thing about Kingpin is that the bad guy wins, making it quite different from any film that Farley ever appeared in. It’s perhaps the first movie I can remember where the villain uses and manipulates the protagonist, allows him to become permanently disfigured, ruins his prospects of a fulfilling professional life, tries to steal his girl, beats him at the big contest, and completely gets away with all of it. To our knowledge, Big Ern faces no consequences of any kind. It was a tough but integral lesson for anyone yet to take their first serious steps into the world. It bothered the kid-version of me, but I paid attention and listened to the message.

It’s the best way not to get Munsoned out there.

Shrek

I wasn’t eager to get to the ogre, but we had no choice.

Truthfully, I don’t care for this movie. Which clearly makes me an ogre, but it’s just not to my taste. Even as a kid, I found the jokes underwhelming and the references tiring. (In fairness, the filmmakers probably didn’t have a 13-year-old Nirvana obsessive in mind when they wrote the “Three Little Pigs do the Macarena” scene.) I couldn’t fathom all the huge, massive heaps of praise it received. Ebert was delighted by Shrek, awarding it a perfect four stars. He seemed enamored with the animation evolution in cinema that occurred around the century’s turn, and crowned Shrek in 2001 the genre’s royal champion. In his review, he wrote:

Much will be written about the movie’s technical expertise, and indeed every summer seems to bring another breakthrough on the animation front. After the three-dimensional modeling and shading of “Toy Story,” the even more evolved “Toy Story 2,” “A Bug's Life” and “Antz,” and the amazing effects in “Dinosaur,” “Shrek” unveils creatures who have been designed from the inside out, so that their skin, muscles and fat move upon their bones instead of seeming like a single unit. They aren’t “realistic,” but they’re curiously real. The artistry of the locations and setting is equally skilled–not lifelike, but beyond lifelike, in a merry, stylized way.

Just like A New Hope or The Matrix, Shrek was a cinematic trailblazer of technical achievement. It raised the bar on animation standards for a new century. It would have, without any conceivable doubt, made Chris Farley into a major Hollywood figure. By the time Shrek was released in 2001, Farley would have been 37-years-old – primed and ready for a slew of lucrative sequels. It went on to become the second highest-grossing animated franchise of all-time, just behind Despicable Me. (Incidentally, in that franchise, Gru is voiced by Farley’s fellow Second City alum, Steve Carrell).

Shrek should have been Chris’s redemptive masterpiece. He’d been so profoundly unhappy with his last two films, Black Sheep and Beverly Hills Ninja. Starring in Shrek would have given him the opportunity to start fresh with new material, a new fan-base, and perhaps, a new sense of empowerment. The jokes in Shrek don’t necessarily tickle my fancy, but they are refreshingly devoid of any “fatty falls down” tropes. As an ogre, Shrek is feared and respected. You mock and laugh at him at your own risk.

Before he died, Chris had recorded the majority of the dialogue, with about 15% unfinished. According to his brother Kevin, Chris’s version of Shrek bore little resemblance to Mike Myers’s Scottish misanthrope. Instead, this Shrek would have been much more like Chris himself: innocent, humble, on a quest for belonging. He had ambitions to be a knight, fall in love, and start a family. (Also, get this: Janeane Garofalo, the lowly serving wench in The Cable Guy, would have been upgraded to royalty — she was once attached to play Princess Fiona. I really like the idea of Chris and Janeane playing opposite each other as love interests – Julie Warner, Chris’s love interest in Tommy Boy, has always reminded me of Janeane, like they could be cousins).

When some of Chris’s recorded audio leaked to YouTube in 2015, his Shrek finally got to speak. He was guttural, contrary, directionless. Chris’s Shrek seems younger than Myers’. Farley was 33 when he recorded this, and may have felt directionless, too. The 30s are like that, but it’s a decade that tends to see chaos give way to the soothing structures of maturity and wisdom. I wanted this so much for Chris, because it feels awful to be talking about the lost potential of someone who died at 33, when I’m here at 41, nowhere near as blessed by charisma and talent.

I don’t like this movie nearly enough to try cooking up an imaginary alternate version, so here’s a quote from a Collider article about Farley’s recordings that I really appreciate:

Chris Farley plays his Shrek against type. He wasn’t the boisterous, over-the-top comedian that we knew and loved so well. The physical antics that were a staple of his work couldn’t be relied upon. All Farley had to depend on was his voice. The route he chose challenged his reputation rather than leaning into it. It had to be intentional, a way of acting with his hands tied behind his back, ready to show everyone that he could be more than the goof who fell down. Ironically, Chris Farley’s version of Shrek is more subdued than the one Mike Myers played. It’s toned down. There is no accent. It’s just Farley speaking in his natural voice, but in a way that we have seldom heard.

It’s the multiverse Shrek that the multiverse me appreciates on every level.

Home Alone

This one is really neat, because Farley must have been great with kids. Remember his guest appearance on All That? Kenan Thompson does. (And I bet having Chris on set made dealing with Dan Schneider slightly more bearable). In the documentary I Am Chris Farley, his friends fondly reminisce about how he liked to frequent children’s hospitals to surprise sick kids, entertaining them by clowning around and just hanging out to chat.

If Farley had been cast in Home Alone, he would have played Santa Claus. Specifically, the hapless, shabby Santa that Kevin McCaulister meets at a mock-up North Pole village. It’s a small part, but Chris was a small actor then. This would have been the late 80s, when he’d just barely landed in Chicago, fresh off the bus from Marquette University; practically still a kid himself, itching for opportunities.

According to director Christopher Columbus, Farley showed up for the audition at 7 am on a Saturday. It was clear that he’d spent the entire night up partying. Home Alone isn’t one of his film credits, so you can imagine how the audition went.

In an oral history with Chicago Magazine, here’s how Ken Hudson Campbell, the actor who did get to play Santa in Home Alone, described Farley’s audition:

I drove out to New Trier. Chris Farley was already there; he was auditioning, too. It was 9 a.m. Apparently, he was out all night and had just been dropped off after a night of shenanigans, shall we say. Farley was kinda making catcalls to the girls who worked in the office. I was thinking, Oh, boy! … Chris went first. It didn’t go very well. He walked in and walked right out.

In yet another oral history with The Independent, Columbus said that he and Farley later attended the same church in NYC, developing a casual acquaintanceship. They discussed the failed audition often, though I wonder how much Farley enjoyed conversations about a past failure.

Although he blew the audition, Columbus contended that Farley could have played the role well, and I definitely agree. It’s not hard at all to see him sauntering up to the door of a hoopty while snarling, “A parking ticket for Santa? What’s next, rabies for the Easter bunny?” Picturing him interacting with the young Macaulay Culkin is perfectly delightful. Also, I believe “mall Santa” is a very bespoke profession for the bighearted and the exuberant.

Well, no Farley in this one. It’s still a holiday classic, and I wager, my favorite Christmas movie. But now, I feel like I’m going to spend every holiday season pretending there’s a Christmas movie starring Farley as Santa and Spade as an elf.*

*There was once a Motivational Speaker sketch with Farley and Spade as Santa/elf foils, which is what that picture above is from, but a full-blown holiday classic with new original characters, a la Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, would be so rad.

Untitled Fatty Arbuckle Biopic

Goddamn, I wish this had gotten made.

Did Chris have a secret passion for history? In Tommy Boy, he and Michelle meet in high school history class. The young Tommy is seen dropping his history book while running late to school, and the only schoolwork we see him doing involves answering a test question about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. (And inserting a jazz legend into the past). His final, posthumous film, Almost Heroes, was a slackstick buddy comedy set in the early nineteenth century. He was attracted to the project because of its complexities, and saw potential to intellectualize his work. It didn’t hurt that the film’s director was Christopher Guest. With Farley rocking the tricorn and Guest at the helm, this one should have gone to eleven and beyond. (Sorry).

But that’s a whole other wormhole, down which we shall not go. (If you’d like to hear more about Almost Heroes, check out this neatly summarized video essay).

At some point, Chris became interested in the life of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. It’s pretty easy to see why Chris would have identified with Arbuckle, a vaudevillian megastar who also performed and directed in a number of silent films. I probably don’t have to tell you how he earned the nickname “Fatty,” but here’s what’s wild: like Chris, he was also known to be surprisingly acrobatic and limber, defying all audience expectations over his size. Arbuckle made one hell of a mark on the early days of Hollywood – not only was he directing his own movies, but by 1921, he was earning $1 million a year; $17 million in today’s dollars. Oh, and if that weren’t enough, he also mentored a young Buster Keaton, too. Arbuckle’s success quickly imploded, however, after he was accused of sexual assault. A Slash Film piece on Farley and Arbuckle describes the scandal this way:

The details are well-known to Hollywood history buffs: A young woman named Virginia Rappe became very ill and was hospitalized at a party Arbuckle was attending. Several people accused Arbuckle of assaulting Rappe, who later died of a bladder-related issue. Some of the details of the case were dark and violent. When the story was reported, William Randolph Hearst, the main publisher of the stories, painted Arbuckle as a monstrous lecher, despite the man having a reputation for being shy, chaste, and generally decent. Arbuckle was brought to trial three times, once on a manslaughter charge. Other actors spoke out against Arbuckle despite never having met him. Hearst got very rich. Arbuckle was eventually acquitted, but by then, many of his films had been banned.

While he’d never been involved in anything as nefarious as Arbuckle’s alleged crime, Farley, no doubt, felt himself vilified by the press, too. He’d grown up idolizing John Belushi, but I wonder if the adult version of him, who by then had weathered abysmal reviews, personal creative failures, and several trips to rehab and the relapses that followed, became more drawn to the distant portrait of Arbuckle. A pioneer of the form, he must surely have recognized that there might never have been a Belushi, a Candy, a Chris himself, without Arbuckle’s innovative work. The script for the movie was written by David Mamet (yup, Mr. Glengarry Glen Ross himself), and had all the trappings of potential Oscar bait. But then, Chris died, and the project along with him.

Full stop: I want this movie to be real so, so, so badly. And there’s no way I’m coming up with a better version than David-freaking-Mamet. Here’s a question: we know the original Shrek audio was preserved. What about Mamet’s screenplay? Will it ever surface?

Forgive me, but this would have been Chris’s Good Morning, Vietnam. It would have made Siskel and Ebert and everyone else with thumbs point them directly towards the sky and even higher than that. It would have forced his detractors to admit they’d been too swift in their pretentious nose-holding. It just, sigh, would’ve been great.

Strangers With Candy

Ok, here we go: venturing into completely made up la-la land.*

Chris never could have been on Strangers With Candy, since it premiered in 1999. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, this was a short-lived Comedy Central series starring Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, and Paul Dinello. If you’re not at least familiar with Colbert, I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul. Anyway, it was a parody of the ultra-cheesy after-school specials of the ‘80s and ‘90s – Sedaris played the iconic Jerri Blank, a 46-year-old high school freshman and reformed “junkie-whore,” who’s back in school and trying to graduate before she’s 50.

So, you know how Chris got his start at Second City in Chicago? Guess who started there on the same day as him:

That’s right! Comedy is a relatively small world, but Chris slipped seamlessly into so many circles.

I was a huge fan of SWC (as we stans liked to call it), and I figured, if Chris were still alive today, he definitely would have guest-starred in an episode. He was friends with the creators and knew them from the nascent days of their careers. I’m the furthest thing from a Hollywood screenwriter – who knew that grown-up writing would actually mean “claim denial letters” – but what the hell: here’s my totally fabricated, very clumsily executed version of a Strangers With Candy episode starring Chris Farley:

It’s a parody of the “Bike Shop” episode of Diff’rent Strokes, and it’s called “When Jerri Spoke Up.”

A cycling craze has come to Flatpoint. All the students are riding bikes, including through the hallways of school, and even in class. Jerri gets a gaudy girl’s Huffy bike with iridescent ribbons on the handles and a big yellow banana seat. She falls in love with it and names it Helen. (It takes the place of the pet for the episode.) Unfortunately, when she takes Helen to Mr. Jellineck’s class, she discovers the chain is missing, and that the eccentric art teacher has cut it off and used it in a painting of Mr. Noblet, featuring him sporting bondage gear. Jerri is upset, but Geoffrey tells her that he knows a repair shop that can help out, and gives her a business card.

Jerri takes her broken bike to Sparky’s Spokes, and meets Sparky. He’s played by – I’m doing a drumroll for you – Chris Farley. When other people are in the shop, he’s goofy, affable, and acting like a real cut-up. When the mother and her two children leave, however, he instantly becomes aggressive with Jerri, grabbing her arm and making sexual advances. He says he’ll repair her bike for free if she’ll “ring his bell,” “ride his handlebars,” or let him give her the old “Sparky’s spoke-poke deluxe!” Jerri protests but also waffles with her intrinsic urges. She knows this isn’t right but also… she hates turning down sex. And free bike repairs sound good. Sparky bawdily comments about his taste in high school girls. Jerri points out that she’s 46 and 10 years older than him, but Sparky is undeterred. Just then, Principal Blackman comes in, wearing a bright blue helmet and racing gear head-to-toe. Sparky immediately flips back to his jovial character, pretending like he’s showing Jerri some parts under glass. She takes the opportunity to leave with her broken bike, wheeling it home dejectedly.

Back at home, she tries to discuss the situation with her stepmother, but Sara advises her that she’s never gone wrong using her body for favors. Derek bikes into the kitchen with his mountain bike and calls Jerri a plug.

The next day, when she goes to school, Jerri learns that there will be a Big Bike Box Social the following weekend in the Flatpoint High gym. She talks with Tammy and Orlando about potentially not being able to go, since her bike is missing a chain. They both encourage her to do whatever it takes to go, including giving in to Sparky’s demands. Jerri has a tortured vision of Sparky wearing a skin-tight bodysuit while riding a bike suggestively and licking the handlebars; her facial expressions switch between disgust and desire.

Eventually, she returns to Sparky’s with her broken bike, Helen. She tells him that no, she’s not here to succumb to his advances, but instead to tell him off, and to take a courageous stand. He glowers at her and snarls an insult, insisting that she doesn’t know what she’s missing. She holds her head up high and leaves with her broken bike in hand, knowing she’ll be missing the Big Bike Box Social, but has done the right thing.

As she exits the bike shop, a large gang of students rides past her, whooping and waving flags. Some of the boys aren’t wearing shirts. Some are swigging beer and hitting bongs while riding bikes with no hands. All are on their way to the Big Bike Box Social.

Jerri turns back around to face Sparky’s. “Oh, what the hell!” she exclaims. “What’s the point of dignity if you’re missing the Big Bike Box Social?” She quickly races back into the door. The episode ends.

::Credits::

Everyone is in the gym, dancing while dressed in biking gear.

Sparky is outrageously dressed in a racing outfit, and dancing with a beach cruiser, grinding against the seat like he’s doing the tango.

Noblet and Jellineck ride past on a tandem bike.

Blackman rides back and forth on a mountain bike with Coach Wolf straddling the handlebars.

Jerri wipes out on her bike and pops back up, revealing severely smeared lipstick to the camera.

The end, bitches!**

*Just out of idle curiosity (and a desire to waste water), I asked ChatGPT to write a version of this. It cast Farley as the director of a fat camp that Jerri is sent to. The script was funny enough, but I felt casting Farley as a fat camp director was reductive and predictable. He played many such characters in his lifetime, but by 1999, I’d like to imagine that his old Second City buddies Sedaris, Colbert, and Dinello would have written a juicer part for him.

**If any SWC mega-fans happen to be reading this, yes, I get that this story is very similar to the episode “Who Wants Cake,” where Jerri has to make another difficult moral choice or face losing out on a fun school activity. My defense is gonna be that all after-school specials are basically the same anyway, and also, you know, I adjust claims for a living.

Tommy Boy 2

This summer, David Spade told Theo Von that he was pitched the idea for Tommy Boy 2. That plot would have revolved around Richard and Tommy’s kids. He refused immediately, telling the studio that there was no Tommy Boy without Chris Farley. I couldn’t agree more if I were an agreement machine.

But I must confess, I also asked ChatGPT to write a version of this. What it spit out was even more disappointing than its SWC script: an identical duplicate of the original, with an incredibly stupid title. (Tommy Boy 2: Back In the Saddle. What… saddle?) In place of Chris, the AI wrote a part for Tommy’s nephew, who has taken over the company after Tommy’s untimely death (wow, didn’t see that one coming). Now, it’s his turn to go on a road trip with David Spade, and save the company. Yawn. I just yawned so hard my ears popped.

If Chris were alive today, here’s my feeble, entirely non-professional attempt at constructing a possible plot for an imaginary sequel starring the real Chris. Ideally, Happy-Madison will produce it, and the final product will be a lot more spectacular than this one:

It’s just called Tommy Boy 2. That’s it. No saddles involved.

It takes place in 2025. Tommy and Michelle have been married for years now. He’s the CEO of Callahan Auto Parts, and she’s CFO. They have one son, Tommy Callahan IV, who is played by Brett Kelly from Bad Santa. He prefers to be called “Tom.” Tommy’s son is the opposite of him: quiet, introverted, bookish. Like his dad, he also went to college for seven years. Unlike his dad, he left with a PhD in computer engineering. Tom and his father are frequently at odds, forcing Michelle to play peacemaker. Young Tom has few friends, and doesn’t understand how to connect with his boisterous, life-of-the-party dad.

Richard is no longer with the company, and hasn’t been in the picture for quite some time. Years ago, he and Tommy had a falling out over business disagreements (and truthfully, Richard grew jealous of Tommy and Michelle’s marriage, and the distance it put in their friendship). Richard is Tom’s godfather, but hasn’t seen him since he was a baby. He has never married.

Although it’s been stable for years, the brake pad deal with Zalinsky is threatening to collapse. Zalinksky has recently gone into business with Lonny Wilder, an eccentric billionaire whose ultra modern tech company, Taunter, has developed a slick brake pad manufacturing method, run completely by AI. Lonny Wilder is played by Mike Myers, and is a parody of Elon Musk (duh). After a tense meeting with Zalinsky and Wilder, Tommy finds himself desperately wishing he could reunite with Richard. In a somber moment of connection, Tom encourages him to reach out on LinkedIn. “What’s LinkedIn?” Tommy asks. “I set it up for you months ago, remember?” Tommy opens his phone, fumbling with the apps, scrolling past several wild pictures of himself partying on Instagram, Facebook, and even Pinterest, before pulling up an unnaturally stern and professional headshot on LinkedIn.

It takes a while, but they find Richard’s page. He’s living in Arizona, running a company that sells supplements. He has a long, scraggly beard, but has lost most of his hair. Tommy hems and haws, but ultimately caves to ego, refusing to reach out. Tom realizes that he’ll have to go behind his father’s back, and makes plans to get in touch with Richard. After a series of failed contact attempts, he finds his way to Richard’s remote Mojave doorstep – a trailer surrounded by cacti and sand. Obviously, Richard is reluctant to engage with him at first, but Tom is more like his dad than he realizes, and Richard soon warms up to him. It takes a few days, but Richard is finally convinced to return to Sandusky and reunite with Tommy. Tom helps Richard get cleaned up: beard shaved, toupee snapped on, and wardrobe upgraded. They get in the car and head back to Ohio.

Then, Tommy and Richard meet again, for the first time in 20-odd years. There’s tension, and accusations fly back and forth, but then, someone brings up the deer that destroyed Richard’s car. They both smile, and the mood shifts. They trade glib memories of dealing with Richard’s auto insurance company. (“They definitely thought we were committing fraud.”) Richard agrees to stay in town for a while, and help Callahan Auto navigate the threat from Zalinsky and Wilder.

Meanwhile, Michelle meets up with her brother, Detective Duane Brock, to have dinner at an upscale restaurant. She’s happy for the opportunity to vent about her marriage – she still loves Tommy, but gets frustrated with the business decisions he makes, or rather, leaves to her to make. They have a solid partnership that has survived its share of difficulties, just like any marriage of 25 years. When talking to the waitress, Michelle glances across the room, and happens to catch a glimpse of Beverly Barish-Burns-Callahan-Zalinsky. She’s sitting at a small booth with a man that Michelle can’t see, because his back is to her. After she and her brother leave the restaurant, Michelle begins keeping discreet tabs on Beverly on social media. She knows Beverly is a society wife, appearing on the arm of Zalinsky at many high status events, but she wonders if she’s up to anything unscrupulous.

What she doesn’t know is that Beverly went to the Ohio State Penitentiary the week prior, where she paid a visit to her incarcerated ex-husband, Paul. At the restaurant, she was meeting with Paul’s parole officer. Facing each other through the glass and talking into phones, Beverly confessed to Paul that she’s unhappy in her marriage. Zalinsky has been cheating on her with a busty blonde actress from his commercials, who also runs his company’s social media. In exchange for her testimony in his favor at his upcoming parole hearing, he agrees to help her cook up a scheme to swindle Zalinsky.

Back at Callahan Auto, Tom has been busy trying to crack the code that Taunter uses to produce its brake pads. The code is highly complex and unusual, and he’s never encountered anything like it before. Richard offers him supplements from his company (“You’ve got to take Tumeric. You can’t crack code without Tumeric.”) but Tom declines. He does, however, ask Richard to provide some historical background on Callahan’s brake pad production. When compared to the brake pads that Taunter manufacturers, Tom realizes that Taunter has essentially stolen his grandfather’s design, but created a cheaper, more rapidly produced version. He brings his discovery to Tommy and Michelle, who request a meeting with their lawyer (Kevin Nealon). Unfortunately, they’re told that they don’t have a case, as Big Tom’s patent wasn’t written to exclude any AI modifications.

Despondent, Tommy leaves their family estate, walking aimlessly around the town, sure that he’s going to be forced to lay off half the company. He thinks about all the hard-workers; good people who are about to lose their salaries and livelihoods. He sits down on a bench, and a bus passes by him. On the other side of the street, Paul is sitting opposite him, on a bench, too. Tommy’s eyes pop wide open.

“You!”

Tommy runs over to Paul, who tries to get away, but is unsuccessful. Tommy corners and confronts him, and learns that he’s been paroled. Paul is afraid Tommy is going to attack him, so he quickly explains that he’s been reformed – he no longer scams or steals, and is trying to look for an honest job. The trouble is, the city is experiencing a dearth of employment opportunities, thanks to Taunter and the monopoly it has gained over Sandusky’s local economy. When Paul mentions Taunter, something clicks for Tommy, and he realizes that he and Paul have a mutual enemy. Even though Paul and Beverly scammed his father, he recalls the brief moment when he thought of Paul as his brother, and feels an inkling of empathy. They part ways, distrustful but intrigued.

Unlike his parents, Tom is undeterred by the threat from Taunter. Without telling anyone, uses a pseudonym to apply for a high-level engineering job there. While he’s inside the building, he asks the interviewer if he can have some coffee, and while the man goes to get him a cup, he surreptitiously rifles through the folders, rapidly searching for anything incriminating. He finds a Post-It buried under several stacks of papers, with the address to a private folder path written on it. He takes a picture of it, then quickly resets everything as it was.

Tommy and Richard are still trying to rebuild their relationship. Richard starts filling the role of Tommy’s executive assistant, just as he had for his father, but problems arise when Richard undermines Tommy’s decisions and insults him at every turn. When Richard makes a devastating comment about how Tommy’s son is smarter than he is, Tommy snarls back that Richard isn’t good enough to be a father, he wouldn’t know anything about it. Richard storms out of the office, threatening to go back to Arizona. On his way out, he runs into Tom, who defuses the situation and insists that he not leave. He tells Richard that his dad talks about him so often, (“Richard said this,” and “Richard said that,”) that he knows Tommy will be completely brokenhearted if he leaves. Their friendship can’t survive another titanic rupture. Richard knows he’s right, and he goes back to make amends with Tommy.

What’s the third act? Taunter has to be taken down somehow. It’s overly simplistic and full of plot holes, but how about this: Tom hacks into the private file path that he found in the Taunter office. To his amazement, the folders contain many classified documents about the company, including top-secret documents about Lonny Wilder himself. With Richard, Michelle, and Tommy all hovered together around Tom’s laptop, they learn that Taunter has a secret plan to buy out all the industries in Sandusky, and repackage them all as cheaper, unreliable, and less-safe versions of the originals. They also learn that Wilder believes Lizard People are real and is financing a serum to protect himself from becoming one.

Over at Zalinksy’s mansion, he’s relaxing in his hot tub, bubbly blonde mistress snuggled up next to him. There’s a flute of champagne clasped between his fingers; he’s about to get even richer with this Taunter deal. Life is very, very good. All of a sudden, one of his assistants, a squeaky-voiced kid, comes running over to the spa.

“Sir! It’s an emergency! You have to come, quickly!”

Zalinsky is furious about being interrupted, but detaches himself from his blonde, gets out of the hot tub, and follows the kid back into the house. Once inside, he’s shown the stuff of his very worst nightmares: Beverly has wiped out his entire bank account and converted it into cryptocurrency so it can’t be traced, leaving him with nothing. She and her jewelry collection have vanished into the night. Zalinsky falls to his knees, white with rage and despair. Overly dramatic opera plays. He vows to find Beverly and exact revenge.

Like Zalinsky, Sandusky, too, has lost everything. There are no jobs to be found, unemployment is at an all-time high, and the only industry doing record business are the bars. That coming Friday, Wilder is set to give a press conference about Sandusky’s future, and his plan to turn the town from a manufacturing failure into a modern tech paradise. At the press conference, Wilder rambles on for 30 minutes, and then takes questions. A fair, blonde boy standing in the crowd raises his hand, and Tom, with all the confidence he can muster, asks Wilder why Taunter is stealing designs from other companies.

Wilder is flustered, and tries to laugh it off. Then Michelle stands up in the crowd, and asks why the company wants to eliminate jobs from Callahan Auto. Wilder stammers, insisting that’s not the case, but then Richard stands up, and smirking, asks, “Is it true you believe in Lizard People?”

Wilder goes very pale, and looks like he might faint. The crowd is now tittering with a mixture of anger and amusement. Then, finally, Tommy stands up. He clears his throat, and throws back his chest. “Sir, can you tell me: why are you trying to destroy this town? I grew up here. So did everyone else around me. I love it here. We just want to work and provide for our families and live and thrive. What’s wrong with that?”

Wilder bleats, “This press conference is over!” and stomps offstage.

The next day, it’s revealed that Taunter’s board voted 24-0 to kill its total automation plan. The press has quickly picked up on the story of the Callahan family (and Uncle Richard) committing sabotage to save their company and the town. All four of them quickly become internet sensations, with Richard’s “Lizard People” clip going viral.

Zalinsky sees all the news, and begrudgingly reaches out to Tommy to congratulate him on all his success. Because Taunter’s stock is dropping like a loogie off an overpass, they amicably agree to renegotiate their original deal, but with modernist revisions that provide for industry changes.

Beverly and Paul are last seen fleeing town in the back of a bus. She stares dejectedly ahead with a blank expression, while he swings booze from a paperbag and looks out the window. Cue Simon and Garfunkel.

Tommy and Michelle decide to renew their wedding vows, and throw a huge celebration for all their friends and family. Tom is Tommy’s best man, and Richard has gotten ordained online so he can perform the ceremony. Just before he heads over to the altar, Tommy glances up at the sky, a wistful expression on his face. “I really wish you could be here today, Dad. You’d be so proud of Tom, and me, I hope. And I know you loved Michelle. Well, here goes nothing. Wish me luck.”

The ceremony is perfect. When Tommy and Michelle kiss, the entire room bursts into noisy, boisterous tears. Everyone at the party spends the entire night dancing.

Well, thanks for indulging in my Farley FanFic. (FFF). Real Hollywood screenwriters would obviously glow this up by approximately 200 billion percent, but I hope it was an acceptable tribute to my favorite Lunch Lady.

Subscribe now

After the Justice Department announced on July 7 that it failed to locate Jeffrey Epstein’s fabled “client list,” I watched the MAGA revolt with eyebrows that were decidedly raised.

“Is Trump really going to be taken down by Epstein truthers? Really?” I sent an incredulous text to my brother, from whom I expected an incredulous reply.

“They think everyone they hate is going to be destroyed by this, but somehow not Epstein’s best friend, Trump. It’s like Where’s Waldo, but Waldo is standing in an empty room,” he said, fulfilling my expectations.

It was a surprise to me that anyone who hadn’t been victimized by Epstein still cared about him. Epstein is dead, and his specter remains somewhat intriguing but mostly banal; a narcissistic billionaire predator whose sins are terrible but not terribly mysterious. The stories of his crimes have been told by countless photos, flight logs, and private island visits. More importantly, they have been told by his survivors, speaking through court documents or interviews or social media posts. It’s well known that on August 10, 2019, Epstein died in his jail cell, leaving scores of victims without any legal recourse for the various ways in which he ruined their lives.

I expect the accusers of Epstein are still thinking about him. Especially when he resurfaces in the news. Questions about how he died and who enabled him remain swirling in the soup of uncertainty. In its July 7 memo, Justice Department and Attorney General Pam Bondi, unconcerned with matters of credibility, stated unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Whatever the truth is, I hate that all the focus is on Epstein. Epstein sucks. To be honest, I really don’t care if he killed himself or if he was murdered. I’m not sorry that he’s dead, though I am sorry for those who wished to see him held accountable in a substantive way.

Voices are raised. MAGA is mad, and it’s calling for action. But long before this Justice Department memo, long before the renewed interest in Epstein, even long before MAGA was a thing (oh, what a time), one voice was already raised above the fray, shouting for justice and truth. That voice is now missing from the chorus, and we’re all the worse for it.

Of all the survivors, advocates, and members of law enforcement who worked to put Epstein in prison, perhaps none were as dedicated to the cause as Virginia Roberts. Later known by her married name, Giuffre, she was the type of person who exuded toughness underneath a radiant smile. In appearance, she was exactly Epstein’s type: lithe, soft, blonde. A delicate, girlish wisp, as erasable as a smoke-ring blown from a billionaire’s cigar. She was barely 16 when she met him, but looked much younger. Her childlike appearance juxtaposed oddly with her rough background, which was anything but a little girl’s fever dream.

“Jeffrey Epstein was not my first trafficker”

"I was just so mentally scarred already at such a young age, and I ran away from that.” That’s what Roberts told the BBC news program Panorama in 2019. Years before she crossed paths with Jeffrey Epstein, Virginia Roberts was already trying to escape from trauma. At age seven, she was molested by a family friend – an event which caused her to run away from home, living in and out of foster homes until she was 14. She was intermittently homeless, and met the sexual predator Ron Eppinger on the streets, where he trafficked her until an FBI raid shut down his operation.

Would you be surprised to hear her salvation came from Mar-a-Lago?

Well, at any rate, she found a decent job there, for a spell. By the time she was 16, she had reunited with her family, and landed a gig as a locker room attendant at Trump’s infamous resort. She found not only stability, but a potential career path, too.

“It's so funny that you're reading a book on that because I know this older gentleman who's looking for a traveling masseuse.” Roberts was on shift at Mar-a-Lago, reading a book about massage therapy, when Ghislaine Maxwell approached her. Ghislaine Maxwell – the wealthy British socialite-cum-Epstein procuress. Ghislaine Maxwell – the monster who taught me that it’s possible to have traded your soul to the devil in exchange for superior accessorizing choices.

In Lifetime’s Surviving Jeffrey Epstein, Roberts compares Maxwell to Mary Poppins – a prim, pretty, entirely-too-proper English lady who floated down from the clouds, spoonful of sugar in her hand at the ready. Indeed, Maxwell managed to sweep Roberts up in her spell, just as she had so many others. I’m sure she smelled nice and spoke at a pitch that could be described as “matronly.”

Roberts leapt at the opportunity. If I were in her shoes, I’m confident I would have, too. And for the next two years, she became, in her own words, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slave. From that day forward, she was assaulted and raped continually by both Epstein and Maxwell. She was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to all sorts of high-falutin individuals. She lived with them as a sort of perverse family unit: she even alleged that Maxwell once asked her to have a surrogate baby for her and Epstein.

By the time she was 19, Roberts, who was rapidly aging out of Epstein’s preference box, was sent to Thailand, ostensibly to attend a specialized massage program. The real reason was to bring back a young Thai girl for Epstein. However, when Roberts arrived in Thailand, she met and quickly married an Australian martial arts instructor named Robert Giuffre. They fled to Australia, where she called Epstein and effectively told him to kick rocks. I hope she used stronger language. The Thai girl that he’d ordered on layaway remained in Thailand, and Virginia Roberts, a foster kid who’d slept on streets and in palaces, became Virginia Giuffre. (Though, it might’ve been fun if her husband had taken her last name, and become Robert Roberts).

If it sounds like I’m describing the plot of the next big Greta Gerwig caper, then I completely agree with you. Virginia’s story is absolutely fucking incredible. It should be a movie. Actresses should be fighting to play her; not as the supporting player to Epstein’s main character, but as the biographical star of the show. She traveled all over the world before she turned 20, and survived some intensely horrific shit. She burned brilliantly in her survivorhood. She has stood up to politicians and princes. She is the reason that the British royal family was forced to awkwardly insist that its holy anointed blood line had no fly in the ointment (or, in this case, anointment).

You should still be here

Virginia should be here right now. Every time I see the name “Epstein,” it’s what I think. Earlier this year, in April, she was at her home in Perth, Australia when she decided to take her own life. She was 41 years old. She had three kids. At the time of her death, she was divorcing her husband of 20 years, accusing him of domestic assault and abuse. (In 2015, Robert Giuffre pled guilty to domestic violence charges filed in Colorado, and in January, 2025, allegedly beat her so badly that she was hospitalized for her injuries).

Of Epstein’s victim’s, Virginia was perhaps the best known, but she’s not here right now to set the record straight. Not here to share the truth with the truthers. You know, the truth-truth. And that’s such a goddamn shame.

I can’t help wondering what Virginia’s life would have been like if she’d never met Epstein. Did she regret meeting him? Or, maybe, did she see herself as forged in fire: grateful for the garbage alongside the gifts. I hate for her that she spent the duration of her too-short life under the thumb of abusive men. I hope that she’s thought of fondly by her children and the people she advocated for.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre will always be remembered in connection with Epstein. That’s usually how women’s stories get told. We’re not speaking of a survivor who rose from the streets, started a family, founded an organization (the anti-sex trafficking non-profit SOAR); instead, we end up referring to an unfortunate casualty in the line of fire.

Do the MAGA voices braying for the release of the Epstein files remember Virginia? I tend to doubt it. Just as I doubt they remember Courtney Wild, Jena-Lisa Jones, Michelle Licta, Haley Robson, Chauntae Davies, Rachel Benavidez, Annie Farmer, Shawna Rivera, Anouska De Georgiou, etc, etc. Could any Epstein truther, red-faced under a red cap, name even one of his victims?

Anyway, why are we still talking about Epstein? Let him rot in miserable pieces. I’d rather be talking about Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the woman who once stated, “I am now a survivor, and nobody can take that away from me.” Donate to her organization. Tell her story. Keep her words and actions alive even where she is not. Remember her goddamn name.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.

Subscribe now