Five Queens

Patti Smith, Barbara Ehrenreich, Camp John Waters, Freddy Mercury, and that other one. And the burned-down Dirty Dancing resort!

I love Patti Smith. She’s just a joy, an incredible poet and musician. And she’s from New Jersey! Vineland, to be exact. I loved this interview she gave the Asbury Park Press, that goes into her past. She’s playing a few shows, but I saw her play in a church a few years ago, and that’s difficult to top. I shared her singing “Because the Night” a few days ago, so here’s another song. The video is awful, but the sound is clear.

Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer and journalist best known for Nickel and Dimed, which helped expose how expensive it is to be poor, has died at 81. This is a fine profile on her and her work. I read her most famous book, and it opened my eyes to how exploited the working class remains in this country. And that my mother (a hairdresser and waitress) and father (a construction worker) and uncle (a bartender who eventually managed bars) all demanded that I go to college and not work with them beyond summer jobs. She will be missed.¹

Also, a British Kardashian died.

My grandfather came over from Bray before the second World War, and I have dual citizenship with Ireland, so… sláinte.² I have sympathy for the Brits who didn’t vote for Brexit, as the United States also suffered from years of Putin puppetry, and faces a similar future of minority rule by plutocrats if we’re not careful. But really, now. Join the 20th century and stop paying millions to display your collection of inbred aristocrats as a tourist attraction.

A tourist attraction you can’t go to anymore is the Catskills resort where Dirty Dancing was inspired, as it has burned down. However, if you feel overcome with nostalgia for the movie—which is better than it has any right to be—another resort where it was filmed is still open, and has Dirty Dancing weekends, where you can do everything except reenact the famous lift (insurance liability precludes it). While it is in Virginia and not the Borscht Belt, it looks like a good time for fans. And if you want to explore a bunch of abandoned Catskills resorts without worrying about crashing through a rotten floor or being heckled by the ghost of a comedian, this photo series by Marisa Scheinfeld will satisfy your curiosity.

Camp John Waters is more my speed, if I were going to spend a weekend with a bunch of film fans. It’s going on right now in Vermont, and costs five hundred bucks. I know, because I had tickets for the 2020 weekend, which I had refunded. Kathleen Turner was going to be there! Who may be immortal thanks to voicing Jessica Rabbit, starring in Romancing the Stone and Body Heat, but she’s also the unforgettable and quotable Beverly Sutphin in Serial Mom. She’s not there this year, but if you tune into WFMU at 11:00PM Eastern tonight, both John Waters and Mink Stole will be on the air, live from the shindig. Maybe I’ll go next year…

Horror novelist Peter Straub also passed away this week, just as I began reading The Talisman, his modern fantasy collaboration with Stephen King.

Next week, I’ll be writing about “effective altruism,” and how utilitarianism has been weaponized to allow billions to die, as long as billions more can survive, at least theoretically, in a projected future space colony that will never happen.

That’ll be cheerful! But until then, this wonderful article on finding the source of a weird little cartoon spotted in the back of an ‘80s family photo was a delight to read.

May you enjoy the weekend, and manage to avoid the ten days of mourning from the backwards island country that embraces irrelevance with a stiff upper lip. Keep calm, carry on, mustn’t grumble, and all that.

There’s only one Queen.

1. I had a few stints as a short order cook, construction gofer, busboy, and bathroom scrubber, and eventually clerked at a local drugstore and gift shop through high school and college.

2. The video was posted months ago on TikTok, but has gone viral again.