Well, Michael’s (the 1/2 vampire) brother Sam realized what’s happened an calls on the Frog brothers (Edgar + Allen), 2 brothers dedicated to wiping out vamps. Well, after a series of events, Edgar, Allen, and Sam grossly kill “all” the vamps. But, Michael and Star (who are now lovers) realize they’re still 1/2 vamps. The last vamp turns out to be the seemingly normal man Sam + Michael’s mom is dating!

Well, there is the usual huge, snarling fight as Michael tries to kill the man. But, he knocks Michael out. Just as he is about to bite the mom’s neck, the grandfather whom Mom, Sam, + Michael are living with drives through the wall, sending a stake through the man’s heart. (The stake was attached to the car’s hood.) The spell is broken. Mom, Sam, Michael, Star, Lenny, Edgar and Allen cheer, hug, and scream. Gramps goes to the fridge, calmly takes a root beer. “That’s the thing about Santa Monica. All the damn vampires!”

It was real cool!

Love,
Karen

When I visited the suggested site, I was surprised and thrilled to find that people kept diaries on the internet for anyone to read. I was — and still am — a lifelong, obsessive diary keeper. I received a diary as a gift from my grandmother the day before my ninth birthday, wrote an entry that night, and have never stopped writing, 33 years later. I was fiercely protective of my diaries, and the idea of someone reading them made me want to throw up, but I was definitely interested in reading other people’s diaries.

The first online diary I really enjoyed was called No Idea, No Spark. The author, Nanette, who was slightly older than me, was smart and sarcastic, had more than one graduate degree, and was really into indie rock. Her diary took its name from a song by This Mortal Coil, which I found impossibly sophisticated. She lived in Chicago and, in addition to music, wrote about pop culture and her day-to-day life in a crisp, funny, stream-of-consciousness style. She was someone I absolutely wanted to be friends with, which at the time was still a weird feeling to have about someone on the internet.

After reading Nanette’s journal for a few weeks, as well as the other journals she linked to, I decided I wanted to do what these online diarists were doing. I had always considered myself a writer, but writing fiction didn’t come naturally to me, and I wasn’t particularly interested in traditional journalism. What came most naturally to me was writing about myself, but I had never thought of that as something I could do in public. Who would care?

But I went back to OpenDiary.com and started writing anyway. I called my journal Love That Dirty Water, because, as the song by the Standells said, Boston was my home. What seems mundane and everyday for me now felt brand new and endlessly exciting in 1998. I was living in a city with my first serious boyfriend in a tiny, shabby apartment. We were entirely responsible for feeding ourselves and paying our bills, and doing so every month and sometimes even having a bit left over felt like a miracle. I rode the subway twice a day, marveling at the existence of public transportation. My friends also had tiny, shabby apartments where we made elaborate breakfasts together on the weekends and drank endless cups of coffee and/or cheap mimosas out of thrift-store mugs. Everything was new, and I wanted to tell the world about it, and I also wanted everyone in the world to tell me what they were doing and how they were doing it.

After writing for about three weeks, I nervously wrote to Nanette, thanking her for keeping me entertained for six hours a day and sending her the link to my diary — not expecting anything to come of it, but secretly, quietly, hoping she’d like it. She wrote back to me almost immediately, and she did like it. She even linked to me on her sidebar, which was incredibly thrilling; during the entire time my diary existed online, about 90 percent of my traffic came from her site.

But unlike Nanette, who at her most popular had about 1,500 regular readers, I never got much of an audience, despite the fact that my friend Shawna, a fellow writer as well as web designer, invited me to move my journal and write along with her on an actual domain, Neat-o.com, that she bought, designed, and maintained. This was a huge and generous gift that made so much more seem possible in terms of people finding and reading what I wrote — but I still couldn’t get the hang of writing about myself in public, and most of my entries were irritatingly coy and lacked any real insight or honesty. (You can read one here.) As you can see, I couldn’t even bring myself to use my own first name; I called myself Hellsbelle, which was supposed to invoke the fun, retro, ironically sexy but definitely feminist vibe that was popular at the time, but just sounded silly and vaguely goth, which I definitely was not.

After a lifetime of writing about myself in private, I didn’t know how to make the switch to writing about myself publicly. I also wasn’t observant enough to realize that online diarists had personas; even people who had more confessional or explicit writing styles were putting out curated versions of themselves. In late 2000, a friend of my boyfriend’s found my diary (via Nanette, of course) and read an entry in which I had said something mean about his wedding. I was horrified and ashamed and never really recovered from it enough to write without second-guessing myself more than I already was. By April 2001, I had stopped updating.

I’m still friends on Facebook or Twitter with all the people whose journals I read, but these days, I don’t really interact with them aside from the occasional “like.” So when I decided to reach out to a few of them, I was nervous. Was it creepy and invasive to me to say, “I remember reading your journal from 15 years ago, give or take a few years! Want to talk about it?” Did they want anyone to remember? Did they want to remember what they had done on the internet long ago? They managed to do what I longed for and feared and ultimately failed to get at the turn of the millennium — an audience for my writing — and I wanted to hear how they felt about it.

I reached out to Nanette first, once again. Like a lot of former online diarists, she has a pretty low profile on the internet these days. In her words, “I’ve thought about starting another blog, but the world doesn’t need another mommyblog or library blog, and I can’t get with all the sponsored posts and professional-level photography and dealing with comments.” She has, however, continued to help people looking for something to read as an adult services librarian in Champaign, Illinois, and co-author of a reader’s advisory reference on women’s fiction, and that makes me happy. Eventually, I asked Nanette if she remembered anything about Love That Dirty Water, and she said, “Oh, yes! I thought you were hilarious, Hellsbelle!” That, of course, makes me happy, too.

Another writer I used to follow, Kathy, started her first online journal, Exercises in Futility (an extremely relatable title when it comes to writing on the internet, to this day), in 1998. She wrote about her life, memories, dreams of the future, and politics. You can tell she’s a natural early adopter because her Twitter name is @kathy (which is a giant pain in the ass for her every time Kathy Griffin does anything noteworthy).

I don’t remember how I first found Kathy’s journal. I might have been one of the many people who discovered her after 9/11, when she began writing in raw, evocative words about living in New York and her journal began amassing tens of thousands of hits each day. One reader even fell in love with Kathy and traveled by bus for more than 30 hours to spend Christmas with her, an event she detailed in an entry called “Only in New York: Part II.”

That entry has almost everything I loved about online diaries. First of all, it’s more than a thousand words long. Online diarists wrote longform essays with character development, story arcs, genuine suspense, and intimate details — often several times a week! It was thrilling to me that people could be so open with their thoughts, feelings, and relationships; that they could tell what seemed like all of their secrets day after day and do it all again tomorrow. There was a popular joke at the time that writing on the internet was about everyone sharing what they had for breakfast, but in fact, people were not only sharing what they had for breakfast, but also what they had fought with their partner about and how that reminded them of their parents’ loveless marriage and the effect that growing up with those parents had on their psyche.

This was addictive and intoxicating to me. In the case of Kathy’s aforementioned entry, here was a stranger meeting another stranger and telling thousands of other strangers all about it in swooping, cinematic prose. Reading it again 16 years later, it’s so perfectly of its time. Her reader took a bus from Oklahoma City to New York to meet a woman whom he’d only seen in “fuzzy webcam photos taken in questionable lighting.”

Some people started keeping an online journal in addition to writing they were already doing. When Wendy McClure started writing on the internet, she was a recent graduate of the University of Iowa MFA program, where she focused on experimental poetry. Post-MFA, Wendy worked in publishing by day and watched Dawson’s Creek and yelled at the screen by night. She wondered if anyone else was also yelling at the screen — and went online to find out. Sure enough, on the site Dawson’s Wrap, other people were watching, cringing, laughing, and yelling. There, Wendy found a new lease on writing: She learned she could be funny. Dawson’s Wrap expanded to become Television Without Pity, and Wendy was one of the site’s first recappers, covering Law and Order: SVU, as well as other, less-memorable shows like Glory Days and Wasteland. In 2000, she started her own site, Pound, around the same time she started doing Weight Watchers.

“It was a case of writing what I wished I could find,” says Wendy today. “I worried about the subject matter; I wondered, ‘Is it feminist to do this?’ But I didn’t see anyone else writing about that stuff. It gave me an angle. I didn’t want to write about my whole life, but I could write about that, and I could keep being funny. It was still a revelation to me that I could write funny stuff.”

Wendy was funny and smart. The only “funny” material I’d ever seen on diet and exercise were Cathy comics, which were not at all funny, no matter how many times Cathy screamed “ACK!” at herself in a dressing room mirror. Wendy, on the other hand, had this to say about exercise equipment in February 2001:

Of all of these options, I like the elliptical cross-trainer the best. I like how it has the word elliptical in it: I like the idea that I am exercising my sense of obscurity. The treadmill, I think, is all about plain old existential banality; the NordicTrack just takes things way too literally, and as for the StairMaster—well, you can tell the StairMaster reads The Fountainhead and that kind of crap. I’m not sure about the dogma of exercycles. I’ll have to think about that.

Wendy was the first person I knew of to have something go viral. On March 13, 2003, she posted a series of now-infamous Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974. I remember it well: At the time, several people forwarded the cards to me, and I wanted to respond, “I know her! I know Wendy!” Even though, of course, I really didn’t. I truly cared about Wendy and was excited to see her succeeding and getting an even larger audience, but she had no idea who I was; our “relationship” was entirely one-sided, and my happiness for her made me feel a little silly. Within a month, there were two mirror sites up to cope with the traffic; one reported 1.4 million hits in a week. The cards soon moved to their own site, where they live to this day.

Soon enough, several editors and agents reached out to Wendy about publishing a book; I’m Not the New Me came out in 2005. Predating later “blog-to-book” deals, Wendy’s book isn’t only about weight loss and self-discovery; it also serves as a meta-narrative about the act of writing about those things on the internet, which in 2005 was still something you had to explain and justify to quite a few people. Internet personas functioned separately from “real life” personas in a way they just don’t anymore.

“I remember being fascinated by that,” Wendy says. “We were ourselves, but we were also not quite ourselves. It was also so funny that we knew each other by the names of our journals rather than our actual names. You also didn’t really think about where people lived. It was just sort of this…other space. God forbid anyone knew what your last name was! The people who did use their last names had professional investment in their personas, and they were a little different. If they weren’t, say, John Scalzi, it was a little pretentious to use your last name! I’d think, ‘Who are you to use your last name?!’”

Today it’s hard to imagine someone like Roxane Gay—someone extremely good at writing on the internet in both long- and shortform—using a code name or hiding the fact that she lives and works in Indiana and Los Angeles. Of course, people still present curated versions of themselves online, but the line between life online and life offline is no longer so stark, strict, and new.

Right around 2005, everything shifted. Blogging had almost entirely replaced longform internet journaling. In 1998, lots of journalers kept blogs alongside their online diaries — Nanette, Kathy, Wendy, and I all had them. The difference was that blogs were shortform: Entries were usually written off the cuff and often included links to articles, sites, or, eventually, videos the writer liked, as opposed to the more inward-focused journal entries.

Blogging also had its own software (Blogger and Greymatter, for example), so it wasn’t necessary to go through the entire process of hand-coding entries and loading them via FTP. As Wendy points out, traditional journal entries were so long in part to make it worth the effort of uploading an entry!

By 2005, bloggers were quickly becoming a useful tool for companies seeking new, more “authentic” ways to connect with consumers. Bloggers got more and more book deals and, suddenly, corporate sponsorships. Heather B. Armstrong, for example, who just three years before had been famously fired for writing about her workplace on her blog, Dooce, went pro in 2005 and turned writing about herself on the internet into an empire. People no longer tended to write longform, confessional essays about their lives in their own journals. Many bloggers sent this type of writing to xoJane’s It Happened to Me series or wrote them for other “ladyblogs,” where only the most outrageous or revealing stories stood out from the crowd and drew attention that was usually short-lived and often hostile.

It all felt much less personal — but, of course, the kind of closeness readers feel toward people who write about themselves on the internet is often a very mixed bag for the writers. “When you share details about yourself with an audience, you create a kind of intimacy,” Kathy says. “It’s very one-sided — you know nothing about the person who’s reading your words, but that person feels as though they know you very well. I found that often led to a lot of resentment for me. Here I was just trying to talk, but I felt responsible for how other people I didn’t even know might feel about what I said. Ultimately, I don’t think fame is a thing I’m equipped for. I take things personally, and I seek to make personal connections with people. That’s not a thing you can do effectively with hundreds or thousands of people wanting your time.”

These days, I see a revival of the kind of longform, diary-esque writing I loved in the past happening in personal email newsletters. It surprised me at first that people would willingly fill up their already overcrowded inboxes with more emails, but like the elusive letter in the pile of bills, newsletters fulfill the need many of us have for writing and reading about people’s lives, memories, and dreams of the future. I no longer have an online diary, but I have a newsletter — though I’ve only sent out 10 installments and haven’t updated since October. I still can’t get the hang of writing about myself in public, nearly 20 years later, but I keep trying again and again in whatever new format presents itself, hoping someone else somewhere wants to read about me, hoping they write something I can read about them.

In 1986, David Lee Roth released his first full-length solo album, Eat ’Em and Smile. His 1985 Crazy From the Heat EP, recorded while he was still fronting Van Halen, hinted that he was on his way to going full drunk uncle at the wedding buffet, vibe-wise. Crazy featured four covers, including, of all things, a relatively by-the-book rendition of Louis Prima’s “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody.” Do you realize how ridiculous it was to hear that on the radio in 1985? Hair metal was at its absolute peak, and DLR decided it was time to marry Aqua Net, spandex, cocaine, and guitar solos with Vegas lounge lizard antics and endless vaudevillian mugging and winking, high kicking his way across stadium stages with precision rarely seen away from Broadway, white-gloved jazz hands shimmering away on either side of his face.

Dismissing Van Halen’s music as “morose” (and who among us has not had a dark night of the soul, lying on the bedroom floor weeping and listening to “Hot For Teacher” on repeat?), DLR decided to strike out on his own once and for all, taking Van Halen’s lighting designer/creative director Pete Angelus with him. They called themselves The Fabulous Picasso Brothers, because, explained DLR, “fine art and pizza delivery — what we do for a living falls neatly in between.” He hired Steve Vai as his guitarist, who, like Eddie Van Halen, was recognized as a metal guitar virtuoso, having replaced Yngwie Malmsteen in Alcatrazz, for crying out loud, and worked alongside Frank Zappa as a teenager.

DLR has to have taken some of the inspiration for his Picasso Brothers jibber-jabber from Zappa; the liner notes for the Mothers of Invention’s album Freak Out! includes the choice quote “Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.” Certainly kicking off one’s full-time solo career with “Yankee Rose,” an erotic ode to the Statue of Liberty, is casting off all sorts of things, including, as it turned out, any hesitation about memorializing one’s penchant for assless chaps.

For “Yankee Rose,” DLR went all-ass at once, both literally and figuratively. In embarking on this new, post-Van Halen project, he had a lot to prove, and he knew it. The video is already mind-boggling before the actual song even starts. “AND SO THE ADVENTURE BEGINS…!!!!” announces the title card, followed by a full minute and 39 seconds of a sort of comedy sketch that takes place in a convenience store and is a barrage of racist and sexist characters so over-the-top that the aforementioned drunk uncle at the wedding buffet would call them a bit much. Eventually, DLR himself appears in the embarrassingly ignorant face paint and headdress from the Eat ’Em and Smile cover, waving around a spear and hollering what sounds like another Zappa quote: “Gimme a bottle of anything…and a glazed donut….TO GO!”

After a smash cut to a signature spread eagle toe-touching leap off a drum riser, he prances across the stage, microphone held aloft triumphantly, mouth gaping back at the presumably stunned audience. His outfit consists of a fuchsia off-the-shoulders long sleeved crop top layered under a gold lame slingshot thong a la Borat and black and gold assless chaps with a large leather tassel providing a modicum of coverage, swinging like a proud show pony’s tail.

All at once, the ass is there and then it’s gone. During the next three and a half minutes, DLR shakes, thrusts, presents, wiggles, and rubs his now-clothed ass in every possible manner, but the first momentary glimpse of cheek is all we get.

This glimpse had a profound effect on me as a child. “I saw David Lee Roth’s new video for his song “Yankee Rose,”” reads my diary entry from July 21, 1986. “His buns show and his you-know-what bulges out of his pants! OH MY GOD! DLR IS A HUNK!” I was ten years old, but I knew that in 1986 math, buns + bulge equaled hunk. The adventure had certainly begun, but DLR would never quite surpass that ass-out moment. The Picasso Brothers movie he and Pete Angelus were planning with a “retinue of characters” fell through. None of his future albums would reach the heights of Eat ’Em and Smile. I never wrote about him in my diary again.

Stay with me now, and join me in remembering the other great breach rebirth, Prince’s “Gett Off” performance at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards.

“Gett Off” was the first single off the then not yet released Diamonds and Pearls, Prince’s first album with the New Power Generation. Following the disappointment of both the movie and the album Graffiti Bridge, which was supposed to be a sequel to Purple Rain, the final remaining members of the Revolution had left. Prince had a lot to prove. Prince was no stranger to both partial and complete nudity, of course. His first three album covers literally move down his body — just his seemingly candlelit face, Afro, and a hint of collarbone on For You, majestically feathered hair, mustachioed face, and bare torso with tasteful-for-1979 chest hair on Prince, and the head-to-groin shot on Dirty Mind, for which he wore the unforgettable combo of studded leather jacket with office lady lapels, a bandana jauntily nestled over the aforementioned thatch of chest hair, and black bikini briefs with pubes creeping out over the top. (The photo is tastefully cropped, so there’s no you-know-what bulge to discuss in one’s diary.) Later, he’d go fully nude for the cover of Lovesexy, which he referred to as a gospel album, going so far as to “beseech the crowds to love God, over and over” during its tour. Nudity was never just an attention-getting device for Prince. It was sexual, yes, but it was spiritual, too.

Post-Graffiti Bridge, Prince had to get crowds to love HIM again. For his reintroduction back into the public eye, Prince had something special in mind. His costume designer, Stacia Lang, recalls that Prince’s secretary told her that she “better sit down” before sharing that “Prince wanted a costume with his BUTT OUT.” My favorite part of this story is Stacia providing two options for Prince, “one with more exposure, and one with less,” leading Prince to silently cross out the “more exposure” option. It’s impossible to imagine DLR showing subtle restraint within the realm of assless pants options; Prince knew what he was doing. Prince always knew what he was doing.

“Gett Off” opens with a scream, which was a departure for Prince, whose iconic screams usually fittingly occurred during his songs’ climaxes. At the VMAs, the scream rings out twice, once to kick off the performance, the stage crowded with the NPG as well as a mass of dancers, and then again by Prince himself as he appears at the 20-second mark. He dramatically throws himself to the floor and is covered by several men who eventually roll off of him as he rights himself with a classic jazz split. He was back.

His outfit is a sight to behold before the big reveal even takes place. It’s composed entirely of what appears to be laser cut openwork lace, calling to mind the ubiquitous Tord Boontje garlands of the early aughts. It’s also citron yellow, thus introducing Prince’s yellow phase, which would see him replacing purple as his signature color everywhere, including his house and car! Yellow and purple are complementary colors, falling opposite each other on the color wheel. Like I said, he always knew what he was doing.

There are several glimpses of ass as the performance progresses, but it is not the focal point. It’s hard to find a focal point because Prince is performing in front of what appears to be a massive, pulsating, torch-lit orgy. I didn’t write about this performance in my diary, but I did watch it as it happened, and I remember being truly shocked to my core, entirely titillated and confused by the line “something about a little box with a mirror and a tongue inside,” and terrified that my parents were going to wake up, discover me watching this spectacle, and forbid me to ever watch TV again.

Prince waits until the 2:39 mark to start the real ass work, coyly turning to the audience as he raps, quickly turning around again in a bit of burlesque, then timing the next turn and reveal to coincide perfectly with the line “let me show you baby I’m a talented boy.”

It is perfect; the audience screams; how could they not? For the rest of the performance, Prince revels in his ass, most extraordinarily when he turns around and grinds it at the audience in time to the line “Now move your big ass ‘round so I can work on that zipper, baby.”

Prince has a tiny, compact ass, but with that performance it became one of the most powerful and enduring asses of all time. In a bizarre coincidence, Van Halen also performed at the VMA’s that year. Now headed by Sammy Hagar, they sang a song about asses called “Poundcake.” It was trash.

Ass-Out Pants: Who Wore Them Better? was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 1997, I was an American college student on a term abroad in London; it was the first time I’d been more than a thousand miles away from the small New Hampshire town where I was born. One of my favorite things about living in a large city for the first time was seeing movies that took place in the place where I was. I was finally living somewhere that was big and interesting and important enough to reflect back to me in popular culture!

I went to see Career Girls, not knowing too much about it other than it appeared to star two women who looked like slightly more attractive than average people I might see at a pub or shopping at Tescos. I wasn’t used to seeing relatively average-looking people centered as movie stars, grinning out from the poster with slightly stringy hair, imperfect teeth, and unpolished nails. I’d never seen a Mike Leigh movie before. I didn’t know it was possible to create an entire body of work about average people and their feelings, fears, and relationships.

The movie opens with Annie (Lynda Steadman) sitting on a train and smiling. She’s on her way back to London to visit her old college roommate, Hannah (the late, great Katrin Cartlidge.) She’s having a snack, she’s dressed nicely if not a bit conservatively, she’s smiling wistfully. We soon find out that she’s smiling at the memory of herself, ten years before, looking at roommate ads on a bulletin board. Here, in the flashback, she’s sloppily dressed in black, torn layers, she’s staring down, unable to watch where she’s going, let alone make eye contact with anyone, her hair is stiff and spiky and bright, Manic Panicky red, and one side of her chalky skin is covered in an angry, flaky rash. She is literally a walking open wound. I laughed, at the time, that this apparently happy, put-together woman could smile at a memory of herself at probably her most awkward and painful. Of course, now, looking back at myself watching this movie as an awkward, pained college student, I laugh in recognition.

She arrives at a London flat, steels herself to knock on the door, and finds Hannah on the other side, flanked by Claire, a giggling Madonnabe. They show her in; the apartment is dark, smoky, cramped, and dirty; the Cure plays in the background. I had never seen a college apartment that looked like an actual college apartment on screen before. I was transfixed.

I myself had bonded with my own best friend over the Cure six years before seeing Career Girls. When my mother got a job at a private high school, it was free for me to attend, and I found myself on the first day of school in a “day student room” full of seemingly carefree, effortlessly cool girls who had known each other for years. I perked up when one of them put on the Cure. I sang along tentatively, not knowing if singing along to music was going to put me even more on the outside of things, not knowing much of anything at all. “Oh, do you like the Cure?” she asked. “Yeah!” I replied. I knew a few songs, sort of. “Moi aussi,” she replied. We went to lunch together. We’re still friends, 25 years later. “The Cure! They’re my favorite band!” Annie tells Hannah and Claire, staring at her lap. She moves into the flat. She’s in.

Annie and Hannah embark on the sort of friendship that happens when you’re young and living nearly on top of each other. They use a well-worn copy of Wuthering Heights as a substitute Ouija board, asking “Ms. Bronte, Ms. Bronte, will I find a fella soon?” They make sloppy meals together and tell each other about their lives, discovering that both of their fathers walked out on them and their mothers when they were eight years old. Their mothers went in opposite directions; Hannah’s became a falling-down drunk alcoholic who needs to be cared for and looked after, while Annie’s becomes her clingy best friend. These are the types of coincidences that seem intimately spooky when revealing them to someone else for the first time. We all carry around so much pain and despair, and when we’re young, we don’t know where and when it’s safe to share this pain. We don’t know who’s going to look at us like we’ve grown two heads, like they don’t know what we’re even doing here, the way Claire does to Hannah and Annie several times throughout the movie. “That’s quite a coincidence!” Annie tells Hannah gratefully as they reveal their mutual missing fathers. “Synchronicity!” replies Annie. They discuss the difference between the two — according to Jung, Annie says, synchronicity is two things happening at once, one actual and one psychic. I realized as I watched that I myself was experiencing synchronicity while watching a movie in which experiences I had had, both actual and psychic, were reflected back to me on a screen. Hannah announces that she hasn’t cried since she was nine years old; Annie replies that she doesn’t think she’s stopped since she was eight. I was and am a copious crier, something I had always hated about myself, and envied others’ toughness and stoicism. My Cure-loving friend, for example, never cried, as far as I could tell. I would later learn that she fiercely hid her feelings and put forward a Hannah-like facade in order to survive. Synchronicity again.

Back in the present, Hannah meets Annie at the train, and they hug. They haven’t seen each other in six years. They set off on an entire weekend devoted to synchronicity, including running into a feckless, smug man, the gloriously named Adrian Spinks, whom they had both dated in quick succession in college. He, horrifyingly, doesn’t recognize or remember either of them. When rehashing the bizarre meeting over dinner, Hannah says she hasn’t thought about Adrian Spinks since college, despite being hurt when he dumped her for Annie, while Annie admits that she hasn’t stopped thinking about him in ten years. This, again, hit me hard while watching the movie then and now. My Cure-loving friend and I also dated the same guy in college and I had always felt both guilty and slightly dirty, taking her leftovers and ending up dumped and wistful at the end of it all, just like Annie. I didn’t know then how common it is for a group of people in the hothouse environment of college life to jump in and out of each others’ beds. I didn’t recognize this trope yet, and so I judged myself and comforted myself in at least seeing my experience once again reflected back at me from the screen.

Toward the end of the movie, Annie and Hannah walk through a park and are passed by a jogger who doesn’t glance at them — it’s Claire! “Talk about a bloody coincidence!” laughs Hannah, along with the audience. “Did you see where we were standing?” replies Annie. “At a crossroads! Very symbolic!” The past is constantly catching up to them, passing them by, and then catching up again. I see the same patterns in my own life; I think we all do. I am now older than the older versions Hannah and Annie; I’ll be 41 on my next birthday. Katrin Cartlidge died in 2002 at the age of 41. Her only IMDB quote reads: “I actually love getting older. I hated my 20s; I couldn’t wait to be 30. I’m really looking forward to turning 40, if I get there. And not just because things are more successful now, but because I think the older you get, the more you find life interesting apart from your own problems. So roll on. I can’t wait.” She just made it.

One Actual, One Psychic: Mike Leigh’s Career Girls was originally published in Applaudience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In honor of #ReadingRhys week, here’s a little story about my history and relationship with Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight:

In the very late 90’s, the year after I graduated from college and moved to Boston with my boyfriend to work in an office and be a grown up, I met a woman in a completely sketchy dive while visiting friends in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She was a window display designer, like my childhood idol Rhoda Morganstern from the Mary Taylor Moore Show and, later, Rhoda, and had a similar New York accent as well as perfect posture and a tiny silver statue of a ballerina that she wore around her neck and used as a very fancy coke spoon. My friends and I went back to her apartment for a party. She and I sat close together on a saggy couch and talked about everything and nothing. I felt sparkly, noticed, special, understood. As I was FINALLY leaving, the sun was coming up and my new friend gave me Good Morning, Midnight, by Jean Rhys, and told me that it was one of her favorites and she just knew that I would really get it. It’s about a woman named Sasha who has hit absolute rock bottom and travels from London to wander around her former home, Paris, “the city of both her happiest moments and her most desperate” in a drunken, penniless haze until she gets picked up by a gigolo who thinks she’s rich because she has a nice coat. She is nearly crippled by social anxiety at all times, and keeps a stream-of-consciousness inner monologue going throughout with lines like “Please, please, monsieur et madame, mister, missis and miss, I am trying so hard to be like you. I know I don’t succeed, but look how hard I try” and “My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafes where they like me and cafes where they don’t…rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I never shall me…and so on.”

I fell in love with the book; I was a little unnerved that a stranger with whom I had an instant, albeit fleeting and artificially enhanced, connection had decided that I would “really get” this book, but I was also weirdly flattered. I was just beginning my adult life, and apparently I was giving off some sort of vibe that I would relate to a book all about a woman who has A Past, a sordid, scandalous, shabbily glamorous past at that. I was drawn in by Jean Rhys’s writing; it mesmerized and soothed me in spite of Sasha’s social anxiety, in part because I suffer from social anxiety myself. Good Morning, Midnight was probably the my first experience with a book that spent so much time and detail discussing what it’s like to live with this kind of anxiety, and between that and the fact that a beautiful, interesting stranger had given me the book because she thought I’d like it, it made me feel the same way as our all-night couch conversation: sparkly, noticed, special, understood. Eighteen years later, I still love the book and reread it regularly. I am probably now the same age as Sasha, which is an odd milestone. I still deal with social anxiety, but I don’t have Sasha’s self-destructive bent or an ongoing, elegant but deadly self-loathing monologue running through my mind, thank goodness. I never talked to the woman who gave me the book again. I wonder how she’s doing.

by Karen Corday and Sarah Howard Parker

Karaoke is a team sport; your audience is just as important as your performance. If this weren’t the case, we’d all just be singing into hairbrushes in the privacy of our own bathrooms. We’re not talking about audience participation, although that has its place and is often useful, but rather audience appreciation.

In order for your audience to appreciate your song choice and execution, you must appreciate their time and attention enough to offer something more than the usual standards. With all of this in mind, we have put together a few suggestions to ensure a wonderful evening for all involved. Now, go get your slips in and tip your hosts and bartenders!

Don’t Sing This

“Paradise by the Dashboard Light” — Meat Loaf

Do Sing This

“Don’t You Want Me” — The Human League

No offense intended to Mr. Loaf, but songs this long are an act of karaoke aggression that no one should tolerate any longer. It’s also a good rule of thumb to avoid anything written by Jim Steinman. (This is not his only entry on this list!) You want to do a funny duet about a stale relationship that’s not a ballad? Try “Don’t You Want Me.” This song should be overdone by now, but it’s surprisingly underused, and the audience might sing along with the WHOA-OH-OH-OH part, which is very heartening and encouraging. Speaking of karaoke aggression…

Don’t Sing This

“Bohemian Rhapsody” — Queen

Do Sing This

“Don’t Stop Me Now” — Queen

“Don’t Stop Me Now” has a slow-fast-slow structure like “Bohemian Rhapsody” with the added bonus of also being by Queen while not having been heard a thousand times before by everyone in the room. It’s an action-packed three and a half minutes long, as opposed to seventeen years long. No one is happy to see someone vault up to the microphone for a seventeen-year-long stay. Don’t be greedy. Finally, “Don’t Stop Me Now” contains the line “I am a sex machine ready to explode!” and that is more fun to scream out in triumph than “Scaramouche, scaramouche, can you do the Fandango?” Try it!

Don’t Sing This

“Summer Nights” — the cast of Grease

Do Sing This

“Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” — Starship

You may think “Summer Nights” is a crowd pleaser, but we assure you that the crowd will be 200% more pleased to hear anything else! Is it a flirty, cheesy duet you’re looking for? If so, look no further than the love theme from Mannequin. You get all of the nostalgia value and none of the awkward lyrics and pelvic thrusts! And who doesn’t love the idea of Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall (in mannequin form) riding off on a motorcycle into the sunset? Waaaay more romantic than two middle-aged “kids” making out under a dock until 10:00.

Don’t Sing This

“What’s Up” — 4 Non Blondes

Do Sing This

“Torn” — Natalie Imbruglia

There are better ways to tap into 90’s grrrly angst than channeling Linda Perry and her ridiculous hat. “Torn” gives off a similar decidedly brunette vibe without trying (and probably failing) to get up that great big hill of hope…for a destination. It also has the advantage of being a slightly unusual choice that will still elicit a strong emotional response from your audience. Further options from this genre include anything by Garbage, The Cranberries, or any other 90’s female-led band named for a noun.

Don’t Sing This

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” — Bonnie Tyler

Do Sing This

“Alone” — Heart

Power balladeer Jim Steinman rears his leonine head again for the second time on this list. With TEotH, you will inevitably have someone (possibly the karaoke host) acting as “Bright Eyes” and they either will or they won’t turn around. Why risk it? You also may think it’s a clever choice to insert salacious language into this song to make it funnier; you are wrong. Let’s avoid both of these scenarios entirely in favor of the far superior “Alone,” which is an excellent, beloved song that still gives you plenty of room to bring the a little bit gothic/a little bit hair metal drama.

Don’t Sing This

“Don’t Stop Believin’” — Journey

Do Sing This

“Can’t Fight This Feeling” — REO Speedwagon

“Don’t Stop Believin’” has had its day and then some. May we suggest moving over to the arena next door where REO Speedwagon will take care of your bombastic, triumphant needs? Just look at those adoring faces in the audience when you clench your fist with sincerity and purpose and sing about bringing that ship into the shore and throwing away the oar forever. Isn’t that a better transportation metaphor than the tired old midnight train going anywhere?

Don’t Sing This

“Piano Man” — Billy Joel

Do Sing This

“Bennie and the Jets” — Elton John

NOW PAUL IS A REAL ESTATE NOVELIST/WHO NEVER HAD TIME FOR A WIFE/AND HE’S TALKING WITH DAVY/WHO’S STILL IN THE NAVY/AND PROBABLY WILL BE FOR LIFE/OH LA LA LA DI DA DA/LA LA DI DA DA DA DUM…(cue audible sobbing)

This song moves quickly from cheerful swaying with drinks in hand to morose reflection on the brutal reality of giving up on one’s dreams and drowning one’s resultant sorrows with a bunch of other sad-sack drunks. BILL, I BELIEVE THIS IS KILLING ME. It’s too real. May we suggest “Benny and The Jets” as an alternative? It is just as instantly recognizable and timeless as “Piano Man” without the violent mood swings. Plus if you feel insecure about your lack of singing prowess, you can sing it in the style of Biz Markie. Speaking of The Biz…

Don’t Sing This

“Baby Got Back” — Sir Mix-A-Lot

Do Sing This

“Just A Friend” — Biz Markie

This one speaks for itself and no further explanation is necessary.

Don’t Sing This

“I Want It That Way” — Backstreet Boys

Do Sing This

“Summer Girls” — LFO

Look, we can’t believe we’re suggesting this either, but the wacky, OMG remember THIS?!?! reaction you want for your Backstreet Boys throwback isn’t going to live up to your expectations. Everyone in the room has heard IWITW so many times that it’s like elevator music at this point. “But what about that hilarious scene from Magic Mike XXL?!” Yeah, what about it? Are you going to tear open a bag of Cheetos and rain them down upon the most absurd abs in the history of torsos? No? Then do “Summer Girls,” sing about Chinese food making you sick and girls wearing Abercrombie and Fitch, and bask in the late-90’s frosted tips nostalgia-induced adoration you crave and deserve.

Don’t Sing This

“Livin’ on a Prayer” — Bon Jovi

Do Sing This

“Praying for Time” — George Michael

There’s no obvious connection here besides prayer. This George Michael song is so beautiful, though. Just sing it. Someone in the audience won’t have heard it in 25 years and they will clasp their hands to their chest in a dramatic fashion when you start to sing.

Don’t Sing This

Any song from a musical or a Disney movie

Do Sing This

“Super Trouper” — ABBA

ABBA is basically perfect for any occasion. And you know what, you can pretend it’s from a musical, because it’s in Mamma Mia. Or, for a deeper cut, you can get really crazy and go with Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok” from the musical Chess, scored by the men of ABBA. What we’re saying is if you are desperate to sing something from a musical, consider something with an ABBA tie-in.

Don’t Sing This

“I Will Survive” — Gloria Gaynor

Do Sing This

“Fame” — Irene Cara

At first I was afraid…to mention this song. Kept thinking I could never…find a suitable replacement. But then I spent…about 5 minutes pondering it and realized this Irene Cara favorite has everything you need and more, including potential audience participation and interpretive dance moves. And I grew strong…in my recommendation, which I hope you will accept.

Don’t Sing This

“My Way” — Frank Sinatra

Do Sing This

Literally anything else

Beyond cruelly forcing your audience to muffle yawns and eye rolls when Ol’ You Eyes takes the stage, keep in mind that there is an actual death curse associated with this song. Please be safe and live to sing another day.

Karen Corday writes, works, lives, eats, drinks, naps, and sings poorly but with great enthusiasm in beautiful Western Massachusetts. She rightfully lost the lead in every high school play to her co-author.

Sarah Howard Parker began her karaoke career around the same time she pretended to have an English accent for several weeks. She would like to thank her co-author for putting up with her during that time. She is now fretting about her song choices in Cambridge, MA.

Sing This Not That was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I started smoking because it was a socially acceptable way for me to stand near the people I most wanted to stand near in high school.

At my first public, rural New Hampshire high school, smoking was strictly the province of straight-up bad kids. I had done it once before, in seventh grade, in an abandoned field with my best friend who wanted to impress a straight-up bad boy next door. She stole two cigarettes from her mother, the second one intended for the straight-up bad boy… who wasn’t around, leading her to ask me if I wanted to smoke it with her. I said yes.

Things had been tense between us for a while; I could feel her pulling away from me a little more every day, phasing me out, and I wanted to try and convince her that I was still a worthwhile best friend, that I could also change and do bad things. We went far out into a field away from prying eyes and noses and smoked. I didn’t cough, as I’d feared I would, but — as I later realized — I didn’t inhale. We went back to her house to brush our teeth and watch “Heathers” again. I saw myself in that movie, but not as a Heather, and not as a Veronica, as most people I’ve known who see themselves in that movie see themselves. I knew I was a Betty Finn — kind of mousy, kind of embarrassing, the kind of friend who the heroine bypassed in order to hang out with someone more interesting, dangerous and cool. Smoking in a field wasn’t going to change that.

Three years later, my mother got a job at a private, rural Massachusetts high school, which waived my tuition, so I started going there. At my new school, it seemed, everyone was approximately 23 years old, had a passport and a perfectly broken-in J Crew barn jacket… and they smoked.

On the first day of school, I met another day student. We bonded over both liking The Cure (I had taped a few of their songs off of the local college radio station and seen the video for “Love Song” on 120 Minutes), and when she asked me if I smoked, I told her I did. It turned out that there was a bonafide smoking area behind the chapel (I now attended a school that had more than one building, one of which was a chapel of all things) where people stood around talking and brazenly smoking. I spent a lot of time in high school standing near people I liked and admired, not knowing what to say, trying to think of something funny and smart and true, but I never got it quite right. Smoking at least gave me an excuse to be there.

I couldn’t un-Betty Finn myself; if no one was looking, I’d pocket my filter and take it with me to flush down the toilet because I had heard those things never break down and I didn’t want to litter. I definitely couldn’t do the masterful, nonchalant flick that sent the filter flying away; I could barely manage to drop and step on the burning butt without hitting my pants and sending sparks flying.

The Cure fan and I are still friends to this day; by the end of high school, we had gone from being tentative friends and tentative smokers to actual friends and actual smokers. We are still actual friends, 25 years after that first conversation; neither of us really smoke anymore (except when we do). I now live in the same rural Massachusetts town as her father. She came to visit from Brooklyn a couple of months ago and texted me to tell me she was coming over after she put her kids to bed.

“Oh, and I’m buying cigarettes,” she wrote.

“Don’t! I have some in my freezer!” I wrote back, which I did, and do — the same pack, as a matter of fact, two months later.

We sat in my driveway, hidden behind my car from the prying eyes of my landlord/neighbor; I told her I was a non-smoker, and I am, for the most part. Now smoking is something I do in secret, something I hide from most people and indulge in very occasionally with someone with whom I have funny, smart and true conversations without trying.

I still pocket and flush my filters to hide the evidence.

Standing And Smoking was originally published in Femsplain on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.