This week was DTM (doing too much). To the tune of “Hawaii just missed that fireball / L.A. is in flames it’s getting hot / Kanye West is blond and gone”: Addison Rae lost her innocence in the backseat, Cailee Spaeny is in a wheelchair, and Joaquin is straight and gone.
I also saw some friends I never get to see and, on a separate occasion, went to Superiority Burger, which I am attempting to make into a bi-monthly routine: I can’t think of a consumable good I’ve ever enjoyed more than their corn/pandan/plum cake, except, maybe, everything else I’ve ever had there. Speaking of treats and joy: this week I invented something called Super Soda, which is a jungle juice of whatever diet sodas I have in the fridge. At some point, sake was also dumped into this deli container, but we don’t need to get into all that; since saying I was off alcohol last week, all I had was a quarter cup of sake in my Super Soda, which I am defending because my friend bought the sake and my Super Soda made it whimsical.
🎾🎾🎾ZWEIG NEWS🎾🎾🎾
If you have been missing the primal joys of watching the movie Challengers and your boyfriend says “I don’t think we need to rewatch that” (#LetClareWatchChallengers), I am happy to report that Challengers is now on United Airlines planes with screens. If you are flying United soon and your plane has screens, get ready to spend 5-12 minutes connecting your AirPods to that thing—boyfriends can’t interfere with what happens on your airplane screen!
Here are some other things that happened to me this week:
I saw Oh, Mary!
I’ve been a casual fan of Cole Escola since their turn in Difficult People, which was, at the time, the funniest thing I had ever seen in my life. I also, of course, love this:
There was never any doubt in my mind that Oh, Mary! was funny, but I have always been skeptical about how “Mary Todd Lincoln wig” could be sustained to the length and scale of a Broadway production. The answer: easily. I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed as much at anything happening around me with any sense of liveness—a theatrical film, live stand-up, recorded stand-up, any other live performance I’ve ever endured—as I laughed at every scene in Oh, Mary! It is relieving and fun, in a way you don’t experience very often, to be pleasantly surprised by something you were already expecting to be good. It’s also crazy that, to have this experience, you have to go to Times Square with your friends which, after COVID, still feels ridiculous and novel.1 That something so specific and lauded can actually be so fun is a weird miracle, and I feel lucky to have seen it in its original run. #ColeEscolaOscarHost
I tried the VIRAL corn ice cream
That’s right guys, I got my hand on the famous Korean Sweet Corn ice cream and let me tell you, it did not disappoint. I have been seeing these CRAZY, corn-shaped ice cream bars everywhere, guys, and I just needed to find them. They are always sold out at my local H-Mart but I was so excited to finally find them and try them for you guys. These are barrels of corn-flavored ice cream around a corn rice cake, dipped in chocolate, and wrapped in a corn-shaped cone, and, you guys, when I say these are amazing: I cannot get enough. The corn is subtle and sweet, and tastes like corn, and the ice cream is cold and creamy. I will definitely be buying more of these because they were just such a yummy, unique, summer treat. 🌽🍦Have you guys tried these viral corn treats? 🤔
I had Levain
I’m back with another viral NYC treat.
Bored of that: I had never had Levain cookies. They always look revolting—cookies are supposed to be flat—but I love eating something or going somewhere (Levain, Junior’s, Magnolia… Rice to Riches2 is next) that allows me post a picture of it on my Instagram stories with AI-generated “NYC” stickers. Here’s an example:
Caramel Coconut Chocolate Chip was the first I tried, which tasted like a mound of sweet, unidentifiable dough with flavorless coconut shreds and errant bites of unmelted caramel chips. No! Vegan & GF Chocolate Chip Walnut was better, if only because I would never have guessed it was gluten-free. I would have absolutely known it was vegan because the chocolate tasted like bitter medicine, but it was an otherwise pleasantly forgettable cookie. Ok! The best was Oatmeal Raisin, which tasted like a properly buttery, chewy, and crumbly treat with a lot of raisins—one of my favorite foods—which made me concede that Levain is fine!
I went to Governors Island
Last weekend I half-heartedly agreed to go to Governors Island to “walk around,” which I brought up to Fran, who then told me she “loves” Governors Island. Much like when Matthew Rhys offers Hannah Horvath his signed copy of When She Was Good because he “likes how happy it makes her,” this motivated me to more emphatically agree to the plans. We walked around and it was way too hot, but I loved that Governors Island looks like a liberal arts campus and that I ate ice cream there. I don’t know that I ever need to return, though, as I can walk around and look at New Jersey from other places on Manhattan that don’t require getting shoulder checked by European tourists in front of Casa Cipriani.
I found the peelable candy
GovIsle talk reminded me of another treat update. I’ve been looking for the Nice Day peelable gummy candies for months, but they are always sold out. Would you believe that the Duane Reade closest to the South St. Seaport had every flavor?
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1f67d61-b70f-4400-aa78-305fc3129b53_616x462.jpeg)
I got banana and mango because pineapple is not a flavor that candies need to be, and we ate them in line for the ferry. They are easily the best candy I’ve tried in a long time, surpassing Swedish Bubs by miles and miles, as well as all the exotic Haribos I also bought this week at Economy Candy. The texture of these things is crazy and I cannot recommend them enough.
I saw It Ends With Us
I thought Colleen Hoover books were the kind of pornographic novels for sheltered women that use words like “quiver” to talk about sex. They very well might be, to be fair, but they are also apparently about domestic abuse and the nuances of how men become abusers. There’s not really much to say about this movie because it is so bad in a TV movie sort of way it almost rounds the bend to being watchable, and “drama” between “Justin Baldoni” and the Lively/Reynolds estate is not something that interests me. But I do have one question: what is Jenny Slate’s endgame? She is married to a nepotism gallerist and does consistent voice work on those horrific-seeming animated shows that seem to bleed from Nick Kroll’s skin. I understand that no money is ever enough money, but she is a fairly well-respected character actor, so I cannot fathom why she needs to take work as the “friend” in a self-serious trauma porn option starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. If anyone has any answers about this, please let me know.
I lost my Regal virginity
Before It Ends With Us, I had somehow never set foot in a Regal. My friends talk about the chain like it is much better than AMC, but I’m here to tell you it isn’t. The monthly subscription seems like a better deal, and the popcorn much fresher, but as someone not looking to purchase either of those commodities I found Regal unwelcoming and sloppy. Don’t get me wrong: all AMCs are disgusting and terrible. But a new, shiny regal should not be in the same state of disarray as a converted, carpeted AMC, with napkins and ripped upholstery strewn about. I didn’t like how unpredictable the trailer package was, either: live theater, Disney World, a movie, cars, soda, a movie. Unprofessional.
The worst crime this theater committed, however, was the bathroom’s lack of hand towels. Let me explain something very important to you: using a hand dryer defeats the purpose of washing your hands. If you rinse your hands of traces of liquid carrying fecal matter, why would you then blow recycled air that contains aerosolized fecal matter onto your hands? It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the hand dryers are—if the air is at all humid it contains water from the toilets. If I catch one of my friends using a hand dryer I become blind with rage. Use napkins from the concessions counter. If you’re not going to dry your hands, I would rather you just not wash them at all and use hand sanitizer, though everyone should really be carrying around hypochlorous acid instead of alcohol to kill noro- and rotaviruses on their disgusting hands before touching anything that I’m going to touch. Grow up.
I canceled Jack’s Wife Freda
A few months ago I started a bit that I was going to make Jack’s Wife Freda cool. This is because it is the ugliest, most uncool restaurant chain I have ever laid eyes on, the way its patrons lay eyes on each pedestrian that must shuffle by its outwardly staged sidewalk patios.
I, of course, had never been inside Jack’s Wife Freda, because you can get yogurt and salad at any brunch place in your hometown, and reading the words “Peri-Peri Chicken” and “Grilled Haloumi” beside doodles of vegetables is an experience that should be illegal outside the United Kingdom. Because the bit has been going on so long, though, Liam and I “stopped in” for drinks during a recent storm. With the menu physically in front of me, I started to get nervous: the lights cast in ghosts of rose gold’s past were suffocating and the $10 Mint Lemonade tasted like a poisonous mistake. Then, we noticed the desserts offered malva pudding. Is this fucking Jack Wife’s Freda South African?
I now present prose from the homepage of Jack Wife’s Freda’s website:
“If you were going to give the cuisine a long and unwieldy name, it might be South African Israeli Jewish Grandmother Cuisine.”
—New York Magazine
Jack’s Wife Freda is an immigrant love story, times two. Freda and Jack met and married in Johannesburg circa 1930. Years later, their grandson Dean packed his few belongings and found himself in New York City, where he met Maya…
She too had emigrated to New York to find that special something. Sparks flew, and another immigrant love story was born. They were married in Maya’s homeland of Israel, at their spiritual center of the Western Wall in Jerusalem.3
I typically don’t “do” event-based socialization, i.e. live theater in the loop or uptown (bicoastal vibe), 4DX in Times Square, Q&A at the Siskel (girl who is based in multiple cities in her Letterboxd bio vibe). If transferring between trains is going to take too long, I have to transfer more than once, or, frequently, if I cannot walk, I am not going.
What did you guys think about the new RHONY trailer? I think the season looks really bad, but I also think Ubah is an all-time top 5 Housewife.
I feel obligated to defend my stance on Governors Island, a place I've been both for 10ks in the rain (bad) and in the fall on a weekday with friends where we just do laps around it and gossip about other people we know. That said, it's a great place to eat ice cream when there are less Europeans in town.
My brother and his girlfriend are OBSESSED with Rice to Riches in a way that transcends both irony and earnestness. Whenever they are in town, they demand to go. Phil on the other hand has been quite vocal that he thinks it's the most evil place in New York. You'll have to decide for yourself when you try it....
Since this post went live, Addison Rae referred to director Sean Price Williams as a "legend" on her Instagram story. I heard from reliable sources that she gifted him "the most expensive baby stroller you can buy." Congrats on the kid, Sean.