Tuff Single Moms (Practical Magic)

TfH enjoys a 90s rom com like anyone else for hire. TfH enjoys queering the mainstream. TfH thinks to herself, Self, why not witch the queer 90s or queer the witch 90s? Or queer the 90s witch? What else were you doing in the 90s, Self, besides eschewing the queerish pleasures of witch movies? Self, no one is too cool for 90s witch movies. No one.

To queer up my misspent straight youth, I have launched Project WitchMovietober.

Part 1: Practical Magic, a 90s witchcom slash nightmare starring winsome starlets at their winsomest, like damn that’s a winsome Bullock. Thoughts for hire include:

1. Their family curse would be irrelevant if winsomes Kidman and Bullock fulfilled their witch destiny by loving women.
2. Bumptious comedy about small town small mindedness needs a whole coven to stay funny
3. Wait damn it’s actually a terrifying drama about escaping your abuser
4. If you need a sisterhood to save you from the Strangler, maybe you’re actually in the (wink wink) SISTERHOOD
5. But if you convene a coven to broom-slay the Strangler ghost haunting your house you can marry Aiden Quinn? Are you sure he’s a man though? Sure sure?
6. Stockard Channing
7. Diane Wiest
8. Slaying the sister’s bad boyfriend to marry the other sister’s good boyfriend doesn’t end patriarchy, even when Character Actress Margo Martindale sweeps bad boyfriend’s ghost ashes out of the house, alas
9. Not even Coven-Fortified Bullock at her dewiest can single mom without magic. MAGIC. Magic.
10. Magic

Mirror has 8 Faces Cuz it Reflects a Monster Woman that will Eat Your Brains AND your Cheesecake

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This middle-aged, single Jewess TfH took forty four and eleven twelfths goddess-damned years to appreciate Barbra Streisand. I blame the patriarchy.

The Mirror Has Two Faces, a heartrending farce about anti-semitic anti-fat beauty norms and male stupidity streaming now on Netflix, is sexist AF. But I didn’t notice because Barbra’s countenance pulled me in 27 different directions: resplendent, passionate, sorrowful, wise, bitter, hopeful, refusing shame, refusing love, refusing rejection. And then at the end, she sings and dances during the credits and makes out with hashtag Jeff Bridges.

Her voice and her white silk pajamas. Bulky pink bathrobe. Elegance. Joy. Humor. Incandescence.

TfH Resurrection: Covid Spring Streaming

Tender blogging emerges like that backyard March bud after seemingly endless Trump/divorce/COVID/mass shootings hibernation. Thinker for Hire streamed some movies. Watch them while you ice your vaccine arm!

Warren Will Beet Their Asses

In honor of democracy that won’t go down without a fight, I made up a delicious recipe that I call “Warren Will Beet Their Asses”:

The End of the F***ing TV

Lo these yon two years I’ve mediated on a moment in S1 of The End of the F***ing World: After cleaver-tongue Alyssa catches eyes-as-deep-as-he’s-tall James getting molested in a diner bathroom, she asks him, “When something bad happens to you, you don’t need to let it. Did something bad happen to you when you were small?”

This fictional high schooler voiced so concisely what I labored 2 score years to therapy into my own head.

So imagine my teary delight when, recently Netflixxing off an overindulgent happy hour, I was able to stream straight to the end of the f***ing second season.

“This Album Couldn’t Wait”

Celebrate our beautiful, troubled world with this lovely conversation between pioneers Lizzo and Janelle Monáe.

I didn’t feel like I had all the time in the world to write Dirty Computer. When you think about the state of this country, when you think about who’s in office, when you think about having a Vice President who believes in conversion therapy, and you think about how 77 percent of LGBTQ teenagers surveyed in 2018 report feeling depressed or down over the past week — I didn’t think that this album could wait.

I read from the Trevor Project that suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people aged 10 to 24. And that LGB youth contemplate suicide at at least three times the rate of a heterosexual youth. When you think about our trans brothers and sisters, our trans sisters being murdered, and when you just look at the state of the world, and when I’m working on an album like Dirty Computer that is centered around uplifting marginalized groups and those who feel isolated and outcast from our society, this album couldn’t wait.