We Understood the Assignment

It will take some time to sort out exactly what happened in the election, and there are probably a bunch of reasons why Kamala Harris lost. She got millions fewer votes than Biden did so part of the problem appears to be that not enough Democrats showed up.

I’m not a political analyst or pundit but a few things did jump out to me in the aftermath. Three blocs voted for Harris in very high percentages: Black voters at 86% (94% of older Black voters), Jewish voters at 78%, and LGBTQ voters at 86% (including 82% of white LGBTQ voters and 92% of queer women). I don’t want to make assumptions about voting blocs I don’t belong to, but I wonder if we all voted for Harris because we know who gets the shaft when the right wing gets into power. We know our history and we’ve all been subjected to either state-sponsored violence or being deprived of our civil rights by the state. We understood the assignment.

 

I can’t speak for other voting blocs, but I do have insight into what LGBTQ voters are thinking. We see an America in which our hard-won civil rights and human rights will be stripped from us, and with the Republicans in control of all three branches of government, we will have no legal recourse.

 

For myself, I fully expect—through a combination of laws, executive orders, court decisions, and a lack of federal protection—to become a second-class citizen in certain respects. I can’t imagine marriage equality surviving. The right wing has never seen my family fit into America, and I’ve always been clear-eyed about that. I expect the president to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the troops to crush any dissent toward these losses of rights. The man said he'd do it throughout the campaign. He said it several times: Democrats in general are part of “the enemy within.” How many people were listening and really understood? It’s state power turned against our own citizens, and it’s going to be bloody.

 

I fear that trans people, already vulnerable, will suffer the most. They may not be able to get the healthcare they need, may suffer the indignity of having the gender on their birth certificates or ID changed, and may be forced to detransition and become different people against their will—people they never were. Again, the right wing told us all this would happen. They promised it. It’s all laid out in Project 2025. I skimmed a little of it and the language about trans people is chilling. It sounds like powerful men standing in rooms and musing on “what to do about the transgender problem.” It sounds like they could have sketched it out on cocktail napkins at the Kit Kat Club.

 

And people voted for this. A lot of voters saw those “boys playing in girls’ sports” commercials that demonized trans people—that put a target on the backs of people who are already at risk—and lapped it up like the bottom-feeders they are. People chuckled at that “Kamala is for they/them” but how many people realized that people who go by they/them are Americans, too? This was a catharsis of hate.

 

If anybody else in our LGBTQ acronym thinks they’re safe, don’t. That commercial endorsed a heterosexual nuclear family as an unsubtle signal that this is the only family the right wing will accept. They laid all that out in Project 2025, too—the architects of this second administration want to “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” That means, my fellow cisgender gays, they’re coming for us, too. Was anybody paying attention?

 

So some of us understood the assignment in the voting booth, but white people—we fucked up. Only 41% of white men voted for Harris and 45% of white women did the same. I wonder if this is because, unless we’re in another marginalized voting bloc, white people have no history of the power of the state turned against them in the form of violence or a denial of rights. I’ve never in my life been in fear of being beaten in the streets for who I am as a white person. We just don’t have a collective history of that; those are consequences for other people. Consequences are still coming that will affect plenty of white people. Abortion is going to be de facto illegal in the United States and the administration doesn’t need Congress to do that. I guess not enough white people gave a shit about it, or figured those were consequences they wouldn’t have to face. Best of luck if you have pregnancy complications in the Republic of Gilead.

 

I’ve heard some variation this past week of “democracy doesn’t matter when you can’t pay your bills.” This is the idea that goods and services are more expensive (inflation is back to normal but that doesn’t mean companies will drop their prices) so people had to vote with their wallets no matter whose rights were at stake.

 

You know what, I have money problems like anyone else, but I saw my choice another way: when your rights are at stake, you vote to preserve them and you find a way to deal with the higher cost of a dozen eggs. I’ll manage with higher food costs; I won’t manage so well with my family no longer legally intact.

 

But right wingers are never, ever expected to empathize with people on my side of things. Instead we will have four more years of sympathetic interviews of people in diners who pretend like they had no other choice but to fuck over their fellow Americans, and they want grace for that. But they won’t extend it to us. Maybe we can share some magically affordable omelettes before the black van comes for me.

 

Apparently there were Democrats who stayed home on election day. There always are. This pisses me off. I canvassed for my candidates for four weekends in a row. I phone banked. I donated. I wrote 600 postcards to voters across the country. I worked with the PRIDE Caucus to get our candidates elected in Delaware (we were mostly successful). I was a poll worker on election day, helping my district to vote. I literally walked the walk and talked to talk, and I still wish I could have done more.

 

So forgive me if I’m a little pissy that some people couldn’t be arsed to do the bare minimum at a time when so many people and rights are under threat and instead sat home and moued that “She didn’t earn my vote.” It’s a convenient way to accomplish two things: (1) not having to get off your ass, and (2) having a smug smirk ready when things go bad and saying, “Don’t blame me. I didn’t do a goddamn thing.” Their inaction still means they have a little piece of responsibility for the world of hurt ahead for people who—conveniently—probably aren’t them.

 

When Republicans win, it’s because their people turn out. They treat election day like church: when the holy day comes, they go. Every four years, there seem to be Democrats who get precious about their moods and sit home in a snit, and then end up fucking over a lot of us, including themselves. Well, when so much is at stake, you get yourself in the mood. The candidate may not have been left enough for you, and that’s a valid debate to have, but how does it make a lick of sense not to choose the candidate who would only get you part of the way to your goals and instead let the candidate win who would not only get you zero percent of what you want, but would in fact actively destroy what you already have? If you stayed home for Gaza, how did you think the Palestinians would fare under the tender ministrations of President Muslim Ban? They’re fucked now. But hey, your progressive halo shines undimmed. Congratulations.  

 

I was on the fence about whether I would write something this acidic in case any of my four readers would be offended, but I couldn’t give a fuck at this point. I’m determined for these people not to steal my joy but I’m incandescently angry about the state of America so don’t expect me to sing “Kumbaya.” It’s easy to call for “unity” when you get everything you want—what the right wing really means by “unity” is “We won so shut up and take the shit we’re making you eat.”

 

The hell I will. I’m not stupid or self-loathing enough to unite with people who hate me. I’ll stand and fight for marginalized and vulnerable people whose country is turning on them. I’ll be loud about it. I’m not scared of any of these motherfuckers and I won’t obey any of them in advance. I’m not going down quietly.

For the Third—and Hopefully Final—Time

I am exhausted. I’ve been canvassing and phone banking for candidates in Delaware and Pennsylvania, writing postcards to voters across the country, and today I’m spending a very long election day as a poll worker. I’m exhausted but democracy is hard work and it’s worth it. I’m also quite exhausted with having to push back on Donald Trump and the rot and hate he’s inflicting on the United States. There are many positive reasons to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and I know they will do something great.

But you know me: it’s more fun to complain and point out the negative—and in Trump’s case, he’s so malignant to the very idea of America and our Constitution that it’s imperative for me to point out to my small corner of the internet why you should not vote for him. So, for the third—and hopefully final—time, here is my case against him. To save time, I’m limiting this to just what he’s done since he lost reelection in 2020. I tried to prioritize this list but it’s like a Billboard chart where almost every song is tied for #1. If you’re a Trump voter, you may want to close this tab. The rest of you, get ready to scrooooollllll down.

 

Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to overturn the election results in an illegal attempt to stay in the White House. You might remember it: a mob attacking the Capitol, people and police officers dying, Congresspeople given gas masks and evacuated, gallows erected to hang the vice president. Trump tried to throw away my vote and the votes of anyone else who voted for Biden. Nobody ever actually presents any evidence of this “election fraud”; the campaign got laughed out of court about 60 times after the election. And when advisors were pleading with him to call off his rioters, Trump sat on his ass in his dining room and watched the chaos on TV and refused to do anything about it. When told his vice president was taken to a secure location to shield him from the mob, Trump said “So what?” Trump also demanded election officials “find votes” for him in Georgia, trying to overturn the will of the people in that state. These were naked authoritarian attempts to subvert democracy, and he’s absolutely responsible for the disgrace of that day. He was impeached for the insurrection (his second annual impeachment) and he’s been indicted, and hopefully he’ll be brought to justice. But if the courts won’t stop him, the people must, and he should never be near the levers of power again.

 

Donald Trump appointed three of the six Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and shattered reproductive freedom in this country. The government should not make reproductive decisions for you. This has led to women like Amber Thurman and Nevaeh Crain dying from pregnancy complications that could have easily been taken care of by a doctor, were it not for abortion bans in Georgia and Texas. Maternal mortality has “skyrocketed” since the Dobbs decision. We may never know how many pregnant women—some raped or facing medical complications—were forced to have children they didn’t want to have, since stories like that don’t always make the press. If Trump gets back in, he won’t need legislation to outlaw abortion—all he’d have to do is direct the Department of Justice to enforce the Comstock Act and nobody in America would be able to get abortion medication through the mail. The Republicans are coming for IVF and birth control, too—they already voted against protecting the former. Trump said last week that he would protect women “whether they like it or not.” That’s not protection; it‘s control. The idea that abortion should be “returned to the states” is deeply wrong. Bodily autonomy is a human right—why should women on one side of a state line have that right, and women on the other side of the line be denied it?

 

Donald Trump is a fascist who wants the military to go after political enemies on the left, calling them “the enemy within.” If this doesn’t apply to you, it applies to someone you know, who could very well be rounded up by a Trump administration. He doubled down on this rhetoric at his Bund rally at Madison Square Garden, so it wasn’t a slip of the tongue, and we can’t say we weren’t warned. He basically suggested Liz Cheney should face a firing squad for the high crime of opposing his candidacy. This is a pattern with him: he has consistently spoken about terminating the Constitution and using violence and the power of the state to prosecute his enemies without even a pretext of an accused crime. It is blatantly unconstitutional to declare a person or group of people guilty of a crime without due process, and it’s blatantly illegal to use the military to enforce the law. It would be extremely dangerous to have a man like this in office again, and the Supreme Court would probably let him get away with using the military to go after his enemies, thanks to their disastrous decision giving the president immunity for official acts and putting an asterisk next to the rule of law. Don’t give me some dopey-dope tapdance of “Take Trump seriously but not literally.” Even broaching the idea of using the military to go after your perceived enemies is un-American and disqualifying, and if a candidate for president broaches it, then you act like an American and you vote against him.

 

Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would remove federal protections against discrimination for sexuality or gender identity, and advocates that the government "maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family." They basically want to legally undo families like mine. Project 2025 would demonize and dehumanize trans people and its clinically hateful language against the trans community sounds like it came from 1933. Project 2025 would outlaw porn in defiance of the First Amendment. It would allow Trump to fire career government employees and replace them with loyalists who will allow him to implement his desire to be a “dictator on day one.” It would allow the government to prosecute anyone who takes an abortion pill. It would round up undocumented migrants and intern them in camps. This is the plan devised by Trump’s advisors for America if he wins in 2025. Don’t believe anyone who says Project 2025 is disbanded or that they disavow it—the ideas remain no matter what the initiative is called. Project 2025 would not end well for immigrants, women, or LGBTQ (especially trans) people.

 

Donald Trump has been convicted of 34 felonies for campaign finance violations related to his sleeping with a porn star while married. With that rap sheet, he’d have trouble getting a job at McDonald’s or driving a garbage truck, so why are we considering him a viable candidate for leader of the free world? He’s also liable in a civil trial for sexually assaulting a woman in a dressing room, and has been fined millions for defaming her. His company has also been fined $355 million for fraud. Trump behaved like a complete ass at all these trials, insulting the court, complaining about everything, and moaning about his victimhood. Any of these indictments should have been the end of his campaign, but here we are.

 

Donald Trump purloined top-secret documents when he left the White House and brought them to Mar-a-Lago, storing many of them in unsecure areas such as a ballroom and bathroom. This slob put our national security at risk. Who knows how many secrets he spilled to foreign powers, how many sources he burned, or how many of our people he put in harm’s way. It was only a personal favor from a judge in Florida that saved him from trial and conviction. We can’t trust Trump with national security information.

 

Donald Trump’s tariff plan is dumb and will wreck the economy. This plan will jack up the prices of goods that foreign companies will export to us and guess who will pay those higher prices? We will.

 

Donald Trump is still racist to immigrants and people of color. This goes back decades but he’s been on a real tear during this campaign. Trump said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” which probably didn’t sound any better in the original German. He said migrants have committed crimes did so because of “bad genes.” He spread that stupid rumor that Haitian migrants—here in this country legally—are “eating cats and dogs” in Ohio, building on a long racist tradition of saying non-white immigrants eat pets. His mass deportation plan would not only be cruel but would ruin the economy—who would do the jobs migrants used to do that keep the country running? Add all this up and Trump has been saying “Auslander aus.” We can’t say he didn’t warn us.

 

Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is an absolute tool.

 

Donald Trump’s own vice president won’t endorse him (probably still salty from almost being hanged). His former cabinet and advisors have spoken against him. National security advisors are against his reelection. His former chief of staff said Trump admires Hitler and wished his staff were more like Hitler’s generals. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs has called him “fascist to the core.” Even Darth Vader and his daughter (not Leia; the other one) are dead-set against him. These are not leftists; they’re diehard conservatives Trump himself hired. They worked closely with him and many are now pleading for the public not to vote him back in. Take the hint.

 

Donald Trump is out of it and not up to the job of presidency. I don’t know exactly what his problem is but his mental faculties have been deteriorating as this campaign goes on. He’s babbling—I’m sorry, weaving—about sharks and electric boats and Hannibal Lecter as if he’s a real person. It’s not clear that he knows asylum for immigrants is not the same as an asylum for the mentally ill. He grinned like a dimwit and gave a thumbs-up over a soldier’s grave at Arlington. “They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats!” “There are some places, your boy leaves the school, comes back a girl.” He’s yapping about Arnold Palmer’s endowment. He fell asleep at his own trial and fell asleep at a campaign event. He’s too “exhausted” to go to scheduled events. Last weekend Donald Trump—a 78-year-old man—simulated manual and oral sex with a microphone stand at a rally. It just goes on and on and on. If your father acted like this, you’d call a family meeting and discuss options. The press ran Biden out of town on a rail over a lot less. The worst, for me, was Trump playing “Ave Maria” and “YMCA” and swaying to the music for 39 minutes at one of his rallies. You could make a meme or a joke out of this but imagine giving the nuclear biscuit back to someone who fugues out like this. It’s really not funny at all.

 

Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden Bund rally—all its ugliness and hate—crystallized a lot about his appeal and his mission. Some jackwad vomited out vile racism about Puerto Rico (part of the United States!) being a “floating island of garbage” and said Black people were “carving watermelons” instead of pumpkins. He also took a shot at Jewish and Palestinian people. Trump’s once and future advisor echoed a Nazi slogan and said “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Some nut brandished a crucifix and called Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the Devil” and a “prostitute.” Somebody called Hillary Clinton a “sick son of a bitch” (we can assume he only meant the last word of that). These clowns were invited and vetted by the campaign and their words were displayed on the teleprompter, so the campaign knew what they’d say ahead of time. It was the distillation of what this campaign believes. At the rally Trump reiterated that he will use the power of the state to go after the Democrats as the enemy within—people you know; people like me. Donald Trump has been warning us all along of who he is and who he and his goons will come after if he wins. Their vision for America is obscene.

 

So if you haven’t already, get out and vote, and let’s send this miserable SOB back to Mar-a-Lago!

My Specific Problems With That Closet/Adoption Commercial

A woman wanders dreamily around a walk-in closet, moving from its silk pashmina wing to its antique brooch wing to its silver bracelet wing. She looks at the photo of a young boy and then walks to one of the closet’s many mirrors and practices several versions of her speech.

“Hello, Michael,” she says to the mirror. “I’m Amanda. But if you want … you can call me mom.” 

 

This is a commercial by Inspired Closets, just inspiring the shit out of everyone with an inspirational commercial about a rich woman who is immediately taking her impending adoption from 0–60 by suggesting her incipient son call her mom at their first meeting. I know everyone’s story varies and everyone’s adoption journey looks different and what works for one family might not work for another.

 

But—girl—did you even take the class? Because we took the class. And in the class, if a prospective parent had wanted to discuss the exact phrasing for suggesting a child could call her mom if he wanted on the day they first met, the facilitator probably would have tactfully told her to slow her roll.

 

In any adoption story, there is trauma and there is loss. The child is processing moving to a new home, and will probably be scared or apprehensive. You really just have to be conscious of this stuff and meet the kid where they are. He might not even want to talk to you. So maybe your first meeting might not be the time to bring all this up. I mean, it’s not like an arranged wedding where you meet your spouse for the first time when it’s already basically a done deal; Amanda doesn’t even know Michael yet and there are many hoops of fostering and finalization to jump through. You two might not be a match. You don’t know!

 

Here's how Steve and I handled it: Sometime after our son moved in, we referred to each other in conversation as “Dad” and “Daddy” and he just picked up on it that that’s what we wanted him to call us. We didn’t want to pressure him. That first meeting, he was much more concerned with our wifi password than anything emotional.

 

Every family is different, of course, and maybe this fictional woman’s request to “call me mom” would work out. But what I’ve learned in adoption and in parenting is that the moments you think might be big and dramatic might be smaller than that—still beautiful, but maybe not backed by a choir of angels and a dramatic slant of sunlight breaking through the clouds. I learned years ago that parenthood might not look like I pictured it, but it would still be amazing.

 

Anyway, what a goofy idea to sell closets through adoption. It’s not that deep; it’s a place to put your clothes. I picture the pitch meeting and wonder if the client and the agency were both, like, crying from how heartwarming this all is. I just think it’s dopey.

 

Madonna Is Worth the Wait

If you’re Madonna, and you want to do a greatest hits tour, how the hell do you cram 40 years of music into two hours? Since 1983, Madonna has had 38 top 10 hits on the Hot 100—still a record among women—12 of which went to number 1. On the dance chart, she’s had an even 50 number 1 hits, by some distance the most number 1 hits by a single artist on a single Billboard chart. So what songs do you choose to highlight and what do you leave out?

 

She mostly chose wisely. The Celebration Tour—Madonna’s first true greatest hits tour—was one banger after another, covering just about every era of her music. There were some frequently performed standards (“Like a Prayer,” “Vogue,” and “Holiday”) but there were also some hits she hadn’t performed in 20 or 30 years (“Crazy for You,” “Everybody,” and “Rain”) and a few true rarities that she’d never before performed on tour (“Nothing Really Matters,” “Bedtime Story,” and “Bad Girl”).

 

I saw the show Thursday with my dear friends and fellow veterans of Madonna concerts for 30 years, Jeanine, Steve, and Rick. Celebration was dense, packed with 20-some songs and countless images and references to her four decades in the spotlight. It took us a full year to get there, as tickets went on sale in early 2023 before the singer ended up in the ICU and had to delay the opener, but it was worth the wait. Madonna’s live vocals were beautiful and she looked great. The show was autobiographical but not linear, hitting on some major themes in the singer’s life but as always, she trusted the audience to make the connections between songs. It was a dense show and left a lot to process.

 

I have to imagine her near-death experience was on Madonna’s mind in choosing the Ray of Light single “Nothing Really Matters” as an opener. Dressed in a halo-like crown underneath a massive circle of lights, she sang “Nothing really matters/ Love is all we need/ Everything I give you/ All comes back to me” and drove home the point she’s made since her illness that she’s lucky to be alive and the love of her children kept her going.

 

After that opener, Madonna went back to her early ‘80s roots, remembering New York’s clubs like Danceteria and the Paradise Garage where she got her start, hanging out and asking DJs to play her tapes. At that time, dance pop must have seemed like the Wild West—disco was dormant and you had synth pop and new wave, but there was so much about dance music that still needed to be defined. Madonna was one of the people who defined that sound, and the other night she showed off a strong string of early hits, including her very first two singles, the moody “Everybody” and the punkier “Burning Up,” picking up a guitar and tearing through it. This was Madonna at her rawest, all desire and hunger, and that paired nicely with the deathless “Open Your Heart,” as she straddled a cabaret chair like she did in the original peep show video.

 

Madonna started in the clubs and though she’s branched out into other styles, she never really left the dancefloor. “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free,” she sang on “Into the Groove,” basically the thesis statement for her career. For her first big hit, “Holiday,” they staged it as a club that Madonna couldn’t get into after the bouncer let all her dancers in. Suddenly, the mood took a turn as the dancers started disappearing and there was only one left lying on the floor, covered up with a jacket.

 

After that opener of early hits played tribute to her beginning days in the club scene, Madonna took the time to sing “Live to Tell” and pay tribute to all the people from that scene who we lost to AIDS. Having lost a number of friends and mentors to the disease, she’s been an AIDS activist since the early days of the plague, back when people were afraid even to touch people with HIV. As she flew over the stadium on a platform, huge video screens showed pictures of people with the disease she knew and loved, like Martin Burgoyne, Christopher Flynn, Keith Haring, and Gabriel Trupin. Then the screens started zooming out to show more and more faces of people with AIDS, until it became a sea of faces—not famous people with the disease, just people—and then those faces faded gently away before a dedication “to all the bright lights” lost to the disease. A good part of a generation, just gone.

 

In “Live to Tell,” Madonna sings “Hope I live to tell/ The secret I have learned/ Til then it will burn inside of me” and “Will it grow cold/ The secret that I hide?/ Will I grow old?” To be able to turn those lyrics around and tell the story of people with a then-fatal disease, who often stayed in the closet in shame and were pariahs after they came out, was extraordinarily moving and deeply human. I’m a little too young to have lived in the fear those gay men did in the club scene in the ‘80s, but I remember it happening—all that ignorance and fear and callousness. Today with so much more acceptance of our community, and with the health risks of AIDS mitigated by new drugs, the disease and its stigma can seem distant to us. But we should never forget our forebears and the price they paid in that fight. Madonna didn’t forget. “Live to Tell” is my favorite song and this was a showstopper, leaving me a mess.

 

So I was in great shape for the next number, my other favorite song, “Like a Prayer.” Madonna sang this with black robes and rosaries imposed on her, with men in black loincloths trapped in a carousel of crucifixes, a revolving procession of bodies. This was cathartic but darker than usual, perhaps suggesting the complicity of the church in the stigma imposed on people with AIDS.

 

While the disease was still raging, Madonna delved into the sex, repression, and anger of that era in her great album Erotica, delving into it again here. “Erotica” was staged as a stylized boxing match, a nod to the original Girlie Show performance. It’s one of my favorites of hers, not performed often, so it was a thrill to see it. As “Erotica” gave way to an orgiastic “Justify My Love” and “Hung Up,” the infamous red bed from Blond Ambition surfaced. Instead of the simulated masturbation from that 1990 tour, she instead lay on the bed as a dancer dressed as her younger self in the cone bra caressed her from behind. It was a striking moment—Madonnas of two eras coming together, each one a ghost to the other, passing each other in the timestream.  

 

The show was heavy on Erotica and the real treat was the first-ever tour performance of “Bad Girl,” something we’ve been begging to see for years. Madonna’s daughter Mercy beautifully played the piano while her mom sang out this underrated ballad. Just sublime.

 

In contrast with the dark queer history in “Live to Tell,” “Vogue” was a queer celebration. The house music classic was a full-on drag/fashion show, with all the dancers parading around the runway, with Madonna as judge, giving 10/10 to everyone. There were videos showing all manner of gay celebrations and protests, and was a beautiful nod to the start of voguing in ballroom culture. It was a lot of fun until the cops came and broke up the party. (Well, they were sexy cops in sheer shirts, but still.) This prompted her defiant classic “Human Nature” and a little bit of “Crazy for You” directed at the sexy cop manhandling her (“Strangers making the most of the dark”), which was unexpectedly spicy.

 

The next few sections of the show weren’t as thematically strong as the beginning, but there was an oblique reference to her near-death experience: the apocalyptic imagery in the interlude “The Beast Within” followed with the defiance of “Die Another Day” and “Don’t Tell Me,” as if Madonna were saying, “Not today, Satan.”

 

There was also a strong current of family. For the American Life track “Mother and Father,” Madonna and her son David sang before huge images of her parents and his birth parents. When kids are adopted, even under the best of circumstances, there’s always a sense of loss as they leave their birth families, so this was a powerful way to connect her loss with her son’s.

 

A blitz of a few more hits followed, with an acoustic singalong of “Express Yourself,” concert staple “La Isla Bonita,” and rarity “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” the latter performed in a pride flag cape while images of artists who influenced Madonna played behind her.

 

“Bedtime Story” was as eye-popping as the futuristic video. In a skin-tight reflective outfit, Madonna lay down on a huge cube that rose out of the stage, with live video of her projected onto the sides of the cube against surrealist art. From there, she blasted into outer space to belt out “Ray of Light” while soaring over the crowd. This is one of her all-time bangers and it was a completely out-of-control performance, with rainbow lasers shining everywhere. It was insane.

 

Then she came back to Earth for another Erotica classic, “Rain.” I’ll always have time for this one and it kind of brought the show full circle: She started singing “Love is all we need” and ended (nearly) with “Your love’s coming down like rain.”

 

Celebration was very front-loaded so the end was a bit of a thud. There was a weird prerecorded medley of “Like a Virgin” and “Billie Jean” (they have similar basslines) while people dressed like Boy Toy–era Madonna and Michael Jackson had a dance off as silhouettes behind a screen. It was OK for what it was but I didn’t see why it was necessary other than that her son wanted to do his Michael Jackson impression. (Personally, I would rather have seen her do a tribute to Prince. He and Madonna were a lot more similar as artists and they actually recorded together.) This meant, oddly, that she didn’t sing anything live from Like a Virgin.

 

There was a very loud performance of “Bitch, I’m Madonna,” a song that aggravates me. The whole show is “Bitch, I’m Madonna,” so I don’t know why she couldn’t just let her work speak for itself. Still, it was fun watching Bob the Drag Queen and other dancers dressed as Madonna’s past personas. It ended with “Celebration,” a song I can’t be bothered with.

 

The only complaint I’d have is that the sound was muddy, so I’m hoping we’ll get professional audio and video to clarify the music more and get some detail. For the first time, Madonna worked without a live band (except for a few solo performers), instead opting to use the basic tracks. It was kind of a cool idea since apparently, they used some of the original demos. It made sense to me and had a nostalgic vibe calling back to her days singing to tracks in clubs. Her vocals sounded live to me.

 

The show crammed in as much music as possible but when she couldn’t sing a song in full, there were still little snippets of things: a few lines of “Causing a Commotion,” the strings of “Papa Don’t Preach,” the arpeggiated synths of “Lucky Star,” whispered prayers from “Act of Contrition” and some deep cuts like “Up Down Suite.” There was also a dense riot of images, drawn from videos, live shows and tabloid stories from the past.

 

There were two quotes from archival footage I was really happy they used. One was from her tribute to MTV at its 10^th anniversary: “You’ve never had more fun with anyone else.” The other was a speech a few years ago after receiving an award: “The most controversial thing I ever did was stick around.”

 

To me, these quotes get to the heart of what I love about Madonna, and I’m so grateful to be able to have had her stick around for 40 years and give me so much joy and pleasure. And it’s been so special to have the best of friends to share all that with.

 

***

 

So this is the basic setlist not including some interstitial stuff:

 

Nothing Really Matters

Everybody

Into the Groove

Causing a Commotion (snippet)

Burning Up

Open Your Heart

Holiday

Interlude: In This Life

Live to Tell

Like a Prayer

Interlude: Living for Love

Erotica/You Thrill Me

Justify My Love/Fever

Hung Up

Bad Girl

Interlude: Up Down Suite

Vogue

Human Nature

Crazy for You

Interlude: The Beast Within

Die Another Day

Don’t Tell Me

Mother and Father

Express Yourself

La Isla Bonita

Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina

Interlude: I Don’t Search I Find

Bedtime Story

Ray of Light

Rain

Interlude: Like a Virgin/Billie Jean

Bitch, I’m Madonna

Celebration

View From the Couch

We watch a lot of TV (I prefer to see the world from my couch while eating bon-bons) but it was a funny year. There were some other shows we watched that I just didn’t have much to say about. So this isn’t everything but it’s a sampler of what we watched.

10. The Crown. We’re not finished this season yet, but yikes, it’s been iffy so far. I did like the sense of claustrophobia and doom in the episode just before Diana’s death where she and Dodi realized they were never going to be able to do anything close to normal under the increased scrutiny of the paparazzi. (Boy, Dodi was a piece of work, wasn’t he? He was weeks away from marrying another woman and broke up with her to pursue Diana and propose to her because daddy wanted him to.) The ghosts of Diana and Dodi appearing was dumb and didn’t fit with the show’s aesthetic. While I might believe Charles and Mohammed would see these ghosts (really just projections of their consciences), I think the Queen would just be too practical to be troubled. It didn’t help that Imelda Staunton just isn’t very good—Queen Elizabeth II was by all accounts a dull woman, but Claire Foy and Olivia Colman breathed life into her. Not so for Staunton. I hear there’s a good episode coming up when Margaret dies, so there’s that.

 

9. What We Do in the Shadows. Points to this show for finally giving Guillermo his dream of becoming a vampire, and for doing it in an amusing fashion—the consummation was from some rando vampire rather than his beloved Nandor, and Guillermo’s vampirism was incomplete and came with weird side effects. Points taken away for the renewed focus on the Guide. I don’t know why but I can’t stand this actress.

 

8. The Morning Show. What a glorious mess this was, and of course, that’s the point of the show. Bradley’s brother turning out to be a January 6 insurrectionist at the Capitol was insane. I did like seeing Alex turn Marks’s corporate takeover around on him, even if I saw the twist regarding the network’s data hack coming miles away.

 

7. The Fall of the House of Usher. Even for horror, this setup was completely unrealistic (six dead kids from one family in separate incidents in one week) but I loved how stylized and moody it was and all its Poe references. Most of Mike Flanagan’s shows aren’t scary-scary for me—except for the Jonestown-esque Easter vigil in Midnight Mass, nothing has much disturbed me—but when the Usher sister started screaming at the very end, that did the trick.

 

6. For All Mankind. This show is ongoing and while it isn’t the best season (that’s season 2), I’ve been loving For All Mankind. We binged it all this year and I’m fascinated at this look at an alternate Cold War after the Soviets got to the moon first and Americans got their backs up and had to compete more in the space race, rather than making it a lower priority. In the latest episode we saw, I was thrilled to see Danielle finally scream “Fuck you!” to Ed for the tension that’s been building between them for decades, dating back to their time on the moon in the ‘70s. Ed (in horrible old-age makeup) has been a complete ass this season, sulking over the return of that cosmonaut/possible love interest to Earth, ignoring his health problems to continue flying, and never leaving Mars to meet his grandchild. I’m happy the show is seeing Danielle as the competent leader she is. We’re also entertained to see how many Russian cast members from The Americans turn up in this show.

 

5. The Diplomat. Speaking of The Americans, it’s been a treat seeing Keri Russell on TV again, this time as US ambassador to the UK. The Diplomat is lighter than her former TV series, although when Russell starts getting that severe tone of voice with someone, I half-expect her to go full Elizabeth Jennings and drop a car on them. Still, the twist with the prime minister was deliciously intriguing. Russell’s husband was an ass and I’m glad the show dealt with him, but that cliffhanger was brutal and left us yelling in our living room when the credits rolled.

 

4. Fargo. The show is also ongoing but season 5 has been great so far, a huge improvement over season 3 (completely unmemorable) and season 4 (pretentiously Saying Something Important About America). Juno Temple is deceptively wily and resourceful as a woman who started over in a second marriage to get away from an abusive first husband. One exchange between that husband (Jon Hamm) and her mother-in-law (Jennifer Jason Leigh) was gold: Hamm tells her he’s a libertarian. “So you want freedom without any responsibility?” she asks. He says yes. “You’re fighting for the right to be a baby,” she concludes. Even the woman who runs a predatory debt collection agency gets it.

 

3. The Last of Us. I don’t have much productive to say here but it was just really well-written and well-acted, particularly with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. The Last of Us is great at developing smaller characters, like the Indonesian scientist who quietly freaks out at the start of the Cordyceps outbreak, the self-sufficient Native couple who barely notice it, and of course, the one-off characters in “Long, Long Time.” This show found a beautiful way to present the love story of two people who managed to live reasonably full lives as the world crumbled around them. In a world destroyed by plague, you should be happy for anybody who can piece together a life.

 

2. Poker Face. For a show about murder and other awful crimes, Poker Face is surprisingly lighthearted and a ton of fun. It’s a delightful throwback to detective shows like Columbo in the ‘70s, where you didn’t have to worry much about continuity, but just enjoy the current hour and savor the twists of the script. Natasha Lyonne’s character—blessed or cursed with the ability to tell when someone is lying—goes around the country running away from her murderous former employer and solving crimes, with a murderer’s row of guest stars (Judith Light!). It helps that I always really like Lyonne in whatever she does. I feel like if I were at a party with any of her characters, I would talk to her and we would become friends.

 

1. Succession. It’s not even close. This show had a visceral effect on me at a few points, bringing me close to a panic attack about the death of an amoral fictional character and about a fictional disputed election. This was due to the acting cavalcade put on by the entire cast, but particularly by Kieran Culkin (his slow-motion breakdown and final, visible snap) and Sarah Snook (every subtle decision she makes playing out on her face). Succession stuck the landing for me, with the saga of Waystar Royco ending in a boardroom in tears. Shiv finally sees that Ken would be a terrible CEO successor to their father and changes her vote to sell the company, while Ken bellows “I am the eldest boy!” (he’s not) while trying to claw out the eyes of Roman. I love purgatorial endings so I loved the idea that Tom ended up as CEO and while Shiv can continue to have company influence as his wife, it’s a very shaky marriage and she has nowhere near the power she would have on the board of the old company. I will miss this show’s dark humor.

 

 

Ornaments

The regiment of ornaments lines the Target shelves, each in various shades of mauve or chartreuse or some other color whose name I can spell but whose hue I cannot necessarily picture. I wonder when we all decided Christmas had to be so coordinated. When each branch of the tree had to fall in line.

Not so on our tree. It blinks and glitters, laden down with bits of chaotic joy grabbed from the past. That little set of Santa figurines I got from Cost Less for cheap for my first dead-broke Christmas in my apartment. Friends’ empty cigarette packs I wrapped up to look like little presents. Ornaments from husband’s grandparents marked with his name and the year almost every year going back to birth.

Nothing matches but I take each bauble and trinket out of its box where it has waited out the summer and each gives me more joy than any perfectly color-coordinated little glass soldier. Christmas is a messy riot of experiences, something without theme or reason or rhyme but something that makes me smile when I see it all at once. That’s life, too.

I'm a little pill with a big story to tell

O

nce upon a time, I was called empagliflozin, a sodium-glucose co-transporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitor indicated, among other things, for reducing the risk of cardiovascular death in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus and established cardiovascular disease, and also an adjunct to diet and exercise to improve glycemic control in adults and pediatric patients aged 10 years and older with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

 

I was just enjoying life, content with my lot as an SGLT2 inhibitor, when the good people from Boehringer Ingelheim showed up. They ran all sorts of trials on me—phase I, phase II, and even phase III. They were randomized, they were controlled, they were double-blind, they were multicenter, they were placebo-controlled. All in an effort to help people with diabetes lower their A1c. Along the way, I was honored and humbled to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

 

Boehringer Ingelheim baptized me and called me Jardiance. I wasn’t just hard-to-pronounce generic empagliflozin anymore. I had a name! A real name! Something musical that just rolled off the tongue.

 

Then, late last year, a breakthrough! The DINAMO phase III clinical trial met its primary endpoint by demonstrating a statistically significant reduction in HbA1c compared with placebo for children and adolescents aged 10–17 years living with type 2 diabetes!¹ It turns out that when Jardiance was added to other baseline treatments (diet, exercise, metformin and/or insulin) HbA1c was reduced by 0.84% compared with placebo at week 26 (95% CI –1.50 to –0.19; P=0.012).

 

Woo-hoo!

 

You might have seen me around. Sometimes I’m 10 mg pale yellow, round, biconvex and bevel-edged, film-coated tablets debossed with “S 10” on one side and the Boehringer Ingelheim company symbol on the other side. But sometimes I’m 25 mg pale yellow, oval, biconvex, film-coated tablets debossed with “S 25” on one side and the Boehringer Ingelheim company symbol on the other side.

 

Be careful with me, though—there have been reports of urosepsis, genital mycotic infections, and necrotizing fasciitis of the perineum. But let’s not worry about that unpleasantness now.

 

Since that phase III study in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, everything’s just been coming up Jardiance! They shot a big-budget commercial that the public has just enthusiastically embraced. You all know the lyrics:

 

I have type 2 diabetes but I’m wearing it well

It’s a little pill with a big story to tell

I take once daily Jardiance at each day’s start

 

As time goes on, it’s easy to see

I’m lowering my A1c

Jardiance is really swell

The little pill with the big story to tell!

 

No need to thank me for giving you this earworm today. Anyway, America can’t get enough of this commercial! They made it a big, splashy musical and hired an actress to do all these amazing dance moves (seriously, the way she waves her arms and jumps from side to side is worthy of the late Tina Turner) on top of this fountain in a town square. Then, just when you think it can’t get any better, she changes into this dazzling yellow dress and keeps on dancing! And everybody is just controlling their A1c and losing weight and diabetes is just a big party!

 

I’m Jardiance, the swell little pill, and that’s my story!

 

THE END

 

^Reference

^{1. Laffel LM, Danne T, Klingensmith GJ, Tamborlane WV, Willi S, Zeitler P, Neubacher D, Marquard J; DINAMO Study Group. Efficacy and safety of the SGLT2 inhibitor empagliflozin versus placebo and the DPP-4 inhibitor linagliptin versus placebo in young people with type 2 diabetes (DINAMO): a multicentre, randomised, double-blind, parallel group, phase 3 trial. Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol. 2023 Mar;11(3):169-181. doi: 10.1016/S2213-8587(22)00387-4. Epub 2023 Feb 1. PMID: 36738751.}