Bless Your Heart
The Ouiser Boudreaux and Clairee Belcher of newsletters is drawlin’ about ballin’ and Baldwins.
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Spreadsugars,
How y’all doin’? This week, we come to you a day late (that Lorazepam is indeed quite calming) and about 100,000 dollars short (not including our health mentor Valentin’s day rate) after spending the past fortnight at The White Lotus, Thailand. What do we have to show for it, beyond the body composition readings of women half our age? Drumroll, please! We’re honored to announce that Victoria Ratliff, whom we met on the boat ride from the mainland, will be joining the Spread as contributing editor! Like your Spreaditors, Mrs. Ratliff has a drawl like a mint-julep-drunk Persian cat and a knack for staying vigilant at all times, no matter what comes our way. Except, you know, when we’re napping.
If you have no clue what on earth we’re talking about, you’ve got some watchin’ to do! In the new, third season of Mike White’s rich-people-on-vacation murder mystery, we are greeted by a family of country-clubbing Southerners—some went to Duke, others to UNC, it’s a whole thing!—led by caftan-clad, generously medicated matriarch Victoria Ratliff, played by a height-of-her-powers Parker Posey. This is a role she’s been training for her whole life: Posey grew up ’bout 90 minutes down the road from Rachel’s hometown, in Laurel, Mississippi, and—get this—caught the acting bug at the very summer camp that Rachel went to as a kid (seriously, she talks about tapping into her inner performer for the very first time during cabin skit night in this WTF with Marc Maron). Small world, eh?
Lucky for us all, the always-excellent Amanda Hess really gets Posey and her hard-won and winding 30-year trek from indie star to the junior grande dame of now, and parses Posey’s -ish and oeuvre with acuity, studiousness, and tenderness in the New York Times Magazine this week. (What Jake giveth, the Spread happily receives.) This is less a celebrity profile than a portrait of the artist as a woman in midlife. Amanda, we are toasting you with too-sweet iced tea as we speak and digging into an issue that—perhaps because of the influence of our new colleague, who really is quite sleepy; perhaps because brains across the mediaverse are in survival mode—is light as cotton candy and, we hope, just as sugary.
Have a blessed day,
Rachel & Maggie (& Victoria)
P.S. We’d like to extend a warm welcome to our many new readers! Please let us know what we can do to make you comfortable during your stay at the Hotel Spreadifornia. Such a lovely place…
P.P.S. As a belated Galentine’s Day treat—sorry, we forgot on the actual day—we’re offering a discount code for 30 percent off paid subscriptions for the next few days! We recommend treating yourself and shelling out for a gift for your favorite voracious readin’ ladies in your life. It’s like you’re Michelle Monaghan and they’re Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb, except it’s only a few bucks a month and we will never talk sh*t about any of you behind your backs.
Baller Alert!
What are you doing tonight? We’ll be scarfing down Running Point, the new Mindy Kaling-and-friends produced show on Netflix. The half-hour comedy stars Kate Hudson (who is 45 now—not sure if we were expecting older or younger?) as a good-intentioned gal who’s suddenly put in charge of the NBA team her family owns. If this premise sounds extremely similar to the expensive-yet-junky, Rachel-beloved series Winning Time from a couple years back, that’s because it’s based on the exact same source material: The Buss family, whose daughter Jeanie Buss took over the Lakers after her dad, Jerry, died a dozen years ago. Anyhoo, thanks to Mindy and Kate we feel certain hilarity will ensue and are grateful that Netflix has offered up the whole 10-episode lot in one slam dunk.
Flirting with highly produced-so-therefore-unlikely disaster.
When we hear the words Amelia Dimoldenberg, we typically kinda just keep it movin’. We have a vague understanding of who she is—a YouTube star who sometimes appears on the red carpet and who at some point had some sort of public flirtation with Andrew Garfield, a man who strikes us as the most earnest millennial alive—but we don’t have, like, thoughts. (And as you know, we usually have thoughts!) Well, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead, who we should mention is 59 and therefore not exactly in Dimoldenberg’s demo (comforting), did us a solid by patiently laying out the whole phenomenon of Dimoldenberg and her show, Chicken Shop Date, in which her alter ego goes on pseudo-dates with celebrities during which she alternately charms them and puts them on the spot. Mead is a master of describing comedy (hard to do) and awkwardness (ditto). The result is an easygoing, satisfying profile from which we emerged both expert and fan in Dimoldenbergology.
Read “The Flirt Behind ‘Chicken Shop Date’” here.
Ex Marks the Spot
We’re sending a bouquet of organza-and-crystal flower appliques to Air Mail for answering our call about Georgina Chapman. Kiss, kiss! After the Marchesa designer prominently showed up on Adrien Brody’s arm at the Golden Globes a few weeks back and also in New York’s recent cover story about her Brutalist-star boyfriend, we wondered—aloud, right here—when and how Harvey Weinstein’s ex-wife made such a seamless and sudden foray back into Hollywood’s loving arms. Turns out, Air Mail has had their eye on Georgina since 2020, when Harvey was first headed to Riker’s, and this week they mapped her quiet return, step by step, from ScarJo showing solidarity by wearing Marchesa shortly after the scandal broke, to Anna Wintour throwing support her way, to her link-up with Brody as he ascended the A-list for the second time in his own career. In the wake of the Lively-Baldoni dumpster fire, we’re more attuned to the public-relations machine than ever, and this piece of analysis scratched a real itch. Still, we’re ready for the tell-all when you are, Georgina!
Read “The Runaway Bride” here.
Still to come in this issue for paid subscribers….
The ultimate escape-Trump plan (for less than the price of a cup of coffee!)…Nine Baldwins + one very bad idea… Vogue is gonna Vogue… will “Messy Man” save us from MAGA adolescents?… and so much more that’s worth paying for!
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