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Hello Crush,
To the new readers coming over from [SIC], welcome!
Thank you to Ben Dietz, publisher of [SIC] for your mention. Ben is a longtime media/entertainment business guy, who I initially met on Clubhouse when it first launched during COVID. (Jesus, right?). Ben writes [SIC], a weekly digest of developments in trends, tech, media, marketing, fashion, food, places and events. (Yeah, he covers a lot of ground, but it’s fertile.)
Ben linked to my reviews of the Diane Arbus show at the Park Avenue Armory and ALL Blues, the Japanese-style listening bar in Tribeca in his latest [SIC], which is free, and you can check out here.
Another good thing that happened to The CRUSH Letter this week is that CRUSH Reader Di took the time to reach out from her vacation in Vail to tell me how much she loved my review of Keith McNally’s memoir, Keith McNally Sends His Regrets.
“You’re right,” she said, “a lot has been said about McNally’s memoir. Yet I really thought what you had to say was original and insightful.”
Thanks Di.
I really appreciate it when you reach out CRUSH Readers, thank you — you can find me at Dish@PrimeCrush.com.
The Crush Letter is a free weekly newsletter on life, love and culture for grown-ups. I’m Dish, the Master of Ceremonies. You can read more about me here.
In This Letter. +Hot Thots. Holy Hell, July Was the Month When All My Friends‘ Parents Had Health Emergencies. By Dish Stanley. Oooof. +Three Things I'm Crushing On. By Dish Stanley. This is like that moment in March 2023 when everybody all of a sudden was getting invisaligned. +dishing. As everybody keeps mentioning, Paltrow is polarizing. I‘d like to understand why. +Social Media I Loved This Week. +Our Song of the Week So much love to go around
Hot Thots.
Holy Hell, July Was the Month When All My Friends‘ Parents Had Health Emergencies. By Dish Stanley
Our Parents Are All Okay (As I Write), But Are We?
I was pulling out of my driveway last week to head over to my friend Deanne’s for a last minute dinner invitation when I got this text from her: “Squash that. My Dad was just rushed to the hospital with signs of a stroke. I’m racing to Logan for the last flight out tonight to PBI.”
Deanne was going to show me how to make her version of a Blistered Broccoli Pasta, which she says is better than the five-star Blistered Broccoli Pasta with Walnuts, Pecorino & Mint from NYT Cooking, which I had sent her earlier that day because she is the only person I know who loves broccoli. As in, doesn’t just tolerate broccoli like the rest of us, but actually loves it. “For one thing,” she had responded (by text) after reading the recipe, “I sauté anchovies in olive oil first to give it umami.” To which I replied “and then you put the walnuts, or the broccoli, or both, into the umami’d oil? Or do you sauté the walnuts and the broccoli separately?” To which she replied “why don’t you just come over for dinner tonight and I’ll show you?“ (This is a trick I often use with her, because she’s a very good cook and she cooks often, and also because it works: I ask her a question about how to make something and then, surprise, surprise!, she invites me over to demonstrate. She’s probably on to me, but if so, god bless her, she’s not letting on.)
(Getting back on point,) two days before that my friend Sarah cancelled a planned dinner to celebrate my birthday because her father-in-law had a heart attack. (“Really tough,“ she wrote, “because my Mother-in-law has Alzheimer’s …)
Oof.
The second week of July my friend Paul, who bought an apartment for his mother after his father passed away, which apartment is a four block walk from Paul’s office, asked to reschedule lunch because his mother‘s nurse had called to say that his mother hadn’t gotten out of bed that morning. “Hopefully nothing serious, but I need to check on my Mom.” (Turns out, it was serious. She was barely breathing when he arrived and he rushed her to the hospital.)
The previous week, just after July 4th, over dinner with two girlfriends, I was asking them about upcoming summer trips. My friend Kathy responded with, “I have to fly from Boston to Tampa tomorrow, then drive my Mom from Tampa back to her home in Indianapolis. She broke her femur over the winter and had to stay in Florida … “ “Tampa to Indianapolis in July?” asked my other friend, Lisa, “Why now?” “Yeah, well, she shouldn’t be going now because she could re-injure herself getting in and out of the car, etc., but she threatened to drive herself if either my sister or I didn’t take her.” Lisa, whose mother had six months earlier fallen while going down stairs that the doctor told her not to walk down (or up) nodded firmly, knowingly.
“Got it,” Lisa said. “That sucks.”
Many of my friends are at an age where our parents are in their 80’s and 90’s. Our parents’ health, how we are managing it (and how they are ignoring their doctors’ orders) has become a central theme when we sit down together to catch up.
My own parents’ health is touch-and-go. I (and my parents) are blessed that my sister moved in with them less than a year ago (after — you’ll recall — my sister’s husband passed away), but my pup Koko and I have been going up 2-3 nights a week to pitch in, plus darting up on a moment’s notice for emergencies. Over the last year my father has been in and out of the hospital with critical breathing issues four or five times, and my mother has had a stroke.
As of this moment, all our (mine and my friends') respective parents are okay. But are we, I wonder? On the one hand, we all rush to say how lucky we are to still have them, how blessed the time is that we spend with them, how honored we are to care for them. We mean it. And, on the other hand, we have all finally admitted to ourselves and each other that it is so much harder than we were prepared for, emotionally and logistically. We admit to being in sustained states of stress, worry and fatigue, which is impacting our own health, sleep and relationships.
Continue reading here
Three Things I'm Crushing On. By Dish Stanley
In this occasional series, readers like you share recommendations for the things they love the most, right at this moment.
I don’t earn anything from my (or your) product recommendations. Why? Because I am suspicious of recommendations from people who earn something off of them. I (and your fellow CRUSH Readers) just offer up the things we like purely to be good doobies. (The exception is books — we earn something de minimus for every book you purchase from the PrimeCrush bookshop.)
GRUNS. This is like that moment in March 2023 when everybody all of a sudden was getting invisaligned. (At that time I wrote Invisalign Is Having A Midlife Moment But Advice Is Anything But Aligned.) Now everybody is taking (or talking about taking) GRUNS. I just started. If you haven’t heard yet, they are nutrient-packed gummies that claim to provide a comprehensive offering of 60+ healthy ingredients. The idea is that they promote gut and brain health, immunity and high energy. A number of the friends started taking them because they travel a lot, especially over the summer, and believe that GRUNS help to make sure that they’re filling any vitamin/mineral gaps while on the road.
Speaking of being on the road, I won’t take another trip without my travel size K18 dry shampoo. My hairdresser secretly admitted to me last year that most every hairdresser she knows thinks K18 offers the best, most advanced line of hair products, but they don’t tell their clients because K18 products aren’t offered for sale in their salons. (K18‘s distribution model requires salons to be certified.) At the time I had just plunked down a month’s rent in Olaplex‘s sweep of products so I did nothing about it, but this summer when I was looking for a dry shampoo I picked up K18’s AirWash. It’s incredible, and head and shoulders above any dry shampoo I’ve used. (‘Dry‘ shampoo is somewhat of a misnomer here because you spray it (wet) onto dry hair.) The result made my hair cleaner looking than other dry shampoos, as well as giving it more thickness and body.
Cocofloss ($36 for a set of 4)
We have to floss daily, so why not make it as uplifting as possible? A friend gave me a set of Cocolab floss for Christmas. (Over a decade ago we started a thing where we gave each other particularly fun (or particularly good or well-designed) versions of useful, every day, ordinary things for Christmas.) Cocofloss is smooth and has a great flavor and sort of makes flossing fun.
CRUSHes, what products or services are making your lives easier right now?
dishing.
things that are getting me off these days.
It’s over, thank god. In a letter to fans, Sex and the City and And Just Like That … creator Michael Patrick King announced today that the Sex and the City universe is coming to an end. Those of us who loved SATC and its unrealistic but heartening portrayal of how women have friends, dress for brunch and live in New York, were the ones who hated AJLT the most, I found. We had the most to lose. I left off when Carrie donned her mushroom hat in the latest season’s premier. Carrie had gone from delightfully quirky to annoyingly unhinged, I thought. Fans of the original series will want to see the tribute to Carrie that SJP just posted. If only the sequel was written with half as much care and heart …
Naked Gun is getting solid reviews for Liam Neeson’s deadpan humor and the slyness of casting Pamela Anderson as a femme fatale. ”It’s a good time,” is what I keep reading. I’m jumping on the bandwagon, because don’t we all need a good time right now?
One of my favorite romantic story lines is widowers finding love again. So Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson coming out as a romantic thing is the best thing that happened to me this week. With his life story (including being widowed after the shocking death of Vanessa Redgrave) and her life story (read our thoughts on her documentary and our review of her recent star turn in The Last Dancer below), what a joyful thing to see all these shots (below, again) of the two of them unabashedly, joyfully enjoying each other.
I’m halfway through Gwyneth, The Biography, by Amy Odell. As everybody keeps mentioning, Paltrow is polarizing. I‘d like to understand why. I neither love nor hate her, but I’m reading the biography to have my own view on something ‘everyone will be talking about,’ and then, also because I have an ex who worked in Hollywood who shared a lot of firsthand stories with me about working with her. She was, he suggested, from very early on (even before she was an actual star) quite aware of her ‘star power,’ and quite willing to lean into it. I wonder how his stories map to the Gwyneth presented in the biography.
I’ll write a review as soon as I’ve finished it, but the first revelation that hit me (page 34/5 is that Gwyneth was a ‘mean girl’ in high school. Did everybody else already know that? I didn’t.
Another thing that surprised me this week? Alt country music legend Lucinda Williams opened a honky tonk bar in the East Village in NYC. Lucinda’s, a “Southern country bar,” will feature weekly bluegrass nights, songwriter open mics, live country performances and country karaoke. Hot damn. I’ll be reporting back.
I want to be her. I absolutely love the uninhibited reactions, not to mention victorious run, of this all-time high scorer on TrackStarShow. If you don’t know TrackStarShow, Jack (the host) plays songs to people on the street who try to name the song and band in what is a running competition. Sue is 60, a soulcycle instructor and former flight attendant, and pretty much the coolest woman you’ve ever seen in your life.
Finally, in a bit of a left turn: fretting over how to take care of your plants when you go on vacation this summer, but don’t want to give the neighbor’s teenager a key to your house? I thought this solution was brilliant.
Social Media I Loved This Week
Song of the Week
So Much Love by Southern Avenue
This one was sent in by CRUSH Reader John Kirk, author of an all-time favorite book of mine, Building the Perfect Music Collection. I reviewed it here.
As usual, John nailed it with this one. Southern Avenue is “the most talked about band in Memphis” according to Rock 103 (that’s the local Memphis radio station), and I can see why. They formed in 2015, were 2016 finalists in the International Blues Challenge and it is beyond me why I am just learning about them now. This song, So Much Love, is a happy, upbeat, almost rock-n-roll number that is perfect summer music.
Thanks John.
Enjoy the first splendid week of August, CRUSHes.
XO,
Dish
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The Crush Letter
The Crush Letter is a weekly newsletter from Dish Stanley curating articles & intelligence on everything love & connection - friendship, romance, self-love, sex. If you’d like to take a look at some of our best stories go to Read Us. Want the Dish?
