By Lori Perkins Ok, so I am staying in with my son and we are drinking champagne and eating Monte Christos sandwiches fried in duck fat for our second New Year’s Eve where we don’t want to leave the house. Just to let you now how contagious Omicron is in New York City (where they are still having the ball drop), a friend of mine tested positive after accompanying her husband to the hospital. But I received a lovely New Year’s card from a friend which featured a list of New Y

By Lori Perkins All my New Year’s Eve plans were canceled due to the Omicron viral surge. For the second year in a row, I said to my son, “it’s just you and me, kid.” So it’s hard to muster enthusiasm for the beginning of another year as we more or less look ahead to a winter in captivity. But then I catch up on my daily online news reading and learn that the poet Amanda Gorman, the beautifully positive voice of a younger generation, has released a New Year poem, and I cauti

By David T. Valentin “So, what are you going to do with a liberal arts degree?” one might ask a wide-eyed and naïve student going into college for an English degree. It’s a question our distant cousins in STEM or business don’t get asked. “I want to write and tell stories,” The student might say. Yet, is that really what we want to do? Is that really all writers do? Let’s go back to college sophomore me. The year was confusing. All my life I had thought I wanted to be a chemi

Movie Review: Don’t Look Up, So on The Nose You Can’t Help But Laugh By David T. Valentin After the past four years of a Trump presidency, an entire pandemic (still ongoing), and a so far lackluster progressive agenda from the Biden administration, watching Don’t Look Up on Netflix seems to be our fictional ending to our apocalyptical themed season, season finale. It’s so spot on, in fact, that you can’t help but laugh (or laugh more after going through what the world has gon

By Lori Perkins So it turns out that comedian John Mulaney and actress Olivia Munn welcomed their son, Malcolm, into our world around Thanksgiving and chose Christmas Eve to release his first image to the world. If you are just emerging form a COVID coma, our celebrity-watching world was rocked this spring when Mulaney announced that he was going into rehab for alcohol and drugs, and when he came out he went on good friend and former SNL-pal Seth Meyer’s late night show to in

By David T. Valentin Just before Christmas, the American author, novelist and essayist, Joan Didion, passed away at 87 years old. The writer was known for her unique journalistic style of writing where she would employ literary techniques in order to tell news as a story but with the opinions of the author, thus creating a very subjective telling of facts. The prose style is known as New Journalism. Didion was mostly known for writing about the counterculture in the ‘60’s and

By Lori Perkins Now, when you think of Santa Claus, you rarely think of how much his North Pole accommodations are worth, but leave it to Zillow, the real estate website that is battling an image problem, to post a cute and clever listing for St. Nick’s not-so humbler abode. According to the website, Satan’s cute North Pole spread of 25 acres would be worth $1,031,401, a nearly 200% increase from its previous 2012 estimate of $341,000. The fictionalized entry features Santa's

By David T. Valentin Icesis Couture, known as Steven Granados-Portelance out of drag and also the winner of season two of Canada’s Drag Race, comes out with a stunning dress with a fierce commentary on LGBTQ+ legality. Just yesterday, the season two winner of Canada’s Drag Race posted a picture of her in a long, flowing dress with a patterned design of different countries’ flags. Each flag represents a country that has yet to legalize and adopt LGBTQ+ representation. When a c

By David T. Valentin And just like that, Peloton ads featuring Chris Noth were removed by the company after three sexual assault allegations came out against the actor just after the ad premiered. After the latest episode in The Sex and the City sequel, And Just like That, Carrie’s longtime lover, Big, dies of a heart attack after cycling on a Peloton bike. That, or because Carrie refused to call 911. But that’s beside the point. Peloton just 48 hours after the episode premie

By Lori Perkins I bought my 3D tickets two weeks in advance, because I read that scalpers were selling them for hundreds of dollars, so when I went to a theater jammed to capacity on opening night (even though we were newly afraid of the wave of Omicron variant that was spreading thorough New York City), I was double-masked the whole time, and wondering if this movie was going to be worth it. It was. Spiderman: No Way Home is a Christmas present to Marvel fans. It is jammed

By Ryan Field Anne Rice passed away at 80 last week. She was the author of 40 novels, and was most well-known for her ground-breaking Vampire Chronicles series of books, which were published in the 70s and 80s. One thing Anne Rice never did was appropriate gay men or gay culture. She wrote characters with a homoerotic twist that didn't always cross the line...but were close to crossing the line. I remember the first time I read her book, Interview with the Vampire, I was sho

By Lori Perkins Yesterday’s newspaper greeted me with stories of New York City restaurants and Broadway shows closing due to COVID 19 breakouts. As I stopped at the local supermarket, next to a doc in the box, there were lines of people outside waiting for their COVID tests. There is absolutely no canned cat food available on the shelves. And I caught myself saying, “here we go again.” But this time, I know how to do this. Not that I am looking forward to what will amount to

By Lori Perkins Image Taken from Planned Parenthood Website The New York City Council voted to remove the name of Margaret Sanger from the square and street sign outside the Manhattan location of Planned Parenthood at Bleeker and Mott Streets. For the past two decades, social justice advocates have pointed out that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the leading voice for birth control in the United Sates, was also a believer in eugenics, making the carryin

By Lori Perkins Like most families, we watch a rotating variety of beloved Christmas movies as the actual holiday approaches. This is a Die Hard on Xmas Eve family, in case you were wondering. As a way of explaining our taste, I am sharing our basic list with you: Elf, Santa Clause, Christmas Vacation, It’s a Wonderful Life, Jingle All the Way, A Christmas Story, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Love Actually. So we like nostalgia, heart-warming and funny with an occasion