Obsessions This Week: June 8–14, 2025

Midsommarfest, The Queen of My Dreams, and Material Girls.

🌞 Midsommarfest here in Andersonville this weekend

I love the annual mid-June (once-Swedish, now plain ridiculous) summer street festival that turns my Chicago neighborhood into a veritable circus of performers, flower crowns, street vendors, free HIV tests, drag queens doing dunk buckets, churros (?), and glogg slushies. Not everybody does—in fact, I was hard-pressed to find a friend to go with me this year—but if you wear a big enough hat and get a gooey raclette, it can truly be fun for at least a couple of hours. Don’t even get me STARTED on the ABBA cover band that plays every year!

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✒️ W.B. Yeats’ birthday was this week

As a fun treat, here is a poem by Yeats my (retired high school English teacher) dad and I both like, for different reasons:

"When You Are Old"
By William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

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🎞️ “The Queen of My Dreams” (2023)

Have you seen this movie? How did I miss it? We love Amrit Kaur! The trailer alone gave me chills, and I can count on one hand how many times in my life that’s happened.

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🎙️ A ton of podcast recs

Gosh, I listened to so many this week! I also listened to three Regency romance audiobooks. Guess I’ve been driving quite a bit.

Seth Meyers and his head writer, Alex Baze, on a show I’d never heard of called Creative Principles

I was not familiar with this podcast when I stumbled on this made-for-me installment. It’s full of great writing advice and insider-y late night nuggets, and I will be putting it on my late night comedy writing syllabus in the fall.

The Sapphic x Radical Feminism episode of Material Girls

This very good episode breaking down “sapphic” + “radical feminism” + “lesbian separatism” for the un- or under-initiated was a must-listen. Also, you can go see them tape live in Vancouver, BC, Canada, later this summer! Say hi to my sister!

Yours truly was yet again the resident expert on “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!”