Postcards from the Edge, AKA Bennifer in Montana, a State Which Has No Dunkin' Donuts
J.Lo and Ben take Montana, Kate Winslet gushes about the majesty of Wawa, Aly & AJ reveal their ancestry dot com results, and Wendy Williams gives them Lala in a mini Top Shelf, Low Brow roundup
This week’s Monday letter is going to be a little shorter, partly because nothing really significant enough pinged on my pop-cultural radar to cover and partly because I am extremely busy with 621 different things. If I owe you a text, it’s on the way and I apologize for being unresponsive and relatively off the grid lately (well, “off the grid” for me includes refreshing Twitter once every three hours instead of three times in one hour).
Anyway, onto the show. Fair warning: There is much discussion of northeastern fast-food chains ahead.
Top Shelf, Low Brow: May 3 — May 9
Bennifer 1.0: Gigli Reloaded, The Re-Up
This is technically a part of the Going to Press beat, but as last week was a slow news week, this is our headliner because I also have so many thoughts on the subject. This afternoon, the world’s most voracious and dependable journalistic source, The Daily Mail, reported that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were spotted together in…Montana?! Montana! As if this headline wasn’t enough to launch a thousand newsletters, The Daily Mail has pictures.
Now, I grew up in North Dakota, a state that borders Montana. I’ve been next door twice, I’ve also seen the Real Housewives of New York season six cast trip to the state. From all of the first and secondhand information I’ve gathered about Montana, I do not see it as a place that J.Lo would love. She’s a warm weather, big city kind of girl — New York, Miami, Los Angeles, those are the kinds of places that Ms. Lopez seems her happiest. Montana? With its high altitudes and low temperatures? I don’t see it for her, but it’s got to say something that she was open to trying! Either that, or she misunderstood and thought they were jetting off to see her good friend French Montana, with whom she recorded “Medicine,” one of the 20 one-off singles that she has released in the last seven years. As I’ve theorized many times in the past, Jennifer Lopez likes to listen to her own music in the car. I just know that there’s no way she’s not requesting album cuts from A.K.A. to her driver. Would I bet that these photos are Ben turning on the radio to some Bob Dylan nonsense station immediately followed by Jennifer yanking away the aux cord and plugging in her phone to blast “Booty” after being duped into flying to the midwest for a week? With my life.
Furthermore, Montana seems like an odd choice for America’s #1 Massachusettes Boy, Ben Affleck, who has singlehandedly kept America running on Dunkin’ for the last 20-some years. The Daily Mail reports that Affleck has taken Montana vacations in the past with the other half of Bennifer 2.0, his Daredevil costar and Capital One’s favorite spokeswoman that isn’t Taylor Swift, Jennifer Garner. However, Montana is one of the few states in the country that has zero Dunkin’ Donuts locations. Affleck famously told Collider in 2019 that he “has Dunkin’ Donuts every day.” Do I believe that Ben Affleck brings his own bags of pre-ground Dunkin’ Donuts brand coffee with him wherever he goes? Of course! But I imagine this is also pure hell for J.Lo, who now has to use one of her beloved bejeweled tumblers to house America’s worst coffee, likely with a shitload of sugar and syrups, just the way Affleck likes it.
There’s only one thing worse than Dunkin’ Donuts coffee made by the kind professionals that work there, and that’s Dunkin’ Donuts coffee you brew at home and try to make palatable the only way you can make Dunkin’ Donuts coffee palatable: with a host of sugary chemicals. This is an opinion I have expressed often to friends, family, and loved ones, who all hate me for it. Every time I put a period on a sentence where I write bad something about Dunkin’, I imagine my Massachusettes-born-and-raised boyfriend feeling a psychic pang of betrayal in his gut from the other end of Brooklyn. But much like Jennifer Lopez, I’m real. I stand by my stance on the world’s shittiest mass-produced coffee.
How much must a woman suffer for her man? Hasn’t Jennifer Lopez been through enough this year? Must she withstand home-brewed Dunkin’ while trapped in a snowy ski resort in Montana? The two reportedly spent “about a week” on the vacation together, but I imagine that Jennifer was ready to go full Riley Keough in The Lodge by the end of the trip.
And still, I wish this couple all the luck in the world! I’m both a sucker for nostalgia and incredibly interested in the cinematic romance of a couple rekindling their fire 17 years after ending an engagement. I just hope that this cold-weather boy and his warm-weather girl can put aside their temperate differences and make it work long enough to last the summer.
(Rating: Top Shelf)
Finally confirmed: Aly & AJ are related.
This week, Aly & AJ released their first full-length album since 2007’s Insomniatic. Granted, the duo has been releasing a series of fantastic EPs and singles since 2017, sometimes mashing those projects together in longer, album-like formats, but a full, original LP has been years in the making.
a touch of the beat gets you up on your feet gets you out and then into the sun, an album with a title that gives The 1975’s I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It a run for its money, is a delightfully warm, folk-tinged album that speaks to the sister duo’s range and innate ability to bottle emotion and feeling into a song.
Apparently, though, some were unaware that Aly & AJ are, in fact, sisters. To celebrate the release of their album, the two did a Reddit AMA on Friday, and thankfully could confirm their lineage once and for all!
(Rating: Top Shelf)
Kate Winslet becomes an honorary Pennsylvanian
Two weeks ago, we discussed the beauty of Mare of Easttown, which is a great show made even better by its stars’ commitment to going full method Pennsylvanian. I’m speaking, of course, about Kate Winslet knowing that in order to make a hardened detective from the northeast believable that she must not only have knowledge of Wawa, but make the holy pilgrimage there herself.
In a conversation on the Los Angeles Times’ podcast “The Envelope” last week, Winslet said this of the beloved convenience store chain:
“It almost felt like a mythical place…Wawa. By the time I got there, I was like, ‘It’s real!’ Walking into a Wawa ultimately felt like, it was kind of an honor, in a funny way, because to me that was the heart of Delco [Delaware County]. So to finally walk through the door of a Wawa, I don’t know why I felt like, ‘Oh, yes, I’m here, I belong. This is where it’s at. Wawa.’”
I remember feeling similarly the first time I walked into a Wawa when I briefly lived in Philadelphia. I was taken aback by the level of pure efficiency. You can walk into Wawa and customize your own hoagie on a self-service machine and have it in your hands less than ten minutes later. The selection beyond their infamous sandwiches is so expansive that I became so panicked trying to find one food and drink pairing to satiate myself that I simply had to leave without buying anything for fear that I’d regret my choice. There is no reason not to deify Wawa, as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing else quite like it.
Winslet also spoke of her costar Evan Peters’ go-to order while the show was filming in the autumns of 2019 and 2020. “He would say, ‘You gotta try The Gobbler,’ and it was this gigantic sub, basically — or hoagie, this huge hoagie. It’s basically a Thanksgiving meal in a hoagie. He was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I just eat that thing and I pass out.”
I’m in love with Kate Winslet quickly correcting her verbiage. From what I know, Pennsylvanians do not like their hoagies referred to as “subs.” There’s a difference, one which I was never able to quite nail down, but I’m sure if I was to reach out to any Philly friends they could quickly brush me up on the etymology. I also adore that Peters fully went in for the Wawa seasonal favorite. It’s clear that the entire cast was dedicated to making sure that they got as much out of their Pennsylvania experience as possible. Full disclosure: I’ve seen photos from friends of The Gobbler, and it usually looks more like cartoonish school lunch slop than this, but I have no doubts surrounding the hoagie’s undeniable deliciousness:
(Rating: Top Shelf)
Where were you the day Williams/Kent aired?
I have only ever seen one episode of Vanderpump Rules. That being said, I am very familiar with the life, times, and career of one Lala Kent, former employee of Lisa Vanderpump and current beau of Randall Emmett, who somehow conned his way into being a producer on The Irishman after he produced one of the world’s biggest commercial and critical flops of the last decade, Gotti, which also ended up having one of my favorite marketing campaigns of all time.
Last week, Lala Kent appeared on my own personal 60 Minutes, The Wendy Williams Show, to promote her new book, Give Them Lala. It was a reasonably tame interview, with Wendy telling Lala that she’s “giving her a bit of Fergie” before throwing Lala her signature mix of softball questions immediately followed up by boldly unfiltered, straightforward barbs like this:
As a side note, that scream is the subject of my favorite anthropological study, the “WHAT in the what-ation is going on?” video series, which compiles clips from years of Wendy shows where Wendy delivers news that ranges from shocking to totally innocuous and is met with a screaming “WHAT!” from the same audience member. When the pandemic started, many people’s greatest fear was that they would become gravely ill, mine was that The Wendy Williams Show having a studio audience made up of only her staff members would deprive me of “WHAT!!!!!!” reactions. Luckily, this hasn’t been so, which leads me to believe that this person is a part of Wendy’s staff. I hope their pay is through the roof.
But I digress! The Williams/Kent interview also gave me my new feel-good video, courtesy of Wendy getting distracted during the interview and beginning to page through Lala’s book, picking out one-sentence excerpts to read for viewers. To wrap up the interview, Wendy cut off Lala as she was giving a sincere recollection of being an alcoholic and explaining what she hopes her book can do for other people going through similar experiences.
“It’s just a book of stories that I hope people find entertaining,” Lala said. “But maybe take away feeling a little less alone and maybe forgive themselves quicker-”
“LATER THAT NIGHT, I sat on the edge of my bed, fixing on whether I would hear from Carter anytime soon,” Wendy said, reading from the page of Lala’s tome. “My dad walked in looking sad. ‘Sweetie, grandma’s passed away.’ Clap it up, please, for Lala Kent!”
I truly can’t stop watching this. Wendy Williams is a gift to the world. If you’re not taking 40 minutes out of your day to watch her show, uploaded in its entirety on YouTube and completely commercial-free, you may be prioritizing the wrong things. Allow yourself joy.
(Rating: Top Shelf)
Well, that’s really it for this week! No Low Brows! Thanks so much for being here and reading, I appreciate your attention even on a less expansive edition. I love you! If you haven’t gotten to read Friday’s deep-dive, The Cult of the Girlboss: How Reality Television Mavens Crush Their Contestants, I’d recommend it! I mean, obviously, because I wrote it. But I’m very proud of it and I think it helped to absolve some of the guilt I feel watching reality competition shows that are very clearly like…evil.
See you on Friday! Here’s a video of Billie Eilish being surprised by Halle Berry:
Have a great week 💖
WHAT !