samhexum

I am pretty sure the last time I watched the Oscars was during the Roosevelt administration but I don't remember if it was Franklin or Teddy.

I am pretty sure the last time I watched the Oscars was during the Roosevelt administration but I don't remember if it was Franklin or Teddy.

I am pretty sure the last time I watched the Oscars was during the Roosevelt administration but I don't remember if it was Franklin or Teddy.

I am pretty sure the last time I watched the Oscars was during the Roosevelt administration but I don't remember if it was Franklin or Teddy.

I am pretty sure the last time I watched the Oscars was during the Roosevelt administration but I don't remember if it was Franklin or Teddy.

That was today?

Seattle Opera posted a new promotion directly tied to the Chalamet incident. In its post, the Washington-based opera house wrote: “All we’ve got to say is… use promo code ‘TIMOTHEE’ to save 14% off select seats for ‘Carmen,’ through this weekend only. Timmy, you’re welcome to use it too. See you at the opera!”
https://ktla.com/entertainment/seattle-opera-trolls-timothee-chalamet-with-promo-code-offer/

As an opera lover, I can say, Wow, people are overreacting. Why? Because there’s some truth in what he said. Opera and ballet are absolutely struggling. He prefers to be in another art form.  Fair enough. 
 
But I wonder if anyone has told Timothee that movie theaters are half empty since Covid.  

I have spent hours watching the various YouTube videos people have created using either scenes from the show or "in real life" snipits from the now very busy lives of Storie and Williams. From the obsessed fan's perspective I have come to the conclusion that both leads are having the time of their lives. Also I am more and more impressed with the pure acting chops of both guys. Storie IRL is completely different in personality and behavior than Ilya Rosenov, so what he is displaying on screen is just amazing. Plus the ability to speak Russian so well in such a short time (especially the scene where he is on the phone describing to Shane his true feelings) is jaw dropping. Williams best strength is his ability to communicate a wide range of emotions and "dialogue" without saying a word. The things he tells us using only his eyes and ears are extensive, and add so much to the story and character development. 

SNL Video: Finn Wolfhard's Harry Potter Gets Romantic With Ron In Heated Rivalry Parody - TVLine
WWW.TVLINE.COM Harry Potter meets Heated Rivalry as Finn Wolfhard's Harry gets romantic with Ron in an SNL parody — watch it here. This week on "Saturday Night Live," host Finn Wolfhard played boy wizard Harry Potter in a parody that mashed up the upcoming "Harry Potter" HBO series and the buzzy gay hockey romance "Heated Rivalry." Harry and Ben Marshall's Ron Weasley innocently bumped into each other in the halls of Hogwarts, and there was a spark between them immediately. "You dropped your wand," Ron told Harry, and their hands touched suggestively as Ron told him, "It's lovely, by the way." ("I'd love to see yours sometime," Harry replied.)
"Heated Wizardry" also saw Harry and Ron stretch out before a sexually charged game of Quidditch, with Harry showing Ron he had no pants on as he zoomed by on his broom. Hermione tried to keep Harry on task, but he preferred spending his time fumbling with Ron underneath the invisibility cloak. "What's the spell to make something bigger?" he asked. 
Harry continued flirting with Ron via messages sent by an owl: "See you at the match against Slytherin. Then you can Slytherin... to my bum." Even Hagrid —played by Jason Momoa! — knew what was going on: "You're a homo, Harry." 

She'll play Connie Francis in the B'way musical starting April 1.
The role marks a return to Broadway for The Pitt star, who made her debut in Hadestown in March 2024. She begins her limited run starting April 1, opposite Matthew Morrison as the crooner Bobby Darrin, and will later play opposite Jeremy Jordan, when he takes over April 21. 
In addition to her role as Dr. Trinity Santos on The Pitt, Briones has often appeared on stage, including in the Hamilton national tour and East West Players’ Next to Normal. Briones said she was drawn to play Francis, a famed 1950s and ‘60s ballad singer, because it allows her to imitate the vocal style of that era. It also balances well with the more serious content of The Pitt. 

Daniel Radcliffe Makes ‘Every Brilliant Thing’ Shine
The actor’s fondness for the audience radiates outward in this delightful interactive play about naming and noticing the good in the world.
Review
By Helen Shaw
March 12, 2026.
Before I went to “Every Brilliant Thing,” now open on Broadway at the Hudson Theater, a friend who had already seen it braced me. “Look,” she said, working her way up to it. “It’s going to make you love your fellow man.”
That news didn’t exactly come as a surprise; I saw Duncan Macmillan’s interactive solo show 12 years ago, when it still starred its co-writer, the comedian Jonny Donahoe. Back in 2014, it charmed my socks right off my body. (Socks are kind of a theme.) Surely with the star Daniel Radcliffe, it would again? Yes — but yes in a new way, too.
When you enter the Hudson Theater, it looks almost as if we’ve turned up for rehearsal. Instead of a set, the seating includes several risers onstage, and the front of the stage itself has been replaced with a broad set of stairs down into the orchestra. The usual preshow scrum has an extra, agitating element in it. Dashing up and down the stairs, collaring theatergoers in the aisles, then rushing back to consult with various assistant director or stage manager types is a guy in sneakers and a violet sweatshirt, his short beard pointing vigorously and persuasively at anyone he waylays.
This is Radcliffe in hyperactive choreographer mode: As the narrator of the frequently participatory “Every Brilliant Thing,” he must cast, and often physically arrange, his audience. He murmurs in one guy’s ear; that man will need to speak a few lines an hour from now. He coaxes a couple into highly visible corner seats, and you know they’ll feature too. Radcliffe is deep into crowd-work by the time the lights dim, so that once he starts the show proper, all of us — from the giddy volunteers to the participation-averse — are already over being star-struck. We’re not fans; we’ve become collaborators instead, a useful attitude to have in an openhearted show about naming and noticing the good.
“The List began after her first attempt,” Radcliffe says. “A list of everything brilliant about the world. Everything worth living for.” The List is a child’s response to a parent’s suicidality, a desperate but also sweet and silly gesture meant to tether his mother to the Earth. (“His” mother does not, of course, refer to Radcliffe’s mother. The play is fiction, and dozens of actors, including Minnie Driver and Lenny Henry, have played the narrator, changing details to suit themselves.)
As the narrator counts off, voices from the audience shout out their assigned brilliant thing: The first item, which we hear several times, is “ice cream” because the boy started making his list when he was 7. As a message to the narrator’s fragile mother, the List doesn’t work, or at least she won’t talk to him about it, even after she returns from the hospital the first time — or after subsequent hospitalizations. (He mails her an expanded version of the List from university, “anonymously,” he says.) As cheery as Radcliffe seems, we do notice that the shocked boy is himself offered help only intermittently, primarily from a kind school counselor, Mrs. Patterson, played by a member of the audience, who gamely turns her sock into a joke-telling sock puppet to draw out the frightened child.
The narrator’s dad has less to say about the family’s crisis, and the night I saw the show, Radcliffe cast a magnificently taciturn theatergoer in the role. As happened again and again, the vicissitudes of audience participation created some spectacularly funny effects. When, during a wedding scene, the dad was called on to make a toast, he stared the “bride” (yet another audience member) dead in the eyes and improvised, terrifyingly, “When I first met you, I didn’t get it.”
The narrator grows up and into his own depression — he tells us that he and his partner have a black dog, named Metaphor, who follows him everywhere — and so the List becomes a crutch and an anchor and a blanket. As the story unfolds, he calls out 24 (“Spaghetti Bolognese”) and 320 (“Making up after an argument”) and 518 (“When idioms coincide with real-life occurrences, for instance: waking up, realizing something and simultaneously smelling coffee”). The List changes purpose and even authorship, but the numbers keep climbing, moving on toward a million by the show’s end.
“Every Brilliant Thing” is itself an accretive artwork: it started as a short Macmillan monologue, was expanded into a collaborative project — people were invited to contribute on Facebook — and then blossomed into this crowd-work-heavy performance, informed by Donahoe’s experience as a comic. Since 2014, it has became a juggernaut, performed in at least 80 countries, and still gathering speed. This particular iteration, directed by Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, has moved to Broadway from the West End, and it does not, strictly speaking, need Radcliffe and his sunflower openness. The play’s instruction to notice what’s beautiful about the world has real motive power, and the interactive components have been machined to perfection.
But the production does have Radcliffe, and he is himself a brilliant thing. Perhaps it’s because he has a quality of perennial boyhood. Not that Radcliffe isn’t fully adult in affect — the gentleness with which he asks his audience to pretend along with him, plus the beard, mark him as a Peak Dad. But he hasn’t lost his inbuilt spring. (When Radcliffe is excited, he boings straight up into the air, like a pop star being launched out of a stage cannon.) Radcliffe’s fully a theater creature now; he won a Tony Award in 2024 for his performance in “Merrily We Roll Along.” And yet we loved him first on film as Harry Potter, or “the boy who lived.” In “Every Brilliant Thing,” the narrator grows up over the course of the show; Radcliffe grew up in front of everyone. As wonderful as other actors might be in the part, it’s key that we knew this one as a little kid, plucky in the face of fear.
And something more is happening here, too. Radcliffe makes himself extraordinarily available to us — his fondness for the audience radiates outward from wherever he is onstage. When participants make tiny errors (say, Mrs. Patterson’s joke is a dud), he laughs with unguarded delight. He thanks those yelling out their brilliant things with a courtly nod. Radcliffe doesn’t just do away with the fourth wall, he manages to expand his magical aren’t-people-wonderful optimism to include the whole orchestra, mezzanine and balcony. (His “Merrily” co-star and friend Jonathan Groff achieves a similar area-of-effect spell in “Just in Time.”)
The same day that I saw “Every Brilliant Thing,” I read about a Pew survey which found that Americans don’t trust their neighbors. Out of 25 countries polled, the United States logged the highest proportion of respondents — 53 percent! — who had described their fellow citizens’ “morality and ethics” as bad. By the time I reached the theater, I had managed to get pretty despondent about it, and I was well on my way to a panicky spiral. As the show began, and we all started to laugh, I felt relieved that the production was going to let me escape that chilling portrait of our body politic. But as “Every Brilliant Thing” went on, I started thinking about it all over again. Come to this theater, I thought at those 53 percent. I bet I know what might help.
Every Brilliant Thing
NYT Critic’s Pick
Through May 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/theater/every-brilliant-thing-review-daniel-radcliffe.html 

Ya gotta like a 6'5 gay former rugby player who posts videos and shorts whilst taking bubble baths.
 

I consider the source.
Admittedly, a talented young man, but one whose longevity will owe nothing to technique. A career that could be scuttled by a botched facial or a pimple on his ass. 

Timothy Chalamet and Opera.
Two things, I don’t care about….at all. 

FOUR MOONS explores being gay at four different ages in Mexico City.  A young boy exposed to the world after making a move on his first crush, two teens who meet again in high school after being best friends when they were eight, a man who is unhappy in his ten year relationship, and a sick old man hiding his desires from his wife and daughters all go through stuff in this fairly engrossing flick.  It ain't a masterpiece but it was worth watching all the way through, even on the night we spring forward and lose an hour of sleep.
 
 

I'm about two musical numbers in, and it's scaring me. It's reading way too fake and forced. I have immediate dislike for Luis Molina. I think he's terribly miscast. I like Diego Luna, but I also think he's miscast. Oddly, Jennifer Lopez looks and sounds like she's lip-syncing, which is incredibly annoying. Right from the start, the film seems off. 

He also bashed traditional Japanese puppetry. Must think the entertainment world began with the colorization of the Wizard of Oz.
 

Having a lot of money at an early age can give you cocky confidence. He's admitted to just running his mouth without thinking. I hope he's more careful in the future, and learns from this stupid blip. America loves to rip its heroes to shreds. There were plenty of preliminary headlines claiming he's been "cancelled," but I don't believe it, yet. But it certainly could happen. The last thing you want as an actor is fans hating on you. Hard to get a job when that happens.

Maybe dating a Kardashian takes ones IQ down a notch.
 

Two lifelong friends from France saw a childhood dream come to fruition with the opening of Le Petit Paris, a bakery and café serving treats like hand-rolled croissants and freshly made pastries, including their signature “Flankie,” made with a chocolate chip cookie crust and topped with vanilla flan.
The bakery, located at 81-45 Lefferts Blvd. in Kew Gardens, opened at the end of last month in the same building where the German and Polish deli, Homestead Gourmet Shop, stood for nearly 80 years. The shop has since been reimagined as an expansive space with French music playing in the background and cozy tables, perfect for grabbing a rose latte or a sandwich on a warm baguette.

In the few weeks since the bakery has opened, customers have really gravitated towards some of their classic items, like their croissants, made with fresh butter from France and handrolled each morning; however, their Flankie, a fusion of a chocolate chip cookie and flan, has quickly become a fan favorite for its delicious and unique concept, blending American and French sweets.
“Our signature pastry is our Flankie,” said Le Mezec. “It has a chocolate chip cookie dough crust and a vanilla pastry on the inside. We also have a pistachio flavor for a weekend special, but I would say it’s the product that really represents us-you can find this one only here.”
Other pastries to explore when visiting the shop include the Kouign Amann, made with croissant-style dough and baked with butter and sugar for a caramelized finish, and the mixed berry tart, prepared on a croissant shell and filled with vanilla pastry cream and fresh fruits, such as raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries. 
 
Le Petit Paris opens in the former Homestead Gourmet Space
QNS.COM Two lifelong friends from France saw a childhood dream come to fruition with the opening of Le Petit Paris, a bakery and café serving treats like...  

After taking office this month, Council Member Phil Wong announced his office is partnering with the NYPD Transportation Bureau to address transit safety and “quality-of-life” concerns, such as illegal parking.
According to 311 statistics compiled by the State Comptroller’s office, illegal parking has been one of the top three complaints within District 30 for years now, with residents reporting an uptick in the behavior following the COVID-19 pandemic. Wong stated he would address the issue throughout his time on the campaign trail and met with traffic enforcement officials Jan. 12 to begin the work of fulfilling the promise.
Wong met with Transportation Bureau Chief Olufunmilola “Lola” Obe and Deputy Chief Brian O’Sullivan to discuss how best to approach the law-breaking on the majority residential streets of Maspeth, Middle Village and Glendale. The bureau plans on working with local precincts and citywide traffic units to lay the groundwork for targeted responses regarding the vehicles in District 30 and the rest of the city.
In 2025, the 104th Precinct alone towed close to 1,000 cars, with plenty more in the jurisdiction of both the 110th and 112th Precincts. Wong noted that the agency and police will put emphasis on targeting RVs parked long-term on residential streets, trucks parking overnight and the many auto-body shops and tow companies that use public streets to store cars. On Jan. 11, Wong posted on Facebook showing several derelict cars, both abandoned and stored out front by the auto-body shops, being towed in coordination with the 104th Precinct.

BEYTO is a cute Turkish man who moved to Switzerland with his family when he was six.  When he falls in love with a man named Mike his parents trick him into visiting their old village where they have set up an arranged marriage with a childhood friend.  It's sad but I liked it.
The movie is on Prime if you have it.  It is on YouTube as well but you'll have to sit through so many ad breaks you'll rather be forced into an arranged marriage than sit through even one more.