Happy Sunday — and my apologies to anyone who might have been inconvenienced by receiving the newsletter twice yesterday! There appears to have been some technical difficulties on the Substack side with a delayed send, which they then overcompensated for by sending a second time 🤷🏻♂️
One last shot for the weekend
A little bit of levity to start here! While things are generally not great for business right now, there’s one industry that’s finding a silver lining to the pandemic: tailors. “Tailors Know New Yorkers’ Pandemic Secret: ‘Everybody Got Fat!’,” an amusing dispatch from The New York Times details.
I’ll continue to beat the drum on this, but … if you care about the future of theater in America, you need to be engaged on federal relief packages for COVID-19. It is not just our leisure, either, that hangs in the balance. It is the livelihoods of the people it employs, both on stage and behind it. The Daily Beast published a great perspective on why we should all care about this from Nick Westrate:
The airline industry got $50 billion of relief, yet the arts and culture sector adds $265 billion more in value-added to the economy than the entire transportation sector. But they’ve got better lawyers. We aren’t asking for “hand-outs,” we are demanding investment in an industry that is integral to our identity as a nation, and our economic survival.
And, as always, a reminder that my employer is matching donations to a number of justice-oriented organizations (all of which are listed and described in this nifty spreadsheet). Make your money go twice as far by noting your organization of choice in a Venmo payment (@marSHAffer).
Now, what you came for…
DAY 136: My Big Fat Greek Wedding (available on HBO GO and HBO Max)
It sounds like a cliché, but I think I may actually know every line of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It would be futile to try and calculate the many dozens of times I’ve seen it over the past two decades — in theaters (remember those?), wearing out my DVD copy and, of course, on cable. In both the broad strokes of a cross-cultural marriage story and the keenly observed dry wit of writer Nia Vardalos, the movie will forever keep me coming back for more.
Not to kick back in my rocking chair and start lamenting “back in my day,” but I really don’t think we’ll ever see another word-of-mouth sensation quite like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Pre-social media, the film slowly built an audience bigger than that year’s entry in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. My Big Fat Greek Wedding opened modestly in April, entered the box office top 10 list in May — and stayed there until Thanksgiving. The idea of any movie sticking around in a theater for six months now just feels unfathomable; for comparison, Uncut Gems went from theaters to Netflix in a shorter amount of time this year.
What makes this so worthy of spreading the word about? For starters, Vardalos makes the rom-com so enjoyable to watch not because she goes above and beyond with a wild meet-cute or a novel grand romantic gesture. She cuts My Big Fat Greek Wedding largely from the fabric of her own life and experiences marrying someone from outside the tight-knit Greek community in which she lived. The film is highly culturally specific, yet in its granular detail and loving portraiture of the vibrant family surrounding protagonist Toula (played by Vardalos), it becomes paradoxically applicable to just about any group.
Whether it’s a running gag, a cutting one-liner or a revealing reaction shot, My Big Fat Greek Wedding vividly captures Toula’s contradictory emotional journeys of falling head over heels for Ian Miller (John Corbett) and burying her head in shame at the antics of her relatives. Few movies capture how family is both totally insane and totally necessary in such humorous, heartfelt rapture. There’s always something there to make me both giggle and belly-laugh. If you can’t find something yourself, maybe try putting some Windex on your funny-bone.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall