Unpaid Spokeswomen #14

Welcome to Unpaid Spokeswomen, a column where we log what we’ve been into this week. Behind the wigs, makeup, costumes, and several layers of irony, we are two humans who genuinely enjoy doing things. Here is a weekly roundup of our unfiltered expert recommendations.

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Trixie:

The Donnas

When it comes to incredible and successful rock bands made up exclusively of female members, the list is hardly a lengthy scroll. Due to a male-dominated music industry, a male-dominated pool of rock instrumentalists, and a generalized misogyny that casts a haze over any otherwise promising future, great female rock bands only emerge every so often; but when they do, they go hard. The Donnas, an all-girl rock band from California, entered the 2000’s TRL era with a searing single called “Take It Off.” I remember seeing them play live on MTV and my small mind had never even imagined a ladies-only rock band. Guitars to me have always appeared phallic and aggro and so when I discovered women with guitars at 13 years old, my interest in picking up the guitar suddenly peaked. Hot girls with ripping guitar riffs and lyrics about turning down men? My dream.

Sadly, like many great girl bands (The Go-Go’s, The Runaways) The Donnas discontinued their trajectories early. Two of the members went on to pursue higher education at Stanford while the drummer retired due to chronic pain developed from years of explosive drumming.

I hate being reductive, but they sound a lot like if Jet was all teen girls. I strongly recommend a few tracks:

-Take It Off

-Fall Behind Me

-I Don’t Want To Know

The Pro Palette

I discovered this product through American drag icon and celebrity hair and makeup artist Fena Barbitall. There’s nothing more annoying than having to carry around twelve different palettes because you have interest in using one or two shades from each. Suddenly I am carrying stacks of palettes from different brands because I have developed a look that leans on having a five or ten products on hand. You might look flawless but you have to basically pull a Radio Flyer red wagon of palettes to and from the gig.

However, your dreams of carrying less stuff can come true. About ten years ago, depotting shadows and pressed powders and building custom palettes was all the rage. Then, for some reason, pre-made palettes swung back into style and pro-pans of products fell in popularity. The Pro Palettes have made me a palette deconstructer and rebuilder once again. I pluck my favorite shades from all different palettes that I like and I Frankenstein them back together in these giant Pro Palettes. I love the clear top so that I can see everything inside. In drag, I use like four or five different powder foundations. With Pro Palette I can pretty much just rehome every powder into one palette and it’s fabulous.

Katya:

The French Dispatch

To borrow an expression from Trixie, none of the girls are doing it like Wes Anderson is doing it. With a signature style so distinctive and immediately recognizable, chances are you either really enjoy his work or don’t care for it at all. I watched this film in the theater last night, and I enjoyed every goddamn beautifully-lit, color-coded, tchotchke-filled, French-talking, mother-fucking minute of it. In what is basically a love letter to The New Yorker, the film feverishly unfurls in three parts, each focusing on the sections of a publication and its colorful cast of contributing writers, whose artistic talents are all lovingly attended to and fiercely protected by the magazine’s editor Arthur Howitzer Jr.(Bill Murray) whose sudden death puts an end to the publication. I loved every section and joyfully struggled to keep up with all of the incredible little details in every carefully photographed shot. I won’t give away too much, although even if I did, it wouldn’t matter much, because the plot of each vignette kind of defies description and simply begs to be experienced and enjoyed and obsessed over. And it’s no surprise to me that my favorite moments involved Tilda Swinton’s fucking batshit art critic character and her laugh-out-loud hilarious delivery. There is literally nothing this person cannot do on screen, and if you throw her a pair of fake teeth, a caftan, and a bouffant wig, it’s a wrap. The rest of the giant ensemble is absolutely marvelous, with my own special favorites after Tilda being Benicio Del Toro as a homicidal painter and the outrageously beautiful Lea Seydoux, his muse and prison guard. I snorted, guffawed, cackled, wheezed, snickered, aha’ed, and wept several times. 5 stars. 

The Witches of Eastwick

This is one of those movies that I have watched close to a hundred thousand times. For fans of UNHhhh, this film is my actual Contact. Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer are all looking incredibly beautiful as a trio of friends who don’t know they’re witches living in a small New England town. All of them single either due to death, desertion or divorce, they gather weekly for girl-talk that inevitably ends up focused on the perfect man, whom they unwittingly conjure in the form of The Devil, played by Jack Nicholson in one of the best comedic roles ever played by an actor. Everyone is in top form here, and even though the ending gets a little nutso with some questionable special effects (it was 1987 after all–no Marvel CGI to be found here) it’s absolutely worth it to watch all these actors chew up the scenery, in particular Veronica Cartwright who plays the devoutly religious woman who tries to warn the town about its new evil inhabitant. She steals every fucking scene she is in, and the gross-out over the top way she meets her end is stomach-churningly iconic. Not only does she scream the words “whores! Dildos! Anal intercourse!” at the top of her lungs in church, she also has one of the film’s best line deliveries when she turns to her exasperated husband Clyde and says matter of factly, “I have nothing against a good fuck, but there is evil here,” and walks away on her crutches. There’s also a fascinating behind-the-scenes detail that I found quite juicy: Cher had been cast but was dead set on playing the role of Alexandra, which had already been given to Susan Sarandon. The producers eventually agreed to give Cher the role of Alex, but didn’t tell Sarandon who showed up to set the first day not knowing that she was to play Jane. This apparently caused a lot of tension between the actors on set. And for any Massholes out there, some of the interiors of the Lenox house were filmed at Boston’s Wang Center (right next door to where I shot my solo show special Help Me I’m Dying!) and many of the exterior scenes were filmed in Ipswich and on the Cape.