The April 29 Round-up, the "It's Almost May?!?" Edition
Juliet writes about feeling found while watching LOST and Sarah Kate explores her post-vaccine socializing-industrial complex
Hi Readers!
It’s been almost a full month since we launched and we are still trying to find our groove. What are some topics you’d like to see us write about? Email us at thewheelhousereview@gmail.com.
Over this pandemic year there have been many conversations and articles about women taking on extra housework while caring for their children and working. Here’s a great piece about why women are also doing the extra worrying around the house. But this begs the question: do work wives also do the extra worrying?
Women aren’t the only ones worrying right now. Anyone who invested in Zachary Horwitz’ “movie deals” should be worried about getting their money back. The 34-year-old aspiring actor collected $690 million from investors (including friends and family) in an elaborate Ponzi scheme.
To all this fretting, we say “wheely?” Don’t worry, be subscribers. Tell your friends (or work spouses) too!
Speaking of “wheels” check out this piece by Juliet Vedral on turning the donkey wheel and finding herself back in time, as she re-watched LOST.
Found
Rewatching LOST On the Eve of Turning 40
I recently re-watched LOST for the first time since the show ended its six-season run in May 2010. It was a very different experience to watch it over a decade later, on-demand and almost consecutively, in a completely different city, as a way to unwind during the pandemic by myself instead of with roommates or friends, with one child asleep in his room and another dancing in my womb. In many ways, it was a sweet reunion with “old friends,” a sense of revisiting my lost twenties on the eve of turning forty.
But the nature of this re-watch--knowing that some questions were never going to be answered--actually made me focus on the characters and their relationships a lot more than I did the first time. And in so doing, made me think about the ways I respond to my own “lostness.”
Juliet wasn’t the only one taking stock this week. Sarah Kate Neall explores the whole, new world of post-vaccination socializing. No one to tell you “no” or where to go (except your uncertain self).
All The Fun We Can Stand
Braving Post-Vaccination Fun In A Half-Vaccinated City
Picture the ragged end of a birthday party, the trampled streamers and the cake gutted by individual knives hunting for seconds, Mylar balloons as they droop over the lawn chairs. Picture the sweaty, blister-heeled end of a day at the local amusement park, or the crinkle of aluminum foil covering leftover pork at the Lions Club Labor Day picnic. You're starting to descend from the funnel cake sugar high. You've been on your feet, winning a goldfish in a plastic bag, or on a roller coaster, or musical chairing as hard as you can in your classmate’s backyard. Your whole body is ringing from the stimuli: the heat and bright colors, the intense flavors and loud noises of a Big Day. You're five or six or seven years old and have no clue you are exhausted, no clue you could contain so much pleasure. Give it another twenty minutes, and you'll be in tears.
On such days, my mom would cue our departure (and head off meltdowns) by corralling my sister and me. Glassy-eyed as the adrenaline left our bodies, mouths smeared with remnants of blue icing, we'd look up and remember that she was our mother, that we were not just rocks submerged under a waterfall of delight.
"Well?" she'd ask, "Have we had just about all the fun we can stand?"
Welp, this is about all the fun we can stand! See you on Monday with some more original pieces. Have a great weekend!