The Friday Dispatch: April 11, 2025
I've recently encountered a famous dog!
Hi and happy Friday! Previously on Hattie, more specifically in last week’s Friday Dispatch, I said this:
What could I possibly mean??? Who is this large dog? Does this mean I finally saw The Friend, a film I mentioned in a Friday Dispatch WAY back in February?
It’s 2025, Dogs Can Be Celebrities
Let me preface this by saying: I am not good at keeping up with theatrical releases. I will shell out to see a re-release of an old favorite, like Party Girl or When Harry Met Sally. Oh, and special events? I’m there. If Fathom Events ever brings the Metropolitan Opera staging of Moby Dick to movie theaters, I will be there, crying into a big popcorn the way Herman Melville intended.
But when it comes to new movies, I am…less…consistent. Most big theatrical releases, I see with my brother, when I’m visiting him, he’s visiting me, or we’re traveling and need to kill a couple hours between other events. This is a great system, because we almost always disagree on movies and so have lots to talk about afterwards (the notable exception to this is The Substance, which my brother and I saw at a theater in Las Vegas and both despised1 equally). I think I saw four or five “new” movies in the theater in 2024, and all but one were with my brother. But so far, 2025 has more movies that have captured my interest, so I am making an effort to see them while they’re still in the theaters!
A couple weeks ago, Myles got tickets to go see The Friend, a book adapted from the Sigrid Nunez book of the same name. The last time Myles and I saw a new-release movie in the theater? The end of 2022, when The Banshees of Inisherin was still showing. When Myles got The Friend tickets, we saw that the Angelika theater was hosting a Q&A after the showing. We didn’t know it then, but the Q&A would feature the directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, as well as two of the stars, Naomi Watts and Carla Gugino.
And also? BING. The DOG. The actual STAR of the movie. And his trainer, Klingensmith! Bing is a 150-pound Great Dane from Newton, Iowa. As those of us at the Q&A learned, he enjoys speaking into a microphone!
Everyone was polite and interested at the start of the Q&A, which was just humans. Then, the moderator mentioned “One more special guest,” and everyone got very…edgy. In a good way! That sensation multiplied when Bing came out onstage. People were, literally, on the edges of their seats trying to see Bing. Myles & I were near the aisle, so we got a very nice view of him, and he was enormous and beautiful and well-behaved and smart.
A quick spoiler: Bing’s character, Apollo, does not die in the movie.2
Oh, on a somewhat-related note, it's National Pet Day and you get a free $10 Chewy e-gift card with a $30 toy order and the code TOYBOX. Just in case you need to reward the Bings of your life.
Amanda Seyfried, I Am Coming to Get You
Sorry, that sounds threatening. What I mean is: Amanda Seyfried, I am going to watch your new TV show, the adaptation of Long Bright River by Liz Moore, in two or five months from now! Like my friend
, I queued up for LBR at the library because I LOVED Moore’s other book, God of the Woods, and was interested in seeing Amanda Seyfried in the TV adaptation. Any press tour which includes a dulcimer is a good promotional effort, in my mind.I finished Long Bright River (the book) in a sprint, clutching my Kindle while I ate lunch and living in the Libby app at pre-show line-through rehearsal.3 The novel follows Michaela, a beat cop in a neighborhood in Philadelphia plagued by the opioid crisis, as she conducts two investigations: an official one, seeking information about a string of homicides in the area, and a less-official search for her sister, Kacey. Like their parents, and many of the friends and classmates they grew up with, Kacey is living with a heroin addiction. This isn’t exactly why she and Michaela became estranged. And it’s not, exactly, why Michaela became an officer—but it’s a factor, and the complex dynamic of their relationship is rendered with compassion and empathy.
A reason I love Liz Moore is that she knows how to make grammar work for her. She does this in God of the Woods, but since that book rotates between points of view, it has a different effect. In LBR, we spend so much time with Michaela, we see how she uses her careful, meticulous, dignified speech to undergird her deep insecurity. It feels a bit uncanny at first, but as the narrative unspools, you learn to navigate these “tells.”
Long Bright River is also a sibling story, which is among my favorite genres, and I think Moore does a good job of showcasing the adult and child versions of a sibling relationship in an authentic way. Hey! Sibling Day was earlier this week, actually! To commemorate it, my favorite Sibling Day interaction with my brother, from 2018.
My text:
His response:
Cat AND Mouse? In THIS Economy?!
Last week, I trained Dottie to sit in a basket at my desk while I’m working. This makes it very easy for me to pet her, and also keeps her from sitting directly behind my chair’s wheels (why does she do this) (I almost SCOOT over her so much!!!!).
Here are some other interesting places Dottie has sat recently:
On the piano!
In her special box, but curled completely around a fluffy toy ball (we lovingly refer to it as her “egg”)
On the piano, again
On my calendar, while I was writing on it (thank you for your help Dottie!)
On a Chewy box (I am sure, on some level, she knew it was full of cat food and that she should guard it)
Earlier this week I spent $1.99 on a Nintendo Switch game called Little Mouse’s Encyclopedia. It is what it sounds like: an educational game, a visual encyclopedia, in which you are a mouse (a little one, at that) walking around, exploring in nature. Everywhere you go (garden! forest! underground!) there are informational cards about the plants/birds/bugs/animals you encounter. It’s fun and fascinating and satisfies the same urge as a Wikipedia rabbit hole, without as much potential for angst or anxiety.4 Apparently, there’s a puzzle mode, but I haven’t even tried that yet! I am too busy watching the pretty animations of illustrated baby shrews, which form a “trailer” behind their mother, or listening to the recorded calls of various nuthatches. For my fellow language learners, Little Mouse's Encyclopedia is available in 17 languages alongside English. So maybe I will try it in French and see what I can learn!
NaPoWriMo Update: Easter Soon
National Poetry Writing Month continues to plug along, and I continue to write a poem per day (though I am very VERY behind on typing them up into my master NaPoWriMo 2025 document). I’ve done this for 10 years in a row, give or take, and learned long ago that “30 poems in 30 days” is the only real guideline you need to follow. Some days, you write five poems and they’re all good. Other times, you write 10 half-poems and retrofit them into one another until you have a single decent piece.
Such is life! Here’s a sonnet-y poem about marshmallows.
Peeps
Darkness lifts against a shade of damp.
Winter melts, frost films its gazing pool.
Spring’s enfeebled step a seeking stamp
caught by anemic sunlight’s gauzy spool.Within the bleach-white bulbs, no flower waits.
They cast an endless day across the aisles.
The lambs rejoice, in clearing of the slate,
in sugared sacrament, break their exiles.Cradled by a woven secrecy,
(immortal shells, their cloisters’ endless cleave)
alight in their polychromatic spree,
my treasures wait for me. Will I receivemy solace in the natural sublime? No,
thank you. Artifice, artifice, each time.
WIDNBTW
Happy Friday, friends. I hope you all are on a strictly all-marshmallow diet til May, like me, and you wake up this weekend with pastel Peeps sugar encrusted on your face. Yesterday I had a rice krispie treat with raspberry jam on it. Wow!
Here’s What I Did Not Buy This Week.
A guitar pedal…I don’t play guitar? I’m not even sure I understand, fully, how guitar pedals work? And somehow I am receiving 5-10 targeted ads per day that are guitar pedals? What does this mean???
A dress made from bark and flowers (wow, both pedals AND petals in this WIDNBTW!)
A Nivea tinted moisturizer, which a gal on Reddit brought to my attention
These colorful buttery NYX highlighters, which remind me of a now-discontinued YSL Touche Eclat highlighter compact which I admired in 2015ish
The Kayali “sparkling lychee” perfume, which I doused myself in at Sephora when I smelled sort of stale before an event earlier in the week, and finally,
Anything from the University of Chicago Press book sale, which goes through June 15th. They sent us a catalog in the mail and I have been flipping through it like a Scholastic book order form, marking the titles I’m interested in with in an elaborate system of codes.
Okay. Go forth, write Peeps, eat poems. I mean…No, that’s correct! Talk to you soon.
In one of the most validating moments of my existence, my brother and I left The Substance, got outside and simultaneously said, “That felt like Zack Snyder tried to make a movie ‘for girls.’” I haven’t met anyone else who found this movie as boring and empty as we did; I’ve considered writing about it, but honestly, I’ve had trouble being critical of the film without being derisive or dismissive of its accolades. It’s also a movie that means a lot to some of my friends, which I respect—at least one person has said The Substance helped assuage their anxiety around aging. It feels a bit mean, in that case, to write a screed against the movie, just for the hell of it. That said, if you also found The Substance tremendously disappointing, reach out! Or if you want to commission me to write a longform piece about the movie’s aesthetic and narrative failures…reach out!
I’ll say this: The Substance was my most anticipated movie of 2024. It’s also the only movie I’ve ever seen that made me consider asking for a refund. A particularly damning sentiment coming from me, a person who did sit through Sucker Punch in the theater—aka the ACTUAL Zack Snyder Movie For Girls.
The movie does differ from the book, which grapples explicitly with death on pretty much every page. Still, somehow, an affirming, uplifting and inspirational story, which I recommend frequently.
Prop in the Bucket was a lot of fun on Wednesday—thank you to everyone who streamed the show or attended in-person!
Now! That’s What I Call Reading the Unsolved Murder Cases Wiki Til 4am!
Incredibly entertaining and enjoyable episode on Broccoli and Ice Cream! Perfect podcast guest