I will get right to it today (you’re welcome, people who don’t love all my usual parentheticals and tangents like this one). I won’t even tell you the story of the gallery opening I went to last night where I changed on the way and must have dropped my bra somewhere so I went without and ran into about 50 amazing people I haven’t seen in ages, hunching over the whole time with my arms crossed way high up like I was 13. Because, who cares about that?

Here’s the update on the writer/editor hiring situation: A few weeks ago, I asked if any of you were interested in working with me here. I was immediately and thoroughly blown away by the number and then the quality and thoughtfulness of your application letters. There are a couple thousand(!!!) of you that I could bring on board right now and be lucky and overjoyed to work with. Since I’m only hiring one person at the moment, what I am going to do is keep the rest of your letters and contact information flagged for when we get to the next round of hiring – which ideally won’t be long if this scheme of mine works and we are able to post more frequently and then afford to bring another person on. And so on.

So if you don’t get the job this time, that just means that you are still wonderful and that I hope to hire you next round. As a way to narrow it down for what is most needed now, if you’re still interested, here’s what I would love for you to do: Forward me your last email again (the one with the highly accurate subject line saying, “I Am A Good Person”) to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com and put a note at the top of it about the extent of your experience working in the Substack CMS. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, just a note about what you have done that will enable you to hit the ground running on day one or dive right in with me here or whatever metaphor you want to use for us instantaneously productively joyously seamlessly collaborating. And that’s the whole deal. From that, I will get back to you quickly to offer the position.

I love you! And if me saying that creeps you out, absolutely I understand you withdrawing your application. Now check out your horoscope if you are into that. Bee has such an amazing track record of accuracy here and such a unique way of doing these readings that it’s worth looking at yours below to see, I think.

Ok, enough! Talk to you in the comments and via your sweet emails!

xoxooxooxox Jane

PS I think this is the weakest intro I have written here to date. Agree?

PPS What should I do or not do about someone who claims publicly to have worked with us on Sassy magazine from the beginning when that isn’t true? Let it go or call them out? Thanks for your advice, as always!

By The Zine Witch

“I just found out my friend has been mad at me since early Covid and never told me, which means this insane grievance survived the damn sourdough starter, Tiger King, and multiple variants.” My client says this under the fluorescent lights of our nearest occult store parking lot, cigarette trembling between two acrylic nails like a tiny white surrender flag. She laughs after she says it, but her beautiful moon shaped face does not participate. Her face is doing something much older and sadder. It’s frozen in shock. Her jaw looks too tight. There’s a tear she’s trying to hide glossy with humiliation and worry. The specific expression people get when the body has already accepted a truth the personality is still trying to negotiate with politely. I feel heartbroken for her. I know this feeling all too well. I stare out the window of the parking lot and just allow myself the space to listen and show up.

“I didn’t even know there was a problem,” she says. “I thought we were fine.”

I think about the word fine. People use the word fine the way landlords paint over water damage. People use the word fine most of the time when things are certainly not fine.

And apparently they have not been fine for years. I sit there watching her reorganize the entire past in real time. Every memory developing a second meaning, every text message suddenly radioactive around the edges. Every “love you” now sounding dubbed over in a horror film. This is the real violence of a delayed conflict. The realization that two people have been living inside completely different versions of the same relationship while calling it by the same name. I know this all too well being Autistic. People think they are being polite. But, really they are being codependent.

Lately this has been everywhere in my practice. Old arguments resurfacing like bodies in thawing lakes. These tiny misunderstandings that are suddenly swollen with years of interpretation and private narration. People reopening conversations they thought had died quietly in the corner years ago. Someone casually says, “I think I’ve actually been hurt for a long time,” and suddenly an entire timeline curdles in front of you. The past does not stay still after a sentence like that. It rearranges itself immediately. Memory is frighteningly easy to contaminate once emotion enters it retroactively.

As an astrologer, I cannot help noticing the timing underneath the personal story. We are moving into Gemini season while Uranus settles into Gemini, and communication itself feels electrically unstable right now. Gemini governs language, friendship, siblings, transportation, text messages, daily exchanges, interruptions, gossip, short travel, the nervous system, and all the tiny repetitive interactions that quietly determine whether intimacy survives or collapses. Gemini is fast and cerebral. It moves the way thoughts move when somebody has had too much caffeine and suddenly remembers every humiliating thing that has ever happened to them since third grade. Under Gemini energy, the mind starts opening old filing cabinets at three in the morning. Old resentments come back wearing fresh makeup. Conversations you thought ended years ago suddenly begin speaking again inside your body. That pre Mercury retrograde glow.

And the thing about Gemini is that it does not always care whether communication is accurate. It cares that communication is moving. Gemini is the passing thought, the nervous text message, the half-finished interpretation formed before the other person has even completed the sentence. Right now people are responding faster than they are understanding. Tone is arriving before comprehension. Meaning is developing frostbite crossing from one nervous system into another. A sentence leaves one mouth alive and arrives in another already distorted by fear, projection, exhaustion, memory, insecurity, pride, loneliness, or whatever private ghost the listener happened to wake up beside that morning.

I know this feeling intimately because I am autistic and communication has never felt automatic to me. It has always felt assembled carefully by hand, like trying to build stained glass windows while everyone else throws rocks through them. It caused me social anxiety where I stopped participating in friendship entirely for periods of time. A perpetual loneliness of being deeply unfulfilled on an intimate or celebral level. If I let down my guard, if I truly was myself, I was going to upset somebody and end up in the same predicament as my friend. Because most people do not actually know how to repair things. And what I’ve come to realize, is many neurotypicals don’t want friends. They want acquaintances. Low maintenance. They know how to maintain surface contact. They know how to perform likability. They know how to slowly starve a relationship while insisting everything is normal. But repair is slower and uglier than people expect. Repair requires returning to the scene of misunderstanding without turning it into mythology. It requires tolerating the nausea of clarification. A delayed text becomes evidence. A strange tone becomes biography. One badly timed sentence becomes scripture. Most people would rather finalize a relationship internally than risk the vulnerability required to revisit meaning together and repair.

Repair often begins with a question that sounds almost absurdly simple: “Wait. Are we even in the same story right now?” Because sometimes the first step toward healing is discovering that the argument was never about the original moment at all. It was about the meaning each person privately attached to it while the other person had absolutely no idea a second narrative was even being written.

And this is what I keep watching in my practice lately. Communication revealing the actual architecture of relationships. People are childhood wounds driving cars too fast through rainstorms trying desperately to explain themselves before the light changes. Of course we misunderstand each other. The miracle was never going to be perfect communication. The miracle is finding someone willing to come back after the sentence lands wrong.

Gemini season has a way of dragging the conversation back into the room whether you wanted to have it or not. The text you ignored in February. The resentment that calcified during lockdown. The sibling tension that got swallowed for the sake of “keeping the peace.” The friendship that quietly shifted shape three years ago and never fully recovered. Gemini is ruled by Mercury, and Mercury does not let things sit untouched forever. It wants movement. Exchange. Language. Context. It wants to understand what happened, even if the answer is uncomfortable.

Last week I received an email from a friend who thought we were in a fight because I had gone radio silent during my dental surgery. Around the same time, the front desk worker in our building, who had been there for almost forty years, retired, and we were gifted a temporary replacement named Linda. The first thing Linda asked me was whether I believed in miracles, to which I immediately replied, “Absolutely.” I knew right away this was my person. For the next month, Linda and I would sit at the front desk talking for hours at a time, the kind of conversations where time disappears and suddenly you feel like you’ve known someone forever. I found out she had been homeless and living in her car since an accident in 2024, and somewhere between my teeth, my surgeries, and my new friendship with Linda, I forgot everything else. In my time with Linda, she saw me while I was allowed to be myself, even in fear and pain. I felt safe in that and got lost for a month in the Linda bubble. Meanwhile, my friend had convinced herself I was angry at her and had been replaying a conversation from weeks earlier in her head, when I had made a snarky joke about how much I hate Chris Brown and what I think his fans can all do. I felt terrible. Miscommunications are strange like that. Sometimes while you are busy surviving one thing, someone else is quietly building an entirely different story about you in their head.

And this year there is an extra layer to this Gemini mood board because by the end of the month we are already moving into the pre-shadow of a Mercury retrograde. You can feel it before the retrograde officially begins. Conversations start looping. Old arguments resurface with new information attached to them. People misremember timelines. Someone from your past suddenly appears with a completely different version of events than the one you’ve been carrying around in your own head. Gemini energy moves fast, but Mercury retrogrades force us to slow down long enough to actually hear what was said and what was left unsaid.

Gemini also rules the nervous system, transportation, social media, group chats, rumors, neighbors, siblings, and the strange emotional weight carried inside casual conversation. Sometimes healing this season does not look dramatic. Sometimes it is just finally admitting that something bothered you. Sometimes it is realizing you built an entire emotional worldview around one misunderstanding that nobody corrected. Gemini season can expose the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive uncertainty. Mercury retrograde asks whether those stories are still true.

So, Gemini season asks you the question: What conversation have you been rehearsing in your head for years that might finally need to happen out loud? And what part of yourself has been trapped inside silence because you were too afraid of changing the relationship once the truth was spoken?

Because that is the strange thing about Gemini season. It does not just expose communication problems. It exposes the emotional cost of avoidance. The friendships maintained through politeness instead of honesty. The families that communicate through implication instead of directness. The way people convince themselves they are “over it” while their body still reacts every time the topic comes up. Mercury retrogrades are not only about miscommunication. Sometimes they are about finally understanding what the real conversation was underneath all along.

Best Days This Month For Sex…

I am putting the paywall here so that anyone who likes good sex will have to pay or take out a free trial to learn when this month to pursue that. As will anyone who wants to read their individual personalized predictions below - and anyone who wants to ask astrologer Bee questions in the comments about what’s coming up for you specifically. I use this ploy so that Bee and other writers can get paid. Forgive me. - Jane

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Hi Girlies (in all open-minded senses of the word)!

I just got back to New York on the red eye. After extending my 3-day Malibu visit to over 2 weeks, I still wanted to maximize the waking hours that I was with my great friend, so I left on the latest possible flight. You know that syndrome where whenever you have to pee, the urge gets increasingly dire the closer you get to a bathroom (or in my case, a bush - once on a sidestreet off of Beverly Drive before a meeting and another on the shoulder of the PCH -during this trip alone)? Leaving my friend is like that where the need to talk and hug multiplies exponentially as departure time approaches. I was even frustrated when I got to the airport 45 minutes earlier than I needed to, because I could've had that valuable 3/4 of an hour hanging out with my friend instead, but oh well, unpredictable LA traffic.

As a final name drop (not a lifetime final, as it would be ridiculously unrealistic to promise that, but a final name drop from this trip) for those of you who graciously at least lied and said that you like when I do it, here is a still from a video taken by Michael that I can't show because my old pal and I are talking about our children in it and I know it doesn't seem like it, but I actually do have some discretion and boundaries sometimes. Bono came over for pizza after visiting with Sean Penn down the road and I won't go into everything, but we did get to hear some new music from him and from Michael and from his friend Gavin Friday, all of which I can't get out of my head in the best possible way.

And now for something actually pertinent to your lives and even potentially useful: This week I will be debuting our entire line of new merchandise and asking you to pick the item you most want for yourselves that I will then send out to you lucky first responders for free. All you need to do is want it and deserve it, the second requirement of which you’ve already achieved. Below is my phone’s current photos page if you want to start looking around early.

While we are on the topic, winners of my last little giveaway - featuring the first ever Sassy shirts in an appropriate size range (up to 5XL) were Misses Robin and Lizzy! Your shirts are in the mail! Show us how they look when you get them, please!

I'm going to keep this semi-brief today, by popular command (you're welcome Andy and Charlie and everyone else too polite to tell me to shut up) and let you read this I think incredibly moving and spectacularly written story that I am so lucky Sammi sent in. I also hope you will talk more with me and her about it in the comments, because there is a lot to react to and relate to. Please send your own story submissions for the It Happened To Me column (est 1988) to me at jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com. I would love to feature yours also and pay you for it, of course.

Thanks so much for being here with me. It means a lot especially now that my BFF and I are back on separate coasts doing those extended FaceTimes that we leave open for hours while we run errands, pee, brush our teeth, etc etc - in an attempt to replicate living together as we were.

Be good.

Love love love, Janey. (Don’t mind me while I play around with punctuation. Do it too in your comments if you like and then I will know that you actually read this.)

The Originals Are Here!

By Sammi LaBue

On our 18-month anniversary I stood alone in my first love’s unlit driveway. Later that night, instead of our highly-anticipated fondue date, I got a call from El Paso County Jail. Eighteen years old, he’d been arrested for sale and possession of heroin.

At this point in my life, a senior in high school, I was of two worlds — one that centered around Bible study and ministry and another that was experimenting with drinking and drugs. In both, I was yearning for healing.

My dad had died unexpectedly the day after I kissed Cliff for the first time in my Mercury Mountaineer after Youth Group. It was an unexpected kiss, followed by an even more unexpected death.

I hadn’t wanted my first love to be Cliff. Cliff, who was hilarious and cute to me, but not to the other girls on my tennis team who favored the cool Colorado uniform of the moment: Ugg boots, Soffe shorts, Abercrombie and American Eagle everything else. Cliff played drums, not sports, and wore skinny jeans.

But his ineligibility for prom court meant nothing to me. His contrarian behavior gave me the confidence to explore who I really was in a cliquish high school environment that envied Mean Girls in its insistence on following the status quo. He didn’t think my desire to cut off all my hair was weird. He thought it was great. He thought I was a gifted painter. I wasn’t, but because of him I painted more. As a conservatory musician as well as a screamo band drummer, the CDs he burned for me exposed me to a range of music that still speaks to me today. And most of all, he could handle the deep sadness that would often shroud me as a newly fatherless teen.

On our anniversary, I pulled up to his parents’ house like I had countless times in the last year and a half, this time with a sense of mature wonder at our milestone. But something was off. Finding the long driveway empty of cars, the blinds closed in the windows, all the clues Cliff had deftly debunked with excuses over the last few months returned to me. His absences at school, tardiness for our dates, distant or missed phone calls, his car approaching the Starbucks parking lot from a different direction than I thought he was coming from, my Youth Group leader asking if he was OK while I waited at that same Starbucks, the scabs on his cheeks he attributed to picking acne.

Neither Cliff or his parents would pick up the phone. I drove down to the dark end of their cul-de-sac and cried over the same center console I had leaned over to kiss him that first time 18 months ago before my dad died and everything changed. I imagined approaching my mom about this would only cause more pain. It would either make her retreat further or come fighting to my defense, neither of which felt like the response I needed.

All my childhood, like Cliff, Mom appreciated my uniqueness — she took me to get the pixie haircut and drove me to painting classes — while I wondered who she really was. To me she was all the makings of a mom: affection and order and worry. But I knew so little of who she was before me, it was like that was a different person I would never meet. As if as her daughter, I was supposed to accept that she was and would only ever be “Mom.”

She wore parts of her past on her body. Like the long, jagged scar on her thigh, so evident she’d had to tell my sister and I how it happened. In her 20s, she’d gone to bring her carpet layer boyfriend lunch one day and kneeled behind him while he was working to say hello. The carpet knife in his back pocket was so sharp she hadn’t even noticed it had slashed her before she saw the wound.

In Middle School, I’d been given a sex-ed assignment to interview my parents. I sat in front of a bowl of popcorn in the sunroom off of the master suite where we sometimes watched “Trading Spaces” or “Queer Eye” as a family, eager to be told a story about my mom, like the ones about donuts after church and the high price of milk nowadays like my dad had just told in the living room.

But she did not relax into the leather recliner or cuddle up to me on the love seat. Her pacing filled the room with anxious energy. I followed her with my eyes, my schoolwork packet opened to the page labeled “Mother.” Finally, she sat in the armchair looking past me at the black screen of the TV as if to will it on for some distraction.

I started with something I hoped she would enjoy, sliding my pen down the page to the final section on Love. I asked her about the difference between love and lust, her past boyfriends, and what her first image of love was. The questions, admittedly odd for a school assignment, landed on her like spotlights. Fidgeting, she answered the best she could, not sarcastically or incorrectly but swiftly, concisely.

Finally, I asked her how she knew she loved my father. Then she cried, she wept, and eventually mumbled, “He saved me.”

“What?” I asked.

“He saved me, ok?” she responded in a burst. The kind I hadn’t had yet, and so I didn’t understand. A broken dam of emotion. She went to the bathroom to finish crying, my interview cut short.

That night, I laid in bed wondering what it was my dad had saved her from. I knew that as a girl she grew up in an abusive household in Coney Island, that she and her mother and sister escaped him by taking a cross-country train to California when she was only 12, and that marrying my dad felt like a new life to her. But maybe there was more in between than I’d ever thought. I imagined rescue scenes based on what I’d seen in movies. My dad catching her from a long fall, stopping a car headed toward her, building a fire to warm her through the night. He was a good man and strong, but a goof, an indoorsman, and I couldn’t quite see him as this knight in shining armor.

Now, sitting dumbly in my idling car I felt that maybe I was beginning to understand what needing to be saved meant. Since Dad died, Mom’s loving yet coy attitude had become a vacant one, and I didn’t know how to reach her. I used to lie on my dad’s chest to watch TV like he was a life raft. Now I was out to sea. I took to drinking, smoking pot, reading the Bible, and developing an eating disorder — I would try anything in my search for a preserver.

Being with Cliff felt close to salvation. On dates, we walked the smallish network of streets in downtown Colorado Springs taking artsy photos of people and places with my Polaroid camera and an angsty kind of youthful joy. He taught me about dark humor. About how things can be riotously hilarious and absolutely in ruins at the same time. With him, my grief and my future didn’t feel like they would fight forever. The grief would be there, but so would the future.

But after a year of dating, Cliff had turned vacant, too. We had one class together — choir — and I loved to choose a spot on the edge of the alto section so that I could stand next to him at the edge of the tenors. But suddenly he was late or absent. If he did show up, he’d sit moodily on a folding chair, slipping out before the director could confront him. Like always, we still met at the Fruitopia machine between classes to smooch, but he was always tired and started wearing the same hoodie every day, letting his hair grow longer, where he’d taken pride in his outfits before. After a few weeks of questioning, he claimed he’d been diagnosed with long mono. He had an excuse for everything, and I fully believed our love would endure.

My hazards clicked mockingly. Since it was a Saturday, I decided to tell mom the date had ended early and asked if I could spend the night with a friend.

At 4 am my phone buzzed across my best friend’s satin duvet. Unsleeping, in the outfit I had meticulously curated for the anniversary that never was — black in case of fondue splatter, but lace to keep it classy, the little pearl necklace he gave me for our one-year-anniversary adorning it all — I pressed one to accept an inmate’s call, my heart pounding. He’d used his one phone call the night before on his parents and called as soon as he was able. He told me he’d been using heroin for months. Selling to support his addiction. The truth arrived cold and disappointing as a late dish to the table, though at least whole and something to chew on.

When I made it home, I approached my mom with a determined, desperate energy. I fell apart crying, yelling that it wasn’t who he really was and that she couldn’t break us up. I imagined she would do the Mom thing, yell back, forbid me from speaking to him ever again, but instead she spoke to me gently as if from the end of a long tunnel made of her own grief. Was this Mom, I thought, or someone else? She said she was so sorry. So sorry for Cliff. That she would reach out to his mom. That she felt for him.

The next morning, his face was in the newspaper. Just as my mind began to imagine the judgments and whispers my peers would fill the halls with, Mom announced that I could stay home from school as she calmly poured coffee into a thermos for work.

That day I treated my bed as a rescue boat, the only safe place in a roiling adolescence that was trying to break me. I clutched onto my blanket and the darkness it provided imagining what I might try next for salvation. Harder drugs? Emptying my breakfast into the toilet? Another party?

When Mom returned from work she sat on the edge of the bed and said in an even voice that felt like a different version of herself, “I want to tell you something.”

Her relationship with the carpet layer had gone south because of their shared addiction to heroin. Living together for a short time in Montana, supporting their habit had escalated into burglary. They were hiding from the police behind separate bushes when she decided to make a break for it and leave him behind, buying a bus ticket to Los Angeles where she was eventually set up on a blind date with my dad.

I was stunned. Her long, manicured fingers played with the fold in my quilt, her eyes cast down. She was a little ashamed, revealing such a chink in her Mom armor. But what I heard was the story of a hero. Someone who literally ran through the night away from a very bad situation to give herself a shot at life.

I remembered the way she’d blurted those words — he saved me. But now I imagined her before my dad: Young, scared, and sick, leaving someone she loved for a better version of her life, though she had no one to fall back on. “It may not be time yet, but if you really love Cliff, you have to break up with him. He needs to lose it all to start over.”

She opened my blinds letting in the day’s final golden ray of light and left. I had imagined a brawl, a mom commanding her daughter to leave the love of her life. But here we were instead, two people having weathered our own storms, all full of holes, but capable of moving forward despite them.

Because of her honesty, I was better prepared to approach my boyfriend’s addiction with empathy and maturity. I could have begged to stay with him. I could have gone looking for the drug myself to cope and feel closer to him. But when Mom told me that stepping away was the best course of action, I believed her, because she’d shown me all her cards. At 17, a person was easier to listen to than a parent

After the breakup I drove down his driveway one last time. Instead of meeting my weed dealer, I met my mom at Starbucks where she was waiting, right on time. When they called her name, “Linda,” I smiled, knowing her for the first time. A knowing that would blossom and save me over and over again.

Yes, she was still the woman who had made me dinners I was too picky to eat, who I’d taken turns reading “Harry Potter” with in bed, and who drove me to tennis practice. But that person was Mom, not Linda. At my deepest moment of teenage turmoil, I needed them both.

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Hello, still from Malibu!

Whenever I come out here, we end up extending my stay by days and weeks and sometimes three months. Mostly because being with a best friend is the best. And when your other best friend is in town also and can come over for dinner and sake often, come on, what could really be better than that? You tell me (in the comments, as always)!

I moved locations on the property the other night when Ed Sheeran stayed over, if anyone cares for another little drop of a name there. (I am trusting the sincerity of those of you who said you do enjoy my name drops. The rest of you, please please complain in the comments because I'm a little uncomfortable doing it anyway and I am happy to stop if majority rules!) I met Ed when he was here working on his first record. I've seen him in New York many times after that, including one visit where he gave my little Charlotte a two dollar bill that she kept until just the other day when she really needed money and so she spent it. Which is reminiscent of when Michael Jackson (quite possibly my ultimate name drop, though controversial) gave me a cookie with his face on it while we were visiting his special little bakery house at Neverland Ranch and I brought it back to New York and put it in my freezer where it sat for years until one night around 3 am when I had such bad munchies that I ate it. Like mother like daughter. Pragmatism rules. Also, Ed is purely lovely. And in excellent physical shape. He uses the gym here and I most certainly don't.

Here is what I do instead: Lie around and pet dogs and eat and drink and talk a LOT and work a lot too and write back and forth with you guys still constantly and be happy, as evidenced below.

OK, good news for you all, I think, is that we are releasing a new vastly expanded line of merchandise that is all because of your specific requests for what you need:

Florida reader who said you never wear anything with sleeves, we made your tank! Those of you who, like me, said you prefer to be covered up (arms especially - and who like to tweak your skin exposure levels constantly based on your body temps which change all the friggin’ time) - for us we made a zip up hoodie! Plus much much more! I thought I was going to debut them all here today but the amazing Ani, my gorgeous and gorgeous-hearted partner in creative crime, and I are still finalizing, and I didn’t want to wait to post Robin’s excellent story below because it’s fun and I think you will really like it.

So a few short days from now, I will show you the fruits of your and our labor. And to celebrate and thank you for the inspiration, I will be giving away new items to those of you who upgrade your subscriptions or just make an argument for why you deserve something new and great. (I mean, you all deserve that and so much more, but all you will have to do is ask essentially.) Details and explanation to come.

I love you all so so so so so so much! Even more than I love being here in Malibu and that's saying a lot.

Xoxox Jane

On Sale To Make Way For New Merch!

By Robin Wheeler

Please, in an effort to protect me from myself, don’t dare me to do something. At heart I’m still a rough and tumble ten-year-old who spent too much time running the neighborhood with the three older boys who lived next door.

“Hey Robin! Dare you to climb that giant pile of fill dirt!”

Dirt Mountain? Climbed.

“I bet you can’t run 50 circles while pulling a Radio Flyer wagon without falling down!”

Wagon? Circled.

While my abilities have changed, my attitude has not. The best way to get me to do something is to somehow make it forbidden. This is how my quest for the world’s dumbest tramp stamp began in New Orleans, as many dumb quests do, in 2023.

“Robin,” I said. “You are a 50-year-old heavily tattooed woman with a bare lower back. Bet you’re not brave enough to tattoo something really stupid back there that flaunts societal conventions and mocks the concept of mid-century womanhood.”

Let’s back up a bit to how I became one of many heavily-tattooed middle-aged people after generations of tattoos being taboo.

I got my first tattoo on the day Allen Ginsberg died in 1997. Why did I want a tattoo? I thought they were pretty, and I love new experiences. Pissing off people who need to be pissed off was a nice perk, too.

I was 24 and spent five years trying to find the perfect poppy design for my upper left arm. I planned a quarter-sized bright orange single bloom but Spyder, the tattooist preparing to defile my virgin skin, nudged me into expanding it to a fist-sized pair of poppies. For $75 and the time it took to play the soundtrack to David Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” I became the most colorful of clichés—a tattooed Gen Xer.

I waited a decade before getting my next tattoo—a quarter-sleeve of violets symbolizing my kid’s birthdate. Violets are the flower for their birthmonth, and the bouquet’s blooms correspond with their birthdate. At the bottom, a clump of black dangly roots to symbolize family.

And so it went for many years as I amassed a curated collection of body art, all flowers assigned to people I cherished and events that shaped my life. My left arm is covered in a sleeve of floral art, those first two poppies still visible just below my shoulder. There’s a Rose of Sharon on my right inner wrist for my favorite character in my favorite novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” and a jar of my grandmother’s gooseberry jam surrounded by the berries and their blossoms on my calf. Two years after having both knees replaced, I had bright bouquets tied with pink and blue ribbons tattooed over the Frankenstein scars.

By the time I turned 50 I was heavily tattooed with no regrets … and no lower back tattoo, which I considered a point of pride. No reviled tramp stamp for me. I had plenty of beautiful, well-planned tattoos that, according to my mother, would be more at home in frames on a gallery wall. To which I replied, “Ew! You wanna frame my skin? That’s SICK!” Even my one silly tattoo, which I call my big dumb Wilco tattoo, took years of planning because if I was going against my better judgement and getting a band tattoo, I wanted to make sure it was on par with my other pieces.

I take my tattoos seriously. Growing up mired in disordered eating that continued as I grew up to be a fat adult, my body art helped me love my body. Which eventually became a body that endured multiple ruptured ovarian cysts, pregnancy, 34 hours of labor with five failed epidurals, an emergency c-section, another drug failure before I was fully stitched, a month-long antibiotic-resistant staph infection in the incision, and a year of postpartum depression and anxiety that came closer to killing me than anything else.

I got my second tattoo not long after that. It took three hours and in the process I discovered that, while the first 20 minutes hurt like I was being set ablaze, after that I felt euphoric, a feeling I rarely experienced elsewhere. It felt good to be in my body.

The beauty of my tattoos gave me a way to learn how to love how my body looked for the first time in my life. The pain gave me a way to work through anguish I’d bottled up for years. Getting tattooed meant feeling the pain, working through it, and feeling wonderful at the end before taking a couple of weeks to heal and nourish the new skin that grew to replace what the tattoo destroyed. In a life with a body that often felt out of control, tattoos gave me a sense of power over a body that had so often betrayed me, and it didn’t hurt anyone in the process.

But what’s the fun in that?

In February, 2023—four months after I turned 50—my best friend Suzie and I went to New Orleans. She’s even more heavily tattooed than me. On the plane she showed me the website for Electric Ladyland, a tattoo shop near our suite in the Marigny neighborhood, just far enough from the French Quarter to deter a bit of the drunk tourist traffic. Suzie planned to get a little souvenir ink if the shop had time for a walk-in.

I had no interest in getting an impulse tattoo. They weren’t my thing. Besides, in a month I would be visiting my favorite artist in Chicago to finish my sleeve. I’d get my fix soon enough. Living vicariously through Suzie was fine with me.

Still, I browsed the portfolios on the shop's website. Among the old school hearts, skulls, and swallows, a blast of candy pink grabbed my attention. And I knew I would't be leaving New Orleans with a bare lower back. Because I had just found exactly what I didn't know I needed.

“Suzie! I need the world’s dumbest tramp stamp!”

And as any bestie worth the title should do, she assured me that this was the greatest idea I’d ever had. [And as any pushy editor worth the title would do, I got wind of a possible addition to this idea from Robin and said she had better do it AND document it all here for you. You are most welcome. - Sleazy Jane]

That night Suzie got her souvenir tattoo while I sat in our suite, eating a muffuletta and thinking about that damned tattoo design. I was joking when I said I needed the world’s dumbest tramp stamp. I cackled every time we talked about it because it sounded so stupid. But I hadn’t put enough thought into it, or pondered the deeper meaning of what putting this tattoo permanently on my lower back would mean.

It would mean I had a bitchin’ time in New Orleans. And someday, maybe, a medical examiner might get a kick out of it.

I stepped away from my thoughtful, curated tattoos and said fuck it. Life is ridiculous. Get that stupid tattoo.

Joel Van Goor, the artist behind the tattoo, has a portfolio filled with colorful vintage cartoon-style designs, like anthropomorphic cocktails, little citrus fruits on knuckles, a voluptuously melty slice of pizza with pepperoni nipples … This man is a genius! His style didn’t necessarily fit my floral tattoos, but it fit something more important—my personality at age 50—in a way I’d never seen from another artist.

My New Orleans impulse souvenir tattoo wasn’t done on a wild Bourbon Street Saturday night. It happened early on a Monday afternoon in the back of FiFi’s Bywater Beauty Parlour. Suzie brought me an iced latte from the neighboring cafe and, in less than two mostly pain-free hours, Joel created the tramp stamp I’d been dreaming of for a whole 48 hours. In orange, not pink, because I love anything that tastes like St. Joseph’s baby aspirin.

It is glorious.

It is ridiculous.

It is all mine.

TO SEE THE WORLD’S DUMBEST TRAMP STAMP, TALK TO ROBIN IN THE COMMENTS ABOUT HOW SHE FEELS ABOUT IT NOW AND BERATE ME FOR PUSHING ROBIN TO DO THIS, SUBSCRIBE HERE! YOU CAN USE THE FREE TRIAL OPTION I JUST ADDED SO YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO PAY ANYTHING….

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I am writing this from paradise. Otherwise known as my best friend Courteney Cox’s Malibu place (I am tempted to call it a compound, but she is humble so let’s just say place). So if I seem a little soft today, it’s because I am. Bitchiness and sarcasm will return as soon as I land back in New York, no doubt, so not to worry - or just skip my posts from here if you really can’t stand this mellowed out version. Being around Court is the best part of everything here and then on top of that, we are in the most gorgeous and delicious environment anyone could conjure up. Ocean, butterflies, everything you could dream of really. This is my heaven.

I hope you spent at least part of this long weekend in your own heavens. (Mine are not all this pristine or glamorous. I have also found heaven as the only audience member in a gritty little San Francisco movie theatre watching a low-budget experimental documentary that no one else I know has seen.) Tell me yours, if you like, as well as whether you experienced it this weekend, in that no-judgment zone that is the AJPT comments below!

Last night here was especially fun because I invited my other best friend, Michael Stipe, over and he brought an old friend and coworker I introduced to Michael way back and haven’t seen in maybe a decade, Spike Jonze. Spike made me laugh so hard by out of the blue (over the best pizza) blurting the name “Dale Lang,” which would only be funny to a handful of people who were around for Spike’s days editing Dirt magazine (son of Sassy). It had me doubled over. I love him.

Another thing you can do in the comments is hate me for the name-dropping. (I’m sure it’s especially tiring when I drop the same damn names over and over again. And especially obnoxious when I refer to someone famous on a barfy one-syllable basis. But remember that most of them weren’t names when I started dropping them.) Or talk about anything you want to there. I will be hanging out comment-ready and especially chatty because it’s been days since I’ve seen you and we have a lot to catch up on.

I still love you!

Mellower Jane

PS Jianna, who wrote today’s featured story about losing her business, is the most patient writer we have had here to date. (Either that or she has been torturing a voodoo doll of me for months.) I won’t even look back at when this story was accepted, but as you all know, I am hiring some help here soon (maybe you! I hope so!). So if you submit your stories - Unpopular Opinions and It Happened To Me pieces are always needed - to me at Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com, it won’t take nearly as long for me to publish yours. Thanks Jianna and I’m happy to publish this while we are both still alive! You’re welcome!

PPS Trendsetters that you glorious larger-size readers are, the red T-shirts I made specifically for you in 4XXL and 5XXL were instantly coveted by people outside that size range. So I’m now making them available for all sizes. BUT I still have one left to give away for free to anyone who wants to claim it in one of the larger sizes, either 4XXL or 5XXL. It’s not that it’s already made and just sitting there. It’s that I made a promise to give two away and I want to honor what I said, so I would love to make it for you if you want it. If you do, say so in the comments please and we will exchange info. Yay!! Free clothes!

PPPS If you haven’t already voted for all of the controversial books you’re interested in reading (and there are prizes involved!), you can still vote now before we close out the ballots and announce the winners next week. So do so if you please, please!

All The Famous People Wear Them

By Jianna Heuer

People never start something thinking about the ending. Marriage, parenting, careers, friendships, anything we build, is all embarked on with hope and an almost delusional sense of capability. We begin with the sense that we can’t fail, which allows us to put in all the grueling hard work to make it something amazing. Which is why when it all falls apart or leaves us or dies, the grief of the loss feels like it could just fucking kill you.

***

Have you fulfilled THE dream? You know the one. Maybe you have never told anyone about it because it is just so dear to you. Perhaps everyone in your life knows that if you could do anything, THIS would be it. Most of us have one, something we would do if we had all the money, time, and energy. Mine was opening a bookstore cafe, and when my husband, Jason, and I moved to Rockaway Beach in Queens, I found the perfect place to do it, and on February 1, 2020, at 10am, the dream became a reality. As Circles by Post Malone played and the sunlight hit Jason’s gold hand-painted lettering that displayed our shop name on the fifteen-foot picture window at the front of the store, I flipped the sign on the door from closed to open for the first time.

The first six weeks of Avoid The Day Bookstore and Cafe’s life were brilliant. The shop was always packed. Families, writers, readers, coffee addicts, and little old ladies drinking chai tea and eating a scone from one of our two local bakeries filled our store with laughter and conversation. We hit every financial benchmark we set. We had put everything into the store, three months of manual labor to get it up and running. We didn’t touch the electric or plumbing for fear of shock or flood, but every other part of the build out was all us. We tore down three drop ceilings, ripped old tile from the walls, painted the floor and walls, installed all the cabinetry and bookshelves, and finally did the most fun part, ordering and organizing all the books. We also did all this while maintaining our careers, me as a psychotherapist and he as a book designer and typography teacher. Those months of creating the store, we knew we were tired but couldn’t feel it; the excitement and anticipation were overpowering.

In those first weeks, we didn’t just succeed financially; it felt like every part of the vision we had for the shop exceeded our expectations. Couples would lie on the window seat and read each other Pablo Neruda’s love poems. As I prepped someone’s coffee behind the bar, I could hear people walking by singing the songs to themselves that were playing from our store’s Spotify mix we painstakingly curated, little snippets of The Violent Femmes, Pink Floyd, and Lizzo softly crooned as they explored the shelves. We got as many compliments about our playlist as our book selection. Kids played in the children’s area in the tent we set up with fairy lights and thick shag rugs, magnetic toys, and books strewn about and they chatted to each other about what happened at school or parents read to them from Goodnight Moon or Madeleine. We imagined them growing up and falling in love at our tables or remembering fondly the safe space we provided them when they were young.

Jason and I embraced our strengths at the store as so many parents do while raising their kids. He is a fantastic host and loves interacting with all sorts of people. I am great at scheduling, setting up events, and organizing. We both love book ordering and chatting with people about music, literature, and art. Somewhere in the process of hosting pop-up bookstore for the two years before we decided to open the storefront, Jason had started to dream with me, realizing many of his skills as a graphic designer and ex-open mic poetry host actually made this an ideal lifestyle for him as well.

A government mandate forced our first unexpected closure on March 22, 2020. COVID-19 had arrived, ending the fantasy we had worked so hard to bring to life. Following the stories about the virus we had already canceled events a few days earlier and started wiping down door knobs, counters, and tables with a sanitizing solution we googled how to make. We thought it would pass in two weeks, like everyone said. We couldn’t even begin to conceive what actually unfolded.

For the first year, we pivoted every which way. Put all 2,056 books online, sold merch, held Instagram author events and puppet shows, re-opened on the street outside of the store, installed a pickup window in our door, bought air purifiers, and spent money we didn’t have on advertising and building a sidewalk cafe.

We had opened the store using all our savings and credit cards, a $50,000 budget we some how managed to stay under, but didn’t have extra, and we weren’t bringing in much. In 2021, once people were vaccinated, things got a bit better, but it never returned to the thriving community space it had been when we began. By 2022, we were working seven days a week between our two jobs and the bookstore, investing our own money to the tune of $1,500 a month just to keep the place afloat. Despite hosting numerous events, such as happy hours and game nights, people weren’t showing up.

At the beginning of May 2022, Jason broke first. “I can’t do it anymore. Sitting in our beautiful empty store day after day is too depressing.”

As Harry Styles’ “As It Was” played on the radio, he wept silently as he spoke. I hadn’t realized how much until I looked at our kitchen table and saw two perfectly round pools of his tears—the size of silver dollars, glistening in the sunlight.

“We said if it ever got miserable, we would stop. Is it time?”

He nodded, “Yes, do you hate me?”

“No, of course not. I love you! I’m burnt out on this, too. I don’t think it will go back to how it was. Let’s figure out how to shut it down.”

I had meant what I said. But it hurt, my knees ached, an affliction I’d had since I was five whenever I was deeply anxious or sad. A big part of me didn’t really want to close. I wanted to give it the five years everyone says it takes to build something like this. I also saw what he did; it wasn’t working, and we couldn’t financially float the store forever. Most of all, I understood that if Jason was calling it, he truly couldn’t do it anymore. We both have this tendency to push ourselves way past our breaking points, which we call being a “work pig.” He must have been feeling this desperation for a long time if he was saying it now.

A perfect mirror of the beginning, the last 6 weeks we spent breaking down what we had built. We sold the convection oven, coffee maker, and blue velvet sofa. Piece by piece, we took apart the custom wood bar we had built ourselves. We were lethargic, weepy, and depressed, crushed beneath the weight of thousands of books we still had to offload and feeling lost about what would come next and how we could recover from such a huge loss. A week before we closed, Jason sent me an article with a startling quote: “Entrepreneurs can feel about their business the same way parents feel about their children. In fact, a team of researchers in Finland took brain scans of entrepreneurs who’d lost a business and compared them to those of parents who’d lost a child. They found the same kind of footprint in both groups. So, when a business fails, the intensity of the grief can be quite full.” This study doesn’t equate the loss of a business with the loss of a child but it does shed light on the pain of grieving something you pour all of your love into in hopes of it growing and thriving and what happens in our brains when it does not. We had put so much care and work into this small business; we conceived it together and could never recreate it.

This was not the first loss we had been through as a couple. In the first year of dating, I attended three funerals with Jason, more than I had been to in my lifetime. My father and I stopped speaking 3 months before our wedding. The year before we opened, his aunt Lynette was hit by a car and killed. The year we started building out Avoid The Day, my 14-year-old niece died. We had mourned together, but this was different, all encompassing, a shroud that covered us in rage and bitterness. People in our lives didn’t understand our grief; it wasn’t like we had lost a person; to them, it was just a business. They still say, “You can open another one, it will be even better.” Instead of telling them it would be too painful to lose something like this again, the disappointment to gutting, we just nod along. Maybe they aren’t wrong. I had only this one dream, now that it is gone. What will I do with myself for the rest of my life if I have nothing to look forward to? The future is bleak when you don’t have something that obsesses you, that you want to put time and energy into building.

It’s been almost four years, and we are still grieving. Sometimes I just get a shooting pain in my head and chest, both at the same time, and double over with the realization that we made this thing that no longer exists. I tear up when I pay another monthly installment on one of the credit cards we maxed out and haven’t paid off yet. I am so proud of us for doing it and trying, not many people do, but it has marred our feelings about our neighborhood. It feels like a betrayal. All those people who had told us for years, “It’s so vital that Rockaway has a bookstore,” didn’t appear as patrons. Going to our old favorite haunts, those we frequented before we dared to follow a dream, without feeling bitter and angry, is hard. They succeeded where we couldn’t.

It’s impossible to forget the messages from people when we announced the closing. A local woman who used to buy a bag of chips for a dollar for the privilege of talking our ears off about her local business wrote, “I’m not surprised.” A guy who had never set foot in the shop DM’d, “Your politics sank you.” His politics had probably contributed to our demise. Still, if opposing Trump and supporting Black Lives Matter does not afford us a space in this community, we probably don’t belong here anyway.

Inside our little bungalow, we still listen to the playlist from the store. It was initially named Avoid The Day Bookstore Mix, but we had to change that, as the pain was too visceral to look at. We still read, Jason makes art, I write, but everything is tinged with hopelessness. When you thought you would grow old doing something with someone, creating community, a center for the arts in a place with nothing like it, how do you manifest a new dream?

With what is happening now, Trump defunding the NEA, all arts organizations under attack, the world burning once again, just like how it was in 2020 when Covid began, perhaps my grief seems nominal or silly. Who cares about a lost dream while people lose their careers, lives, and bodily autonomy?

I care, and I want you to care. Grief, whether for a home, a child, a partner, a friend, or the life you thought you were building, has the same dismal effect on your mental health. The pain is real, and it is lonely. Given the moment society is in now, I fear many more people are about to lose their dreams and experience the suffering Jason and I have been through.

A fellow business owner was one of the few people who sent a message we needed to hear as we closed: “I am sending you love today. I know how it feels. I have done it a few times already :-( Small businesses are an endangered species, and people on the other side, the customers, the ones that rave and tell you how much you mean to them, how cool your spot is, etc, mean well, but they just don’t understand that their ongoing support is needed to make it work. I have been in biz for almost 20 years and the human behavior around mom & pops have changed a lot. I am thankful for your beautiful store and Camilo is your number 1 fan. Sending you guys hugs!” When she would stop by the store we would talk about how none of us can pay the rent with likes. She just got it, and we have never forgotten her kindness in telling us what we had done mattered and how hard it is to let something like this go. It still brings tears to my eyes, both the attunement of her words and the loss itself. For the both of us, for all of us. There were better businesses with more fans and a more extended history of success that threw in the towel before we did. We almost thought we were too small to fail.

Grief changes how you live. You can learn to cope with it, but it’s always there. When we hear about a thriving bookstore or someone comments on the boardwalk about a new business opening, it still feels like a vein being opened with a dull pocket knife.

The people who refused to see my pain and downplayed the death of my business are no longer in my life. Without understanding such a monumental heartbreak, how could I possibly move forward in an authentic and meaningful relationship with them? The ones who remain let me talk about the sadness and anger. We reminisce and celebrate the good bits of once having something incredible. Most of them have lost something precious, too, and we have a shorthand of lamentation between us that allows for a deep understanding of what once enlivened us and what we no longer have. Maybe that’s all one can hope for, a few people who get it and choose to buoy us even in the choppiest times.

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Yesterday I got what I am pretty sure was my first manuscript submission that was completely AI generated. The funny thing is that it is not from someone new to me or AnotherJanePrattThing.com. It is from a repeat contributor. Someone who didn’t write this way in the past. I work a lot on each story for AJPT, as you know because I complain about it and have now gotten you in on the effort to take over some of my editorial duties, thank you thank you and thank you. So in what seems like the AI story, I gave my editorial notes and cuts and changes, as I usually do, but have not mentioned that I am fairly certain it was all AI. Would you say that? And how?

I am also winding down the period where I can accept new applicants for the writing/editing position announced here, so that I can move along and get the help I need from you to be able to publish more frequently and also sleep sometimes. So if you still want to be considered, email me Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com with the subject line “I’m A Good Person.” [Clarification for diligent people – thanks AJoy! – who have already written me about this: I wasn't clear – what else is new? – that if you have already emailed me, no need to email me again. This is just for new people who haven't applied yet. Thank you so much!]

It has felt a little cult-leaderesque - even for ME!! -to receive thousands of emails with that exact same mantra at the top. At the same time, I am glad that you all know what great people you are! And don’t let the number of applicants already make you concerned about your chances, because though I am picking one person in this round, I will certainly be hiring more in the ideally near future, so I will keep all of your wonderfully winning submissions on hand for that.

As always, I am going to go live in the comments now, where I would love to talk to you and where I hope you will answer my question about the etiquette of telling someone they are rudely cheating you and potentially your beloved readers with AI crap, so that I can respond the best way. You all are so good with words.

I love you!

Fellow Good Person, Jane

By The Zine Witch

Get One Before They Sell Out Again

What was going on in your life seven years ago?

What if your life had an algorithm that could unlock the patterns that help you solve life’s biggest problems?

We talk a lot about algorithms now. Algorithms deciding what we see. What we buy. What we think we want. Algorithms shaping attention, desire, and entire timelines of information before we ever consciously choose anything.

We also talk about systems tightening. About technology moving faster than our emotional ability to keep up with it. About the blur between convenience, surveillance, influence, and choice.

And right now, we are in Taurus season.

Which brings everything back into the body. Slowing down and getting back into your sensual body. What you can touch, taste, smell, hear. Into what is real and what actually holds. Taurus shows you what lasts and what collapses under pressure. It strips life down to what can be sustained.

In my work as an astrologer, people come in crisis. That is usually the entry point. Not when life is neat or reflective, but when something has already shifted and they are trying to understand what is happening before it fully lands.

I’ve often thought of my work less as interpretation and more as pattern detection inside real life. Detective work. Veronica Mars energy. Situations where too many layers are active at once and someone needs to see the structure underneath the surface story.

A family court case where someone is trying to understand the behavioral pattern they are dealing with. A celebrity navigating manipulation dynamics while maintaining public life. A musician trying to time an album release so it reaches the right audience. A writer mapping launch timing because visibility follows structure. An artist standing at a threshold where their direction is reorganizing itself. A CEO carrying inherited family dynamics while making decisions that affect entire systems. A mother trying to understand her autistic child without external projections distorting what is actually there.

I’ve also worked with people trying to understand chronic illness patterns, not only as diagnosis but as rhythm. What triggers flare ups. What stabilizes the system. What emotional states precede physical collapse. The body repeats information. It operates in cycles. It has its own logic.

My work lives in pattern recognition under pressure. Timing applied to lived experience. Seeing what is actually happening before language fully catches up.

And I’ve had to learn how to hold my own clarity inside that.

There are moments where naming what is real becomes the most stabilizing action available.

There was a moment with a client where I paused and asked directly if she wanted me to be blunt, even if it hurt.

I could see something forming in the chart suggesting her father may be entering a process of decline. Not certainty. Not fixed fate. A trajectory that required attention in real time.

Those conversations are not symbolic. They are immediate. They require honesty that does not wait for comfort to arrive first.

Inside this work, my own thinking has also changed.

My mind no longer moves in straight lines.

It moves through association, repetition, timing, symbolic linkage, and pattern recognition. Meaning forms in layers instead of sequences. Understanding often arrives before explanation is available.

Witchcraft was part of that shift.

It changed how I understand attention, intention, and symbolism as active forces inside lived experience. What you focus on repeatedly begins to reorganize how experience responds.

It also changed my relationship to power.

I stopped seeing myself as reacting to life and started noticing participation inside it. Not control. Participation. A feedback loop between awareness and outcome.

And that brings me to Uranus moving into Gemini.

This is a shift in how communication, movement, information, and thinking itself operate through everyday life.

My mind already moves in this direction. Ideas branch, reconnect, and form meaning in real time while language is still catching up. Sometimes understanding arrives before articulation. Thinking becomes less like sentences and more like live signal processing.

So the question returns.

What was going on in your life seven years ago?

What patterns were running your life at that time, and what has shifted since then underneath everything you thought was stable? That’s the big question this month for us to collectively ponder.

Best Days for a Date Night or Sex….

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I was thrilled, THRILLED, by how many of you are interested in helping me out with writing and editing here at AJPT. I think there are about 2350 of you so far who could do an outrageously stellar job. Thank you!

I pretty much broke down what it is I need in the comments of the last story. The one key criteria I did not mention yet is trustworthiness. Working with me, you will have access to everything on this site and also my personal stuff. (Since starting Sassy magazine all those years ago, I’ve had little delineation between what’s work and what’s personal - I am sure some of you “creatives” whose own lives are your material can relate.)

I get that it is unwise to announce this in public (though I have less to lose than Kim K. when she posted images of her $4M diamond ring on Instagram that time), but: I am the worst with security and confidentiality and passwords and doorlocks, etc. I keep other people's secrets forever, but I myself have always been a haphazardly open book. (Okay, not completely open yet, as you will see when you read my truly open and actual book, officially announced today via this link you won’t be able to access unless you subscribe but it is a pretty basic announcement and says that the book will be published by Random House(!!!) and titled, duh, It Happened To Me. That’s the book I am working on writing now and thus my need for your help with AJPT.)

I figure staying open and honest and forthcoming - and handing out my phone numbers and credit cards routinely - will all work out in the end. Who wants to spend valuable energy worrying about what might happen if information were to get leaked or even waste time memorizing a new password after decades of the same one. A lot of you may feel differently, but for me it’s called freedom and living life! (Note that there is another iteration of this free-living doctrine that I find self-serving and calculated and do not support: people I know who always park their cars without even taking a moment to pay attention to signs and reason that the amount they pay a year in tickets is a fair cost for the privilege of parking whenever and wherever they please. That’s more rude and entitled. As a therapist once told me in an upbeat tone, at least my quirky behaviors only hurt myself.)

In terms of being so open with all my personal stuff, it is however a slight bummer that I have modeled for a minimum of three completely nude photo shoots over the course of my adult life and not one of them has ever surfaced. I get the hint.

So anyway, the next step for all of you who have expressed interest in the job or who want to now: Ask me any more questions in the comments and then if you still want to apply, send an email to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com with the subject line: I’m A Good Person. (You have to really mean it when you type or dictate it or the email won’t go through.) I will then write you each back with the details I need from you, as well as hours and pay. The plan is to wrap this up quickly because I could use the help yesterday. Like right now when I am in the CMS building posts instead of working on The Book!

I love you and I always love most what you have to say in the comments, so I will look for you there!

Jane

Super Superficial PS: A podcast was just released for which the interviewer - the one-of-a-kind - had done the most incredible research. He was bringing up people and places and experiences my own mom and I had forgotten about. The problem is that I think I look really shitty in it. I taped another podcast with that same night and I look fine there, so I think the problem was me trying to following specific lighting directions rather than winging it as I normally do. A dab of makeup might not have hurt either, but like with updating passwords, I generally can’t be bothered. So be forewarned and watch it here if you want to know more about my past than anyone ever. And you will have to wait until the summer for Rachel’s to see how much more pleasant I can look. I know, exciting!

PPS: Today's Unpopular Opinion, like many of the best ones, has ideas in it that I completely disagree with (starting with the first sentence in the large-font quote that’s pulled out before paragraph two, for example). So you should feel free in the comments to disagree as vehemently as you want to with any or all of it. I would love to hear your best, worst and most mediocre girls’ trip stories too. The one I regret the most was leaving Michael in Sao Paulo on an extremely fun tour with REM to meet up with a bunch of moms of Charlotte’s kindergarten friends for a girls’ trip in the Bahamas at an all-inclusive where the floors were so greasy slippery from the sole cleaning amounting to buckets of some bright blue formula dumped onto them every night and the drinks were the same bright blue and tasted probably the same. I felt it was important to go make those connections for little Charlotte’s sake and I still get that (and am close with at least one of those moms still). But come on, Jane! And that’s the end of that whiny, bougie, privileged girls’ trip story. Tell yours too please!

Put This On And See Who You Attract

By Rosie K.

I’m coming off the heels of a weekend getaway with ten girls. We laughed, we danced, we partied—we had a good time. Why then, did I leave feeling just as doom and gloom as I did when I got there?

We went to the middle of nowhere, Washington state, for a “Girls’ Getaway” over a three-day weekend. We are an eclectic mix of moms, powerhouse business owners, and savvy community leaders who had only known each other six months prior to planning the trip, bonded by a ‘friends of friends’ type of situation. We were very much looking forward to time away from our kids and husbands to relax, reset, and day drink without judgement.

We stayed in a beautiful glass cabin surrounded by mountains with a sauna, hot tub, winery down the street and day spa at our disposal. We hired a chef the second night we were there, who prepared a gorgeous and delicious four-course meal: Classic Caesar Salad, Fusion Chicken Cakes with ginger aioli, Prime Filet Mignon with chimichurri sauce, and a Tahitian Vanilla Créme Brulee with fresh berries for dessert. The meal, while overpriced, could have been the highlight of the trip for me.

The disappointment lay in an entire day wasted walking around an art museum that one of the women (the ring leader) was dying to go to. Not my kind of a Saturday activity on any Saturday, and especially not one on a girls’ trip. It was boring, arduous and depressing, and completely killed my buzz.

Walking around the art gallery felt similar to being in the lunch line behind the popular girls. Everyone had paired off with their respective friend, giggling together like idiots, leaving me to pretend to enjoy myself as they oohed and ahhed over sub-par paintings. I couldn’t have been more annoyed. It made me miss my real friends terribly.

When we got back to the house, the entire vibe was off and it felt like it took forever to get back to vacation mode baseline. When you’re dealing with a group of women with strong personalities, making a suggestion like going hiking (we were in the woods, and the weather was perfection) instead of going to see art felt like it was met with daggers and crickets.

One of the moments that hurt me the most was when they were still up drinking night one and at 11 pm, I said I was heading to bed because I was going to wake up early to do Pilates. That simple statement was met with judgmental stares and eye-rolls, and then one of the women - the ring leader’s bestie and roommate - turned to her and loudly said the nastiest thing so that everyone could hear: “This skinny bitch would wake up to workout. How annoying! Go home!”

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Today's entry is entirely courtesy of the great Charlie, whom you old-timers here likely already know and love. For you who don’t yet, let me suggest the following compendium of Charlie’s Another Jane Pratt Thing artistry. (It might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but I am genuinely not. He is an artist as far as I'm concerned - and a humdinger of a guy.)

There are so many to choose from, but here:

Charlie’s experiences with fatphobia affecting his healthcare, fatphobia being something he writes about in a more vulnerable way than I have ever seen from a person of his gender.

A personal favorite of mine he wrote on tax day last year that I think is so powerful about the political issues we are all grappling with and I wonder if you agree.

And the classic “I Shit My Pants At Work,” accompanied by one of the best opening images in my publishing history.

Now For The Fun Job Posting Part:

I have at least 20, maybe more, incredible stories to post here. What I don’t have is enough time myself to build and publish them. (On top of regular AJPT stuff, my book is due in 10 months, which sounds like a long time and is not at all for the way that I like to write and then revise and add and revise and subtract to within an inch of my poor writing’s life. Also, the private stuff I am writing about - and I know a lot of you memoir writers can relate - is difficult to dredge up and relive, so that excavation process can add time. And as I am telling many of my personal stories for the very first time - to anyone in any format - there is no shorthand with which to say them.)

Anyway, enough parenthetical entitled griping over my little humble-braggy problem! What I need is someone willing to help me edit, build and post all these current glorious gems and to work with me on other ones for the future. If you’re into writing, you could do that here too, no problem. I know that whoever you are, we’ll have so much fun together, I will work really collaboratively (maybe more than you would want!), pay fairly and be forever in your debt for helping keep AJPT growing and thriving. If you think that might be you, please let me know in the comments and await further instruction. Thank you in advance!

Last thing, especially for you new subscribers I value so much and thank for managing to hang on this far: Every day is a surprise here and if you don’t care about today’s featured piece, that’s fine and there will be more and different ones coming right after. I also deeply appreciate you letting me barge into your inboxes. I don’t take that access lightly. But since I am currently in, I will be like the person who blurts out during sex and say it to you here: I love you!

And in this case, I really do! I will be back with a story from me in two days and I hope you stick around.

XOJane

Who Doesn't Want This Thing??

By Charlie Connell

For the first 15 minutes of my job interview at Nationwide Video, nothing exceptional or out of the ordinary happened. I answered a bunch of questions about my previous employment, explained why I was excited to work at a video store1 , and I lied profusely about my work ethic. You know, normal job interview nonsense. Then things took a turn I never saw coming2.

“Well, Charlie, I really like everything I’ve heard so far,” the interviewer said to me. “But we aren’t actually hiring for this location…”

“Fuck a duck, what was the point of even bringing me in,” I wanted to scream, but instead I waited for him to finish his sentence.

“...but we are hiring at the Clarendon location. We have a more robust adult section there, so the last question I have for you is, would you be comfortable working in an environment surrounded by adult videos like this?”

Then he held up an oversized box for the film “Black African Gold: Hardcore.” With this being a family-oriented publication, I don’t want to be crass and describe the cover in too much detail. I’m confident you already have some sort of picture in your mind, and no matter what that picture is, I can tell you two things: 1. You’re on the right track, and 2. His manhood is at least 43% larger than what you pictured. But more than the shock of having hardcore porn thrown in my face during a job interview, I remember the serene, yet simultaneously bored, look in the cover model’s eyes. Well, that and the horrifyingly large dong.

I took a second to gather myself and process what had just been the craziest 30 seconds of my young professional life. “Porn’s rad,” I said with a chuckle. “I have no problems with it whatsoever.”

And that was that. I had walked in a slacker looking for the ultimate slacker job, and I walked out as a smut peddler.

A Den of Iniquity

Before we get too far into this, this was a rental video store specializing in porn, not a sex shop with toys, magazines, or spooge booths. I swear that every time I would say I worked at a porn shop, the follow-up question was always about the booths. That’s not to say that there weren’t some disgusting moments (once you reach the end of this you’ll consider this sentence to be Chekov’s Revolting Substance), but aside from the content on the tapes, Nationwide Video looked like any other independent video store in a major city in the early aughts.

In the stereotypical indie store, there would be a large section of movies and then tucked away in the corner, perhaps behind a beaded curtain, would be a small adult section. Nationwide was the exact inverse of that. On the ground floor, we had a small checkout counter and a dozen or so shelves of videos nobody ever glanced at, let alone actually rented. There was a law in Chicago mandating at least 15% of the stock to be non-adult, so once the new releases had grown stale at the other three locations, they were shipped over to the Clarendon branch to rot. We had an entire shelf of “Airheads,” with a full shelf of “The Avengers” (Connery and Uma, not Iron Man and Cap) below it. There was a stairway in the back that led to the Hot-N-Nasty Annex. No, that’s not a flourish of prose; it was the actual name, complete with an honest-to-god neon sign.

As you walked up the stairs, under that gaudy neon, a brand new world rose ahead with each step. Think of it like when they drive into Toontown in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, but instead of Goofy and Bugs, it’s tits and ass. At the top of the stairs, customers were faced with a choice: take a left to the straight section or pull a right and head to the gay section. Or, if you didn’t move it all, you could choose a video from the hilariously minuscule Bi section that served as a sort of demilitarized zone between the two others. And yes, this arrangement was done purely for our own amusement. Across from there was a counter with security monitors, a Coke machine3, and a 10-foot Xenomorph wearing a thong.

Whereas downstairs was cramped, upstairs was as massive as a suburban Blockbuster. There were thousands of VHS tapes. I know what you’re thinking right now — it was the 2000s and the store was still all video tapes? Back in the olden days before you could pull up 10,000 XXX videos within five seconds on your phone, porn was really fucking expensive, even on VHS. We’re talking over $70 (back then!) for a new release, and when things came out on DVD they were even more expensive. It seems backwards since porn tends to be the first industry to latch on to any new technology — it was porn choosing VHS that killed Betamax, afterall — but the prohibitive prices made it so we were very busy renting VHS tapes long after most stores phased them out.

Among all those thousands of tapes, there was a little something for everyone. And quite often that something was a fetish I had never even fathomed could “be a thing,” which is saying something for an urbane sophisticate such as myself. Discovering what bukake is for your job is the kind of thing you wish you could unlearn, but know you never will4. For the first couple of weeks, I made note of every funny video title (“Sistas Gotta Piss 2: Pissin’ In The Fat Lane” will always be the champion) and outrageous premise (“Mister 18 Inch Meets Bridget The Midget”), but soon it all sort of blurred into the background.

Once you get beyond the shock of working in an all-caps PORN SHOP, this was the idyllic hipster video store job. I got to wear whatever I wanted (fraying corduroy shorts and punk band tees). I got to listen to whatever I wanted to (ska when my coworkers would allow, more often punk and metal). I got to spend most of the time reading whatever I wanted (The Onion, The Chicago Reader, and Tolstoy). And if you wanted to have a few small beers during your shift, nobody gave a shit. Most of my coworkers were artsy weirdos like me who had applied to work at the non-porn location, which meant we all had enough in common that everybody was pretty close.

It was a job like any other job. Stocking shelves with copies of “Down The Hatch #8” is really no different than stocking them with cans of soup; annoying customers are annoying customers no matter what they’re buying. But then, out of nowhere, some wild shit would spring up as a brutal reminder that no, this wasn’t a normal job.

At Least We Got Hazard Pay

It was a dreary morning and I was working the counter downstairs. We’d only been open for about 20 minutes, and I was still working on my bagel and coffee when a customer came in and threw four videos onto the counter to return them. I aimed for the one on top of the pile and as I squeezed my fingers to grab it the video case shot out of my hand and on to the floor.

“What the…” For a split second, I was in a daze, unable to connect the dots as to what would make a plastic video case shoot out of my hands like a carp. Then I felt the bile start to rise up my esophagus as the revulsion of the moment struck.

“My hand is covered in fucking lube!5 What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I screamed as I grabbed a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex and shoved them into the arms of the bewildered customer. “Clean up your fucking mess and apologize.”

“They were like that when I rented th…” he tried to stammer out before I managed to find an even higher decibel level to bellow, “Do you see me freaking out?! There is no possible way that tape was put on a shelf in that condition. Do I need to cancel your account?”

“I’d like to see the manager…”

“I am the fucking manager.”

And like that, it was over. He put his head down, red with shame, and moved to the side of the counter to clean the tapes while another customer stepped up to rent his store-maximum six porno films. Officially, we called this a “substance warning,” but that really undersells how dehumanizing it feels to have to serve some asshole who couldn’t even be bothered to wipe the spunk and filth from his hands before running out the door to rent six more and repeat the cycle. Sure, I got to charge him an extra $5 and cow him into an almost sincere apology, but it’s hard not to develop a hatred for someone like that. Which is why I completely lost my shit and went into a panic when my wife and I were standing outside the Lincoln Park Zoo 15 years later when I recognized a customer notorious for substance warnings pulling up to the curb in a pedicab. I never forget my enemies6.

Even though substance warnings were few and far between, eventually they happened to everyone. For me, it was the first time I had any reservations about the job, but then I remembered two very important things: I actually had fun almost every single day (high praise for a retail job) and I was making about $12 an hour. In 2000. That was significantly more than my friends working at sandwich shops and bookstores, and my job was infinitely more chill than any other part-time gig I could find. Hell, when you factor inflation in, I’m not making too much more at my very professional journalism job. Yeah, every once in a while, I had to call the police because a guy was in the corner whacking it to the cover of some Jeff Stryker movie, but every job has its drawbacks.7

A World Without Women

The most peculiar thing about working at Nationwide Video was the complete and total absence of living, breathing human women. Not only were 99% of the customers men — during my four-year term as a smut peddler, the number of female customers I served was in the single digits — but so were all of my coworkers. While I’m pretty sure the policy was never actually written down, especially given the probable illegality of it, we never hired any women. The thinking was often that it was for the woman’s safety, but I always thought it was more for the customers’ comfort. On the rare times a woman was in the store, the customers didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t that they were creeping on them (thankfully), but more like they were dumbstruck by the mere presence of a woman. Imagine the kind of look you’d have on your face if you got off a plane in Hawaii to find yourself surrounded by 15-foot snow drifts; that’s what the customers looked like. Most of the time, they’d lock their eyes on the ground and shuffle out as quickly as possible.

Being surrounded by nudity all day, every day had a few odd side effects. The most notable was how it completely altered how I thought about sexual attraction. Look, I was 20 when I got the gig, and even if I were a Lothario, I still wouldn’t know shit about shit at that age; but as a happily married man in his forties, I can comfortably admit how sheltered and inexperienced I was. It had only been a few years since I would flip back and forth to the Spice channel, hoping that for just a split second the cable box would fail to scramble and maybe, just maybe, I’d get a peek of a nipple. Now I was spending entire shifts where it was impossible to stare straight ahead without seeing two dozen naked men and women in all stages of sexual congress.8 It scrambled my brain. I became completely desensitized to nudity. Remember Nipplegate and all that nonsense after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime show? I was watching when Jackson’s wardrobe “malfunctioned,” I just didn’t process that there was anything strange about it since it was the 683rd nipple I had seen that week.

The flip side of that naughty lil’ coin is that it became incredibly hot to see women fully clothed. And if they had an ankle-length skirt and a heavy cardigan on… va va voooom! From the time I was 13 on, I desperately wanted to know what women looked like nude, but once seeing naked women became just another part of my job, that allure was gone.9 I was still telling people that I bought Playboy for the articles, but this time I wasn’t lying.

Jokes aside, I think that this aspect of working at the porn shop rewired my brain in a healthy way. Lonely, horny teens tend to think about women in some pretty disgusting ways, especially during the late ‘90s/early aughts, and I could see an alternate universe where I ended up becoming a toxic incel. Working in the porn industry (albeit in a tangential way) forced me to really consider all the aspects of it, which killed a lot of the boneheaded machismo nonsense lurking in the corners of my brain. My mind was opened to a lot of concepts I’d rarely considered before, like sex positivity and ethical pornography. Considering that this porn shop was in the Chicago neighborhood known as Boystown, I naturally met a ton of people from the LGBTQ+ community. It’s embarrassing to admit this in 2026, but even as a radically progressive guy in 2001, I still had a few less-than-enlightened ideas gleaned from stereotypes that I probably would have held on to had I not been forced to confront them. When a dude who calls himself Stick Daddy brings you bagels every once in a while, all of that stupid, bigoted bullshit evaporates.

Super Stupid Saturday and Other Adventures in Mischief

What happens when you get a bunch of dudes in their early twenties and throw them into the aforementioned world without women? A lot of really dumb shit, that’s what. This is one of the oldest cliches around, but it’s also true — when women aren’t around, dudes get very creative with our mischief.

On the clock, this usually meant dashing fluorescent light bulbs over each other’s backs on the way to the dumpster or writing pithy notes on a customer’s account page. If you’ve ever been at a video store and seen the clerk stifle a giggle after entering your account number, I can assure you that they are laughing at a note left by a coworker. My favorite instance of this occurred with a customer who had a quite unfortunate name — Robert E. Lee.10 The second his phone number was entered the following note would pop up on the screen:

I gave the customer his change in $5 bills and he rudely ripped them in half and spat on the ground before storming out.

Paid with a $50 while mumbling about how Grant was a worthless drunk with no honor. Real weird.

After checking out he said, “These videos will help my Dixie rise again.”

You get the idea. We spent hours trying to one-up each other with jokes in the notes. So much so that pretty much every store meeting included at least one half-hearted plea for us to use notes for business reasons only. Or at least primarily. These pleas fell on deaf ears.

My favorite little bit of mischief was finding ways to drink on the job without getting found out by the customers. Our bosses didn’t really care as long as we got everything done, but customers couldn’t be trusted to be as cool. So we would rip out pages of Adult Video News — the trade magazine of the porn industry — and wrap our tall boys of Old Style with them. If a customer ever asked what I was drinking, my answer was always “Porn Soda.” This did a great job of fooling the customers, but ended up really irking the bosses since we needed those AVN catalogs for work.

Off the clock, things got drunker and weirder. Every Wednesday the bowling alley down the street did cheap games (If I recall correctly, they started at $.50 and I think were $2 by the time Marigold Bowl shut down. RIP), so we’d get a crew including folks from other stores and show up. We did not consider bowling to be an athletic competition as much as an opportunity to pound Bud heavies in bottles shaped like bowling pins, throw eight-pound balls 84% of the way down the lane in the air, and tackle each other as we were about to throw the ball. Once we wore out our welcome, or when the bar closed, we’d end up at a 24-hour taqueria until the wee hours of the morning.

One of my favorite things we did was Super Stupid Saturdays. A typical one of these involved a couple cases of Old Style, illegal fireworks being shot off a roof in Uptown, and ordering an absurdly large pizza that needed to be put at a diagonal to make it through the door. We loved our dumb hijinks. At one momentous party, one of my coworkers powerbombed another one through a folding table in somebody’s kitchen. But we weren’t total ingrates; we brokered a price for the table before wrecking it. I’m pretty sure I still have a chunk of it in a box somewhere.

There was a lot of insanity over the years, but also a lot of bond-building. Working at a video store, even a Hot-N-Nasty one, involved a ton of downtime. Most days were spent just listening to music and shooting the breeze with my coworkers. There are so many authors, bands, and (mostly not x-rated) films that I first got into thanks to my coworkers. Working alongside a bunch of other artsy college kids opened my mind in a lot of different ways, a thing I’m reminded of every time I put on Jawbreaker’s “Dear You,” reread Solzhenitsyn, or try to explain the revulsion/infatuation I had watching “Gummo.”

It’s been 26 years since I started working there and I still talk to a bunch of my coworkers. I ended up becoming really close friends with a few guys, one of whom moved to Jersey City and kept coming back to Chicago with his buddies from town, many of whom I would become friends with. My first break in media came from one of them, and a few years later, when my relationship ended and I was politely asked to find somewhere else to live, I said fuck it and came to Jersey.

Which brings us to that enormous blizzard we had last February. I had tucked into an edible and was walking around the deserted streets, marveling at the snow and thinking, when a thought hit me with the force of a runaway plow — taking that job at Nationwide Video was the single most consequential decision of my life. It’s certainly more impactful than choosing where I went to college or any of the other jobs I’d go on to accept. Even more so than responding to an OKCupid message from some cute girl in Brooklyn who would eventually become my wife. Taking that job was the butterfly effect moment from which everything I love about my life today became possible. Holy shit. It’s the kind of story I imagine I’d regale my non-existent grandchildren with if the entire narrative didn’t hinge on looking at a gargantuan cock.

Editor-in-Chief was the best professional title I’ve ever had, and getting paid to write will always feel like a gift more than a chore, but the best job I ever had was as a smut peddler.

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Best Gift Ever!

For Starters:

Here's How Not To Meet The Mayor For The First Time

By: Jane

How Not To Meet Your Mayor:

Don't wash your hair because you washed it the day before and even though you did one yoga class and it looks ridiculous down, putting it up so solves that and saves a lot of time that you can spend on Instagram instead of wasting effort "getting ready.” Pull items out of your closet that you haven't worn in decades and put them all together. Be very happy with that outfit.

Don't realize that you are actually going to hang out with him one on one and assume you will just hear him speaking in a big room full of people. Try to bring your half-drunk wineglass into the room with him and have security stop you and tell you you have to leave it out there on a table so you take one sip first. Remember where it is in case you want to take it on your way out.

As you enter the room, overhear other people in the vestibule saying to each other "whatever you do, don't wear red.” The decades old coat you have chosen to wear for the evening is bright, red and big. Thank god spot a big puffy couch just inside the room as you are ushered in and shove your red coat down into a corner of it between the cushions where hopefully neither he nor anyone else will see it.

Decide to tell him “Thank you,” rather than trying to converse about any policies you know nothing about. Say it twice, emphatically, to which he reacts instantaneously and warmly and then replies “That is so sweet,” and gives your arm a nice squeeze.

Ta da.

Other things happened too since we spoke last, but I'm going to save them for the comments. There is also another new piece right here that just went up and talks about friend divorces. Which had me thinking a lot about mine with Natasha Lyonne years ago, partly obviously because she's been so in the news. So I would love to talk about that and reason it out with you and also talk about yours.

As far as today's featured story goes, I've known Anka since the ‘80s and to paint the picture of the life we were all living then, I'm 95% sure the last time I saw her was at a crazy awards show where I was seated two spots away from Madonna and my date was Courtney from The Dandy Warhols, who I was soooo crushed on. She and I have had some fun. Anka has a Substack now too and everything on it is as good as I think this story is so check it out AFTER you read today's piece. I love you all so so much! Talk to you below!

Now without further ado….

Jane

My Brown Eyes Turned Green!

By Anka Radakovich

I was having a lunch date in Los Angeles, where the sun bathed our faces in warmth, as it does there, and everything seemed perfect. My date looked at me and said “You have the most beautiful green eyes.” I said “Thank you,” and I giggled, and said “But I have dark brown eyes.” And he said “No you don’t silly, you have green eyes.”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had dark brown eyes. What was he talking about? A WTF moment. I secretly freaked out, and as soon as I got home I looked at my eyes with one of those scary 10X magnifying mirrors that shows everything, and I indeed had green eyes. Why did I not notice this before? What was going on? I immediately called my doctor to ask her why this was happening, and if I am turning into another species, like a reptilian, a green lizard lady.

She laughed, which is always a good sign when your Doctor laughs. She told me “not to worry about it” but to get a blood test in the morning. Omg, was I turning into an Amazonian woman in a 1966 sci-fi movie where I turn green and become a crazed monster who is an insatiable nympho? I took the blood test to find out.

The blood test revealed that I was perfectly healthy, but my cholesterol shot up to an alarming high of 268, and my Doctor immediately put me on 40 mg of Lipitor so the fat in my blood wouldn’t blow out my arteries. The weird thing is that just three months ago I had a blood test and my cholesterol was a perfectly normal 180. I asked the Doctor why my eyes might have suddenly turned green and she told me to “not worry about” it but to go to an eye doctor. Ok, now I’m worried again. Was I going blind?

TO FIND OUT WHAT THE HECK IS HAPPENING TO ANKA’S EYES AND TO SEE PICTURES OF THEM GREEN, please do a nice thing and subscribe here so she can get paid!

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Hello friends and former friends!

My friend Kat and her friend Jennifer made a movie about friendship breakups that may be right up your alley. All the links you need to watch it are below, along with a q and a they did to explain why they wanted to make this movie in the first place. As you might have guessed, it’s personal.

Enjoy and I will see you in the comments to talk about our friend divorces and anything related. I am having a weird moment on that subject right now with a former friend, Natasha Lyonne, who has been trashing me for a couple of decades over a story I published (and understand in retrospect that I shouldn’t have and have publicly apologized for every time it comes up). Anyway, let’s get into all of our stories below, yes? And let’s talk about what you think of the movie!

I adore you all.

Jane

Your favorite shirt! New color!!!

By Jennifer Zahlit and Kat Belinfante

Friend breakups are brutal; no one wants to have a single girls’ night out when your platonic best friend dumps you. So we made a movie (an 82 minute indie dramedy that we co-wrote, Jennifer directed, and Kat starred in) inspired by the heartbreak of our own friend break ups. While making it, we experienced two other friend breakups, but somehow our friendship emerged stronger.

Kat Belinfante: I think my worst breakup was with Chelsea. We always had so much fun together. My other friend Anne and I ordered her a cake with a print out of all the guys she had made out with for her birthday; we would prank strangers at a bar telling them to shake their butts and pretending we had already met before. The tension began when Anne started dating Chelsea’s roommate, and I chose to remain friends with Anne. Chelsea told Anne to date this man but was secretly (not so secretly) in love with him. Weirdly, she was not a Scorpio, but my lack of loyalty was enough for her to cancel the birthday trip she was planning for me that year and just stop talking to me completely. What was yours?

Jennifer Zahlit: Mine was two years ago. After spending many weeks with her and her family over the holidays, I came home to sense that she was avoiding me. When we finally talked, she said that we had been codependent (we lived in two different states and talked maybe once a week), was feeling self-conscious about a career change (what actor doesn’t think about changing careers every month), and felt like a passenger in her own life (this just made me feel sad). It soon became clear that she couldn’t communicate what was happening with her and didn’t want me to be a part of her life anymore. That was obviously devastating, but it was all of the reminders after that got me: the bit we had about that one friend’s Instagram stories, the French restaurant we would always go to together, the street of her old apartment where I always peek into her old place.

Kat: Yeah, honestly my breakup with my ex-boyfriend was much easier, no offense to him – my mom just told me she saw on Facebook he got married, so he’s fine, but you know that’s the risk when you enter a romantic relationship…it might end. I don’t think anyone enters a friendship thinking those are the stakes.

JZ: There’s not really any space or time given to a friend breakup like there is for a romantic breakup (not that I would know…unless ex situationships count?) But there’s something so deeply personal about a friend breakup. The old adage “it’s not you, it’s me” doesn’t apply because it really is about “you.” How do you move forward from that?

KB: Yeah, where’s the Taylor Swift album about replaying every interaction with your former friend wondering if that was the moment things went past repair?

JZ: Well, there is “Bad Blood.”

KB: So true; I love that song. I have such a vivid memory of forcing my old roommate/ our sound guy to listen to it on repeat driving to set for Friend Divorce.

JZ: Ok segue queen! But wow too real, we really went through it! Looking back on the entire experience of making Friend Divorce, would you have done it if you knew what it would entail?

KB: Absolutely not. I both am so grateful we made it, and also think we’ll still be processing the effects of it for years, not unlike our most painful friend breakups.

JZ: Same. Lol. But I don’t regret it at all. I feel like it changed us as people, friends, and artists.

KB: The fact that we each had a friend breakup while making the film, had the big personnel shakeups we did, went into debt, not to mention but obviously to mention, the death of my dad, and stayed friends is nothing short of a miracle. I think in a lot of ways making this film broke us - not in just a shattering way, which did happen, but it also broke us open. It was one of the hardest things I think we’ll ever do, and there was so much heartache along the way (with friends, with grief, with rejection after rejection from the festivals), but I’m really proud of us for never giving up on it.

JZ: The rejection…sigh. Yes, lots of heartache for sure, but also a lot of highs. I’ll never forget getting an email from one of our creative heros, encouraging us to keep going or the wrap party where we all jumped in the ocean, giddy with celebration and disbelief at making it through. But ultimately, I think we made it through because of our communication. We had a lot of #hardconversations but I feel like we always genuinely wanted to know how the other was feeling and what we could do to support. Even under the weight of debt, of figuring out every new stage, of doing this all on our own, we kept talking.

KB: Yeah, I remember one hard conversation we had on set, where you basically told me to step up as “number one on the call sheet.”

JZ: Gently checked in…

KB: I mean you were right…I was just so nervous to be starring in the film and having flashbacks of a webseries I co-created a few years earlier (a comedian’s rite of passage) where I felt like I was wearing too many different hats, and I felt like it took away from my acting. I really thought about what you said and showed up in a completely different way the next day, which was my character’s big blowout scene with her best friend on set. That day showed me that I could step up in a leadership capacity while still having fun with my friends on set. That and my “fake wedding” were definitely my favorite days because we got to have so many of our friends on set and create all of these micro moments that helped bring the story to life. Plus, I loved seeing myself in a wedding dress (it was a $69 white dress from Lulus but I’ll take it!).

JZ: I’ve been thinking a lot about how scrappy we were in making the film. We called in all of our favors (think getting a location from a friend of a friend of Kat’s fellow yoga teachers, casting two gals that I used to babysit since they were three, etc) to make this happen. We willed it into existence somehow. All of our friends chipped in, whether it was through contributing to our Seed & Spark, getting us free Covid tests from the library, lending us their homes, listening to our five minute voice memo meltdowns…the list goes on. In that way, the film became a manifestation of all of the love and care we have poured into our community that came back to us tenfold. We emailed everyone in the industry we could find an email address for during pre-production, casting, post-production – I’m kind of in awe of how brave we were. But I think it came back to the core of the film; we really believed in the story and could see that it always sparked a conversation with people when we brought it up.

KB: Friend breakups are so brutal. But through this process, we’ve realized it’s a nearly universal experience, and it’s reinforced why we still place such a high value on our friendships in our lives. Even if we decided that neither of us would get “friend married,” friendships will always be a top priority for us.

JZ: Ditto. Love you girlina.

XO

Watch Here!!!!!!

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I had the worst nightmare last night (I know who cares, but hold on because you’re involved). I was sitting on a white couch in the bedroom of the worst person we can think of (you know who I mean - he lives in a House the same color as his dumb couch). That person was talking at me and then leaned over and started kissing me. Thank god my legs worked and I could run out of the room, though the door was heavy. After I woke up, I realized what sparked that horror: I announced yesterday that I had reached an epiphany about starting a print version of Sassy magazine again. I have never wanted to for so many reasons and all of a sudden I saw all the reasons to do it. So we can.

BUT in announcing this, I made a (true) comment about feeling like I’m in some kind of heyday - and that everything seems optimistic and hopeful and easy. I asked if any of you could relate. It’s the sweetest thing how many of you are still responding to that note. But a few smart people made the point that the world is shit right now and that in 2026, no, they do not feel any of those happy vibes. I get that and I think the guilt of not acknowledging that infiltrated my dream - that I had somehow pleased and supported and aligned myself with the gross dude by saying I was so optimistic right now. So I promise you all that I am not letting him off the hook for any of his atrocities and I now know what my real hell feels like. Anyway, I will be writing more here about the process of doing Sassy again and will include you in every step that you want to be part of.

Next up: Whenever I do any public speaking (I am doing three appearances today, because I have been saying yes to everything - which sounded like a good idea at the time and is about to come to an abrupt halt because panic attacks are so derailing), I like the Q&A part best. That’s because I know that at least one person wants to hear what I’m saying. So I’m using the same method with this deep investigative “story” you requested about our time with America’s Next Top Model. I'm not going to try to tell you that this is the most astounding exclusive world-changing scoop I've ever published (because that was last week).

If you’re new here, today’s piece is a little bit of a diversion from the norm (the abnorm norm). I’ll be back in two days with our regularly scheduled programming like your beloved It Happened To Mes and all those extremely messy stories you (and I) love so much. So enough preamble, and here goes, by popular demand…

Also: I love you no matter what.

Jane

PS Here's another great thing: I am extending this giveaway offer because so many of you used it, so if you become a subscriber today, a month of access to all of our best stories ever and all of those coming up in the next month are yours for free free and free! Take advantage of me and that here!

Support Abortion RIghts This Way

By Jane Pratt (but all credit to Eric Nicholson)

Way back in the now-trendy then-vaguely-boring ‘90s-’2000s, shortly after I started Jane magazine, my fashion editor and handful-of-favorite-people person Eric Nicholson walked into my relatively-fancy-in-retrospect – though I didn't appreciate any of it at the time - office to tell me he had been approached about being a judge on some show called America’s Next Top Model with Tyra Banks. It was between him and an editor from Glamour magazine, but they wanted Eric.

Of course I immediately said yes. Because I was in the middle of an intense editing session with another editor over these lost Courtney Love interview tapes that never did materialize, but also because being the publishing partner for ANTM meant that on a (minor) network show every week there would be mention of our still fairly new magazine - thus exposure to a broader audience. Equals more readers. Equals more ads. Etc in the simple days before algorithms.

The trade-off of having to orchestrate and publish a photo shoot with whoever became “America’s Next Top Model” was not an ideal arrangement, because editors like to pick – usually along with a photographer – the models they use in their valuable expensive print pages. They want to carefully choose the models, photographers, clothes, messages, etc., that will do the most for their readers and secondarily advertisers. (Though sometimes the advertiser was the first priority – especially if you got monthly notes like I and many of us did from people like our beloved Giorgio Armani, who went through each new issue and counted the number of editorial credits we gave to Armani versus Versace compared to the advertising pages that both ran in that issue. But that’s another thing.)

Okay, back to Tyra. So Eric did the show while still working his regular job at Jane where I would see him every day and he would come in to my office with stories after taping ANTM. I was so busy with the magazine and I’ve still never had time to watch the show, but over the years people would mention to me that they had seen Jane magazine featured. A lot of times that would be the first thing people would say about the magazine when they approached me. Mission accomplished.

When all the interest in Tyra and ANTM sparked up again - starting with that podcast “Curse of America’s Next Top Model” which I loved because the host was so sassy, and then of course the Netflix documentary that everybody seems to have watched and then the E! series on the same exact topic, which got less attention because it came out last, I guess, but did feature Janice calling Tyra a bitch twice - of course I texted Eric about all of this.

Eric had been asked multiple times by the producers of the E! series to be featured on there. But he’s classy and said no. He was raised in the fashion business at a different time (as everyone now gets from the scenes in Love Story where Carolyn aligns those heels in the Calvin showroom maybe a dozen times in the first episode). This was the same era where I was, as Jane Editor-In-Chief, made to fire someone because she insisted on wearing the wrong lipstick in meetings with our boss. It wasn’t my call, but after the third infraction, even I knew I had to follow through. In any case, Eric has standards, holds his head up high and only does publicity, and work, that he’s proud of. And it’s good work.

[When I was searching for pictures of me at Jane magazine, two things from that era kept coming up: This sort of goofy picture above of me and Mike D attending an event for Food Bank of New York, and this interview from right before I started Jane, which there is zero reason to watch unless you want to.]

Anyway, finally, here’s Eric:

It’s fascinating, but not at all surprising, the amount of attention the show has been getting. I feel for Shandi, and remember her being your favorite. [She was and I was always pushing Eric to make her the winner.]

I truly was focused on my career being a fashion editor at Jane and was happy to do the show to help promote the magazine AND hopefully inject some of the spirit of Jane into the show. Like when they were I remember pushing back on criticism of Yoanna’s body not being thin enough or when some said Shandi was too thin. I had absolutely no contact with any of the models other than the weekly judging. ZERO insight into what was happening at the shoots or the models apartment, etc.

I think the backlash is a testament to how far the culture has grown and that what you/we were doing at Jane did make a difference. [He knows just what to say.]

Though I was a fashion editor at Jane when I appeared on the show for 12 episodes, I approached judging America’s Next Top Model through the lens of choosing the best model overall. After all, it was called America’s Next Top Model, not Jane’s Next Top Model. I understood the assignment.

That said, I was also representing Jane — the magazine and the brand — so I inevitably judged through that perspective as well.

.

Here is my take on some of the standout Cycle 2 Contestants:

Yoanna

She was somewhat of an underdog, and I’ve always loved an underdog — and always will. Her face was striking in a classical way: impossibly symmetrical, with large, wide-set eyes and full lips. Her short, choppy hair felt fresh and fashion-forward.

Her face reminded me of a young Carol Alt — whom, coincidentally, I had the privilege of styling for the launch of xoJane. [Carol was my favorite model when I was a teenager too, and I was so excited we got to photograph her for the xoJane launch.]

Nigel said that Yoanna was flat-chested and looked like a boy, or had a boyish body. I remember saying — though it was edited out — that she was the only contestant I could realistically see being cast in a Marc Jacobs show. At the time, Marc was the hottest designer in the industry and represented a somewhat new take on beauty. He championed models with distinct personalities and often cast his friends in campaigns — Sofia Coppola, Winona Ryder, Lil’ Kim, Kim Gordon (young, old, short, tall, etc).

Yoanna radiated a genuine love of fashion and style. She had that extra special something — a personality that elevated her beyond just a pretty face.

Xiomara

During one judging panel, I said that Xiomara was the only model there who could walk in a Jean Paul Gaultier show — and I still stand by that. She had the height and physical presence of a traditional model, but with an interesting, powerful edge. Gaultier is known for casting memorable, sometimes unconventional faces, and that’s where I saw Xiomara fitting into the fashion world.

This will definitely date me, but about a year after the show ended, I was at the Limelight club in NYC and Xiomara was bartending. She leapt over the bar to give me a huge hug. If you remember, she wore bright blue contact lenses on the show — way over-the-top, obviously fake, and they made her look… bizarre (though, again, very Gaultier).

She told me she had worn them to the auditions, but once filming began, she hadn’t planned on continuing to wear them. According to her, producers insisted she keep them in or risk immediate elimination. How manipulative is that?

I’m sure each contestant has her own story about manipulation — as we saw highlighted in the Netflix special — and I genuinely feel for them. I’m sensitive — Jane can attest to that — and every time a girl was sent home, it saddened me.

Judges

The first judging session went something like this:

A producer tells me which chair is mine behind the judging desk. The lineup is: Nigel, Tyra, me, Janice.

I’m five-foot-six. They are tall. Very tall. Especially in wigs and heels.

I’m chronically early, so of course I’m the first one seated. Janice sits down next, takes one look at me, and announces: “You’re SHORT. Sit up straight! Don’t slump. Get a pillow!”

So I get a pillow. It helps.

Tyra arrives. We clap, we gush, she sits down. She immediately clocks my pillow and asks for one too. Then Nigel and Janice ask for pillows. Before I know it, I’m balancing on three pillows.

That’s how judging began.

Tyra, Janice and Nigel are exactly as striking in person as you’d imagine. Cameras don’t exaggerate them — if anything, they understate.

Tyra

The fashion nerd in me was constantly debating whether to ask her about her true high-fashion era — pre–Sports Illustrated, pre–Victoria’s Secret bombshell mythology.

I was dying to ask:

• What was Karl Lagerfeld really like?

• Was Naomi Campbell actually awful to you?

• Is it true Tina Turner recommended you to Azzedine Alaïa?

• What Alaïa do you still own?

But Tyra was always impeccably professional with me — warm, lighthearted. Cordial. I never quite felt the opening to dive into fashion-history interrogation mode. That may have been her boundary… or just my hesitation.

Nigel

Nigel modeled before becoming a “noted” fashion photographer. I’ll admit — I’d never heard of him, so I didn’t arrive with burning questions. [I remember thinking this was hilarious in the same way that they get Bachelorette contestants to squeal in delight about a country music performer they could not possibly have heard of suddenly joining their date - or Abbie Lee Miller introducing a ‘world-famous’ guest choreographer. I had never heard of Nigel Barker either and had worked in magazines for decades at that point. No offense.]

He was always kind to me, though [says Eric, more diplomatically than me]. And whenever I ran into him and his wife, Crissy, they were genuinely lovely.

Janice

Janice is the one I became closest to.

Her stories are endless — and she tells them freely. You don’t have to ask. But of course, I asked anyway.

“What was Diana Vreeland like?”

Janice told me Vreeland once warned her, “Janice, don’t ever MAR yourself with ink,” when she was considering a tattoo.

“Weren’t you terrified posing with a cheetah for Peter Beard?”

“Did you really fuck Peter Beard?”

“Tell me everything about Irving Penn. And Richard Avedon.”

Four months with Janice could fill a book. One day, maybe. For now, I’ll keep it close.

On the very first day of judging she told me, “Someday you’re going to be a CEO — so act like it. Let me be the bitchy one.”

Honestly? That might have been the most valuable critique I received all season.

I do think Eric was too sensitive for what the show actually was. Don’t get me wrong, he has the snobby seemingly-insensitive fashion side that I adore, but thank God he didn't know about what was all really going on behind the scenes because you could see in his eyes that he was upset even whenever a girl simply got cut. So I can only imagine if he had known what was going on with Shandi for example (filming and exploiting her drunken sex with someone not her boyfriend), he wouldn't have been able to take it. He's a good person. “I feel terrible for Shandi,” he still says.

After talking to me about ANTM - and other gossip we fit in, of course - Eric texted me the post below with this note: “Someone sent me this from Reddit about my judging and I hope this is how I came across on the show and it reminds me that the best advice I could give to anyone who’s trying to succeed at work is super simple ‘don’t be late.’ I tell this to all the new assistants I work with to this day.”

I had my own snobby editor side and I was somewhat bummed when we actually did have to run a feature using the contest winner, not because of Yoanna but because it felt like a promotional shoot more than an editorial choice (as I already whined about above). But of course we were going to follow through. We did an accessories story, which can be a little more utilitarian and less fantastical and aspirational, in the front of the book so that we could run ads adjacent to it and not call as much attention to its aesthetics. We gave it six pages which I think was honorable of us because we could’ve tried to run it at 4 or even 2. The story wasn't something that I promoted on the cover because it would not have helped sales (now with all the notoriety of ANTM maybe, but not then). So it just kind of flew under the radar, as I hoped it would, and that was that and this is what it looked like:

REMINDER THAT IF YOU SUBSCRIBE NOW, YOU GET A FULL MONTH FREE OF ALL ACCESS TO EVERYTHING GOOD HERE!

One of my editors called me after watching Tyra’s interviews on the E! series, saying Tyra reminded her of ME. Wtf?! But here is where I do relate to the situations Tyra was in:

Sometimes you get into a job where you are hosting a show that is exploiting people. This happened to me with my talk show Jane that ran on Fox in the 90s. Your name is on it but you feel like you have no control over who the guests are or how they are prepped, etc etc - especially when it is live TV like my show was most days. I hosted shows where people would stand up and announce that they were pregnant to their mothers or start stripping in front of their dads. But here’s what you can do in that situation: Quit. Which Tyra didn’t do.

Another scenario that has happened to me too: Being made to compromise and release content that is not what you want to be promoting but feeling like you shouldn’t quit because of your staff, who may lose their jobs if you go (this happened to me at both Sassy and Jane magazines, where I stayed longer than I would have because I wanted everyone to keep jobs that I had hired them into). But in Tyra’s case, she fired her whole staff anyway when the show was at that compromised crossroads. So it is hard to relate to what she did or why.

I would love for her to come back with something actually altruistic. That’s my goal for Tyra. I have hope. That doesn’t mean we can’t trash her or anything else about ANTM in the comments because that’s fun.

AND one little addendum that came up when I was telling the Jane staff that I was going to be posting this:

From former Jane magazine editor Josh Lyons (who incidentally is one of at least three former employees to include scenes in their memoirs where they were on drugs in meetings with me and I didn’t know it and thought that I must have been off that day because we weren’t connecting. His awesome book with that in it is Pill Head.):

If you need any additional ANTM Jane content, I was so obsessed with the first season that I somehow convinced you to let me fly to Albuquerque where me and Elyse (3rd runner-up) hosted America’s Next Top Med Student (cuz Elyse was in med school and they kept talking about it on the show) and she judged a bunch of women on how well they could draw my blood.

I also helped write Miss J’s book. And one more ANTM story: Around 2004/2005 I was at a gay bar and got hit on by a guy who told me he’d been a photographer on the currently-airing cycle. We got super wasted and started trading deep dark secrets and his last one right before I bolted was something along the lines of “I only really like young boys. I’ll never act on it because I know how wrong it is, but I can’t help it.” His episode aired maybe a month or two later. Oh and one last random detail and then I swear I’ll stop blowing up your phone: Elyse was dating/living with a member of The Shins at the time, which made the whole experience even more early aughts.

Thanks for the perfect ending, Josh! I forgive you for doing drugs in meetings with me AND taking advantage of our expense accounts for your own follies (which was pretty close to Jane’s Mission Statement anyway). Thanks to the greatest crew of editors, thanks to Yoanna and everyone else involved in that crazy magazine and that crazy ANTM chapter. Josh’s visual proof below…

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For now, I am going to add an extra month on to every paid subscription. (I am also in a really good mood for OTHER reasons, so you all can reap the benefits of my happy-drunk largesse.) I will do this after the weekend so if you are not already a paid subscriber and sign up to subscribe today or tomorrow or Friday or Saturday or even Sunday (April 19 - my wonderful brother Ben’s birthday!), you will get that extra free month on top of whatever subscription tier you choose. (Even for Founding Member/Lifetime subscribers, I will figure out a way to produce an after-life accessible version just for you, in both Heaven and Hell editions - preorder whichever you need in the comments so I can plan accordingly.) And if you were hoping to get out of reading more from me and have been just waiting for your subscription to lapse, then sorry again and you have to suffer through a whole extra month of emails alerting you to stories from me and this unusual crew.

Those of you who have been around AJPT for a while already know today's writer from her take-your-breath-away punch-in-the-gut comments on most every story. I had gathered from these comments that Gina had a bigger story of her own to tell and I felt lucky when she said she wanted to tell it to you here. I love love Gina. She is not afraid to fight for anything she cares about. Which is most things. For this reason, she has often been controversial in the comments (which you know I REALLY love). The one-of-a-kind experience she writes about here will probably make it even clearer why she is the lovable fearless warrior and champion she always is. Go, Gina, go all the way.

As you have probably already surmised from the subject line, this story is intense. So the next promise I will make in this span of three paragraphs is that the feature I send out later this week will be goofy and happy-go-lucky and gossipy and superficial. Yay! And you can just wait for that if you prefer.

If you do choose to read today’s story, first you may want to brace yourselves or take a gummy or do whatever ritual you do before entering into something that might bring up strong reactions. (Speaking of which, if you are ever going into a situation with people you want to protect yourself from, this can help: Physically mimic the motions of putting on a hazmat suit and zipping it all the way up to the top just before entering. That has reduced or eliminated my stress many times - better than a cortisol-reducing supplement I also take. Plus I paid my therapist for it and it’s yours free! If you try it, let me know if it works for you also.)

Then feel free to say something nice and supportive to Gina in the comments, because going through what she has been through is a lot and putting it out there for all of us to read and see is also a lot. I can only imagine. Also, ask her questions! I had a ton of them and still have more. I know the medical aspects of this are complicated and that you may have your own knowledge about and opinions on all of them, which we would also love to hear. As I've said, Gina can take it all on and more! As can I!

OK, that was supposed to be a short intro today for Charlie’s and Andy's sakes and it didn't end up to be. Sorry again, guys!

Sincerely (and I mean that),

Jane

PS Truly last chance to vote for all the controversial books you’re even mildly interested in reading. Lena and Lindy are currently in the lead, but can Keith or Vladimir can catch up?? Next week, I will make the announcement that we will all have to live with, so have your say now!

The Cutest Shirt Ever In The Land

By: Eugenia Mancini Horan

On the day of my appointment, I put on a long skirt, long-sleeve shirt, and jacket in the August heat to cover my frail frame and cancer accessories. We set off, my heart pounding with excitement and tachycardia.

Dressed up? In my head, I thought I looked amazing.

My husband, my mother and I arrived at the cancer center. I could feel eyes on me, but I didn’t let myself think about it. I remembered how I’d gone through that same door just two and a half months earlier. Even though I was even worse now, I was one of the only people smiling.

I wasn’t asking them for help; not this time. Today I knew how to help myself. I just needed a signature. Easy. How could my doctor deny me this treatment that could save my life? That was too ridiculous to waste energy on.

Just like at my first visit, I was completely unaware of how unbelievably sick I looked. I was just over the moon that all the fighting had paid off. I held on. I didn’t give up. I had never believed I was too far gone to get here. I said this woman would fix it, and here I was to be fixed.

But I obviously wasn’t thinking clearly. My Oncologist had no idea that I had obsessively thought about this exact moment since July thirtieth. Imagining this triumph had gotten me through the darkest moments in the ICU, the scariest moments in hospice, and my late-night terrors at home. But she had no idea. This wasn’t the winning of an incredible battle against time, power, and my own body—not to her.

I had turned her into my salvation because, honestly, there was nowhere else to go. I believed the fact that she knew me would save me. She knew I was stubborn, that I was a fighter, and that I wanted to get well. I knew her to be fair, even-tempered, and thorough. She wouldn’t turn me away and sentence me to death. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

I was called back to see her, and within three minutes, all these attributes I recalled seemed the opposite of the doctor that I saw looking at me. I saw it immediately. She did not believe that treatment would save me. She didn’t believe anything could save me.

She only believed my cancer math—those stupid numbers.

I hoped she would see what I had going for me: My mind was on, it was firing, and I was determined to live.

She wasn’t able to see past my frail, useless body.

I used the most important muscles I had—those that enabled me to speak. I plead my case. I outlined and framed my argument, serious as a sermon. I think she was quite surprised to find out I had a mission. It was a word that had never passed between us before. I also think she saw the uncertainty on the faces of my husband Seth and my mother. She spoke to them, and I flinched as she saw the shrugs and uncertainty.

“God damn it,” I thought. “Are they trying to get me killed?”

I didn’t have the luxury of not betting it all. I wouldn’t hear of anything else or look at any other option; I had found my person. I intrinsically knew it was treatment or death, so I’d picked my side and never wavered. There was no other side. I was too sick for chemo. Even if I had been willing to take it, it would certainly have killed me. I had outlived a few death forecasts in order to sit in this room.

She looked at me, her face blank, as if she wanted it to seem like she was considering it.

She said, “No.” …and continued to.

For over thirty minutes we volleyed. Not only did she refuse, but she actively tried to dissuade me from this drug. But I could not be swayed. I was fueled by adrenalin. I had never considered the possibility that she might say no, because it was so obviously black-and-white. She was a doctor. Their duty is to at least attempt to save lives—to do no harm. This seemed like the ultimate harm. I was present and I was fighting. How could it be “too late?” How could I be “too far gone” if I’d gotten my ass into that office to beg?

I didn’t buy her stance that it could be considered cruel to prescribe it to me, likely because it was bullshit. If I died from pneumonitis or colitis, then so be it. But I would be damned if I died from neglect, waiting for cancer to shut down my lungs, from not being brave enough to try… or from her not being brave enough to try.

I had nothing to lose. I started pleading and could not stop. I talked about my deepest desires. I said that I wasn’t done with my life, that I could do this; that I would fight harder, longer, relentlessly. I would live. I didn’t want to leave Seth. I didn’t want to leave my dogs. I couldn’t bear the thought of my mother and father losing their child. How could she stand it? How could she sentence me to death? I didn’t stop. I pulled away from Seth and my mother, both of whom were trying to catch the snot running from my nose. I laid myself bare. I was livid. The past seven months flashed before me, and the memories of my mistreatment lit me on fire. I would not end like this.

I was called back to see her, and within three minutes, all these attributes I recalled seemed the opposite of the doctor that I saw looking at me. I saw it immediately. She did not believe that treatment would save me. She didn’t believe anything could save me.

I was two weeks past my two weeks to live. I was already on borrowed time. Who was she to just say no? I was asking her to prescribe it, not to pay for it herself. I wasn’t asking for heroin or crack. I wasn’t asking for cash or prizes. I was asking for a chance—just ONE chance—to keep my life. I was asking her to do her job, not for her opinion.

I called once again on my philosophical training to assess the situation. How do I best argue for my life? I knew her stance was based, if not on personal bias, then most certainly on the bias of the medical system. If there was a crack in her agreement with the system, I might still have a shot. I could not convince her I would survive. That had been my error. Asking her to believe in me had been a nearly fatal mistake.

So I tried to convince her of the death I thought I deserved.

TO READ THE REST OF GINA’S STORY AND TO SEE PICTURES OF HER NOW, PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND THANK YOU SO MUCH.

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Hello, good people!

I love how you operate.

Paid subscribers, I’ll start with you because I worked in publishing back when all subscriptions were paid and all writers were compensated relatively fairly (unless maybe you were writing for Spin or Nylon or The Source at that time). So those of you paying your six dollars a month (or less if you take out a founding subscription) so that we can replicate that model as much as is possible in these AI times, I love you, I thank you deeply and I know exactly who you are. (Paid subscribers who get an email from my janky yahoo account, that is actually non-automated me, just not switching over when I see that you upgraded, to tell you how much I appreciate your support and I mean it.)

If you’re someone who took out the free 7-day trial or the one-time upgrade, hang on before canceling - if you can manage the psychological burden of having something outstanding to do, which is a tough one for me. That’s because there’s stuff coming out this week that’s extra juicy and I wouldn’t want you to have to go to the trouble of subscribing all over again and then unsubscribing yet again - though I'm sincerely impressed with how quickly some of you manage to sign up to read one paywalled story (like currently a lot of this one or this one) and then cancel minutes later. It’s remarkable and I would love to ask about your reading comprehension. Special admiration goes out to endurance athlete Bob, who subscribed and unsubscribed three times in the course of an afternoon yesterday!

The main thing is: If you’re not into this email, I get it and don’t worry because the next couple are worth hanging around for.

And now for some breaking news: NEW SASSY MAGAZINE T-SHIRTS!

Last week, one of you lovelies alerted me that the Best Shirt Ever (“ever” meaning since we sold them in SASSY Magazine starting 38 years ago) was stupidly only available in sizes up to 3XL. Well that’s because the company that makes the shirts only carries pink shirts in those weeny sizes. So my wonderful partner in crime Ani and I went and created what I now think is an even more gorgeous version. It features, as you can see, the glorious color pairing of hot pink on red! I’m producing it exclusively for sizes 4XL and 5XL. In celebration, I will give them away free to two commenters who tell me in the comments below why they want it.

See you in the comments! Unless you’re too busy having your best sex ever or getting your teeth checked (Virgo) or enjoying any of the other incredibly precise predictions from Bee below.

Love love always, Jane

PS If you haven’t already, you can still vote for all of the controversial books you’re interested in reading (and there are prizes involved!). Next week we’ll close it out and announce the exciting and worthy winners.

PPS Today’s horoscope column is unusually free to everyone, which also means that you can get personalized coaching - which is usually for paid subscribers only - from the most amazing and unique astrologer I know right there in the comments. I use her every month personally. And look how great my life is! Okay then.

The Perfect GIft For Anyone Cool

By The Zine Witch

So there I was, in the tragically muted green rotunda hallway gripping my not so gently used bloody tampon in my hands as I furiously walked down the hallway like an actual Terminator towards Karen’s room. I could not take it anymore. This see you next Tuesday had pushed me too far. Too far! Now I’m over the edge. Yeah, I’m Donita Sparks of L7, baby, and you’re on my shit list. And suddenly, I hit my target. I furiously opened the door and threw it. Right to the kisser. Headfirst, full force. Imagine me. The elevator scene from The Shining. The reluctant hero. Let the fucking games begin.

“Residential school looked like a prison. Kids were medicated severely to compliance. Sexual predators roamed the halls. One cop traded cigarettes for young girls’ tits.”

Residential school was a wild, chaotic, absurd place. Valley of the babydolls. For starters, it looked like a prison. Kids were medicated severely to compliance. Fights broke out constantly. Psychological warfare was everywhere. Sexual predators roamed the halls. One cop traded cigarettes for young girls’ tits. I was punished for defending myself. We all were. I was punished for reacting. I was punished for being human. Bullies went free. Adults were absent, negligent, or predatory. Every day was a brutal, absurd test of endurance.

When Judy spent too much time on the pay phone, the girls got together and cut all of her hair off and every individual piece of clothing in her closet into shreds to teach her a lesson. Day, one, the teddy bear that my dead mother’s best friend had given me that I’ve had since the day I was born was torn to shreds. After losing my father, it was a devastating loss, but there were no times for my tears. Like everything else in my life, it had to be dead and buried and move on for my own survival. This was my reality now.

I have always dreamed of writing this experience as a television show. The absurdity, the pure characters, the danger, the chaos is practically a blueprint for dark comedy, horror, and social critique all at once. Every moment highlighted structural issues in ways you could never stage. The system was designed to fail kids like me, to punish difference, to control rather than protect. And yet, somehow, it made me who I am. I learned to meet chaos head-on, to take fire and turn it into survival, and maybe one day into story.

Being autistic, the school system had no idea what to do with me. And like many neurodivergent kids who just needed care and coregulation, I was sent away for most of my late teens. The more I look back, no one questioned why the behavior happened. They were much more focused on controlling it than understanding the root issue. Many of our systems are designed this way. But this is where I ended up.

I really just wanted to be everyone’s friend growing up. With undiagnosed autism, I often ended up alone or worse, bullied for being myself. A lot of of my poor behavior was just a reaction to my environment. I feel like I was a good kid at heart. I tried to be but would often fail. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t keep up. I wasn’t…interested in what was being taught.

And like any kid who had gone thought the tremendous personal hell I grew up in, I had problems. My parents were not present and both died by the time I was 13. I was raised by a stepmother who was slowly descending into madness, so I had to look to my rock gods in the pages of Rolling Stone, Spin, Sassy, Circus, and whatever other magazine I was reading at the time for advice on how to grow up because I sure as hell was doing it alone.

In a place like that, minding your own business was practically an invitation to a nosebleed. Predators could smell hesitation the way sharks smell blood. Judy’s biggest crime was calling her mother too much and they butchered her entire wardrobe. In this world, your shampoo was pissed in. Toothpaste was rubbed on your face while you slept so you woke up with your entire face burning. Anyone could turn on you at any time. And the staff repeatedly told you you’re worthless. I left my body at a certain point.

Every hallway felt like a battleground. You learned to read a room in half a second. Who was about to snap. Who was high on their meds. Who had decided today was the day they were going to make someone else miserable just to feel powerful for ten minutes. The adults floated around like ghosts who had already given up. Sometimes they were negligent. Sometimes they were cruel. Sometimes they were just tired in that hollow way people get when they work inside a broken system too long.

The rules were arbitrary and the punishments were not about safety. They were about control. If you defended yourself you were aggressive. If you reacted you were unstable. If you cried you were manipulative. If you stayed quiet you were suspicious. There was no winning the game because the game itself was rigged.

So kids created their own ecosystem. Alliances formed and collapsed overnight. Rumors traveled faster than light. Some kids hardened into little warlords. Others disappeared into the background and tried to become invisible. Some of us developed a strange dark humor about it all because laughter was one of the only ways to metabolize the insanity of it.

Looking back, it was absurd in the way only institutional life can be absurd. Teenagers navigating violence, hormones, grief, medication, and abandonment all at once. Children trying to survive systems designed to contain them rather than understand them. You learned quickly that survival was not about being the strongest person in the room. It was about being the most adaptable. To turn off all feeling. The most observant. The one who could sense danger before it arrived. A breeding ground for sociopaths.

And sometimes survival meant snapping.

Sometimes it meant gripping a tampon like a tiny weapon of war and marching down a fluorescent hallway with the conviction of a soldier who had finally decided the battle was unavoidable. Karen had gone too far. She had given my diary to another student who took it upon themselves to photocopy and share it all over school. My private poems, my thoughts, fears, prayers…exposed. Now it was war.

I don’t know what came over me. It was like my mind stepped into a new persona in that moment. I became my own hero. Donita Sparks was the Aries singer of the band L7 a group that played with ferocious intensity and absolutely refused to take anyone’s shit. She is perhaps most famous, however, for an infamous moment at a concert when a heckler in the audience pushed her too far. In response, Sparks pulled out a used tampon and hurled it straight at his fucking head, instantly cementing the band’s reputation for fearless, confrontational punk rock. And now, I too was pulling a Donita.

Aries is the god of war. In the Jewish tradition, to celebrate the new year, the first month of the zodiacal new year, we blow an instrument called the shofar, which is made from the ram’s horn. The noise of the shofar is loud, jarring, and can bring a room to pause. Aries energy enters the room with a gust of fury much like the sound of a shofar. Traditionally, the shofar is meant to intimidate the enemy, to declare war, and to call people to assembly. As such, Aries energy bursts in with this energy. Like Donita Sparks. Like me in this moment where I declared The Crimson Uprising.

You see, Aries energy pushes us to the edge where politeness collapses and instinct takes over. It is the moment when the body says enough. Enough humiliation. Enough silence. Enough swallowing anger to keep the peace. Aries is the archetype that grabs the door handle, throws it open, and acts. It is not always graceful. It is not always strategic. Sometimes it looks like chaos. Sometimes it looks like a teenager in a residential hallway launching a tampon like a biological grenade.

But beneath the absurdity is something ancient and sacred. Aries is the force that defends the self when no one else will. It is the spark of life that refuses to be crushed. It is the war cry of the nervous system that has endured too much and finally pushes back. In a world where I was constantly punished for reacting, Aries was the part of me that refused to disappear.

I will not be fucked with, Karen. And I never was by her ever again. Her roommate? Now my best friend. I won the battle and the war. Take that!

Listen, I am a very demure person these days. I would never throw a bloody tampon at anyone except for perhaps the maintenance worker who consistently says misogynistic things to me, though I have reported him at least a half a dozen times, but only has his job because he’s union…… But that’s a complaint for another day. These days we handle our business in a more civilized way: using our big girl voice and asking for what we need directly.

All of this is to say: I’m not telling you to throw a tampon at someone this month. Though maybe you want to. The month awakens that urge to disrupt, to shake things loose, to confront what’s been stagnating. It asks you to call forth the master or hero within yourself, to step into your own authority, to start something new even if it feels reckless or audacious. You may surprise yourself with your own audacity. It’s a time to declare war on old patterns, on fear, on complacency, on anything that’s been quietly controlling you. This is the energy that pushes you to ignite bold ideas, unapologetic self-expression, and fierce independence, even if it scares you a little.

FOR ALL SIGNS:

Best Day for Healing Work or Therapy (your choice!) - April 17

Best Day for Sex or a Deep Conversation (again, your choice) - April 25

To Read Something Else Entirely

AND HERE ARE YOUR INDIVIDUAL HOROSCOPES - ALL FREE THIS TIME:

Astrologers tend to write horoscopes for your rising sign or Ascendent. This is the sign that was rising in the east when you were born. This tends to be the most accurate prediction. However, will need your birth time for that and you can go to various websites to figure out your own particular chart, but I enjoy Astro.com. If you do not know your birth time, feel free to read these for your sun sign, which works also.

Aries & Aries Rising- After weeks of exhaustion, you may be feeling like putting yourself out there more! There might be a little fire in your chest this month telling you to start fresh, take risks, and finally do what makes you feel alive instead of what everyone else expects. Someone close might get dramatic when you stop bending to their whims, and a relationship could reveal who actually gets you versus who’s just along for the ride. This is your moment to claim your space, speak your truth, and sprinkle a little extra sparkle on your own life. The people and opportunities that really belong will show up, and the rest can twiddle their thumbs somewhere else.

Taurus & Taurus Rising- This month is the time to slow down and give yourself a little extra care. You might notice your body and your routines have been running on empty, and it’s time to rest, recharge, and pay attention to what actually supports your health. Small changes to your daily habits sleep, meals, movement can make a huge difference in how you feel. Someone or something in your life may push for more from you than you can give, and that’s your cue to honor your limits. When you prioritize your well-being and protect your energy, everything else falls into place more easily.

Gemini & Gemini Rising- This month is all about what lights you up and who’s cheering you on. You might feel a surge of creative energy or a craving to do things that just make you happy, no explanations needed. At the same time, your friendships and social circles could shake things up, showing you who really has your back and who’s just along for the ride. This is a month to follow your curiosity, make space for fun and self-expression, and invest in connections that actually energize you. When you lean into what excites you and the people who get it, everything else falls into place.

Cancer & Cancer Rising- This cycle feels like the universe is inviting you to play both interior designer and CEO of your life. The full moon in your fourth house shines a spotlight on home, family, and the emotional corners you’ve been avoiding, urging you to tidy up old baggage and create a sanctuary that actually feels like yours. Meanwhile, the new moon in your tenth house whispers, “time to show up,” planting seeds for career moves, public recognition, or a new life direction. It’s a dance between nesting and rising like grounding yourself in what feels secure while stepping into ambitions that finally honor your inner truth. This is the moment to make your personal foundation work as hard as your public persona.

Leo & Leo Rising- You might find yourself needing to speak your truth, share your insights, or release old patterns of thinking that no longer serve you. Siblings, neighbors, or close connections could play a bigger role than usual, bringing either closure or revelation. Emotionally, your mind is where the drama unfolds, so watch for mental overdrive or impulsive communication. This is about stepping into bigger ideas, new philosophies, or long-distance experiences that broaden your worldview. Travel, higher education, spiritual growth, or publishing could all be themes. You’re being asked to take a leap of faith, trust in your curiosity, and set intentions for personal growth that feels adventurous and meaningful. It’s a reset for how you see the world and how the world sees you.

Virgo & Virgo Rising- This month is putting your resources and your sense of security under the microscope. You might notice where you’ve been giving too much of yourself: time, money, or energy and finally decide some of it needs to stay put. Things that feel hidden or off-limits in relationships could surface, showing you who is really loyal and who’s just along for the ride. This is a month to own your worth, set boundaries around what you share, and make space for the people and projects that actually matter. When you honor yourself, everything else falls into place naturally. Oh, and keep an eye on your teeth this month. It’s not a bad time for a dental check up or to pay a little bit more attention to what you’re consuming.

Libra & Libra Rising- Balance, baby. That’s key this month. You may be noticing your own needs more these days. You don’t just need to be loved, you need to be understood. You don’t need work that drains you or people who take without giving. You need space to create, to move, to show up fully as yourself and you need the same from others. But, you also wanna look cute while doing it. This is a month to show off your pizzaz. Someone close might push against your boundaries later in the month, testing whether you’ll shrink or finally say no. A new connection could appear, bold and unpredictable, challenging the way you’ve done relationships so far. Or you may prefer the company this month of sharp people who challenge the old and welcome in the new. This is a month to stop apologizing for taking up space, to speak your truth clearly, and to invest your energy only where it actually matters. The people and opportunities that belong in your life will rise to meet you, and the rest will fade without a fight. This is a good month to start a spicy new connection or commit with your work life. Just make sure to pause, listen closely, and pay attention to what it tells you about your own needs and desires.

Scorpio & Scorpio Rising- This month it’s all about finally shedding the invisible chains of people-pleasing and relationships that lead to your subconscious undoing. You’re seeing the ways you’ve bent yourself into someone else’s mold, the old scripts you’ve followed to keep the peace, and now you’re ready to dissolve them. You’re planting intentions around self-priority, daily habits, your work life, and boundaries, creating a routine and meaningful work that serves you first. This is your villain era: unapologetic, decisive, and fierce in how you take care of yourself and claim your space. There is a need to pay a little bit more attention to your health this month and to rest where and when necessary. Take that oil of oregano or chug that fire cider and be kind to yourself.

Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising- This month brings a strong focus on your inner child and the people you genuinely connect with. Parents may notice their children taking meaningful steps toward self-expression, while others might find themselves stepping into the role of the big sister or brother they once needed. It’s a wonderful time for dating, pleasure, and deepening connections. Some reevaluations around who you connect with may arise, but these shifts will ultimately strengthen your relationships. This is a great time to take a calculated risk towards your goals and the future you envision.

Capricorn & Capricorn Rising- Work life balance is at the core of this month for you. This month is all about finding balance between your progressional ambitions and personal fulfillment, making sure your work aligns with your deeper values. You might feel pulled to make adjustments whether setting boundaries, reprioritizing projects, or reclaiming time for yourself but these changes will help you step into a more authentic and sustainable version of success. There’s an opportunity to clean house, literally or figuratively at this time. Who you are is changing, and with that comes the pillars that create the scaffolding around your life.

Aquarius & Aquarius Rising- You may be questioning your beliefs, long-term goals, or sense of purpose while also noticing the need to communicate more openly and authentically in your daily life. Travel, learning, or exploring new perspectives could inspire breakthroughs, and conversations with others whether casual or deep might reveal exactly what you need to shift to feel more aligned. This is a great time for publishing, broadcasting, or sharing your ideas with the world around you. Connect and use your voice.

Pisces & Pisces Rising- This month is about reclaiming your worth. You are being asked to plant seeds around your self value and financial stability this month while examining the deeper agreements you have made with others. Finances, taxes, debts, these are the areas of concern this month. You may be looking at how much you consume or what it is that you’re consuming. It’s also not a bad time to take care of your teeth and make a dental appointment. By the end of the month you may find yourself standing a little more firmly in the truth that your energy, your time, and your gifts have real value, and that the right exchanges will honor that.

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If you’re new here, WELCOME ABOARD! Thank you so so much for signing up and my gift to you is permission to skip this italicized part from me and scroll right down to today’s featured story. Or skip it all and go straight to the website where you can read more than 500 thrilling articles and their equally thrilling accompanying comments. It’s never dull in there.

Moving on… The story submissions I get here* at AnotherJanePrattThing sure do follow logic-defying trends. If you have been reading AJPT for a while, you may remember when I was getting all those death-related stories and had to put a call-out for some lighter stuff? There was also one point a couple of months ago when I was flooded with It Happened To Me submissions from people in open marriages (like this one that I did run and boy did it get a lot of engagement - and the single most sexually explicit comment on anything I’ve run in my long publishing life - I will tell you where to find that if you want). Another phase involved a slew of dog-related story proposals all within about a week of each other. That was adorable. And then so many eating disorder-related proposals came in all of a sudden, at the opposite time of the year as Eating Disorder Awareness Month too. Well, right now the tide seems to have turned to first-person encounters with celebrities. With a particular bent toward sex with famous musicians. It’s uncanny.

I can count at least four submissions I got recently with that premise (stories that a lot of people probably would have read. Including probably me). These were all different celebrities, by the way. I didn’t publish any of them, for various reasons, even though some were gorgeously written (you know who you are, gorgeous writers) and some have gone on to be published elsewhere.

Mainly, you don’t want to tell a story where the subject doesn’t have the option of telling their side. Or where they don’t want the story exposed at all. Whether they are famous or not. Of course. And even in this story you are about to read as soon as I shut up, we edited out a lot about other women - and a couple of men - who were involved because it didn’t seem right to expose them even while Tara very much wanted to expose Dave - for her reasons which you will see.

I didn’t keep up with the past years’ gossip about Dave Grohl. I’m pretty sure I have met him multiple times over the decades, but I definitely don’t know him. I’ve always liked whatever I’ve known or seen. I also don’t love to perpetuate gossip. And you would think I would’ve learned my lesson about this general topic when a story about a really wonderful musician and sensitive person appeared in the comments section on my old website XOJane - a comment that turned out to be very untrue and very hurtful to the person it was about. I was able to delete it when I was alerted to it by his publicist. (Note to Mark Zuckerberg and every other tech titan hiding behind Section 230 to argue that you are not responsible for third-party content on your platforms: Yes you are and yes you can do much much better.) I still feel terrible about being part of that hurt.

I did also hear (along with I’m sure many of you because it got a fair amount of press attention) that Dave is currently in lots and lots and lots of therapy and I praise him for that and I hope his life and all the lives of all the people involved are better than they were. I’ve done things too. (Thus my memoir, coming in 2027 or so, which would run tens of thousands of pages - in shorthand - if I include all of the shit I’ve done.) Let’s all keep growing.

And if you think my growth should include unpublishing this article, let me know that too. I hope you will talk to me and Tara about her story - and about how you feel about it being aired and the importance of people/women telling their stories like this and how best they do that. And ask Tara all the questions you want, and me too. I want to hear it all.

I love and respect you all tremendously.

Jane

*Send me your stories that you want published to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com, just like Tara and hundreds of others did before you!

Quiz (sort of): How Sassy Are You?

By Tara Dublin

Dave Grohl knew my name before we ever met in 2001.

Yes, the Dave Grohl who’s been on a solo redemption press tour ahead of Foo Fighters releasing their new record on April 24th (two days before my birthday) because of the bombshell revelation that he had fathered a fourth daughter outside of his marriage in August 2024. That news, combined with the firing of drummer Josh Freese without any explanation, had tarnished Dave’s rep as the “Nicest Guy in Rock,” so he’s out there trying to smooth things over before Foo Fighters hit the road again.

At the same time, one of Dave’s most famous exes, Melissa Auf der Maur, has just released her memoir, and I’ve read a brief excerpt that was posted on Facebook. The few details about the beginning of their relationship rang familiar to me.

There was a brief time in the early 2000s when Dave and I were in touch, after he was married, but long before Violet was born. I had an AOL email for him and a cell phone number with a Virginia area code. We never spoke on the phone, and this was before texting. But some of the things that Melissa shared in that excerpt I read were…not original material, shall we say.

I’ve kept secrets about Dave for 25 years while waiting for answers to questions I’ve never been able to ask him. I’m not a vindictive bitch, and there are things I’ll never tell, because I respect him and the relationship he has with his family. Even before I learned about his fourth daughter, I stayed quiet to my own detriment, often misunderstood and called things like “groupie” and “stalker,” when I was only seeking the truth. I don’t want him, I need my poor brain to finally rest after a quarter century of “What if’s” and “Why me’s.”

500+ stories not about Dave are here

It’s been a rough few years for The Grohl, and if you have a forgiving nature, as I do, you might be able to cut him some slack. Dave lost Taylor Hawkins and his mother, Virginia, within four months of each other in 2022. That would fuck anyone up for a good while.

But if Dave Grohl really wants to reclaim his title as the Nicest Guy in Rock, he has to do something bigger than go to therapy or release a new album. He’s got another confession to make. There’s one last component to his redemption arc so he can really stick the landing.

And that component is…

TO KEEP READING AND SEE ALL THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE OF TARA AND DAVE’S TIMES TOGETHER, AND TO TALK TO TARA ABOUT HER STORY, PLEASE SUBSCRIBE RIGHT HERE. IT COSTS LESS THAN $2 A WEEK AND WE HAVE TO PAY FOR THESE ARTICLES SOMEHOW. THANK YOU!

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I'm making the featured story free to everyone AGAIN today, partly because I'm excited about all the new readers who just found us and haven't paid (yet!)*. I am truly so grateful that you are allowing me to send you these stories, regardless of your subscription type.* Thank you!*

I'll be back next newsletter with more meaningful material from me and I'm curious which topic you prefer - or if you prefer neither or both:

1. My behind-the-scenes history with America's Next Top Model. As I‘ve mentioned, one of my Jane magazine editors and favorite people in the world, Eric, was right up on that ANTM judging dais between Janice and Tyra when we worked with them as the publication partner for Cycle 2. He turned down talking to “E” for their recent series (because he is much classier than me), but he of course tells me and will tell you everything. As will I (big surprise).

2. My history with JFK Junior, who I knew thatmuch in high school and again when he was living in NYC pre- and post-meeting Carolyn.

“Neither, Jane” is a perfectly valid response. It's weird when a topic is being discussed so widely that you have a connection to and hard to know whether to tell your little side or not. You don't want to be the “it's all about me” person at the table. On a related note, you definitely don't ever want to be the person who, the moment someone dies, it’s as though you were the New York Times obituary department with their farewell piece ready to publish, racing to be first to post an IG picture of you with that person. Often I have noted that it’s also a picture where the subject doesn’t particularly look great, but who cares, I guess, they’re dead and You Knew Them. I do appreciate how far my old friend E Jean Carroll takes this trend; the moment she finds out someone has died, she just blasts out an email with their first name in all caps followed by a lot of exclamation points as the subject line. Why be subtle about what everyone is doing anyway? I love her.

At the same time, you don’t want to withhold any stories your friends might find interesting. So let me know in the comments what you want.

And let me know what you think of Jenn’s piece today there too. I want to talk to her more about her story because it was understandably difficult for her to write and because I think what she covers is part of an increasing dilemma for so many people. And I know she wants to hear from and talk about it with you too. So say anything.

Last: If you haven’t voted for any controversial books yet, get in there and support your favorite offenders!

I love you all a lot.

Jane

* If however, you are a particularly beautiful and generous and supportive new person who understands that we pay the writers out of the six dollars or so a month subscription fees, it will mean even more if you upgrade now when your nose is not being held to any grindstone or your curiosity about what comes after a cliff-hanger paywall is not eating away at you so much that you cave and say, “OK I’ll just take out that free 7-day trial to find out whether she lives and then I’ll cancel out of it after 6 days.” Though you can always do that too, of course!

I Wore This & Everyone Wanted It

By Jennifer Dines

I puked out the car window and pissed my pants every morning in the early months of 2014, en route to the middle school where I taught English to four sections of twenty or so new immigrant students each per day. I made a point of arriving early to work in those days, heading to the staff bathroom to double-bag my wet underwear and pants into corner store Have a Nice Day sacks. I stuffed this squishy mass of cotton, pee, and plastic into the front pouch of my backpack for the walk down the hallway to my classroom. Once I sat down at my desk, I swiveled around in my teacher chair and pulled out one of the four-gallon trash bags in the top drawer, dumping the evidence of my incontinence inside. Then I hid the whole mess in the back of the bottom drawer, where it languished until safely after the final bell. Before leaving for the day, I placed the trash bag in my third bag of the day, a paper grocery bag, which I carted home, sitting in the damp driver’s seat with the old folks’ home scent of urine wafting around me.

It was the second trimester of my first pregnancy - twin girls! My body transformed into a shape not un-like Roger Hargreaves’ Mr. Greedy, the main character in one of those British Mister Men and Little Miss books. Mr. Greedy, a purple blob-man, has a giant beer-belly, but not from downing pints at the local pub. Rather, his binge-eating disorder drives him to devour a giant’s “pillow-sized sausages” and “potatoes the size of beach balls,” this after wolfing down a 17-item breakfast.

My Mr. Greedy-ness came not from the meals I couldn’t keep down, but from the exponential growth of the babies and their accompanying rivers, lakes, and oceans of amniotic fluid. I could no longer engage in pre-partum fitness routines either. Running? In the city? I couldn’t see over my bump, so I couldn’t see the slip-and-trip hazards of sidewalk cracks, uneven pavement, pebbles, and sticks, not to mention the ever-present threat of stepping in dog poop. Pilates Reformer? Nope. My trainer of three years cut me off from sessions because she felt lacking in the expertise to work with pre-partum clients, and I didn’t care to find someone else. [Just a tangentially related aside, but I quit my one form of exercise, Pilates, when I got pregnant with my daughter because I couldn’t imagine that those pelvic moves and compression and twisty stuff and pushing were good for her. And now I see women whose water basically breaks on their front-row Soulcycle saddles and I still can’t imagine that that’s healthy. But tell me why I am wrong and old-fashioned in the comments. -Jane]

I headed to the library to peruse the fitness DVDs for child-bearing ladies, where I found PregoFit, KnockedUp Fitness, and fitmama. The titles of these workouts set my already precarious pregnancy hormones a-ragin’. If someone called me ‘Preg-O’ or ‘Knocked Up’, I’d clock them with my swollen fist. And Mama? MAMA? What, was I wearing calico bonnets, churning butter, and sewing ragdolls now? I huffed out of there and road-raged home to my computer.

I cruised the internet for an hour or so but found only more of the same stupid stuff and more irritability. I took a break from browsing to scarf down half a sleeve of saltines and a couple huge spoonfuls of peanut butter. This replenished my energy enough to give the World Wide Web another old college try.

I don’t recall the search terms I typed, but, all the sudden, a miracle popped up on the monitor: Ballet Baby Fit & Graceful Pregnancy. The ballerina on the DVD cover had a huge swollen belly, a knowing smile, and long glossy chesnut-colored hair. Her face resembled Mad Men’s Allison Brie. And her positioning, in spite of her big bump, somehow formed an elegant diagonal line from the tips of her fingers to the ends of the satin slippers.

If this isn't your topic here's 500 more

The DVD cover beckoned: Stay long, toned, and graceful during all 9 months. Whoever this Mary Helen Bowers was, her posture made it look so possible.

And then I spotted the words that sealed the deal. MARY HELEN BOWERS Trainer to Natalie Portman in Black Swan. BLACK SWAN! A film so dark, so intense, so horrific…one of my all-time favorite movies. And this MARY HELEN BOWERS played a part in that. I whipped out my credit card like it burned a hole in the pocket of my high-elastic-waistband maternity lounge pants.

And, let me tell you, this online DVD purchase really delivered. Honey-voiced pastel-clad Mary Helen looked like an angel, but her tendus, leg lifts, and one-legged bridges burned my ass like the devil’s pitchfork. Sometimes I could only survive ten or fifteen minutes before collapsing onto the sofa, but I enjoyed the movement, the fantasy of being a dancer, and regaining a modicum of control over my mutating body.

I credit Fit & Graceful Pregnancy, particularly its seated core exercises, along with the splendor of an epidural, for the relative ease of my childbirth experience. Instead of agony, adrenalin, unadulterated raw power, electrified my body. I activated my ab muscles, kegel-ed up. And with a few pushes, Francine’s first cry echoed across the delivery room, busting out of her mighty lungs.

After the twins’ birth, I didn’t need workout videos because I got jacked wheeling them around our hilly neighborhood in a double stroller a couple times a day and hauling car seats up and down the stairs of our building. Fifteen months and a third girl later, I upgraded to a triple stroller and gained even more definition in my muscles. My once-beloved Fit & Graceful Pregnancy DVD collected dust in a storage closet until I wiped it off and donated it to a thrift store during a bout of spring cleaning.

I all but forgot about Mary Helen until a year or so after COVID when ads for a Ballet Beautiful streaming service popped up on my Instagram. Oh, the memories of pregnancy - Mary Helen’s lilting voice, that classical piano music, those movements that strengthened me up for one of the most important moments of my life. Also: AS SEEN IN VOGUE. I had thirty pounds of pandemic weight to lose, and so again I yanked out my credit card and signed up for more Mary Helen.

I became obsessed with the program: a mix of longer workouts filmed at Mary Helen’s house in North Carolina and then shorter in-studio videos with those familiar Chopin waltzes. I created detailed spreadsheets of the challenges on the Ballet Beautiful site, mapping out sequence of workouts to complete and recorded the dates I completed each one.

In the mornings before my commute and during my lunch breaks, I fit in five minutes of Swan Arms here, ten minutes of standing abs there. I kept light dumbbells and fitness bands in my desk. My bed frame and the side of a long table in my classroom became impromptu ballet barres. I even bought a Spandex turtleneck leotard and wore it several times a week under my work pants and cardigans.

Once a week, I did the hour-long videos on Friday afternoons at the gym, a pick-me-up just for me after a long week of lesson planning, grading, and stressed-out teenagers. In the little back stretching area of the gym, I planted myself on a mat in front of the wall of mirror in the little stretching area, popped in my earbuds, and fired up a livestream Full Body Mat workout on my phone, which I propped on the mirror.

At the outset, the usual parent and teacher worries ticker-taped around my brain, but Mary Helen’s ethereal voice took me out of my anxious mind and into my body.

Really turn out your thigh.

Keep your hips square to the mirror.

Neck long.

Lift-down-out-in.

While focused on Mary Helen’s concise directions, I concentrated on precision, and then, as I properly aligned my bones and muscles, I had to tolerate the intensity of the repeating movements.

This is really starting to burn.

MARY HELEN! This burned sixty-four reps ago! I talked back to the screen, joking around with my old pal. She ignored me. She directed and counted to eight, again and again and again.

After the video ended, I rolled onto my back, closed my eyes, and breathed deeply in a corpse pose. I stood up, faced the mirror one last time. The workout elongated my posture, glowed up my skin, and painted a Mona Lisa half-smile and soft eyes on my face. I had become the calm, strong woman I wished I could be all the time. You look great, sweetie, I told myself, before heading to the locker room for a long hot shower and few minutes in the steam room.

My Ballet Beautiful routines felt more essential then ever when the whiplash changes of Trump’s second term began. My job as an ESL teacher? Classes bursting with new arrivals? My once-thriving career became a distant memory. By September 2025, eighty-plus students a year dwindled down to thirty-three. My classroom felt like a ghost town. You’d think fewer students meant less work, but it didn’t.

Anyone who watches or reads the news knows the violence and vitriol that MAGA vomits onto migrants and most US-born non-whites. Xenophobia and English-only initiatives have always existed in schools. Migrants have always struggled with all the adjustments of reinventing their lives. But, for my students, it seemed in the past those struggles lived alongside hope for building a more prosperous life in the United States: dreams of college, job opportunities. Dozens of my students over the years shared the same sweet wishes: I want to build a house for my mother. I want to build a house for my grandmother.

This school year, I’ve witnessed more tears, panic attacks, anger, overeating, undereating, sleeping in class, and defiance than ever before. The Boston Public Schools and the City of Boston have firm laws and policies around public safety for migrants. But the school system slashed funding for social-emotional learning initiatives at the end of the 2025 school year. And, so, teachers working with these populations have been left to navigate the impacts of trauma on our own.

Still, I soldiered, continuing with the same instructional routines of years gone by. Even if schooling no longer led students towards a real future in the United States, I still believed that rigorous academic demands could at least serve as a distraction from the real world.

Despite being the old Mrs. Dines at school, the Jennifer outside its walls really started to change. I had once been a serious woman striving for an awareness beyond my whiteness and its accompanying privileges. I attended screenings of The Cost of Sugar and Born into Brothels. I ball-point penned essay annotations in the margins of Rethinking Schools and Mother Jones. I poured over Reading Lolita in Tehran, Mountains Beyond Mountains, and A Different Mirror.

I didn’t want to know anything anymore. It all seemed so…vulgar.

But at the start of the 2025 school year, I swapped CNN.com and the New York Times for Page Six. And I fell into a rabbit hole of media about the most glamorous lives of the 20th century. Podcasts about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s divine feud. Multiple Doris Duke tv biopics. Books about the histories of media empires, art heists, and luxury department stores.

Forget doomscrolling. I glamscrolled, staying up later than ever on my phone, combing over Wikipedia biographies of celebrities of yesterdays. I zoned out during any discussion of current events, but if someone asked me about Jason Robards’ alcoholism or Zsa Zsa Gabor’s emotionally abusive marriage to Connie Hilton…well, to tell you the truth no one ever inquired. I even built a capsule wardrobe of grey skirt suits, which I paired with a long white coat and beige pumps a lá Kim Novak in Vertigo. It was my own little world. You could say I lived in a bubble, but it was more stepping into a balloon shellacked with gold glitter. I could not and did not want to see the outside world. I used the idealized sparkle and shine of the past to block the devastation lurking outside the latex.

I leaned into Ballet Beautiful more than ever. I started doing longer videos during my break instead of eating. After school, with ten minutes between the final bell and meetings or homework help, I wedged four minute Posture Stretch segments.

But, the week before Halloween, during one of my longest late-night Wikipedia jags, I uncovered a devastating piece of information, the catalyst for my slow break-up with Mary Helen and Ballet Beautiful.

There I am in bed, wearing my hot pink sweatpants and Future Corpse t-shirt, munching on goldfish crackers. Failing to conjure up the name of some long-dead celebrity, I pop MARY HELEN BOWERS into the search bar of Ye Olde Wikipedia.

As is my custom, I scroll right down to PERSONAL LIFE. There’s only a single sentence: She is married to Paul Dans, with whom she has four children. Yup, her kids! In one of the livestreams, Mary Helen pointed out a purplish-green chunk of goo on her gray wool sock. While her chunky cat Missy meowed at some birds chirping out the window, she explained how her kids left homemade slime on the kitchen floor, and she’d stepped in it. Relatable!

Paul Dans. Who’s this guy now? I click on his name and…BIG MISTAKE! HUGE!

My eyes dance frenetically over the blue links in his bio.

President Trump…Republican…Project 2025…the Heritage Foundation…Lindsay Graham.

All these boorish proper nouns flicker in the dark like a strobe light, stabbing me in the eyes with the pain of betrayal.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Should I keep reading? I have to keep reading.

I open my peepers and scroll through subheadings, stopping at Heritage Foundation.

Dans is known as the architect of Project 2025.

Well, that’s it for me. I shut off the phone, nearly slamming in down on my nightstand. I pop a Unisom from my nightstand. I put on an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries. I doze off during a segment about the death of George Reeves.

In more cognizant days, I’d read a little bit about Project 2025’s fascist vision of America and its fetish for criminalizing migrants. Dans name wasn’t familiar to me, but I knew right away he was evil. And his neoconservative fantasy was coming true. Abrego Garcia came to mind, taken by ICE while in the car with his five-year-old son, right in my hometown of Baltimore, and shipped off to an El Salvadorian prison. It seemed like ICE might come for my students, their families, the many many immigrants in my community any day now.

Mary Helen’s marriage hit me like a ton of bricks. How could my friend be…sleeping with the enemy? A better version of me would’ve grabbed my laptop, unsubscribed from Ballet Beautiful right away. My $40 a month might as well be a donation to the Department of Homeland Security.

However, breaking up with someone you’ve known for over a decade isn’t so simple. I associated Mary Helen with the birth of my daughters, one of the most important moments in my entire life. I didn’t really know Mary Helen, but when you look at a person and listen to their voice multiple times a day, the relationship with them feels personal.

Ballet Beautiful was a major part of my sanity preservation, until it wasn’t. I quit the classroom workouts cold turkey; I couldn’t bring Mary Helen into that space anymore. At home, I joked with my husband about my GOP workouts, but he didn’t find it funny. Still, I continued in my living room and with those unmissable Fridays at the gym. While I loaded Ballet Beautiful onto my phone, I tried out all the classic techniques of denial.

I normalized: Everyone drinks coffee. Everyone wears cotton. Both are products of slavery and child exploitation. I’m not much more of a hypocrite than everyone else.

I self-pitied: It’s not fair. Why can’t I just do my workout without a moral reckoning?

I rationalized: What am I? Some big campaign donor? Forty dollars? Hah! A real SuperPAC, right?

Still, something that made me feel beautiful and in control increasingly made me uglier and uglier. Ballet Beautiful wasn’t working anymore, and I started peeking at the real life news again. I read a little bit more each day. The more I read, the more my cheeks, the ones on my face, reddened when I thought about Mary Helen and especially after a Ballet Beautiful workout. The shame burned more than my muscles ever had.

My fellow union members protested in freezing temperatures while I nearly cried into my yoga mat over my toxic relationship with Mary Helen. ICE murdered Minneapolis mother of three Reneé Goode while I fantasized about Mary Helen taking her children and leaving Paul because she didn’t want to lose me. It got to a point where the workouts didn’t even feel bad. Instead, I felt numb, a nothing person who’d really lost her way.

It took the death of Veterans Association nurse Alex Pretti to snap me out of it. If the Department of Homeland Security had no shame about killing an American white man, ICE would stop at nothing. An hour after I heard the news, I logged into Ballet Beautiful and closed my account.

A few days later, ICE snatched a man from his car only a couple feet from the grocery store I visit multiple times a week. But I wasn’t funding a GOP business anymore. I even agreed to be photographed for a news story about ICE’s effect on Massachusetts schools.

Since the breakup, I’ve gained a few pounds. But I’m exploring some new free workouts on YouTube. The instructors are no Mary Helens, but they don’t have me spiraling into a spiritual crisis either.

The $40 a month. I should probably donate it to some worthy cause. Then again, I could save it just to blow it on some trip to an amusement park with my family. Quitting made me a bit of a better person, but I’m still not that good.

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First of all, if you signed up for this because you love our contributor Michael Stipe, well so do I! But anyway, where I was going with that was: If you signed up because of Michael, you can see some of his past contributions here, here, and here, or just use the search to see what he’s written and what I’ve written about him. I also highly encourage you (and everyone) to join us in the comments where all the contributors and readers hang out pretty much daily. You can write about anything you want or ask anything you want there - and we do. It doesn’t have to be related to whatever story is highlighted in the day’s email (what some people call a “newsletter” but there’s no way this is that). I don’t even care if you read my email or the story. Non-sensical non-sequiturs and disquietingly random thoughts are always encouraged, as is speaking out of turn, interrupting and interjecting. So join the writers and other readers in the comments sections as often as you like. I live there myself.

If this is your first note from me on this platform and you signed up because you’re a fan of my past publications, well so am I! Partly kidding - but the good news for you is that your favorite writers from SASSY, JANE and XOJane are all over this site, so you can reunite and talk with them here.

If you’re a new subscriber for an entirely different reason, welcome, welcome, welcome and also use this place however you like. These emails I send out are just the marketing device that’s required to make this site grow on Substack (thank you, Substack) but the joy and the fun and the enlightenment and the tears among like-minded kooks, and all of that worthwhile - and worth subscribing to - goodness is in the 500+ stories and their comments here. So I hope to see you everywhere.

Thank you so so much.

Now for Book Club! Here we go!

Love, Jane

Better Than A Thrasher TShirt

By Amanda Long and Jane Pratt

[UPDATE: I'm back to add the following very urgent clarification. One reason you are meant to like all of the books that you are at all interested in reading here is because Andy's is in a category unto itself (duh) in that it's an option for anyone who wants to be part of giving him feedback on his work in progress. But we are still picking a book – at least one book! – from the others on the list to read and rant over together. So as I said, choose unwisely and vote early and often! Thank you! -Jane]

Let’s start with how reader/contributor Amanda got roped into putting together this second cycle of the AJPT Controversial-Books-Only Book Club with me.

Amanda says: Giddy from the first AJPT book-club gathering, a little gobsmacked that I got to hang out (even virtually) with an editor in my personal Editor Hall of Fame, and aching to do more writing thanks to what Jeff Bezos (Asshat Hall of Fame) was doing to my former writing home, I volunteered to “help out” with the next meeting. Five rounds of edits and 15 or 20 so book ideas later, here we are.

“One warning I have for you beforehand is that I don’t expect these books to be an escape or a happy diversion, or a breath of any kind of air.” – Jane Pratt, Aug. 1, 2025. I don’t know how Jane feels about me quoting her back to her, but I’m doing so with her statement from the original AJPT Controversial-Books-Only announcement to remind you of her rules for this club. Like members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, we are tasked with both nominating and picking our next winner. The books also all have to be controversial in some way. So after repeatedly and enthusiastically asking us for picks and pestering her friends in publishing, we came up with this season’s line-up.

From Jane: Unlike last season when we only had three measly books for you to choose from, this time we have 9 titles plus an exciting bonus offer I will explain below. I will put each author’s name in a comment and all you have to do is vote by liking the comments on AS MANY OF THE BOOKS as you are even remotely interested in reading. And if you have a new and better book suggestion than what’s on this list, add that there and we will all vote on yours too.

I’m sure there are some books on here that you actively do not want to read or do not want to even see on this list. Me too! So don’t vote for those but do vote for all the others and I will be back with our final tally next week!

A related aside you can skip: Something one of my Oberlin professors told our Modern Dance class seemed really deep at the time and then has actually stuck with me. She said that the least interesting thing you can say about a piece of art is whether you like it or not. So the idea here is not to necessarily indulge in happy-go-lucky escapist shit that we adore (which has its place, especially now) but to think and talk and agree and disagree – which you all are expert at already. One of the reasons I so admire you and listen to everything you have to say.

And the nominees are….

American Canto by Olivia Nuzzi

From the publisher: A mesmerizing firsthand account of the warping of American reality over the past decade as Donald Trump has risen to dominance—from a participatory witness who got so far inside the distortion field that it swallowed(!) her whole. Olivia Nuzzi spent a third of her life observing those in power. She became a reporter in 2014, when the political landscape began to recon­figure itself around a singular personality whom she was uniquely primed to understand. Over the next ten years, she used her access and eye for detail to chronicle his campaigns, trials, and government. Then, in 2024, her personal life collided with the public interest in a scandal that cost Nuzzi her job and reputation.

The controversy: Who doesn’t know this one? Just in case: Olivia got fired from New York magazine after revealing that she had an affair with Robert Kennedy Jr. while covering his campaign for the magazine - and living with Ryan Lizza, a journalist who was also fired from The New Yorker for “improper sexual conduct.” She refers to RFK Jr. as “The Politician” throughout. The Atlantic calls it a “Tell-Nothing Memoir.” But it was our AJPT diehard reader and contributor Cathy Alter whose comment made us finally choose the book for this list: “If we do pick Nuzzi’s book (which I am all for), everyone has to promise to send me your copies. RJK Jr. lives in Georgetown and has a free lending library outside of his house. I want to STUFF IT with Nuzzi’s book. My small act of resistance.”

Famesick A Memoir by Lena Dunham

From the publisher: In this rowdy, frank reflection on illness, fame, sex, and everything in between, the remarkable mind behind the hit series Girls and the bestselling author of Not That Kind of Girl asks whether fulfilling her creative ambitions has been worth the pain.

From Jane: Ok, Lena’s book isn’t out as we are announcing this - and I didn’t get an early copy to read or anything (even though we share a publisher - c’mon, please??). So I don’t know what about it will be considered controversial, but I’m sure there will be something in it that’s at least so provocative that it will help propel Famesick to be an even bigger blockbuster than it’s already obviously going to be. Lena is sassy so there’s no way she wrote anything safe. Also, we (royal we and self-effacing Editor-In-Chief we) just love her personally and professionally and every which way and want to read her book so if you do also, you can vote for it by liking it in the comments and we will find the drama surrounding it as we go. You can also preorder it via the link above, as I am because as I said, no free copy (just being a brat).

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

From good old Wikipedia (who finally corrected my page so it no longer says I was ever married, thank you all for telling them!!): Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita is highly controversial for its depiction of a middle-aged man, Humbert Humbert, who sexually abuses his 12-year-old stepdaughter, Dolores Haze. The book was banned in multiple countries—including France, England, and Argentina—for obscenity upon release. It sparked debate over artistic freedom versus the moral, taboo, and abusive subject matter.

From Jane: Certainly fits the criteria! I've had a hard time convincing some of my cohorts in this book club of the value of including old books, but I'm going with it anyway. This is one I haven't read in at least a decade or two and think would be interesting to read now in light of everything. (It was also really fun picking which cover to show you here because there have been so many good ones – and some really cheesy ones too. I went with a classic but if we read it, you certainly don’t have to buy the pictured vintage $150 hardback.) Vote for it if you're ready for a read or reread. And if you absolutely don't want to read it, I'm interested in hearing about that also.

Adult Braces by Lindy West

From her website, just an excerpt: Through Shrill—the book and then the Hulu series—Lindy West became an inspiration. To this day she is stopped on the street and hailed as a beacon of empowerment by women who felt badly for not conforming to a narrow set of societal norms—thin, straight, compliant. But behind the scenes, Lindy never felt like she was the self-actualized woman fans made her out to be. When she found herself in the throes of a deep depression, with her marriage and sense of self-worth hanging in the balance, she knew she needed to make a change.

Why It’s Upsetting The People, according to Chat-GPT:

The Polyamory Debate: Many critics and readers have debated the ethics and power dynamics of the relationship presented in the book. Some reactions have been harsh, with commentators suggesting that West was coerced into the dynamic by her husband, characterizing it as “patriarchy disguised as progressivism.”

The Content of the Book: The memoir details a “chaotic” period of their marriage, including early, difficult attempts at opening it up, such as instances where her husband would disappear for hours. The book also describes a solo road trip West took to process her feelings and navigate her marriage’s collapse and subsequent restructuring.

Reaction to a Feminist Icon: As a prominent feminist voice known for Shrill, some fans have struggled to reconcile their image of West with the vulnerability and, to some, concerning choices revealed in this new memoir.

From Amanda on the controversy: Like Molly Jong-Fast, who wrote our first controversial book club pick, West didn’t wait for things to get all better or even figure out how she, her husband and their girlfriend were going to figure out sleeping arrangements.

From Jane: I was just happy that there was a controversy because I really want to read this book, although I atrociously still haven’t read her first three – which I will rectify as a fun pre-read or co-read if we choose this. Anyway, want to read it (again)? Vote below!

All The Way To The River by Elizabeth Gilbert

What About It, From A Google Search: Chronicles the evolution of Elizabeth Gilbert's friendship with Rayya Elias into a passionate, codependent love affair, intertwined with both of their addictions. Deals with the pain of Elias’s terminal cancer diagnosis and her subsequent death in 2018. Details Gilbert’s personal reckoning with her own self-destructive tendencies and her path to spiritual healing and sobriety. Written in a raw, unpolished, and intensely personal style, sometimes resembling a journal, and includes poems, sketches, and journal entries.

Why It’s Controversial, from the same Google Search: Some reviewers found it excruciating, self-indulgent, and uncomfortable to read.

From Jane: Wow, I love Google’s succinct bitchiness. I never read Eat Pray Love but this sounds more interesting to me than that, and was suggested by a few of you. So up to you all!

Next to Heaven by James Frey

From the publisher: One night. An ultra-elite swingers party. Multiple betrayals. And a murder that will shatter New Bethlehem’s carefully constructed facade. Enter a world of troubled opulence and sharp betrayal that’s reminiscent of “The White Lotus,” “Your Friends and Neighbors,” and “Big Little Lies”—a world of spectacularly badly-behaved rich people where money can buy anything… until it ruins everything.

Why It’s Controversial, from Amanda:. The author famously called onto the carpet by Oprah for passing off a work of fiction as memoir has been teasingly walking the fiction/nonfiction line in his press tour (and wearing a big-ass silver chain). His life in New Canaan, Conn., is source material, as is its wealth and cut-throat, cocktail-party competitive circuit.

And from Jane: This book is on here because even if it isn't highly controversial, as Amanda well describes (though I wouldn't call the Oprah-bashed book a work of fiction personally – we can talk about that more), James is one of the icons of the genre so he inherently is, and because I promised him I would include his book when it came out about a year ago, and because he wants to join our book club meeting when we talk about it, and because he once saved my life. Again, up to you! Vote with your likes - early and often (meaning choose as many titles as you want).

The Tell by Amy Griffin

The book’s website says: “An astonishing memoir that explores how far we will go to protect ourselves, and the healing made possible when we face the secrets that terrify us and begin to share our stories”

Why it’s controversial, says Amanda: A cautionary tale of repressed memories, via psychedelics, made into a best-selling memoir, fueled by the circle jerk that is the Oprah-Book-Club-led publicity tour of rich people telling us to read books by their rich friends. Now at the center of a controversy for its questionable provenance. A former classmate of the bestselling author says “The Tell” uses a story from her own life and has sued. The “who is the ‘me’ in this memoir?” questions are coming from many directions…

Jane Finishing That Thought:… making it way more interesting to me than if it were just a legit integrity-laden truthful memoir. I had no interest in reading this book until I heard about the controversy.

The Emperor Of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

The publisher says: A young man on the verge of suicide is saved by an elderly woman with dementia, leading to a life-altering bond and journey of self discovery.

Why we are including it: Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), faced controversy regarding its explicit descriptions of LGBTQ+ relationships and sex scenes, leading to it being banned in some Texas school districts. That novel has also sparked debate over “blunt-force ethnic credibility,” with some critics arguing it fetishizes trauma for Western readers. Emperor of Gladness received criticism from reviewers who labeled the prose “overwritten” or a “failure,” arguing it relies on a “forced” or “sententious” style.

I Regret Almost Everything, by Keith McNally

From Amanda on what the book’s about and our internal controversy around it: McNally, a Londoner, helped to create and shape the downtown scene in NYC too with his lineup of “be seen, be mean and be obscene” bars and restaurants. Then, late in his career, he had a stroke. I kept waiting for this book to find a narrative arc, or for the writer to learn something about himself. I’m still waiting. I’m glad I’m no longer on IG, as he’d likely take me down like he did James Corden.

“I Regret Almost Everything” Well, me too Keith. I regret downloading this “frank and funny” memoir. I regret that Jane is agreeing to include it in this roundup, but considering some of our lineup, it fits in with the “Oops, I fucked up, but I also have juicy gossip about famous people and friends in the New York publishing world.”

From Jane: That quote sounds like me and like the protagonists of all of my most-treasured stories! I want to even say bedtime stories because that sounds so lulling. And now I’m further intrigued. Also note that I think to guarantee yourself the IG terrorizing James Corden got, Amanda, you would have to inspect Balthazar’s special order omelet for egg whites like James and his wife supposedly did and then complain. I am going there for lunch next week, so I can order a yolk-only omelet and send it back and let you know how it goes. In any case, I can’t even decide on whether this book should be on this list, so that seems to qualify it. Vote your conscience, folks.

BONUS OFFER: Unfinished Manuscript by our own Andy(!)

From Jane: This is a little departure, but there are so many writers in our AJPT community that in addition to picking a published book to all read together, I thought we can also vote to look at and give feedback on a work in progress by one of our own, in this case Andy Finley. It’s called Frank Pickney Can Do Anything for Five Minutes. If you are new here (yes, you again, and thank you again for being here!), Andy has been a prolific AJPT commenter and contributor since day one, including the classic It Happened To Me stories he penned, entitled “I Pooped In The Pool” and “ I Painted My Dad’s Kitchen High On Acid.” (These are real. Search if you want.) So if you are interested in reading his book manuscript, vote for that too and he will get us all the pdf.

A note from Andy about the potential controversy in his story: The main character is a man who was severely abused by his ex-wife--who in turn was able to successfully convince him and anyone who would listen that he was the abuser in the relationship.

That’s it! So don’t take it too seriously but do cast a lot of likes so we can move this along to the fun part!

PS Speaking of fun parts, did I say that like last time, this AJPT Book Club season will culminate in a gathering at my apartment that you can join virtually or in person. With free food and drinks and Sassy Tshirts and other good stuff. Last time we did it at 9:30 am on a Sunday because of (the wonderful) Corynne’s busy schedule but now the world is our oyster and time is meaningless. So once we pick the book, you will get to weigh in on when is best for you for the party and I will schedule around that.

PPS If you want to show your gratitude to Amanda and your relief that it was her and not you working on this with me, you can follow her own Substack too.

Leave a comment

Hello lovely people!

The way I got today’s It Happened To Me story is the way I hope you will consider sending me yours: Emma emailed me at Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com with a version of this headline and I asked her to write it up. Then the fun began (for me) of editing the story, gathering photos and captions, finding pullquotes and about 20 exchanges between us later, here is Emma’s piece. I love her sassy and non-reverential approach to talking about the deceased, for one thing. (Emma is also $50 wealthier - woohoo - and you know why? Because a disproportionate number of you pay to subscribe, which I am beyond grateful for. I was interviewed recently and the journalist mentioned the percentage of AJPT subscribers he presumed were paying and I had to say no it was at least 3 times that. And those fees all go to these writers, so thank you on their and my behalves. It also warms my heart when you become paying subscribers while reading a free post, just because we asked and just because you are good. Thank you, Maureen - most recently - and others!!!!)

Before you read today’s featured piece, I want to point out that there is a tangential moment in the story that may be upsetting or jarring to cat-lovers (aren’t we all?), but I left it in because it is real life and I think worth talking about. Tell me if you disagree with my judgment call.

And finally, if you care about what Happened To Me between the last time I wrote you and today: I got to dance for hours with my BFF (and AJPT contributor!) to a performance of his music and then hear him get up and sing some of it too. I was the only person there who had known him while he was writing all of those songs and it was trippy and thrilling. I was high as an adrenalized kite and we couldn’t stop talking for at least three hours after. His voice was better than ever. Getting older is awesome. I cried.

I love you and I will talk to you more (if you want to) in the comments.

xo Jane (By the way, if you happen to have heard of that website named XOJane, I never actually signed things that way. Our boss Troy just made that up because he thought it looked good.)

PS For those (ten?) of you who are following my recent Celine wallet predicament, I reunited with the friend this week! I will fill you in more in the comments because I know you just can’t live without this major update.

This shirt will look great on you!

MY BOSS DIED, LEAVING ME IN CHARGE OF HER FRAUDULENT NON-PROFIT AND MESSY LIFE

By Emma Margraf

For a while, it was a job I loved. I was Director of Special Projects for a non-profit dedicated to volunteer service, and I had a wide berth: I led fifty people in a flash mob– a choreographed dance in the middle of a main street in our town to Take a Chance on Me by ABBA, organized a Day of Service for an entire middle school to honor Martin Luther King, and ran something called the Economic Survival Fair, where folks could find every helpful resource I could muster under one roof for a day. Every month I led a large, fun, chaotic community project and I loved it. Until it started to fall apart.

The work appealed to me as a veteran of a progressive Catholic school; it was service work with a thread of whimsy. Plus my boss loved me, and loved that I was a foster parent. I knew there were people who didn’t like her, but I didn’t know why and I didn’t see it. But a few years in, I did see something new. My boss started to turn on people she used to love. She became angry and her anger became explosive. There was something clearly wrong with her but anyone who tried to get close enough to find out what it was regretted it. Over the course of a few months, most of the staff were laid off. All we were told was that we’d lost most of our funding and that the three of us who remained were the three that she deemed most capable of helping her raise money to keep this twenty-four year old non-profit afloat.

She spent several weeks screaming at us before she stopped coming into the office. She didn’t respond when I asked her if she was ok. She started to not respond to me at all. Our remaining staff were left in our offices at one end of a long and lonely hallway. The only sight of her we had was on Fridays, when she would pull up in front of the building to take our developmentally delayed volunteer receptionist out to lunch. The only communication we had was through emails she was sending to whomever she was speaking to at the moment. I remember feeling relieved when that was me.

I knew I wasn’t handling this well. I knew I had to leave, but I was so hesitant to leave a job I loved and thought maybe this was a temporary situation. I was at a friend’s house discussing the state of my life when I got a text from my boss’s landlord. She’d apparently listed me as her emergency contact and they were out of town, but their housesitter saw my boss get taken away in an ambulance. They wanted to know if she was ok.

She’s definitely not ok.

Why am I her emergency contact?!

I’m the worst person on earth. Get it together.

The second hospital I called told me that my boss was in the ICU, and that they could give me no more information. I got chills down my spine. I called our board chair, who said he would see if he could get more information and call me back. I waited. I couldn’t think of anyone else to call.

There was nothing I could do, so my friend and I made a lemon meringue pie. It was a nicely complicated thing to focus on and for that I was grateful. Right as it was going into the fridge to set, my phone rang.

My board chair had just gotten off the phone with my boss’s parents, who were getting on a plane to make a cross country flight to come to our town. They were informed by the hospital that my boss had a blood clot that led to an aneurysm, and was in critical condition.

They took her off life support the next day. She was 36. I told the staff while we all sat in my office eating lemon meringue pie straight out of the tin. None of us knew what to think or what to say. Fortunately, my friend also sent along a key lime pie.

We posted an announcement, and my phone started ringing off the hook. Our town was shaken by the loss of this young leader and we were the only ones aware of her decline. It felt like everyone wanted to talk to me, including my boss’s landlord, who wanted to know if I could tell him who would be responsible for her belongings, and her cats.

None of those calls were from friends of hers, but my boss’s elderly and very nice parents were asking whether we were going to have a funeral, and there was the issue of these cats.

Meanwhile, the board asked me to be the acting director of the organization and funders were calling….

There is free content on this site, about half of it, but in case you want to keep reading this piece specifically and so we can pay the writer, you can take out a subscription or just a free trial here. Thank you!!

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Hello!

I love this day. Because I get to talk to all you old and new people, from AJPTers who have been following this site for over a year, to past readers of SASSY magazine, JANE magazine and xoJANE, some of whom are just finding us and each other again here decades after being unceremoniously torn asunder! And a special welcome to those of you who came here thanks to our tight-knit highly-valued “Oldster Magazine” connection. For all of you: I will be sending out an It Happened To Me story tomorrow you won’t want to miss. So look for that for sure, whether you care about today’s featured subject matter or not.

Speaking of today’s excitement, we have another installment of Another Jane Pratt Thing contributor Rain Phoenix’s unconventional advice column. This is one of only two places on AJPT where anonymity is fine (the other being this recurring feature called Extra Safe Space), so that you can fully go for it in your questions without worrying about repercussions from the people you’re writing about. (I don’t care about anonymity myself because my proverbial cats are already all out of the bag, with multiple proverbial generations of kittens, so I ask Rain my relationship questions as myself in the comments - as I will today - and you certainly can too. Up to you!). If you like the anonymous route, send me your questions to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com to pass along to Rain (just put in the subject line that your email contains a question for Rain and if you want me to not even read yours first, say For Rain Only and I will pass it along without even glancing).

One thing that I think makes Rain so good at giving relationship advice is her extraordinary life experience. Another is her complete lack of judgment. There’s not anything you could ask her that she would not carefully look at strictly in terms of how best to help you with it. You can get a sense of all that from her past stories:

Anyway, Rain’s a genius at many things. She always gives me new and practical insights - and does it again in her answer below - even when the question is not one I personally relate to. I’m thrilled she is here helping you and me. And I’m beyond thrilled you are here too, if that wasn’t already abundantly clear.

Love love,

Jane

PS Do you often read advice columns for the juicy questions and then skim through the expert answers? Do you get irked when the columnist foists you onto some other expert, like “See your doctor,” shirking responsibility and making you feel like the burden you thought you were for asking in the first place? Maybe that’s just me. Here’s Rain….

Check Out This Shirt First If You Want

By Rain Phoenix

Today’s Reader Letter:

Hi Jane!

I’m so happy to see that you have another online publication. Janexo got me through a lot in my 20s.

I know you mentioned Rain is taking questions on relationships. If that is still so I’d love to ask her a question:

Hi Rain,

How do you come to terms with friends ghosting you? I had a friend and everything was seemingly great. We were close and would hang out pretty often and we would communicate with each other pretty openly. Then all of a sudden radio silence. What hurts is I can see through social media and through the discord for the various communities we are a part of is that she makes plans with other mutual friends and hangs out with them. Even made plans to go to a festival with other people....a festival we originally talked about going to together.

People have told me to take her silence as an indication that she doesn’t care anymore.

It just hurts. I don’t understand why she couldn’t tell me if things were bothering her. The idea of asking what I did to make her not want to be my friend anymore just makes me feel lousy and pathetic. I don’t want to chase after people who don’t want me in their lives. It just......hurts. I feel like my self esteem is tanked. All the bad feelings of being bullied in elementary school come back. I feel unlovable.

How do I work through something like this?

I appreciate any insight you could share

Much love,

Crocus

P.S. Thank you for all of the beautiful music over the years. “What’s Left” by the papercranes was the first song I ever bought on itunes and put on my ipod nano. That and “minor” are still on repeat in my household.

Rain’s Letter Back:

Crocus,

Thank you for your question. I’m also grateful for your kind words about my music. I regret the delay in replying.. I wasn’t ghosting you, promise! I hope this response serves to be of benefit in some way.

I think it’s fair to say no one likes being ghosted. From what I understand you’re feeling hurt about the loss of a friendship. A sudden change in a relationship can be really jarring, especially when you’re on the receiving end of the sudden change and there seems to be no indication as to why. Or even if there is a reason, being ghosted feels like it prevents us from pinpointing exactly what that reason is which can be very painful.

When situations feel acute like that, I try to remember, we always have choices. There are probably more than three choices, but these are a few I came up with. We can blame the other person. We can be self-reflective. We can let it all go and wait to see what happens. The latter is extra tough because we want answers! I also think blaming the other person is unsatisfying long term, because we rarely find closure. I advocate for choosing self-reflection because there’s more agency. We can examine the difficult experience, gain deeper insight and uncover relationship patterns that haven’t served us. The hardest part is allowing the other person their own timeline of self-discovery.

We can wish, hope or pray, but we cannot insist they do the same. It’s my experience that we humans have the tendency to insist others make changes believing it’s more likely their fault when we’re feeling discomfort. Self reflection can help us to reverse engineer that tendency. It’s not the easy route but, if we hold ourselves accountable, the outcome can be very empowering. I don’t know if this has helped at all. Whenever I’m struggling with what to do, how to help or even how not to be upset during challenging times, I read this Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche quote.

“Trying to change the world without changing our mind is like trying to clean the dirty face we see in the mirror by scrubbing the glass. However vigorously we clean it, our reflection will not improve. Only by washing our own face and combing our own unkempt hair can we alter the image. Similarly, if we want to help create conditions that foster peace and well-being in the world, we first need to reflect these qualities ourselves.” ~ Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

If you’re looking for inspiration and tools to practice with, I recommend the book Change of Heart, also by Chagdud Tulku. It was written as a support to people with any kind of belief system, but clearly steeped in Buddhist philosophy. That said, you can use the meditations without adopting the beliefs.

I hope you find this helpful in some small way. I really appreciate the opportunity to share about what has been a support to me in difficult times. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Best, xxx Rain

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To start: If you are new here (because many of you are and I am so so appreciative of that), I encourage you not to immediately unsubscribe if today’s story or subject line doesn’t interest you. (That last one I tested showed that you as a group both open emails with SEX in the subject line the fastest and unsubscribe from them most quickly thereafter - but I get that.) The range of topics we cover here varies a lot, as do the writers, so I would love for you to look around on the Another Jane Pratt Thing homepage itself and see if something else there does appeal. I also LOVE criticism in the comments if you are generous enough to offer up any of that.

That disclaimer was meant with no shade at all toward today’s story, which I find fascinating, and has more to do with this newsletter format versus everything else you can get from going to the whole site. Anyway, today’s It Happened To Me happened because Cal wrote me (at jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com, which you should use too any time you want to write your story here - and get paid $50 for it!) with the subject line:

Re: Submission From a Non-Cis/Trans Person.

Now that’s how to get the AJPT assignment! I had told friends (including you here) that I was looking for more diversity among the AJPT contributors. Cal heard about it and wrote me with a pitch on a riveting topic I’d never heard before. Then we had to wait a while for Cal to actually submit the story because it was tied to an ongoing trial.

Side note: I have been impatiently waiting for months to write here about a friend of mine who was shockingly and horrifically murdered this year, because I don’t want to screw up the trial any more than I just might have by using the word murdered without quotes around it. (The case was in the news a bit and I can give you clues in the comments if you want to look into it.) But it is killing me - bad word choice - to have to refrain from telling you a story that I so want to tell - for my friend’s sake, for his family’s sake, for all of you to get to know what an angel of a person he actually was, and to keep that part of him alive. But the “justice” system takes time and I have to wait. I am not good at this.

Anyway Cal, with more restraint than I just displayed, kept up with me for months while the first trial resulted in a hung jury – one woman was believed and the other initially was not in a sexual assault case against the same man. And then stayed in touch through a retrial and finally, the verdict. But I won’t give any more away. Here is that story. Let’s talk about how we feel about it all in the comments, as usual.

Thanks for being here always,

Jane

This shirt was made for you

By Cal Cates

My parents named me Lauren. Seemed harmless enough. Lauren’s a beautiful name for any baby with girl parts. My parts, as it turns out, were just a packaging error.

Growing up as a person who never saw themselves as a girl, I also missed many of the things that I now understand were and remain part of life for women who went the “woman route,” ifyaknowwhuttameen. In case you don’t know what I mean, I remember watching Weird Science with my brother when I was maybe 10 years old. When they “built” the woman played by Kelly LeBrock, I only ever thought she was hot. No part of me was like, “Oh, that’s how I could fashion myself to attract the male people.”

When I was 8, playing flag football with the boys, they would pull the bottoms of their shirts up over their heads when it got hot. (Because I guess 8-year-old boys in rural New Jersey didn’t just take their shirts off. I don’t know. I didn’t make the rules.) I did the same. Obviously. Because Summer.

I’ve never questioned my own story. But for people whose comfort depends on everyone’s gender being obvious and stable, my existence is threatening. I am a white, transmasculine person assigned female at birth (that means I look mannish… well, boyish honestly, and I intentionally work to present myself in this way). I’m also a massage therapist and a rabid activist for the legitimacy of massage therapy as a healthcare profession. When I get to talking about massage therapy and massage therapists, I can be pretty compelling. Downright believable, you might even say. It’s possible I might even change your mind about things you thought you knew.

That’s how, many years ago, in a town far far away, I got invited to serve as an expert witness on a case involving a massage therapist who was facing charges for felony sexual assault.

The lawyer who commissioned my expertise sent me all the police reports, witness statements, and other background information. I’d done this gig before. My job would be to use these documents to write an expert opinion as a subject matter expert on massage therapy ethics and practice as they pertained to the case. Easy enough.

Somehow, I had made it through four decades with just one scary experience with a man, while my female friends who’ve remained solidly, socially cis women tell me such encounters are regular occurrences—in dating, at work, even in their marriages. As a result, reading through the legal documents triggered a feeling tinged with something unfamiliar. Certainly, I toggled between my experiences as a massage therapist and back to the sense of unsafety that I have often felt being a trans person, but maybe I was also feeling threatened as a woman?

As I read, I felt like I was there in that room, being assaulted. My hands shook, my heart raced. I had to stop reading multiple times to let my nervous system come back to itself. It was like a panic attack, but with a side of deep and inescapable vulnerability.

Two women were victimized in this case when they should have been able to feel safe and to trust the massage therapist. They didn’t know each other, but now they would be bound to each other in the way so many other women are by the things so many men do. The cases were very, very similar. Without photos, my brain found it hard to keep their reports separate. Every time I messed it up in my notes, I piled on myself about how I was doing exactly what I hate—failing to see these women as distinct individuals. I spent hours reading, making notes in the margin, re-reading and collating my notes so I would absolutely get it right on the stand.

I submitted my expert opinion indicating that not only were the actions taken by the massage therapist during these sessions far outside the bounds of ethical practice and consent, the environment and logistics were such that consent would have been virtually impossible for either woman to grant, based on a variety of ethical precedents and concepts. Done and done.

Then, I was asked to testify.

Ruh-roh.

I have been in a courtroom exactly one other time in my life. For a moment, I imagined myself standing up in the witness box and shouting, “This whole trial is out of order!!!”

Ahem. Reel it in, buddy. Deep breaths. This is a circuit court in Podunk, USA.

After talking with the lawyer, I knew I would not likely take the stand until the end of the second day of the proceedings, and possibly not until the third day, right before closing arguments, but I had been asked to attend the whole trial so I could be available to be called if necessary. I knew I was in for a couple of days of… court...? Imagine my shock at the conspicuous absence of both Doug Llewelyn and Judge Judy when I arrived at court on the first day. A most unsettling turn of events.

Listen. Court is slow as shit. It’s so much better on TV. Hats off and a hotline number to anyone who has chosen this type of law as their life’s work. I cannot imagine waking up energized to sit in a windowless room every day of my life wading through carefully-crafted evidence and arguments only to have it all come down to which lawyer is more clever or which jury member has a grudge or unexamined trauma that wasn’t surfaced in the jury selection process.

The trial began and I watched them call the receptionist from the massage practice to testify to evidence that was unbelievably obvious, and this person completely bungled their very simple testimony. The defense attorney asked, “Were you working the front desk on (the dates of the incidents that are the whole effing reason any of us were in the room)?” I shit you not, the witness cast their eyes toward the ceiling with a legit pensiveness and asked the attorney to repeat the dates. Wow. This was the first witness. Did anyone believe this person?!

Woof. I began to mentally apply for a karmic refund for the hours of my life that would disappear into the miasma of this trial. We wandered through the first witness’s “testimony” and over the next two days we heard, very briefly, from the women who reported being assaulted. Then, we heard from the police officer who picked up the massage therapist. His answers were mercifully short and polished. Who wouldn’t believe this man?

Just before we broke for lunch the judge said the bodycam footage from the arrest interview would be available for any juror who wanted to see it. As I drove to lunch, I rolled this over in my mind. Wait. So, some jurors would see this footage, and some wouldn’t? Personally, if I were a juror, I would want to look under all the shells in this game, thankyouverymuch.

I guess I wasn’t the only one wondering if we’d be seeing this footage with our own eyes because when we came back from lunch, the trial proceeded with everyone in the courtroom watching every minute of that arrest video. The video showed these two dudes, the cop and massage therapist, talking about how, if, and why one of them engaged in sexual behavior in the course of his work as a massage therapist on the two occasions in question. I watched the officer normalize it so the massage therapist could feel comfortable enough to share what maybe actually happened. They joked about how sometimes one thing means one thing and sometimes that same thing means something else. Over the course of the video, I watched the massage therapist admit to the crimes he was accused of, while insisting he had every reason to believe these “encounters” were consensual.

As the video concluded, I could feel my ladyboy wheels start to come off.

I felt a responsibility to take the evidence seriously. I was surprised to feel, as I watched, like the system was kind of “working.” Despite the locker room vibe and some crafty police work, I found the massage therapist’s testimony compelling. I could see his humanity. He seemed like he really thought these were consensual engagements. He appeared to be truly unsure why he was in a police cruiser talking about these nothing events.

I found myself wondering about consent and about the well-documented truth of how humans do most of their communicating in woefully unclear and indirect ways in just about every setting. I was left with a serious shadow of a doubt. I almost believed him. I wanted to believe him.

At the same time, I was acutely aware that the showing of this video essentially meant that this massage therapist just got two full hours of airtime in the courtroom, and he hadn’t even testified yet. When he took the stand, we heard a story that was very similar to the bodycam video. The details crept out of his face like a magician was pulling scarves out of his mouth, one by one.

Except, this time, his lawyer went a step further. His shifted his line of questioning in a way that positioned this massage therapist as a de facto expert on “sexual” moans versus “other” moans. As a result, the massage therapist’s assessment of the women’s vocalizations during the session were entered into the record as part of his unchallenged testimony.

And the kicker? He admitted that he did commit what the law deems a sexual act during each session. He testified that he received good training. He said he knew that he violated the ethics of massage therapy practice. He admitted to signing the clearly worded policy regarding sexual misconduct at the place where he worked.

Wait. Did we all just watch him deny committing a crime by completely owning it? If that’s not some systemic boys’ club action, I don’t know what is.

And I fell for it.

Then it was my turn on the stand.

“Mr. Cates, do you solemnly affirm that the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

When I heard “Mr,” I did the somatic shift that has become reflexive after so many years of sitting on the gender fence. I pulled my shoulders back, hardened my face, and deepened my voice. “I do.”

The attorneys both asked me questions about my education, experience and current employment. So far, so good. Next came the questions about what massage therapy is, what’s typical in a massage session, ethics and boundaries. I answered truthfully and clearly without over-elaborating, which had been my biggest fear. I deflected the attempts made by the defense attorney to twist my words and turn me around. In terms of expertly witnessing, I killed it.

And I felt empty, powerless.

The massage therapist accused in this case had just said openly and on the stand that he knew and understood everything I had been brought in to say. None of it was in question. I was relieved I hadn’t made things worse or failed in the epic ways my massage therapy colleagues had warned me about, but I was deflated knowing that my participation had not clearly tipped the scales toward the women who had been assaulted.

I’ll admit I still felt a little slow when counsel made their closing arguments the next day and the only thing they were asking was if either of these women agreed for their massage therapy sessions to become sexual. That was the only thing left in question.

Personally, I didn’t know the answer. Or did I? Still, I silently wondered, “Why would he admit it, knowing the consequences, unless he really believes he did not commit a crime?” I was deeply conflicted. He didn’t have a prior record. He presented as kind and thoughtful. He testified that he had trained as a massage therapist because he wanted to “help people.” Even so, what he did was wrong? Right?

And these women, well on their way in their lives, with futures ahead of them, and good friends who showed up in court to testify about their mental state after the massage sessions and about their years’-long friendships through thick and thin did nothing wrong. How could he do this to them? And did they, as defense counsel suggested, “go with it in the moment” and then feel guilty and ashamed after the fact, setting the legal wheels in motion that had brought us all together in this deeply fraught and intersectional conundrum?

I was spent. Every version felt impossibly possible in the chaos and immediacy of those three days. My biology and identity were at war deep inside me.

The pretzel of my stomach tightened.

Is allowing space for complexity the same as enabling harm? In a situation of possible sexual assault, “both sides” can never be a neutral framework. The biases are deep and fraught with tribalism and loyalty and shame and trauma. My essential feminist (I know. It’s complicated.) fiber was shouting, “Believe women!” while my – was it maleness? was it fairness? was it conflict avoidance?---was doing a six-seven motion.

And, just in case this didn’t already feel like a terrible episode of SVU, leaving the courthouse after my testimony, I was approached by a pair of men, hands extended, “We just want to say thank you for what you’re doing for the profession.” It was clear they had clocked me as male. A trusted source to be believed.

Flattered. Dumbfounded. Totally unrehearsed in how to handle a conversation with people I had seen in the courtroom gallery and assumed were journalists, I asked who they were. The one man lowered his voice and scanned the immediate area in a laughably Maxwell Smart kinda way, “Let’s just say we’re people with a vested interest in the profession.”

I stifled a laugh.

Wanna know who they were? Yeah, ya do. And I hope you’re sitting down.

They own the practice where the incidents in question took place. They’ve owned it for many years.

Fellas, please at least try to be less predictable and straight out of central casting. Still, I wasn’t sure whose side they were on. Obviously, nobody wants to be sued, but maybe they’re still good guys who value massage therapists?

Man, I’m a sucker.

The next afternoon, as we sat outside the courtroom awaiting the jury’s decision, the one guy, arms crossed, hips jutting out, smug, “It’s obviously just a money grab. These women saw that they could sue us and they went for it. It doesn’t even matter what happens here. They’re after the civil case cash.”

I looked up at him from the bench on which I was seated. “That is the grossest kind of dudespeak I’ve ever heard. Do you really believe that these women have gone through all of this to maybe, possibly, squeeze some blood out of your little stone?!” I was… woman? He heard me roar.

He blinked. Scoffed. Obviously a little embarrassed, but honestly only embarrassed to have been caught talking shit and possibly to have thought I was a man and on his side all this time.

I stood up and shuffled to the other end of the hallway. Shaking.

I talk a good game, but I was gutted. I quietly wondered who was really being served by the narrative of complexity that had been created in that courtroom. A narrative that had left me on my heels and a jury to wonder who had been harmed and who deserved to be punished?

The jury would be expected to decide if consent took place in each instance. All the jury had to go on was what he said and what they said.

The jury came back very, very late that night and it was complicated.

Since the case had begun, my cis woman spouse, who has most certainly been harmed at the hands of and by the choices of men many times in her life, had been continually checking on me. Wondering how it was going. How was I doing? She knew I couldn’t really tell her anything until it was over, but she was worried about me. I had been keeping everything I was seeing and feeling and hearing to myself, but as I drove home that third night, I called to talk with her.

I told her about how compelling the massage therapist’s testimony had been. About how I observed the women as reticent and reserved, even on the stand. About how much I wanted to believe the massage therapist, to believe that he is somehow a victim, too-- caught in system of masculine expectation, a system in which massage therapists don’t make enough money to live on, a system where we know women are not believed, but in which people are people and some people, even women, might seek out some unattached sexual pleasure when introduced to the idea in a safe setting.

I took a breath to continue, but was interrupted by her audible crying.

“Stop. Just stop! He’s guilty,” she shouted. “They’re all fucking guilty! I can’t talk to you about this anymore.”

I was floored. Ashamed. Confused.

Oh, man. I suck the most.

How could I, knowing so much about my wife’s history, just spill my unedited, self-focused, epistemologically curious version of events?! And how could I still be under the spell of the dog and pony show of “open admission as absolution” that had been created?

Stand by please while I scratch a huge hash mark in the unintended, but very real harm ledger. The silence on the phone gaped a cutting admonition. I hung up. And then? I cried so hard my nose and mouth made a suffocating snot vacuum. What kind of person could wonder if these women consented? Is this “man thinking?” Maybe the testosterone has gone to my brain. I mean, this can’t be “woman thinking.” What woman would even hint that another woman may have consented to this?

Or maybe I am neither or both - occupying some liminal middle ground where I can see the machinery of male power for what it is, but still find myself caught in its gears.

Everyone wants to be believed. And I want to believe them.

I will never know what really happened. I do know that a man is probably going to jail and I think, now that I have some distance from those days in court, that he should. I also know that MeToo is a deeply important response to centuries of harm that has been made invisible. And I know that I ache for want of justice in a broken system that adjudicates the actions of broken people in a broken world.

In the end, my spouse’s response shook me awake. The practice owners’ gloating revealed whose interests the fabricated complexity was really serving. And I learned something about my own position I wasn’t prepared to see: my gender-bending perspective and presentation give me access to a kind of male credibility that I didn’t ask for and which I find hard to resist.

That’s work I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.

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I will be extra succinct today (love you too, Andy!) as I'm posting this just-completed gem at the very last minute.* So I will let the piece speak for itself (which, like all good Unpopular Opinions, it clearly has no problem doing). And I will save my many stories and takes for the comments. I can't wait to talk to you and Genevieve more there. She is chatty, so you don’t really have to worry about the content of what you say. She’ll chat anyway.

Now if you're new here, don't get too accustomed to this brevity, because usually I ramble on quite a bit more. And if you're new here, big big welcome and thank you for being here! If you're old, well, so am I and that's what we can talk about - among other things - in that comment section we all love so much. See you there once again!

Xo Jane

*Partly because its theme sort of ties into the glowing interview with ’s in the New York Times today and I wanted an excuse to congratulate her again here before the day is out. Go, Sari!

Remember Sassy magazine?

By Genevieve Sage

I’m in Madison Reed, the national hair color bar with nearly 100 franchises across the country.

They don’t cut hair. They don’t even pretend to care about your layers. They just color it. That’s it. It’s a root triage center. And it is filled — respectfully — with “women of a certain age.”

We’re all there for the same reason: to eradicate the grey halo jutting from our scalp like something Tyler Henry might see as a spirit who’s crossed over to deliver you a message. And that message would be: ditch that skunk stripe, babe.

I’m snapped into my black salon smock, clear plastic shower cap crinkling like a microwaved popcorn bag over my head, settling in for the 45-minute miracle that promises to move me from “late 40s” to “early 40s if the lighting is soft, the camera is forgiving, and the Filter Gods accept my humble offering of a 3 year old box of unused tampons.”

I pay $42 a month for my signature Barletta Brown 4.5NN touch-ups. It is technically a color, but spiritually it’s a belief system. A tax bracket for my childless womb I never got deductive credits for. Nay. Maybe even simply for “serving lewks.”

The color dye bar is more like a suburban coven. All of us there, a ream of cotton fluff worn like a sad crown beneath our shower caps. We’re there to reclaim our beauty and maybe even our youth. It’s a resistance movement. A silent war against the Crone archetype. Yeah, I said it.

I can hear you typing already: “It’s a privilege to age!” Correct. It is. I’m thrilled to be alive. But I have a personal rule based on hours of observation and zero facts: silver works in only two windows — women under 32 (cool, downtown art girl) or over 75 (regal matriarch energy). The middle stretch? That’s a lawless no-man’s-land. That’s where you either look chic… or like you’re kinda tired, Janice.

Yeah, I know: come at me.

Before Madison Reed, I forced my brawny, manly, 6’6” husband to dye my roots in our bathroom like we were running a meth lab but for vanity. He treated it like a painting project. “Ooooh boy,” he’d say, parting my hair with the tint brush, “a lot of snakes in the grass this month!” Charming. But impractical. My natural hair is (was) dark brown. When the greys come in, they don’t whisper. They scream. It’s less “distinguished streak” and more “electrical wire exposed.”

I don’t remember the first gray hair I found. I don’t even remember when I started dying it. But it was never sparkling flecks, never the chic streak that Stacy London has. It was a BAND of whitish gray that grew all around the crown of my scalp and sprouted like a Chia Pet marshmallow cloud against my natural dark brown hair, it was…stark. It was..not cute. I’ve heard the phrase “going gray gracefully” too many times. I’m sorry but it will add about 15 years on me! Is it a pain in the ass? 1,000%!! If the whole world was blind, I would’ve gone gray a loooonnnnnggg time ago (ok, not that long ago…calm down, self). But I have a teensy bit of vanity. Ergo. I dye.

As a burgeoning TV/film writer, I’m fully committed to the Delulu that I’ll soon land on a real red carpet, and I BETTER BE READY. I may not make it to the gym, and the plastic-y gel nails make me itchy and irritated, but damn it, I will not—not—be caught without great hair. (What can I say? I’m a Leo Rising. The mane is non-negotiable.)

Now let me tell you about the time I tried to go grey.

Five years ago, I decided I was done. I was evolved. I was a “good feminist” (still am!! I promise!). I was sticking it to The Man. I marched into my stylist’s chair with my very dark brown hair and the delusional confidence of someone who had clicked on one too many Pinterest boards. I said, “Make me silver.”

Reader. I wish that stylist had said a simple, “No.” She did not. She moved forward like Mark Zuckerberg launching TheFacebook — a little unsure at first, then fully committed to the takeover.

They stripped it. They bleached it. They hovered. I wish someone had just been honest and said, “There is no universe in which this espresso bean becomes icy Edie Sedgwick.” It would not lift past angry tangerine.

After hours in the chair, I emerged Ronald McDonald orange. Not auburn. Not copper. Traffic cone. Emergency flare. I could’ve directed airplanes on a runway.

And it was damaged A.F. so it looked like fried cheetos. On my head.

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If you didn’t say your “Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits” first thing on the 1st, don’t get down on yourself because the end of February is particularly tricky to keep up with and I forgot and talked until about 2 AM before realizing too. Just redeem yourself with “Tigger Tigger Tigger” now - AND follow Bee’s brilliant astrological advice here - and your month will be whatever you want it to be! (I also re-said the whole “RRR, TTT” thing three times in unison with my patient daughter after doing it myself, due to extreme superstition/mostly-subclinical OCD tendencies, but I don’t recommend that.)

If you are new or otherwise unfamiliar with The Autistic Astrologer, you might want to see her It Happened To Me story from when we first met and before she began writing our monthly horoscope column. It explains some of what makes her so uniquely good at these predictions.

And because there was such a hullaballoo over the accuracy of her previous Amazing Sex Day prediction, I am giving you that date for free this month! Usually that is part of the paid-subscribers section, which contains your individual signs’ readings and your opportunity for one-on-one coaching and answers from Bee to your specific questions in the comments. We charge for that last part so Bee can get paid and she definitely makes it worth the investment. But today Free Sex for all!*

I love you!

Jane

*However, if you are considering even the free 7-day trial subscription that is offered when you hit the paywall, I highly recommend doing it now because this week coming up is more jam-packed with great stories than maybe ever in our little AJPT history. I am upping my game because of all the SASSY, JANE and XOJane readers who have joined here recently with their Sassily high expectations. You all deserve it!

ETA: I’m running a title test on the open rates for this email and so far Your Most Enticing March Horoscope is beating out Your Best Sex Date. I’m impressed. 9:27 PM UPDATE: Spoke too soon. You chose the sex. Understandable.

Original Sassy TShirts Right Here!

By The Zine Witch

Are you exhausted? I’m exhausted.

And to that, I think the answer this month is oranges. Yes, oranges. Let me explain. But, first, an introduction.

I’m The Zine Witch, your resident astrologer and celestial flight attendant this month, watching the cosmic skys and asking the big questions for you here at Another Jane Pratt Thing. Make sure your seatbelt is fastened. Grab yourself a drink. Something you’ll need that orange for. (Tell me in the comments what you choose) This is another big month astrologically.

Last month was a cannon. This month is processing the remains. What a news cycle. Eclipses in the ancient days brought the death of the king. Nowadays, it’s usually a titan of their field. RIP James Van der Beek, a legend of his craft, but, also was a genuinely empathetic, thoughtful, deeply emotionally intelligent parent, husband, and thought leader.

James Van Der Beek once shared an Instagram story that really OK stayed with me. So many of us grow up never learning what repair feels like, never taught how to return to safety after a storm of emotions. He remembered that after a meltdown as a child, his mother would quietly start peeling an orange and bring it to him, asking gently if he wanted help, offering a small snack and a moment to breathe and speak. In that simple, luminous gesture, the orange became more than fruit. It became a lifeline, a soft bridge back to calm, a silent promise that he could be held, understood, and soothed. It was an ordinary act transformed into extraordinary care, teaching that even in the aftermath of overwhelm, tenderness and connection could exist. It reminds me that love often whispers in small gestures, and that healing begins in the quiet patience of someone willing to stay with you in the mess. And if we are exhausted right now, maybe some oranges will give us the vitamin C our adrenal system needs!

In addition to losses, many things were revealed last month. Many of the Epstein files were exposed leaving us feeling emotionally paralyzed and righteously angry. Prince Andrew arrested. Questions of a Ghislain doppelgänger. A new Lana Del Rey single. Aliens are real! It’s been a month.

Lately I’ve been thinking, with everything being so jarring in the news, that the real shift this season isn’t about what these men did. It’s about who we are becoming in response. The illusions we’ve been holding onto are dissolving, and suddenly we can’t hide from the parts of ourselves we’ve been avoiding.

Much of the framework around this month is about dissolving. Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac. Have you ever met a Pisces? They are always the one with one foot out the door and the other in outer space. They are world builders who feel not from this world. They see the truth even if they want to run from it within themselves. James Van der Beek. Drew Barrymore. Kurt Cobain. Chappell Roan. Olivia Rodrigo. These magical fairies too sensitive for this world. Now, that we are in their season, we begin to take up space as they do. Fluid. Sacrificial. Receptive. Enigmatic.

With what’s dissolving, in the background we are also being asked to pay attention to the places interesting new things are now forming. Last month we had a rare conjunction of two planets that last met in 1989. This was a pretty important time culturally. Almost every band that would go on to shape the early 90s musical trajectory formed during this time. Even the records of 1989 sounded more like the 90’s than the 1980’s. Oh, this is a great year for art. The new Lana sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard.

So there’s fog but new messages coming through. A collective weight in the air, a sense of disillusionment that makes authority, institutions, and old narratives feel brittle. Pisces season dissolves fantasy. How comfortable are you with truth? That’s the test of this transit. The lower octave of Pisces is to disassociate. To completely spaced out and do nothing. Pisces season can be hard to sit with. It will point out where we are lying to ourselves, or denying reality, avoiding the real work. It can be gentle or it can hit like a tidal wave. This is the magic of free will on the amusement park called Life™. Evolve at your own pace. No refunds.

Mercury is retrograde in Pisces this month, which means the mind is naturally circling back, wandering, and revisiting old conversations, decisions and feelings. You may notice yourself rereading messages from mid February, replaying situations, and noticing details you didn’t see before. Electronics stop working. Headphones go missing. Texts get delayed. Messages get fumbled. That fog is not a flaw. It is an opportunity. Mercury retrograde asks us to slow down, pause before reacting, and give ourselves permission to rethink without judgment.

Some days, focus drifts. Emails get half written. Texts are sent and immediately regretted. Decisions that once felt simple now feel tangled in unseen threads. The theme isn’t clarity. It’s reflection. Walking through the fog and realizing the fog is inside you.

This season is not about doing more. It’s about noticing more.

The missed detail isn’t external. It is internal. This season asks us to uncover the places where we’ve abandoned our own clarity, where we trusted noise over intuition, where we confused hyper-vigilance with power. Mercury retrograde nudges us to rewrite, revise, and reclaim our story. Nothing needs to be perfect. The goal is awareness, not completion.

Around the nineteenth, something internal clicks. Not loud. Not cinematic. A moment where you cannot unsee your own truth. A conversation, a plan, a story you told yourself needs revision. Boundaries feel porous. Emotions leak in from every direction. You absorb other people’s moods. You romanticize the impossible. You see illusions you wanted to believe. And you see yourself more clearly than you have in months.

There’s a strange seriousness emerging around identity. The fantasy self meets the responsible self. It is uncomfortable. Necessary. There is anger too, quiet, righteous, clarifying anger. You realize you’ve been tolerating things that no longer align with who you are becoming. Compassion remains. Firmness deepens.

Pisces season is not about doing more. It is about noticing more. Noticing the stories we repeat, the wounds we nurse, the patterns that masquerade as spirituality but are really fear in a silk robe. Mercury retrograde reminds us that reflection is productive, even when it feels slow.

We feel ourselves dissolving a little. The version of us that was hyper-vigilant and self-correcting is exhausted. Good. Let her rest.

The next six months are seeded right now with what we are willing to release: mental habits, old guilt, the compulsion to be flawless to be loved, the illusion that if we just analyze harder we’ll finally feel safe.

Pisces season asks us to surrender. Safety isn’t perfection. It’s acceptance. It’s noticing where we cling, where we resist, and letting it go. Use Mercury retrograde to reread, rethink, and refine, not to punish yourself.

Maybe we need to grab that orange peel in our own lives this month. Sit with it. Peel it slowly. Smell it. Taste it. Bring it to someone who needs repair that’s long overdue. Maybe thus ourselves. Let it remind you that finding repair, care, and gentleness are possible even when the world feels chaotic. Let it inspire you to have the conversations you’ve been avoiding, to speak truths that are uncomfortable but necessary. To connect with the people you love in your life about the uncomfortable stuff. Mercury retrograde gives you permission to revisit, reflect, and reclaim your voice. You’ll be happier you did next month, I swear.

Orange ya glad your astrologer gave you this advice? Okay, No more dad jokes, I swear.

Best Day for Sex: March 9

Best Day to Send an Important Message:…. [Sorry, you have to pay for this prediction. I gave you the sex for free! What more do you want? -Jane]

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