I really want to find the moment when ZL went from being a nice guy to this asshole and I’m pretty sure it has to be near the end of the Chuck run after he did Nerd HQ, but someone help me. I met him (and then hung out because weird reasons) enough that this switch really fucking hurts my brain.
I read his book and he goes into a lot of detail about his mental health struggles, which the lockdown and social media seem to have made worse. According to his book, his mother was very anti Western medicine.
He has also always been extremely religious, which itself is not a disqualifier obviously, but he managed to fall on the side of “Dude, is that really what you want to say and who you want to say it to????” So some of this heel turn is not a surprise and in fact maybe not that far of a turn at all. And definitely not remotely as recent as the pandemic, though I’m sure that exacerbated things. -H
I get that is hard on anyone (and he is so social so it makes sense that lockdown was bad) but Laura’s stories are from 2016 so it started before that.
I think he's always been an asshole. He was better at covering it up before Covid. Laura's stories read to me like she noticed his behavior while everyone else was able to overlook it. A position where I have found myself many times before. And now that public opinion has changed, Laura now feels comfortable talking about it.
My BIL went off the deep end in 2016 similar to ZL- he was always very religious and had a strict upbringing but I think the echo chamber of misinformation has gotten so loud this last 8 years, it becomes very hard to extricate from it. When other people aren’t talking about it, it can be difficult to go against public opinion- for me I started to notice a shift with my BIL in about 2015 right after my sister had her first miscarriage. The need to find something to blame for medical events seems to be a gateway path to a lot of the antivaxxer stuff.
My next-door neighbors had big medical problems in the 20-teens, and then the pandemic sent them down the worst conspiracy and religion extremes. I think feeling so helpless and limited can do terrible things to your head.
I follow Laura Benanti on IG and during that show they did together she would do Intermission Kitchen on 2 show days where she and her makeup and wardrobe (?) people would make things in an Easy Bake Oven. It was super cute and quite often she would have her costars sample the results etc and I wondered at the time because ZL would rarely if ever show up in the clips. I was hoping it wasn't because he was so awful because of my love for Chuck but I just had a feeling because she is so delightful.
I read an article back when Chuck was still on the air, and it totally killed my crush on him. He has always been a messy bench who used extreme Christianity and substances to try to paper over wounds from a crazy childhood.
Co-opting the death of a beloved Broadway star for his own purposes really hurts my brain. Also, I know Levi has been in some shows, but Gavin Creel could run rings around him in terms of talent and range.
I once made a vegetarian cassoulet from Deborah Madison or Madhur Jaffrey for me and a boyfriend. It was so much work. I still dream of it but don't want to make it again.
In the 90s, my favorite holiday tradition, in a month of ragers, was when a gay friend would host his annual watch party for Martha's Christmas special. Although your post reminds me of the year she inspired me to buy gold paint to use with hand made potato stamps to make my own wrapping papers from grocery bags. I even painted some leaves gold to use instead of bows on a couple of the gifts. I was young and had time for things such as homemade wrapping paper and cassoulets. Or maybe I spent my time better back then? Now this time I year I'm just knitting like crazy to finish Christmas presents.
I remember when she inspired (conscripted?) me to stay up until the wee hours to carve heart stamps and make homemade hand-stamped, embossed Valentines.
I still remember following her directions to glitter real pumpkins at Halloween. The results were amazing! I was a young adult with no responsibilities, so I had the time, and my only regret was not using fake pumpkin so I could reuse them for a few years.
I love Martha, and am glad to note that she is VERY self aware that she is probably insane. She has a great sense of humor about herself.
The CGI simpsons characters were freaking me out a bit for some reason. I couldn't sit through that whole game (which may have just been me being exhausted because I was asleep by 9pm).
As a Jew (and we celebrate some high intensity holidays), I get so exhausted whenever I hear about Christmas prep. Who has the time/energy/will to go through all this work for one day of joy?! I am not trying to be a grinch, but no wonder women are revolting and stopping the magic. A slide ruler to make a gingerbread house!
For years, my Jewish mom, purchased the Christmas tree for her Christian husband, but stopped when I was twelve. It is a bunch of work to do it all (and so soon after Thanksgiving).
I am a Soviet Jew so I celebrate the Gregorian New Year in style, but putting up the Fir is such a hassle that I wonder if it's worth it - and my husband and I celebrate it pretty simply (tree, festive meal with olivya salad, and presents). I can't imagine doing it the full DECORATIONS! FESTIVE COOKIES! GINGERBREADS!
I come from a family who builds the joy into the whole process of getting ready for Christmas. We also celebrate the Christmas season which runs until January 6th. There are a couple of days where there is little joy to be found when you are in the thick of putting up the decorations and cleaning up after Thanksgiving, but those days are few. I don't do a big tree my little ceramic Mr. Christmas tree brings me joy. My mom puts up an artificial tree because a real tree is too much work. My sister and her family go all out with getting their tree every year. My mother also loves to cook and bake for people, so the hours she is in the kitchen bring her joy. She cranks up her Christmas music and gets to work. We are not a gingerbread family despite having more than one engineer. My family also noped out of doing elaborate meals decades ago. We do simple food that just needs to be heated. Christmas Day is breakfast casserole, a ham with the fixings, and comfy clothes. We also to borrow a phrase from Clark W. Griswold Sr. have a lot of help from Jack Daniels.
It sounds like your family has done a great job of focusing on the part of the holiday prep that appeals to them. I think that is the important thing, do what you like and don't feel guilty about skipping the parts that aren't you.
We have. It also helps that my parents moved to a different state when I was in 8th grade where travel around Christmas became impossible. We have no extended family in our area so we made the day about what brought all 6 of us joy. Then as we got older, my sister married a man with one sibling who lives close to him so we can all be together instead of wasting the day driving from house to house. Things will probably change here soon with my little brother finding a partner.
Amanda has already explained some of this -- for observant Christians this time is not Christmas Day but a whole season from Advent through Epiphany (with variations depending on whether one is Protestant / Catholic / Greek Orthodox etc). Advent is meant to be a time of waiting and preparing for Christ's birth and my family tries to focus on that. It can be a nice antidote to the incredible consumerism of secular Christmas and puts the focus on the traditions, rituals, family time, food, etc.
I like both sides of it - the Christian, meditative rituals, and some of the secular holiday stuff. (I may have spent this past weekend dressed as a shepherd and handling a live goat in our church's living nativity. It was fun! He is a very good and cute goat.)
I think the key with the holiday stuff is to do what you want, and not more than that. I am up for decorating ONE room in the house with our fake tree and our family hodgepodge of decorations. We put on carols, and it takes maybe 90 minutes. I look forward to it every year, but I ain't doing more than that. (My husband can put up lights outside if he wants to.)
I also have ONE Christmas cookie recipe (raspberry thumbprints) that I make every year to take to events. When my kid was little, sometimes we would roll out and decorate gingerbread, but I'm not initiating anything like that anymore. (If she wants to do it, I'll help. But she better clean up.)
My son requests rugelach for the holidays every year and every year I psych myself up to bake it. Challah, rugelach and brisket are a LOT of you cook from scratch!
We finally found it at Target in Las Vegas! It is delicious, but somehow we haven’t drunk any more of it since that first can. It’s more exciting in THEORY than in DRINKABILITY, I guess? What did everyone else think?
I feel like it needed more flavor. It was good - I thoroughly enjoyed it and have bought a second pack, but I wanted a little more of that shirley temple taste. It was too much of a hint. I basically wanted a shirley temple in a can.
Can attest that Sepp Leaf is good. It's what we use at work for our gilding. Absolutely hilarious though that Martha was using it to make cookies inedible.
I remember watching Miss Piggy and Martha making Christmas sugar cookies, and Martha is showing Piggy how to cut out a small star from the center of a larger star-shaped cookie, to make a hole in the middle, and then Piggy says, "Oh! How obsessive!"
Ok this newsletter is hitting me on so many levels today!
I purchased ingredients for a cassoulet earlier in the week THANKFULLY NOT ENOUGH FOR 10 LET ALONE 100. I was really delighted by the Simpsons-ification of the game mainly because it meant I didn't need to listen to Troy Aikman and Joe Buck. And I frequently just say "FUDGE" like Jordan Peele just to make myself giggle.
I continue to feel so betrayed by what a garbage person Zachary Levi has turned out to be. Thankfully Adam Brody just seems normal because I couldn't take it if he was like on the hunt for UFOs and thinking that Bill Gates is secretly injecting us with nanobots or something.
Martha, Martha, MARTHA! My mother and I got all inspired by her circa 1989 and––having never made one before––made an insanely elaborate gingerbread house with a thatched roof (shredded wheat). It was gorgeous, and took several days to make. Not unlike cassoulet! I looooove cassoulet, and several years ago the NYT published Brasserie Benoit’s recipe; it would take three days of shopping to track down all the esoteric ingredients. The menu price of $56 seems very reasonable to pay for someone else to go through all that hassle! It’s almost never a good idea to read the comments, but NYT recipes are a noteworthy exception—people went haywire when someone asked “Can you make a vegetarian version?” NO. You can make a big pot of beans, sure—but you can’t claim that it’s cassoulet.
I need to call bullshit on this 18th century amish silk coverlet. Or at least on the amish and silk combo. I do this with no expertise except one time I read this great book about amish quilts by jannekan smucker and i don’t think a thing exists in exactly that combination 3 out of 4 sure. Not all 4. So likely even martha wasn’t doing this as she described (Although she may not have known)
This. Is she implying that the Amish were trading with the Chinese in the 1700s? Yes, I know that other groups had silk by then, but the Amish are famously DIY. So did they get silkworms somehow?
They would have had the same access to silks as just about any other colonist living in their area of Pennsylvania. They may have lived differently than their neighbors, but the still would have traded with them. The Amish may DIY things like barns, but they have never been totally self-sufficient.
I grew up in Northeast Ohio where my mom sold Tupperware to the Amish. I've seen their buggies tied up outside of Walmart and been in their homes to see they eat the same breakfast cereals as we did. And that Amish community was not weaving their own cloth. They may have made their own clothing, bedding, and curtains, but they were purchasing fabrics the same way the English do. They also loved to come to my neighborhood's yearly multi-family garage sale.
Access to trade goods in the North American colonies accelerated rapidly in the mid-eighteenth century as the British Empire expanded so I agree it's not impossible.
I grew up in York County, PA, one county over from Lancaster, which is the home of that state's Amish community, and had similar experiences. I'd see Amish women buying overnight pads at Sam's Club, for example, or looking at Corningware at the outlets.
Martha and I have very different definitions of the word "party." I am not cooking for three days to have 200 of my closest friends over. FOR CHRISTMAS. Just buy some booze and some snacks, no one is going to be mad at that! (This is why I'm not rich and famous.)
I really want to find the moment when ZL went from being a nice guy to this asshole and I’m pretty sure it has to be near the end of the Chuck run after he did Nerd HQ, but someone help me. I met him (and then hung out because weird reasons) enough that this switch really fucking hurts my brain.
I read his book and he goes into a lot of detail about his mental health struggles, which the lockdown and social media seem to have made worse. According to his book, his mother was very anti Western medicine.
He has also always been extremely religious, which itself is not a disqualifier obviously, but he managed to fall on the side of “Dude, is that really what you want to say and who you want to say it to????” So some of this heel turn is not a surprise and in fact maybe not that far of a turn at all. And definitely not remotely as recent as the pandemic, though I’m sure that exacerbated things. -H
Exactly! In the ways I was around him, I knew of how Christian he was but it never came across as it does now.
I get that is hard on anyone (and he is so social so it makes sense that lockdown was bad) but Laura’s stories are from 2016 so it started before that.
I think he's always been an asshole. He was better at covering it up before Covid. Laura's stories read to me like she noticed his behavior while everyone else was able to overlook it. A position where I have found myself many times before. And now that public opinion has changed, Laura now feels comfortable talking about it.
I can buy that. Like I said, I didn’t see some of this until later but with 20/20 and all that, it was there.
My BIL went off the deep end in 2016 similar to ZL- he was always very religious and had a strict upbringing but I think the echo chamber of misinformation has gotten so loud this last 8 years, it becomes very hard to extricate from it. When other people aren’t talking about it, it can be difficult to go against public opinion- for me I started to notice a shift with my BIL in about 2015 right after my sister had her first miscarriage. The need to find something to blame for medical events seems to be a gateway path to a lot of the antivaxxer stuff.
And also given what I know about his family, this sort of tracks. I just wish it didn’t. Maybe good memories are harder to like now.
My next-door neighbors had big medical problems in the 20-teens, and then the pandemic sent them down the worst conspiracy and religion extremes. I think feeling so helpless and limited can do terrible things to your head.
I follow Laura Benanti on IG and during that show they did together she would do Intermission Kitchen on 2 show days where she and her makeup and wardrobe (?) people would make things in an Easy Bake Oven. It was super cute and quite often she would have her costars sample the results etc and I wondered at the time because ZL would rarely if ever show up in the clips. I was hoping it wasn't because he was so awful because of my love for Chuck but I just had a feeling because she is so delightful.
I read an article back when Chuck was still on the air, and it totally killed my crush on him. He has always been a messy bench who used extreme Christianity and substances to try to paper over wounds from a crazy childhood.
Co-opting the death of a beloved Broadway star for his own purposes really hurts my brain. Also, I know Levi has been in some shows, but Gavin Creel could run rings around him in terms of talent and range.
Oh true! I feel like ZL let the love for Tangled go to his head.
She went through the effort to bake cookies then covered them in non-edible copper? What the heck, Martha??
I feel like cardboard "cookies" covered in copper gilt would work just as freakin' well
I once made a vegetarian cassoulet from Deborah Madison or Madhur Jaffrey for me and a boyfriend. It was so much work. I still dream of it but don't want to make it again.
In the 90s, my favorite holiday tradition, in a month of ragers, was when a gay friend would host his annual watch party for Martha's Christmas special. Although your post reminds me of the year she inspired me to buy gold paint to use with hand made potato stamps to make my own wrapping papers from grocery bags. I even painted some leaves gold to use instead of bows on a couple of the gifts. I was young and had time for things such as homemade wrapping paper and cassoulets. Or maybe I spent my time better back then? Now this time I year I'm just knitting like crazy to finish Christmas presents.
I remember when she inspired (conscripted?) me to stay up until the wee hours to carve heart stamps and make homemade hand-stamped, embossed Valentines.
Well, we didn't have the Internet or endless streaming television to distract us!
I still remember following her directions to glitter real pumpkins at Halloween. The results were amazing! I was a young adult with no responsibilities, so I had the time, and my only regret was not using fake pumpkin so I could reuse them for a few years.
Martha has such a distinctive speaking voice, I can hear her reading those passages.
I definitely read the book exerts in Martha's voice.
I love Martha, and am glad to note that she is VERY self aware that she is probably insane. She has a great sense of humor about herself.
The CGI simpsons characters were freaking me out a bit for some reason. I couldn't sit through that whole game (which may have just been me being exhausted because I was asleep by 9pm).
I laughed at "this recipe is very simple, but takes two days." TWO DAYS?!?
Well you have to cure the ham and that's at least 24 hours in the smokehouse.
As a Jew (and we celebrate some high intensity holidays), I get so exhausted whenever I hear about Christmas prep. Who has the time/energy/will to go through all this work for one day of joy?! I am not trying to be a grinch, but no wonder women are revolting and stopping the magic. A slide ruler to make a gingerbread house!
For years, my Jewish mom, purchased the Christmas tree for her Christian husband, but stopped when I was twelve. It is a bunch of work to do it all (and so soon after Thanksgiving).
I am a Soviet Jew so I celebrate the Gregorian New Year in style, but putting up the Fir is such a hassle that I wonder if it's worth it - and my husband and I celebrate it pretty simply (tree, festive meal with olivya salad, and presents). I can't imagine doing it the full DECORATIONS! FESTIVE COOKIES! GINGERBREADS!
I will say when she was working as a teacher we didn’t do all those things but I feel you. (One reason why I’m not sad to be single and without kids.)
I come from a family who builds the joy into the whole process of getting ready for Christmas. We also celebrate the Christmas season which runs until January 6th. There are a couple of days where there is little joy to be found when you are in the thick of putting up the decorations and cleaning up after Thanksgiving, but those days are few. I don't do a big tree my little ceramic Mr. Christmas tree brings me joy. My mom puts up an artificial tree because a real tree is too much work. My sister and her family go all out with getting their tree every year. My mother also loves to cook and bake for people, so the hours she is in the kitchen bring her joy. She cranks up her Christmas music and gets to work. We are not a gingerbread family despite having more than one engineer. My family also noped out of doing elaborate meals decades ago. We do simple food that just needs to be heated. Christmas Day is breakfast casserole, a ham with the fixings, and comfy clothes. We also to borrow a phrase from Clark W. Griswold Sr. have a lot of help from Jack Daniels.
It sounds like your family has done a great job of focusing on the part of the holiday prep that appeals to them. I think that is the important thing, do what you like and don't feel guilty about skipping the parts that aren't you.
We have. It also helps that my parents moved to a different state when I was in 8th grade where travel around Christmas became impossible. We have no extended family in our area so we made the day about what brought all 6 of us joy. Then as we got older, my sister married a man with one sibling who lives close to him so we can all be together instead of wasting the day driving from house to house. Things will probably change here soon with my little brother finding a partner.
I think there's a balance to be found between a Stewart Christmas and a Basic Christmas but it still seems like so much work.
Amanda has already explained some of this -- for observant Christians this time is not Christmas Day but a whole season from Advent through Epiphany (with variations depending on whether one is Protestant / Catholic / Greek Orthodox etc). Advent is meant to be a time of waiting and preparing for Christ's birth and my family tries to focus on that. It can be a nice antidote to the incredible consumerism of secular Christmas and puts the focus on the traditions, rituals, family time, food, etc.
I like both sides of it - the Christian, meditative rituals, and some of the secular holiday stuff. (I may have spent this past weekend dressed as a shepherd and handling a live goat in our church's living nativity. It was fun! He is a very good and cute goat.)
I think the key with the holiday stuff is to do what you want, and not more than that. I am up for decorating ONE room in the house with our fake tree and our family hodgepodge of decorations. We put on carols, and it takes maybe 90 minutes. I look forward to it every year, but I ain't doing more than that. (My husband can put up lights outside if he wants to.)
I also have ONE Christmas cookie recipe (raspberry thumbprints) that I make every year to take to events. When my kid was little, sometimes we would roll out and decorate gingerbread, but I'm not initiating anything like that anymore. (If she wants to do it, I'll help. But she better clean up.)
I just want to say that I am super jealous you got to hang out with a cute goat. I never get to hang out with goats!
My son requests rugelach for the holidays every year and every year I psych myself up to bake it. Challah, rugelach and brisket are a LOT of you cook from scratch!
Heather or Jessica - did you end up finding the Shirley Temple 7-up? I did but I need someone else to talk with about it.
I am so annoyed that my grocery store does not carry it!
I ended up going to a town three away from mine to find a Ralph’s! There was effort to buy these 24 cans.
We finally found it at Target in Las Vegas! It is delicious, but somehow we haven’t drunk any more of it since that first can. It’s more exciting in THEORY than in DRINKABILITY, I guess? What did everyone else think?
I like a fizzy drink at dinner without caffeine so I’ve had them a bunch since Friday and it’s a nostalgia thing more than real drinkability I think.
I feel like it needed more flavor. It was good - I thoroughly enjoyed it and have bought a second pack, but I wanted a little more of that shirley temple taste. It was too much of a hint. I basically wanted a shirley temple in a can.
Ok, interesting. Maybe I need to just make my own and cut out the middleman.
That is true; it doesn’t have as much cherry as I want to remind me of being in a bar with my dad and his friends in the late 80s, early 90s.
I did!! I love it but it needs a lot of ice. -J
That also does make a difference. I keep drinking them room temp.
Maybe this is a regional thing, but around upstate NY, people who like Shirley Temples are addicted to Saranac Soda's version. https://www.sodapoponline.com/products/saranac-shirley-temple
Ooh I have to head out to Western Mass in May, maybe I can find this.
If you're in L.A., it's probably worth checking to see if Galco's carries it.
I am (ish) but good to know!
Have you ever been? I'm not even a big soda drinker, but I looooove it.
Galco's is probably my Dad's favorite store in the extended SGV. We should head over there this season. It has amazing candy too -J
I haven’t! I used to go to Soda Pop’s all the time across from Largo but it hasn’t been there in like 7 or more years.
Oooh, thank you for this! My 7-year-old daughter loves Shirley Temples!
That Miss Piggy video!! I want Miss Piggy everywhere saying sarcastic things to hosts, state leaders, etc etc.
Can attest that Sepp Leaf is good. It's what we use at work for our gilding. Absolutely hilarious though that Martha was using it to make cookies inedible.
I remember watching Miss Piggy and Martha making Christmas sugar cookies, and Martha is showing Piggy how to cut out a small star from the center of a larger star-shaped cookie, to make a hole in the middle, and then Piggy says, "Oh! How obsessive!"
It is in that supercut!
Ok this newsletter is hitting me on so many levels today!
I purchased ingredients for a cassoulet earlier in the week THANKFULLY NOT ENOUGH FOR 10 LET ALONE 100. I was really delighted by the Simpsons-ification of the game mainly because it meant I didn't need to listen to Troy Aikman and Joe Buck. And I frequently just say "FUDGE" like Jordan Peele just to make myself giggle.
I continue to feel so betrayed by what a garbage person Zachary Levi has turned out to be. Thankfully Adam Brody just seems normal because I couldn't take it if he was like on the hunt for UFOs and thinking that Bill Gates is secretly injecting us with nanobots or something.
Martha, Martha, MARTHA! My mother and I got all inspired by her circa 1989 and––having never made one before––made an insanely elaborate gingerbread house with a thatched roof (shredded wheat). It was gorgeous, and took several days to make. Not unlike cassoulet! I looooove cassoulet, and several years ago the NYT published Brasserie Benoit’s recipe; it would take three days of shopping to track down all the esoteric ingredients. The menu price of $56 seems very reasonable to pay for someone else to go through all that hassle! It’s almost never a good idea to read the comments, but NYT recipes are a noteworthy exception—people went haywire when someone asked “Can you make a vegetarian version?” NO. You can make a big pot of beans, sure—but you can’t claim that it’s cassoulet.
I need to call bullshit on this 18th century amish silk coverlet. Or at least on the amish and silk combo. I do this with no expertise except one time I read this great book about amish quilts by jannekan smucker and i don’t think a thing exists in exactly that combination 3 out of 4 sure. Not all 4. So likely even martha wasn’t doing this as she described (Although she may not have known)
I think it's possible that some 18th century Amish quilts have bits of silk on them, but the primary fibers used on the quilt would be wool and linen.
Well a coverlet (as opposed to a quilt) may have been worked with silk threads in that era but would have been much less likely to be amish.
This. Is she implying that the Amish were trading with the Chinese in the 1700s? Yes, I know that other groups had silk by then, but the Amish are famously DIY. So did they get silkworms somehow?
They would have had the same access to silks as just about any other colonist living in their area of Pennsylvania. They may have lived differently than their neighbors, but the still would have traded with them. The Amish may DIY things like barns, but they have never been totally self-sufficient.
I grew up in Northeast Ohio where my mom sold Tupperware to the Amish. I've seen their buggies tied up outside of Walmart and been in their homes to see they eat the same breakfast cereals as we did. And that Amish community was not weaving their own cloth. They may have made their own clothing, bedding, and curtains, but they were purchasing fabrics the same way the English do. They also loved to come to my neighborhood's yearly multi-family garage sale.
Access to trade goods in the North American colonies accelerated rapidly in the mid-eighteenth century as the British Empire expanded so I agree it's not impossible.
I grew up in York County, PA, one county over from Lancaster, which is the home of that state's Amish community, and had similar experiences. I'd see Amish women buying overnight pads at Sam's Club, for example, or looking at Corningware at the outlets.
I love your comment so much! Buggies are Walmart and eating Cheerios... I had no idea!
OK, “Martha Stewart’s Gilt Trip” is comedy gold 😀
Martha and I have very different definitions of the word "party." I am not cooking for three days to have 200 of my closest friends over. FOR CHRISTMAS. Just buy some booze and some snacks, no one is going to be mad at that! (This is why I'm not rich and famous.)
In all fairness to her, people probably go to her parties to be amazed. Same with Oprah. And Martha delivers.
This WAS literally her job though! - J
Would you if you had staff to do most of it?
LOL probably not
The Bond testicle ads are the funniest thing I've seen in the past month.