Meeting Miss Congeniality at an All-Girls Quaker School in Rhode Island
Louisa Kellogg wins the opportunity of a lifetime with a poem about basketball. Plus recs for My Old Books, Django Gold, and Brian Merchant
A NOTE FROM CHRIS: I am currently out on parental leave so each week, a new celebrity guest writer takes over Bright Spots. This week’s newsletter is being written by Louisa Kellogg. In the more than a decade that I have known Louisa, I have never stopped being amazed by the hilarious ideas she comes up with. While at The Onion, she developed and wrote their hit podcast, a true crime parody called “A Very Fatal Murder.” Later on, she co-created a hilarious series for Conan O’Brien called Frontier Tween about “a tween with a dream living on the untamed prairie.” Louisa has also written jokes for puppets on the TV show Crank Yankers and last I heard, she was hard at work co-writing a musical comedy that takes place in a whaling village in New England. What a brain! I love her stuff.
Ok, enough from me, now let’s hand it over to Louisa….
LOUISA TAKES OVER BRIGHT SPOTS:
I (Louisa) went to an all-girls Quaker middle school. The school was old, but they really embraced the girl power mania of the 2000s. Yes, we wore kilts, but in the cold Rhode Island winters we were allowed to wear kilts with sweatpants underneath. Our music teacher wrote a musical for us to perform about powerful-but-lonely businesswomen. If there were ghosts haunting those centuries-old halls, they damn sure would’ve been women. Basically, it was a feminist utopia, right down to the Choco Tacos in the cafeteria.
One day, an announcement was made: the school was holding a poetry competition and the winner would get to leave school for an afternoon and attend a thing about female empowerment at the convention center, where the star of Miss Congeniality would speak. I’m sure this is not exactly how it was phrased, but this is what I heard, and I was all in. I loved the convention center. I loved getting to leave school for a reason other than 9/11 happening. I LOVED Miss Congeniality.
That night, in a fit of creative inspiration, I wrote the most feminist poem I could come up with. I knew my poem would win. I was absolutely confident, not because I thought I was an amazing writer, but because I had chosen to write about a topic that obsessed the minds of feminists in the 2000s: being a girl who wants to play basketball with the boys.
Of course, I have never once wanted to play basketball, let alone with the boys. Who would?? But I knew this message would be catnip to whatever assortment of English teachers was tasked with picking a winner. So I jotted down some bullshit about the lonely dribbling of a girl who just wants to get her shot and handed it in.
The rubes fell for it hook line and sinker, and a few weeks later my name was called. I had conned my way out of math class and I was going to see a celebrity. Miss Congeniality: live and in the flesh.
On the day of the event, I was taken out of class before lunch and shuttled downtown with several of my teachers. As we ascended the grand escalator at the convention center I was buzzing with anticipation, but something didn’t feel right. I kept hearing a name I didn’t recognize: Murphy Brown.
I should mention that, at this point in my life, I did not know who any celebrities were except the ones who stated their names followed by “and you’re watching Disney Channel.” It didn’t occur to me that the star of Miss Congeniality could be anyone other than Miss Congeniality herself (whatever her name was).
We sat down at a table with some other soon-to-be-empowered girls from other schools to eat our fancy little lunch, and an announcement was made that the speakers would start shortly. I sat up in my chair, anxiously waiting to see Miss Congeniality–the tough but beautiful woman who gets to wear dresses while also getting credit for thinking dresses are dumb–take the stage!
Then Candice Bergen walked out. No one has ever been more disappointed by the presence of acclaimed actor and star of Murphy Brown, Boston Legal, and (evidently) Miss Congeniality than me. I spent Candice’s entire speech trying to remember what role this random lady had played in Miss Congeniality, and how I was going to explain this to my friends at school.
In the end, it was I who had been conned.
But I learned an important lesson about being a woman that day: you can play all your cards right and star on two hit network shows, but if you’re not wearing a pink strapless gown it doesn’t matter. Sorry, Candy.
This week’s list (Louisa’s Version)
GREAT:
The Instagram account @myoldbooks is run by a vintage children’s bookshop, but what’s really great about the page is this thing they do to help adults reconnect with books they read as children but can’t remember the names of. People will write in with what they remember about a book, which often sounds like a note scrawled while on an acid trip, and the account will post it verbatim. Usually, someone out there will remember the name of the book and the rest of us get to enjoy absurdist little poems like, “it was about a mother who washed her children so enthusiastically that she washed away their faces. The children wore wooden shoes.”
FUNNY:
Django Gold is an equally great writer and performer – a rare combo despite everyone in the world having “writer and performer” in their bio. His special, Bag Of Tricks, is on YouTube and it is so so funny. It made me laugh a bunch of times when I watched it at home alone, which is not normal for me!
INTERESTING:
Brian Merchant always writes interesting stuff. He is one of the only tech journalists who is not automatically like, “omg coooool” about every new thing a power-mad nerd does. He recently wrote a book about the history of Luddites, and I learned a lot from this conversation on the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us about the Luddite movement and how it relates to our current big-tech-centric economy.
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That's it for this week. Thanks for reading! Please share Bright Spots with anyone you think might enjoy it.
Sorry Candy,
Chris Duffy (but mostly Louisa Kellogg!)
This has been Bright Spots, a newsletter.
FOR MORE FROM LOUISA: You can read a list of Louisa’s Onion headlines here and you can listen to A Very Fatal Murder wherever you get podcasts. If you are looking to hire a genius comedy writer (or you just want to pre-purchase your tickets to the musical comedy about whaling New Englanders), Louisa’s got her contact info up on her website.
…wait, who are you?
I'm Chris Duffy, a comedian, TV writer, podcast host, and both a former fifth grade teacher and a former fifth grade student. I’m currently writing a nonfiction book about humor for Doubleday.