Tempest in a Teapot
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On their Instagram page, we are golden.

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Hello, ladies. Hello, girls. Hello. I'm Sam Sanders. I'm Saeed Jones. And I'm Zach Stafford, and you are listening to Vibe Check. Vibe Check.

This week, we're going to talk about the life and legacy of Leslie Jordan, a true jewel. We grieve a legend. We really do. A true legend. A legend. I'm so sad. And we're also going to talk about a, I think, now legendary Twitter uproar involving a woman known as the Garden Coffee Lady. Oh, is that her moniker now? I was wondering if she got it. She changed her handle to

I think her location's also in a garden with coffee. I love she's kept her location secret. I was like, I know that's right, girl. Don't tell anybody where you are. Protect yourself. But before we get into all of that, I want to ask my sisters how we're feeling. Y'all know I'm feeling good because there's a Christmas in the air. But Saeed, how are you doing?

I'm conflicted. On one hand, you know, I got some writing done this morning and yesterday I had a nice day. I've been kind of trying to be intentional about taking time to invest in myself, not for the work, just like, you know, like reading, not to write, reading just to read, for example, is something I actually don't do very often. But then

But then, I don't know, the last 12 hours I feel like have been a bit like a sledgehammer. I mean, the news about Leslie Jordan just really knocked the wind out of me. And then I wake up this morning like, okay, you know, you're going to write about it. And then I pick up my phone and I see that the political system in Russia denied Brittany Griner yet another appeal.

And Brittany Griner, of course, has been in jail dealing with this. I think it's all a ruse. I think it's all a ruse, but accused of drug smuggling because something was found in Brittany's suitcase. I just don't buy any of it, but has been behind bars in Russia since February, since February alone. And now because of this appeal being denied in the next few months, Brittany will be moved to a penal colony. Yeah.

And is faced with being in a penal colony for up to nine years. And I'm like, I mean, she's been away from home, away from her wife and her family, away from her joy, her livelihood for so long. But to think about penal colonies, and I was reading a recent political prisoner was forced to sit at a sewing machine for up to seven hours a day. People are forced to watch propaganda videos for hours and hours, and it just...

It's really sad. And every detail about the story makes your heart break a little more. Apparently, about a week or two ago, the Russian prison authorities were like, oh, we know that Brittany Griner plays basketball. We can give her a basketball with a hoop. At first, there was a hoop with no basketball. Then they offered her a basketball. And she said, I can't do it. It's too painful. Mm-hmm.

To have to play basketball alone in a Russian prison, it's insult upon injury. My heart just breaks for her. Yeah. My heart breaks for her every day. Yeah. And I know it's very complicated. This is a really messed up situation entangled in a literal war happening right now. So it's just kind of like, I think what sucks at the end of the day is that

we know that if she was not a Black woman, if she was a white woman stuck over there or someone else, there would be a lot more focus and power and movement. And that's just the facts. Like people keep forgetting about Brittany Griner because she's a Black woman. And we see that with every other thing. And that's just the truth. It's really infuriating. But I just want to say to Brittany Griner, to her families, to her loved ones and other people, I know so many of us do share this concern and it can feel lonely, but there are many of us thinking of her and we're not going to be quiet about it.

Yeah. Zach, how are you feeling? I'm good. I have to get on a plane after this taping. Where are you going? I'm going to New York City. You're always going to New York. I'm always going to New York City. This is what happens when you have a show on Broadway. But I'm excited. I mean, some of you have seen the news, but A Strange Loop will be closing in January. And then we were figuring what happens afterwards.

After that, you know, sometimes people go on tours. I won't say what's happening next, but things are happening. But, you know, we're trying to figure out the best ways to kind of end this run. And this Thursday, we are doing a big Black and Queer-esque night at the theater with Bob the Drag Queen hosting. And the theater will be mostly Black and Queer folks there, which is the first time this has ever happened.

And, you know, the only other version of this was Slave Play, Jeremy O'Harris' play with a blackout night. But it's so exciting. I was there that night. I'm going to be there this Thursday where we get to fill theaters with people that look like us. And that really changes the dynamic of the show. So we do have some seats left if people are interested. Reach out. You can find your seats. But it'll be 950 queer people in a theater celebrating, which will be very exciting. I love it. Gosh, I wish I could be there. That sounds wonderful. Yeah. Sam, how are you doing?

I mean, I'm happy it's fall. I know we've had this debate on this show before. You do look good in flannel. Those colors do suit you. Thank you. I bought this thing in like July just waiting. Well, that's how you do it. That's how the real girls do it. You know, you know, you got to get ready. But no, we are entering what's going to be the holiday stretch. I'm taking off a week for Thanksgiving. I think, fingers crossed, Lord willing, I'll have three weeks off for Christmas. I'm just ready for that. I'm just ready for that. I mentioned probably a few weeks ago that...

That stretch of like September and October just feels unforgiving because there's no real holidays, but we're about to get back to holiday season and my store was ready. So that's my vibe. Love it. Love, love, love. I love it. I love it. I just love when people acknowledge what they need and think ahead. So I love that you're like, uh-uh, I am not going into this winter without a plan. I love that.

Okay, well, before we get into our first topic, of course, we want to thank all of you for the fan mails, the tweets. Look, people are still talking about Snickers. I laugh every time I think about our candy conversation. I go back and listen to it every few days. Our iconic candy conversation. And so here's a note from last week that we wanted to highlight. It came from Kaylin Elizabeth.

Kaylin tweeted, screaming, crying, laughing over y'all discussing the gayest candy. And they mentioned Snickers because Kaylin says it was my nickname in high school because, quote, I was guaranteed to satisfy. Come on, Kaylin. Lord, may I move to the world with the energy of Kaylin. My good sis. Wow. We stan a queen.

We stay in a quaint. I would say also, I want to hear more on that. That's like something I want to sit down and have a cocktail. Tell me everything. Well, shout out to you, Kaylin Elizabeth. Guaranteed to satisfy. That's really good. Keep them coming. You can email us or tweet us. The email is vibecheckatstitcher.com. But sisters, let's jump in, shall we? Let's do it. Let's do it.

To start things off, we want to reflect on the late, great, and incredible Leslie Jordan. I think everyone could probably recognize him if you saw a picture of him because he has been on television for almost 40 years. And sadly, the actor died yesterday here in Los Angeles while driving. He was 67 years old and he had a medical emergency and crashed his car. The Emmy Award-winning actor is probably best known from his role as Beverly Leslie in Will & Grace.

which is one of my favorite shows of all time, where he was on many, many seasons and always the best side piece to Karen's antics, I'll say. He was the perfect foil. Yeah. The perfect foil. He was also in the show American Horror Story, and he was in the movie The Help, which

He also was a star of a few queer pieces of cinema, famously the series Eating Out All You Can Eat, the third installment of the Eating Out series, which most of you have probably never seen, but you should go watch and I'll talk about it a bit. And he also was in the black comedy Sorted Lives, which is an incredible, incredible movie that was originally a play, became a movie, and then also became a television show on Logo, which he played the same character, Brother Boy, who

In 2020, he became a viral sensation when the COVID-19 lockdown happened. He took to his Instagram while living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and he started making these videos that everyone began to love. And his Instagram grew from 80,000 to almost 6 million at his time of death. Leslie Jordan grew up in a deeply conservative part of Tennessee and a very religious part as well, very similar to the three of us in religious conservative backgrounds. And

And I think that's a really good context to bring up because that's where we do share a lot with him. It's that we grew up in a similar part of the world, similar identity. He was older than us and he definitely is part of a generation that is very rare. Men that survived the AIDS epidemic and survived the tell-the-tell. And we just want to reflect on him today. Well, even just to hear you talk about how he really took off during pandemic lockdown with his Instagram videos.

He owned the Instagram quarantine lockdown video before any of the young kids were getting it right. He was one of the first to really lean into that and make the medium his own. And, you know, besides just looking at the ways in which he was groundbreaking on a level of just seeing queerness on screen.

He was one of those rare celebrities that was able to manifest fame and celebrity in a different and new way in every phase of his life. A lot of people, they have a good run in their 20s, 30s, 40s and kind of phase out. He didn't phase out. He found ways to stay fresh,

to stay in front of us and to appeal to all ages of people up until his death. That'd be impressive for a straight person. But to do it as a queer person, hats off to you, Leslie, like a true consummate professional. You know, he was very good at being himself. Yeah. It's also kind of funny, you know, he had a 40-year career. It's sad to realize I need to start using past tense language when talking about Leslie Jordan.

But, you know, even his introduction to me and I think to us, you know, watching Will & Grace when the three of us were in middle school, he was already like a white-haired older man, I think, in our face. And so you're right. It is interesting, you know, in the way our country and our culture and gay people can be even more brutal.

in terms of ageism. There was an interesting vitality and immortality to Leslie Jordan for the reason you pointed out, Sam, that he was so authentically in love with who he was at every moment of his life.

It meant that he wasn't trying to compete with the different archetypes, the different ways particularly white gay men are supposed to look, supposed to present themselves because he was able to just like no one can do me like I do me. And that's always going to be relevant. And so you're right. It's like it becomes four decades of just being gay.

captivating. Yeah. Well, and then it's like when you read the obit for someone like Leslie Jordan and look back on queer cinema he was involved in decades ago that most people don't even realize exists, it makes someone like me even more upset when a young kid like Harry Styles says a few months ago, I'm going to teach you kids how gay movies work. Right. You know, there's just... The arrogance. The arrogance. And so I hope that his death...

reminds all of us to seek out some of these queer trailblazers and these queer legends who were making queer content since before we were born. There's a rich history there, even if we don't know that it is there, you know? And so this should be a good week for us to have an education in Leslie.

and an education in queer history. Yeah. And what I love, last night I revisited Eating Out, All You Can Eat. And tell folks what it is. Okay. I always tell people. So it's very, very campy. So at a time, there was a place called Blockbuster. Blockbuster.

Some of you remember. Oh, yes. And it's where you went to rent videotapes. And for us as queer people, there were sections called special interests. The gay ennui of like walking that aisle to make sure no one else is there before you got that low-key porn. Where you go pick up your Julia Roberts movie and maybe, you know, Latter-day Saints, the gay movie. And you would be able to rent these movies that were definitely rated R, but they didn't really flag a lot. And you can kind of take them home and watch them.

And Eating Out was one of the first, I would say it was the first and probably still the biggest of this like late 90s, early 2000s rom-com series. There are seven installments of it. And you know, the kind of ideas, like there's always like a love story, it's a gay rom-com, it's super pornographic and explicit, really racist. Like the jokes I was watching last night are really racially staged.

They do not age well, to be very clear. But they were kind of all we had. And it was at a time and it was a place for us to reflect and make jokes. Like in Eating Out, this third installment, they make jokes about Matthew Shepard five years after his death. And it's not a joke joke. It's more of a way that we could come together as queer people and talk about the realities that we're in. And that's what comedy does. And Leslie Jordan was always in the center of that for us to kind of see ourselves and laugh at ourselves.

Because he always played this closeted queer person that you always knew he was queer. His entire career, that's what's so special about him, is that because he was so effeminate and so small and not masculine and not traditionally attractive, he was always queer in the most broad definition. And that was his strength. Because before a lot of these networks and shows would let someone be openly gay on TV, you had to kind of dance around it. And who could better dance around being queer-coded than Leslie Jordan? He was so queer-coded.

Exactly. And so something about Eating Out that was interesting is that it kind of is like this visit back to the past of not only how we all consume queer media, but how queer media was presented to us. And the biggest tropes at the time were the gay best friend, which I didn't realize until last night. We have grown out of it and we haven't talked about it. That we no longer are only shown as gays with a fag hag next to us. So we were always presented in these kind of like heteronormative stereotypes.

And I don't know, I just wanted to flag that because I was like, when did that happen? When did the Will & Grace archetype go away? And when did we begin to grow? Because Leslie Jordan was a part of that. He was kind of pushing against that through his own career. And it's interesting because I do think Leslie Jordan's career is an interesting window to conversations about representation. Because even on Will & Grace, which obviously...

is a show right about a straight cisgender woman and her gay cisgender best friend right like that is the setup that's the whole point but it's interesting on like you go up to the side track because yeah like Leslie Jordan's character which is named Beverly Leslie which feels like a a

Like you said, he was always kind of playing himself. That was part of the point and part of what made it so fun. He has a life of his own and his relationship with Karen Walker, like his would-be duo partner, is oppositional, actually. Like they're not leaning on each other. So I think even in that part of the conversation,

comedy is that they both have their own character integrity and know that they don't like need each other. They are like peers in each other's world and thus they can trade barbs as equals. And so there was an independence in his character. Like he wasn't leaning on straight characters for validation.

And there was just like a range of like what he got to do emotionally. I think that when you have a setup where you're the gay best friend, all you can be is supportive and helpful. I love you, girl. You're the best. It's so great. That's a good point. He was her frenemy. He was hateful. He was mean, right? And there were just more emotions present in that performance because he didn't just have to be –

Support staff, you know? I don't know. I think it's really groundbreaking what he was doing. I also want to point out that Saeed wrote about Leslie on his sub stack this morning, and I just found it so beautiful. There's a graph that really spoke to me, Saeed. You wrote, quote, I heard the victory of escape and the lilt of your voice, your being Leslie. You continue, you savored every word and every pause, and God, I loved you for it.

A child doesn't have to understand science to know that sunlight feels right, good, and necessary. I love that. He was sunlight. He was sunlight. And thank you for making that plain for us. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, people can read the ode on my sub stack. I just, I had to take a beat this morning and pay homage because I,

I think representation politics have become very literal in a way that's quickly becoming unproductive. I don't think actually I've really felt a need to see myself, my literal self.

on the screen. Like, I feel like that's what representation has become. It's like checking boxes. Does this character match, like, this list of five or six attributes that add up to who I am? That's never quite been it for me. What I've wanted and what I've always loved in the performances of someone like Leslie Jordan, I've wanted people who...

felt human to me and who I felt if those characters leaped off the screen and interacted with me, they would see my humanity. It's the same reason why like Toni Morrison's work, you know, the first time I read Sula, I fell in love with her writing because I was like, oh, I know these women.

I know these women. It wasn't like, oh, Toni Morrison wrote Saeed Jones into it. It wasn't that. She wrote characters who, if they interacted with Saeed Jones, our humanities would echo each other. And I think, you know, in the way Leslie Jordan, his relationship to being a Southern person, his relationship to Christianity and faith, which he talked about, you know, and that he was often playing closeted or like…

closeted in plain sight, glass closeted characters, which I think is very much a Southern trope. Like people, I don't know what people outside the South are doing, but as the three of us from the South know, an interesting aspect of Southern culture is that you will grow up with people who never come out because they never felt they needed to. They're like, what are you talking about? They won't even identify necessarily as gay or trans. And they're like, those terms aren't me. No,

Yes. And they'll be euphemism for it. Yes. Their roommate, their special friend, et cetera. I mean, just to put a pin in this. They named themselves. Oh, yeah. I was on the phone with my mother yesterday and she called my boyfriend my friend. And like, that's how deep it is. Yes. She's met that man. Yeah. And that's where like, I mean, Leslie Jordan in the movie Sword Dead Lives, he played brother boy where he is literally a drag queen taking after Tammy Wynette, the country singer. And his family like won't talk

about it in an explicit way, but they're like, oh, he like is Tammy. And that's why I'm going to miss Leslie so much is that to your point, Saeed, he gave us consistently a very real queer representation. There wasn't a fully realized, you know, we watch movies like Love, Simon, and there's this arc of, I come out, I fall in love, everything's great. And Leslie Jordan showed us in Will and Grace that you may never come out. You may marry a woman. You may have a black lover named Benji, and you may live in a glass closet in New York City still because your family's so homophobic and you need your wife to pay your bills.

and that's going to be okay. And you can still find joy in that. And I think that's what I love about him is that just because you're not this fully developed, queer, empowered 2.5 kids doesn't mean you're going to be sad. Like, I don't think Leslie was ever sad. He just bought his first condo last month or two months ago in West Hollywood and he was 67 years old and he was

He was joyful. And that is something that we should all look to is that life isn't, you know, the full fairy tale or Cinderella story. It could be a bumpy, closeted, glass rollercoaster of a ride. And you could be laughing the whole time. It might not be right. It can be okay. And also someone like Leslie Jordan just leaned into exactly who they were. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, his ambitions for himself were to be just himself. And it paid out. Like, you know, at the end, he left this earth more loved than ever before. And it's because he was always himself. And I'm sure that was never easy. I mean, the man was sober for most of his life. He battled addiction and he kept persevering. And I think that's the story people should take is that like, just be yourself and it's going to be okay. This is what I want all of the folks trying to make queer content right now to think about. Go back to Leslie Jordan. Go back to that work. It's a masterclass.

Not just Harry Styles. Oh, y'all. Check it out. Because that's the difference. I think there's like a narcissism sometimes to representation and representation politics. Or it's like, if I'm not on screen, then it's not real. And it's like, no, it's like real people and humanities. And that means honoring all of the nuances. And anyway, Leslie Jordan, we love you. You will always be famous, baby. Jen and regret. Tell folks how to find your sub stack, Saeed. Oh, my sub stack, saeedjones.substack.com.

The easiest URL. All right. Well, it's time for us to take a quick break, but stay tuned. We will be right back.

This message is brought to you by McDonald's. Did you know only 7.3% of American fashion designers are Black? Well, McDonald's 2024 Change Leaders program is ready to change the face of fashion. The innovative program awards a monetary grant to five emerging Black American designers and pairs each with an industry professional to help them elevate their brands. I

I know specifically and distinctly how McDonald's can support and empower not just black Gen Z, but black people. My first job was McDonald's. I learned a lot there about customer service and how to relate to people. I still love that place and go there very often. Look out for the change of fashion designers and mentors.

We are back. You're listening to Vibe Check. And now we have to talk about my favorite Tempest in a teapot from Twitter last week. This was a...

Garden Lady Coffee Drama. Y'all followed this, right? Oh, yeah. Unfortunately, deeply concerned about it. Yeah. So where to begin? Let's start with the tweet itself. Last week on Twitter.com, a woman none of us knew before last week. Her name is Daisy Miller. She tweeted the following. Quote.

My husband and I wake up every morning and bring our coffee out to our garden and sit and talk for hours every morning. It never gets old. Love him so much. Seems safe enough, huh? Seems safe enough. And I'll say, I saw this tweet. Someone retweeted it pretty early on. I'll admit I rolled my eyes. Yeah.

I'm not a morning person. I'm not trying to talk. I was like, every morning. But I didn't feel angry. I didn't feel anything very strongly. I was just like, love that for you, I guess. And I kept him. To me, I was like, oh, look, a Pinterest board as a tweet. That was literally my first thought. You know what I mean? Yeah. But then. Then it went crazy. So this tweet ends up getting tens of thousands of retweets and quote tweets and comments everywhere.

And most of them are viscerally angry. I think, Saeed, you said it was like some Les Mis lyrics up in there. It was. I mean, because that's the thing. I was like, well, it's Twitter. We know these social platforms are, in fact, like emotion engines. And the engine is toward negativity. That's how it's spelled. So I was like, I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of the replies are people, you know, being haters or.

But instead, they were like bringing their portable guillotines. I want to read a few of the craziest tweets in response to Coffee Lady. I think my favorite one was, quote, I wake up every day with chronic pain, tarsal tunnel syndrome, and wash my OCD medication down with an iced oat milk latte. But whatever, potato, potato, am I right? Another one said, quote,

This is cute and all, but did you think of all the people who wake up to work grueling hours, wake up on the streets alone or with chronic pain before posting this? You should be mindful next time before bragging about your picture perfect life. You might upset someone. Someone else said, I mean, good for you, but one, don't y'all work?

Two, hours seems like a stretch to me. Three, don't y'all run out of shit to talk about. You can't sit and talk to someone for hours every single day. There's not enough going on to do that. Especially if half the day is y'all talking. Oh my God. Y'all, I have to say-

This just really confirmed something my therapist told me years ago. He said anger is a secondary emotion and whenever you're angry, it's connected to something else. And all we're seeing is people are really mad right now about people just like going to have... And also her garden isn't like, you know...

Versailles. It is, like, she has a plot of land. She's, like, lives, we don't know where she lives, but she doesn't live in, like, an urban jungle where she has a bunch of land. Like, she lives in, like, middle America, has a yard, is sitting outside with her husband. Like, what? It has been wild to see how she's responded to this. She's actually taken it all in stride and been a really good sport about it. But she, like, shared some photos of her garden to be like, it ain't no mansion, baby. It's a yard. Yeah.

And it's funny, someone, because I tweeted just like aghast at what was going on. And someone was like, the irony is her response, as you say, are so like diplomatic and calm. I was like, actually, it's proof that a healthy morning routine clearly is. She proves the point. Yeah, she proves her own point just in how she's interacting with people. But it's interesting to me that, I mean, there was all kinds of chaos, but it became this class thing. And I was like, you know, reading her tweet over and over, I feel like

you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get to this assumption of wealth. It wasn't like I read her tweet and was like, oh, she must be like Oprah, who when Oprah talks about her garden, she's talking about like acres and acres and acres. Yeah, she has like a grove of

of like ancient oak trees. That's Oprah's quote unquote garden. She loves avocado so much she created an avocado field. Like, come on. I was like, that's not, there's nothing in this tweet to indicate their garden could be on a fire escape. Like for all we know, it was just so odd that that's a

And then the second, it was like, when do you go to work? Like this obsession with people's work. And I think her job is gardening. It's like, y'all leave her alone. Yeah, and I think she was like, my husband teaches yoga classes. I just like, for me, it underscores something that I think we should all be reminded of. Twitter is not actually real. Twitter is this internet hellscape of emotional performance and performance art. Yeah.

No one in the real world is as angry as they pretend to be on Twitter. And we should keep that in mind before we let Twitter or tweets ruin our day. They're going to be angry over something all the time, and you've got to find your joy in spite of it. And I don't know. I find Coffee Garden Lady an inspiration because she is saying to the world through all of this, your joy is not a crime, and your joy is allowed. I don't know. So it's like this comical story, this absurdity of tweets story for me underscores –

kind of a larger, bigger, good truth. Like, just be joyous. You can have joy. Hold on to that. Has joy finally died on the internet? Is it just gone? No.

Are we over? Because people keep doing these nostalgic tweets where they'll say specifically BuzzFeed stuff. And maybe my Twitter's like oriented towards this being ex-BuzzFeed. But they'll be like, I miss the internet between 2012 and 2015. I miss gold dress, blue dress Twitter. Yes, people like talk about this era. I miss where's the mama Twitter. Yes. And I'm like, it's not wrong. I do miss the dress. The dress like, you know, took over the whole internet. It was just a dress. It was so fun.

But it does feel like joy and the internet have maybe disappeared. It feels like we're years away from like all the memes about Jason Derulo tumbling down the stairs at the Met Gala. Even that shit was fun. I just feel like...

Something has happened and it's been happening for years. But we're in this place now where Twitter is really only doing anger. It's annoying to me. Well, I think Twitter is real because it is coming from us. It is a part of our interiority. If a young man spends hours online as an incel tweeting about misogyny and his hate and

That is not real. Like, that is a part of how he's engaging life. I think what we're seeing on Twitter is, like, it's like our interiority. You know, we are performing, sure, but the performance requires us to enact it, you know? I think what we're seeing is pain. Pain everywhere.

a sense of bereftness, of loss that maybe we are better at masking in the physical world because you're right. You're walking down the street, there are these social norms that keep us from just like walking up to a stranger and being like, how did you spend your morning? There's these inhibitions that prevent us from doing it. But clearly enough people

have this inside them, which makes me sad. So I think I would just say, in kind of thinking about Leslie Jordan's joy and what he lit up and colored in us, to use queerness as an example, I think there are two sides of a coin when you're struggling with your sexuality. One side of the coin is

You're closeted, you're figuring this out, you're really struggling. You see a fierce gay person, you see a Leslie Jordan, you see a fierce drag queen, you see a fierce trans woman walking down the street, you know, owning themselves.

The two sides of the coin. On one side, your response may be inspiration. You may see that and go, oh, this is beautiful, right? Like you see the woman talking about the garden and you don't have a garden, but you're like, I want one now. I want, like this is going to go on my Pinterest board. The other side of the coin, unfortunately, is what I think we're seeing a lot of now, which is why don't I have that? They must be lying. That can't be true. Like a negative pushback.

Yeah, or what I see a lot with the performance of Twitter anger and performance of anger that folks would never do out in these streets. You know, they would not shout at this lady's garden to her face. I would hope not. I would hope not. But what I see happening is...

I'm anxious about the state of the world. I'm anxious about our politics. I'm anxious about anti-Semitism. I'm anxious about climate change. I'm anxious about inflation in the economy. I'm anxious about queer rights. And I feel disempowered. What can I do? What can I do? What can I do? Where does my anger go? Where does my insecurity go?

Damn. ...about this woman, I do not know. It's an easy way to have a pressure valve release, you know? But what if the answer is to just, like, leave Twitter for a bit and go get your own garden, go touch your own grass, go make your own coffee? Like, it's a reminder for me that, like...

Spending too much time on a place like Twitter, it makes everybody unhappy. You got to put it down. I do think there's like, you're right. This is textbook projection happening. And I love that you said misdirection. Yeah, it's like misdirection projection. It's like, we're not talking about this woman's garden. This woman, like as to the context, this woman was not an influencer before. She didn't have this huge following. She was just a person on the internet. It would be different if we're talking about Gwyneth Paltrow in the middle of the pandemic.

Or like Kim Kardashian. Like, oh, every time I'm sad, I get on my private jet and fly. Exactly. But this is like white lady living her life, not hurting anybody. Not even being racist. We haven't even seen, because we would have found out by now if she was racist or something really messed up. You know they were looking. You know they were looking. This is a nice white lady just having coffee with her man. And we just had to like project all the stuff onto her. So no, I think you're both right. It is more of like a temp check of the culture where we're at.

Yeah. How we're feeling, what we're dealing with. I would just say in – and I have to do this too. It's good to have these temperature checks where you pause and you say, think about your last three to five interactions with X person. And I've done this with people I love. I realized that, you know what? The last three to five times I interacted with them, I said something sarcastic.

And I'm assuming they know I love them and that the sarcasm's out of joke or it's my own. But all I've done is given them barbs and thorns. And I think on Twitter, maybe it's the ephemeral, maybe it's the nature of the timeline. I think there's this thing where we can forget and not look at the big picture of how we're interacting with people. Which is why I don't like trying to divorce Twitter from real life and say, no, it's real, baby. Let's own it. And look at your own tweets. Look at your last 10 tweets.

And just see if you would put them in a positive, negative, or neutral box. And it's like, if it was all negative, maybe that's something to think about. And it's like, yeah, we can talk about technology and everything going in the world. But at the end of the day, all we can control is ourselves. Yeah. You know? And I think we need some of that introspection. Yeah. Because she really wasn't bothering anybody.

She really wasn't. My grandmother always told me, if everywhere you go, it stinks, you might be the garbage. If everywhere you go, if everywhere you go, there's some nastiness, there's some negativity, maybe it's you. Maybe it's you. Listen. I have a few texts to send with that. That's a word. Ooh.

Wow. We needed that. On that note, I want to send my best to Leslie Jordan up in gay heaven and also my best to Coffee Garden Lady. I'm staying with you, queen. I'm going to go find you in that garden and we'll have some coffee together. I'm vibing with you. I'm vibing with you. Anywho. We're going to take one more quick break. Do not go anywhere when we come back to Vibe Check. Recommendations.

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And follow the journey of the 2024 McDonald's change leaders on their Instagram page, We Are Golden. Hello, my loves. We are back. And before we end the show, of course, we'd love to share something that's helping us keep our vibe right this week. Zach, let's start with you.

I'm so excited to go first because if you have talked to me privately for weeks, you have known I have been counting the days for Ticket to Paradise starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney. Yes. Just for the press rollout of this movie. Every...

Phenomenal, phenomenal. But, you know, we've seen a lot of conversations about the rom-com is dead. Do we need rom-coms? I love rom-coms. I think rom-coms exist in a very specific format way of doing everything. So this movie I just knew was going to do well, unlike Bros, sadly. And it has done stellar. It is making money. People are going. It's already made $100 million at the Global Box Office. Opening weekend in the U.S. and made over $16 million. That's really good for like...

Gen X older persons rom-com. Yeah, people love them. I'm like, seriously, like, great numbers. It's a huge number. So anyway, I saw the movie. The movie is good. It's not bad. It's not amazing, but it's great. It's like, it takes you back to kind of like a time when Leslie Jordan was on our TV screens every Thursday. It's like a time where things were just like content and it was not perfect and it was just fun. And you know these people. Like, I know this couple that is like, hates each other but ends up together. So I loved it. Highly recommend it. Love it.

Okay. I love it. I love it. Sam, what about you? What's your recommendation? My recommendation for those in the LA area, and I think this show will be touring later on, go to the opera and see an opera called Omar. I have never been to the opera before, but my partner's mother, Miss Linda, she loves the opera. She came down for the weekend. We all went. It was my first opera experience. And I expected a certain thing because I know what I was taught about opera as a kid. This was not it.

It wasn't in Italian. It wasn't in German. It was English. It wasn't all white. It was pretty much all black. The story of Omar is a story of an African member of nobility who ends up in the slave trade, comes to America, flees one plantation for another, and has to grapple with maintaining his Muslim faith or moving towards Christianity. It's really well done. And the librettist is Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. So this is a black show with black writing and black music.

It's a little strange at first, but by the end, there's a whole chorus, a black choir singing opera together. It's very moving. It's very powerful. For those of you who don't think you're opera people, you should be. Go check out Omar. It's great. Okay. Yes. Well, I wish I could. I was about to be like, let me just walk down the street as if I live in L.A. You can't. Your recommendation was that good. I forgot where it was. Also, Omar, the lead.

He's fine. Fine. His face is all over LA right now. He's fine. Fine. Yes. Perfect. My recommendation, well, it's a book, it's a vibe, it's an essay. So the New York Times has a style magazine called Tea Magazine. Yeah. And they have like a book club.

I didn't know about this until recently, but their book club choice this month is Toni Morrison's most experimental novel, Jazz. One of my favorites. Morgan Parker, a friend and incredible poet, wrote an essay about it titled How Toni Morrison Wrote Her Most Challenging Novel. It is one of her more challenging novels in that the entire plot actually is like right up front, like in the

first couple of pages and then it becomes this examination of kind of how the characters got to this moment but it's a jazz age novel it's set in Harlem in the 1920s and a man has an affair with a young woman I think she's actually a teenager and falls in love with her so intensely the novel writes that he killed her just to keep the feelings

going. And then the wife shows up at the funeral and slashes the dead girl's face in the casket. Like, that's literally the book's opening. Damn. It's like very intense. There's so much going on. Opera has nothing on that drama. What I was going to say, that's operatic, but not as intense. So the book has like all of these layers. It's so good. The narrator is like a gossipy neighbor. The novel opens with the letters S-T-H, which black people know as the...

I know that woman. It's just so good. And I just wanted to read a couple sentences because it's also about the great migration, this period where a lot of black people from the south have made their way north and made their ways to cities like Detroit or Philadelphia or Harlem in New York. And she says, when they fall in love with a city, it is forever and it is like forever, as though there was never a time when they didn't love it.

And it's just a couple of sentences. It's so good. And I don't know. I think book clubs can be really great, especially for books like jazz, which are more experimental and more challenging. It's great to like read together. So if y'all decide to read jazz over the next few weeks, know that Saeed Jones is reading it too. And you can tweet me your questions. I will happily talk about it with you. I love that.

Love that bit. All right, my dears. Well, of course, you can tell us about your recommendations. What are you feeling or not feeling this week? Did you see the garden lady? Have you seen her? It sounds like a specter. Have you seen the garden lady off at the edges of the digital realm? Check in with us at vibecheckatstitcher.com.

All right. So thank you guys for tuning in to this week's episode of Vibe Check. If you love the show and want to support us, please make sure to follow the show on your favorite podcast listening platform. Huge thank you to our producer, Shanta Holder, engineer Brendan Burns, and Marcus Hom for our theme music and sound design. Special thanks to our executive producers, Nora Ritchie at Stitcher and Brandon Sharp from Agenda Management and Production. And last but not least, thank you to Jared O'Connell and Amel Deskender for all of their help.

And of course, we want to hear from you. Don't forget, you can email us at vibecheckatstitcher.com and keep in touch with us on Twitter at TheFerocity, at Sam Sanders, and at Zach Stafford. Use the hashtag vibecheckpod because frankly, we're just too lazy to start a new Twitter account at this point. We got things to do. Just use the hashtag. And you can follow us on TikTok at vibecheckpod. Stay tuned for another episode next Wednesday. Bye. Bye. Come on, everyone. Say bye.

Goodbye. Bye. Mind your own coffee. Mind your own garden. Goodbye, folks. Stitcher.

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