COVID strikes again. (Well, for me anyway.)
If you read my last dispatch and thought, “Sounds like Christie’s flying a little too close to the sun,” congratulations: you were correct! I came down with what is (I think1) my third case of COVID-19 sometime last weekend, as unfortunately did both my mom and my dad who was in town visiting. I didn’t test positive until the day he left, though, and we had a great time. Here’s a photo of us at a Dodgers game, where I somehow didn’t realize that we’d be seated on the actual surface of the sun:
Turns out that Shohei Ohtani’s real good at the baseball, have you heard? He cracked a home run during the game we caught that made me, a person who barely speaks sportsball, go “WHOA”. It’s fun to see people be good at their jobs, turns out!
Anyway. I hope that this current wave of the plague spares your house, or if it visits, that it’s merely annoying as it has been for me. We’ve got some busy months coming up, y’all…
what’s living rent-free in my head this week
the things that have kept me entertained as I recover from the plague
The last time I had COVID (late June 2024) I was coming off of a short film shoot and going straight into having a short musical piece in a space-themed performance art festival hosted by the City of Los Angeles and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (as one does), and suffice it to say, I did not take the best care of myself. It’s a quirk of scheduling that I managed to get sick this time going into the only week in the next three months that I had literally nothing on the calendar other than my day job. And even if I hadn’t, I learned my lesson last time: by chilling the F out this time, the whole recovery process has been relatively easy and painless.
That said, it’s meant a mind-numbing amount of time spent at home alone. My number one symptom has been low energy, though, so 1) I don’t have a pop culture deep dive to share this week, sadly, but 2) while I haven’t done much, I have at least spent some time consuming things I can enthusiastically recommend, so here I am, doing just that! (Expect more of my on-brand shenanigans next time.)
That Thing You Do! (1996; dir. Tom Hanks)
First of all, I revisited one of my all-time favorite movies, Tom Hanks’s That Thing You Do! (1996). It’s probably deeply unsurprising to anyone who reads this or knows me personally that I love this film, given that it’s a meticulously crafted love letter to mid-1960s pop music (the dead center of my wheelhouse), but what may surprise you to hear is that for a brief time in 1995-96, I was angry that this movie existed???
Here’s the story: when Tom Hanks was in pre-production for the film, he put out a call for songs to find THE song this movie would be centered around. (I sadly don’t know the specifics of this call for submissions — if it was an open contest, or if certain folks were invited to submit. I haven’t been able to locate any information about this process.) If you’ve seen the movie, you know how crucial the quality of the song is to the entire thing. It has to be a perfect slice of 1965 power pop, earwormy to a fault.
All I do know is that the song that came in second when the submissions were ranked featured my uncle Jim Baugher, a brilliant session player and one of Louisville’s most beloved gigging musicians, on bass. And so when I heard that the song that my uncle played on wasn’t picked, I got angry, and refused to see the movie when it came out on principle.
I then finally saw That Thing You Do! at a slumber party a year later and realized that not only was it an absolute gem, so was the winning song, by the late, brilliant Adam Schlesinger. It’s a perfect song.
I’m sad to say that I’ve never actually heard the song my uncle played on (he passed away in 2014, and I never got to ask him about it), but my hope is that someday it turns up. Wilder things have happened. Maybe someday I’ll get the chance to meet with Tom Hanks and ask if he has a copy.
(Well, that’ll be my second question. My first will be “have you ever considered turning That Thing You Do! into a Broadway musical, and are you interested in hearing why I’m the guy for the job?2”)
It’s a legitimately great movie — well worth seeking out for the first or hundredth time. Sadly it’s not streaming for free anywhere at the moment (though it’s rentable/purchasable on Prime), but every so often it’ll pop up on Hulu if you keep an eye out.
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie (2025)
Speaking of my wheelhouse, I mentioned a few weeks back that I’d started and was hugely enjoying
’s new book about the creative and personal relationship of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and now, having just finished it, I can say definitively: I loved this book. As a person who’s been reading a lot about the Beatles lately (I can’t help it, they’re my soap opera, my Rashomon; it’s a prismatic story that fascinates me from every angle and I’m in too deep), I can say with some authority that this book is really special. If you enjoy reading/hearing what I have to say on the subject of music (like, for example, my recent post about “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” in Oklahoma! and the power of suspensions in musical storytelling), you’ll appreciate the thoughtful dissection of the Lennon/McCartney canon in this book, and how movingly it charts their story as told by their songs. Very near the end I had to set it aside for an hour because I was too shaken by where I knew it was headed — and again, I’m a person who’s probably reading 2-4 books about the Beatles at any given time.
Pee-wee as Himself (2025, dir. Matt Wolf)
Last night I finally watched the second half of the Paul Reubens documentary Pee-wee as Himself on HBO Max, and it’s as devastating as I’d expected it to be. People talk a lot about the reawakening of core memories nowadays, and consuming Pee-wee Herman content for me as an adult is nothing but that sensation. When I saw Pee-wee’s Big Adventure for the first time in decades on the big screen at Vidiots last year, I was struck by just how formative he was to my aesthetic (particularly my eclectic midcentury maximalist decorating sense):
But the documentary unlocked another long-buried memory: the sadness I felt every Saturday morning when Pee-wee would get on his scooter and leave the playhouse as the end credits rolled on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. It was a place I never wanted to leave. I’m so grateful for the wild, singular thing that Paul Reubens and his collaborators created and how much love was baked into its bones. He knew on some level how much it would mean to weird little kids like me. I’m so glad he got the chance to tell his story, complicated though it may have been. Even if Pee-wee has never meant anything to you, you should still check out this documentary — it’s a really stunning portrait of the highs and lows of making art, and the great personal cost that sometimes comes with it.
Cheddar Blast! Pirate’s Booty
The true MVP of my quarantine.
what’s next?
Well, I still haven’t seen Superman. (Oops.) I have, however, watched an ungodly amount of Antiques Roadshow (honestly the perfect show when your focus comes and goes in bursts) and here’s an appraisal relevant to the interests of anyone waiting for news about my writing (which is coming soon!) — a Zelda Fitzgerald painting from 1935.
in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog
It’s my second confirmed case; I would swear on everything I own that I had it in February 2020, and that I caught it in the waiting room of a CityMD in upper Manhattan. I prefer “early adopter” to “hipster”, thanks. I also once read the riot act to a guy who’d led me on and stood me up one too many times after bumping into him in the waiting room of a different CityMD. (One of the most deranged and satisfying experiences of my life, made more so by the fact that I’d literally just had emergency surgery to drain a staph infection and was already in A Mood.) It’s just a place fraught with drama for me, what can I say?
Keeping the pre-existing diegetic songs, of course. I’m no fool.
Friend I hope you’re feeling better!! Also I would have loved to been a fly on the wall when you cussed that loser out. Stand YOU up?? The gall!!!
I always enjoy your regularly scheduled deep-dives, but this installment lacked nothing. Principled if misinformed teenage spite and rebellion, followed years later by understanding and reconciliation… a heartwarming story that reminds me of simpler times.