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Welcome back to The Monthly Hoot: Witch, Please Productions' Newsletter!

Witch, Please Productions

— 10 min read
Loading: Hot Challengers Summer

Hey lovely people!

I think every month so far this year I’ve opened our newsletter with a comment about the weather. Boring of me, but frankly I need all the warmth and sun I can get. I’m just a lizard chilling on the rock of life. I hope it’s warm where you are, too.

I’m in a period of working in publishing that is, as the poets say, hell, so I’ve been self-soothing with lots of thinking about Challengers, texting Coach about Challengers, and saying “this is just like in Challengers” whenever anything at all happens. If you’ve seen it, let me know which fruity little white boy is your favorite in the comments (I’m writing this at 9 pm, which, as devoted listeners know, is my bedtime, so I apologize for being uncouth).

Okay, enough of that.*

<3,

Gaby, Hannah, Marcelle, Coach, and Zoe

*not really

Coach (blue) and Gaby (gray) having Discussions

Material Girls went on spring break! It was all very girls in bikinis, boys doin’ the twist (one of my favorite episodes of Gilmore Girls ever, fyi). While Material Girls was away, Gender Playground and Making Worlds hopped into your feeds.

In this unlocked episode of Making Worlds, Hannah talks with scholars (and friends) Lucia Lorenzi (she/they), and Clare Mulcahy (she/her) about Dimension 20! They explore the intimacy of collaborative world-making and the magical possibilities of pretending together. Then Lucia and Clare share what they take from Dimension 20 into their own lives. It’s a heartfelt discussion between three friends who really love Dimension 20, so get cozy and enjoy!

Next, we released an episode of Gender Playground on the main feed! This episode begins with an anecdote from Marcelle about the discomfort she feels labelling her daughter Billie as trans, given Billie started using she/her pronouns soon after becoming verbal. Together, Marcelle and Raimi think through the shortcomings and utility of labels, gender as a social construct, and the importance of affirming the gender and gender expression of people of all ages. Raimi then explains “transition” as an umbrella term that includes a range of actions pertaining to internal, social, legal and physical changes and choices folks may make. Marcelle asks some questions and there’s a fair amount of giggling!

DID YOU KNOW? At our $10+ tiers we host bi-monthly watch-alongs on Discord! If you join today, you can hang out with Marcelle and Hannah as they watch The Princess Bride!

We’re gathering at 11 PST/12 MT/1 CST/2 pm ET on Saturday, May 18th!

Marcelle and Hannah basically talk over the film (you can mute them if you want…) and we all chat through messages and it’s simply always a hoot and a half.

Join Our Patreon

Gender Playground’s sixth episode comes out tomorrow! We’re so excited for you to hear it. For that episode, Marcelle and Raimi were joined by Reese Carr, Gender Playground’s incredible Associate Producer without whom we would not be able to make the show. You’ll learn more about them in tomorrow’s episode, but until then, we thought we would introduce you real quick!

This is Reese. They are a Ph.D. candidate in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto and their work focuses on queer and trans kinship, reproductive politics, the ethics of care, and family abolition. So fucking cool, right?? They’re also an avid reader, a gardener, a potter, a dog-lover and an all-around cutie patootie.

It’s time for me to recommend some reads!

For Jack (there are a couple Jacks, this is for the Jack who said their most recent favorite read was The Reanimator’s Heart): You mentioned you like queer romance in a sci-fi setting—boy do I have the book for you. The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer is a YA sci-fi romance that definitely reads more adult. It’s a little sad, a LOT twisty, and there’s a beautiful queer romance at its beating heart.
For Lorraine: *chanting* speculative litfic, speculative litfic! If I love one genre the most, it’s speculative litfic. I’m recommending Open Throat by Henry Hoke, which is written from the perspective of a queer, hungry mountain lion who lives up by the Hollywood sign. Stay with me! It’s a gut punch of a story that manages to combine tenderness with savagery in only 156 pages, and I found it to be incredibly moving.
For Grace: I also love books with Flannery O’Connor vibes that are a little haunted, and I also love body horror in my reading, so I have to recommend Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo. I LOVE this book, as a Southern queer myself, and I’m going to share the blurb from my shelf-talker at my old bookstore below:

Sweaty, blistering, and more than a little bit queer, Lee Mandelo's debut is Southern gothic for a new audience. Summer Sons is an exploration of masculinity and repression, the darkness of academia, and generational trauma; a number of heavy themes that Mandelo explores with nuance and expertise. A novel perfect for people who love the atmosphere of a Flannery O'Connor short story and wish Maggie Stiefvater's "Raven Cycle" quartet had more car chases and bad choices.

So, okay, remember how I said I couldn’t think about anything but Challengers? The theme of this playlist is “sluts playing tennis” and I’ll say everyone delivered in a big way. And that’s that on that.

Get your playlist on Spotify here or Apple Music here.

Have a topic you want us to tackle? Feel free to submit to this form!

Something else you want us to know? You can always email us at ohwitchplease@gmail.com.

Want to talk to us all the time? Join our $30 Patreon tier and find us on Slack, where we live.

Want to sponsor an episode of Gender Playground? Learn more here!

Have a strongly worded comment about this newsletter? You can now reply right on Substack and we’ll be able to see it and even reply! Just be nice to us.

You can also leave us a review for Material Girls or Gender Playground on Apple Podcasts! We love that. Thank you podprofesh for your review of Gender Playground!

Musical comedy is one of my favourite genres, and it’s REALLY hard one to do well, because the music has to be genuinely good in addition to being funny. That’s why I believe that Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020) is one of the greatest movies ever made and why I think Schmigadoon! is an almost perfect show (except I find Cecily Strong very cringe, I’m sorry, we can fight about it in the comments). But you know what IS a perfect show? Girls5eva. Starring Sara Bareilles, Busy Phillipps, Paula Pell, and Renée Elise Goldsberry of Hamilton fame, it’s about a one-hit wonder girl group from the 90s who decide to give it another shot, except now they’re middle aged women with kids and careers and very little understanding of how the contemporary music business operates. Everyone in this show is a comic genius, every song is perfect, and it’s got the kind of joke density that rewards rewatching which is great because I’m on a lot of pain killers and muscle relaxants right now and my brain isn’t holding onto new content very well. Peacock cancelled the show after their first two seasons but miracle of miracles it moved to Netflix and we got a third season. If you haven’t watched it yet, do yourself a favour and go binge the whole thing right now and then let me know what song stays stuck in your head the longest. Mine is B.P.E.: “open up those classified files from the department of treasury, big pussy energy!” I have a PhD in literature so I’m qualified to tell you that this is actually a perfect song lyric.
I resisted the "hipster" label furiously as a youth, but like... why? Hindsight is, as they say, 20-20. And for most of my 20s (haha do u get it) I wore a sideways belt and lived in the Plateau of Montreal; I was neighbours with Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade and I'm friendly acquaintances with Bry Webb of the Constantines. I'm not a music snob, but I am a musician snob and I want you to know that I'm friends with Charlotte Cornfield. If this isn't some hipster bullshit, then WHAT. IS. The point is, I love thinking of myself as someone with solid, varied taste in music, whom you can rely upon to recommend good listens. And those of you who agree with me that I do indeed have exquisite taste in music must be wondering where I keep discovering incredible artists now that I am a normal adult who lives out West and stays home most nights. The answer is satisfyingly consistent with my youthful hipster bullshit: it's the CBC. Very specifically, I'm recommending the nightly CBC radio program Afterdark hosted by Odario Williams. I LOVE this show. Williams is a great broadcaster with an elegant command of the microphone. He's a performer himself so it's not surprising that he talks about music with both affection and admiration (I think the same is true for his colleagues, like Julie Nasrallah and Rich Terfry). But what I think makes Afterdark so exceptional as a listening experience is its nighttime broadcast schedule. There's an intimacy between listener and host that you just don't get during a busy day, and Odario Williams is particularly skilled at maintaining a rapport with his listeners. I just feel like I can trust him with my evenings, you know? So if you're looking for a reliable source for new music that isn't an algorithm, tune into Afterdark and let the music bring you home
I will tell you what… I am not cooking enough to feel like the full-grown adult that I am. I have made a vat of couscous salad for two weeks in a row and every two hours you can see me hovered over it with a spoon like the goblin I am. The recipe? A cup of cooked couscous, a chopped cucumber, chopped cherry tomatoes, a drained can of garbanzo beans, corn (I love corn), chopped white onion, feta cheese, and shredded basil leaves (and pine nuts if you are rich). Then you dress it with vinaigrette. I do: olive oil, a teaspoon of mustard, a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, a teaspoon of maple syrup, salt and pepper! I never measure so I cannot guarantee ratios — just use your palette to decide what you need!
Recently I really wanted to read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire again. I think I just wanted to re-experience the excitement I felt reading it as a kid. But, as long time Witch, Please listeners know we don’t purchase any HP products new because we don’t want to give JK any more money than she already has. To get around this I visited my nearby used book store (Carson Books & Records), a teeny place with a dusty (moldy?) smell, complete with an older shop owner in a fedora. The place was organized to fit the shop owners tastes, so I had to ask for his help to find the book. Luckily he had a copy! I bought it for 9 bucks! In good condition! For full transparency, I couldn’t even get through the first chapter of Goblet of Fire because the fatphobia was so blatant and horrible! Like wow! So, I don’t recommend re-reading Goblet of Fire. But, if like me, you get that sudden urge to reread one of the HP books from your youth, go to your local used book store to find it.
I simply can’t lie to you all. I’m reading nearly every published piece of Challengers fanfiction available to me on AO3. Sorry!!! I’m never going to publicly share my bookmarks or username because that’s between me and god, but if you also couldn’t get enough that slutty little movie and want to set feminism back by a couple years, slide into my DMs and I’ll link you to my favorites. My mom gets these newsletters, so I’m leaving it at that.

Okay, bye! xoxo

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