7 posts that never saw the light of day

newsletters I started writing and never finished

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of this newsletter. I want to be more intentional about what I post and when, and to write y’all with more ease. Basically I want to evolve and get better at doing this, and this led me to look through my old notebooks, draft folders, and Stickies—places where I go to brainstorm and jot down ideas for TV Dinner posts. I’ve been writing this newsletter for almost 5 years now, which means a lot of failed attempts and writing projects that just never panned out.

In the spirit of spring cleaning, I thought it would be fun to share 7 posts that I outlined, began writing, or even just thought about writing, but weren’t strong or topical enough to survive. A kind of extended director's cut, if you will. Read to the end for a long thing about Shakers. xoxo, Maddy

unrelated but this is Vin Diesel, the puppy I’m currently fostering

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90 Day Fiancé sex work essay: The winter of 2022-2023 was a real low point in my life and unrelated to the turmoil, but not not its own source of turmoil, was this mega-essay I was trying to write about sex work and 90 Day Fiancé. I am a dedicated, longtime 90 Day Fiancé viewer and I was inspired by Scaachi Koul’s essay about the show, which is one of my all-time favorite pop culture essays. My favorite bit: “Technically-- and purely technically--90 Day is focused on the idea of love. The same questions arise in every episode: Can love conquer all? Are they actually in love? Will everyone accept their love? The answers are always No, No, and Absolutely Not.“

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You really get a full gamut of what contemporary sex work looks like on 90 Day, from webcamming to OnlyFans to what many cast members refer to as “foreign dating apps.” There’s also sex tourism and the fact that many of the non-Americans are resort and hospitality workers in the Global South. The show compares sex work to marriage in a way that is stark and kind of radical, maybe?? There are also soooo many sex scenes, some of which are super tame and some that edge on soft-core porn or fetish content (the scene where a post-BBL Jasmine dresses up as a nurse and presents Gino with a case of vaginal dilators is burned into my memory.) Someone needs to write a PhD dissertation about the sex scenes in 90 Day Fiancé and what that says about like, othered bodies in U.S. immigration narratives or something.

Ultimately I didn’t know enough about sex work or porn to make this essay work, but maybe you do and you should write this!! A big challenge is narrowing down a specific season or couple, since TLC has been churning 90 Day Fiancé and its many spin-offs for over a decade at this point.

“midwesterners who hate target:” In 2020, I turned out a weak draft of an essay about how going to Target is actually depressing because everything there is crap or a box of Millennial-coded organic cotton tampons. Now it’s cool to boycott Target, but this would have been super controversial a few years ago.

Reflection on advice writing: Big, long essay on this very weird thing that I do!! I still plan on writing this, but in the far-off future when I’ve retired and no longer write queer advice.

“scratch city:” This was a 3000-word draft of an essay of all the different jobs I’ve had and my relationship to money, class, work, and my parents, plus what it was like to graduate from college in 2013 and not get any sort of decent job. It culminated in how I got obsessed with scratch tickets in the winter of 2023-2024. Definitely too personal to share and absolutely bonnnkers, though a parred down version appeared in this diary post. The happy ending is that I have not purchased a scratch ticket in several months. The monkey is off my back, so to speak.

Family estrangement: There have been so many articles about estrangement between children and parents running in legacy media lately, I think due to the popularity of the Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents book. But if you’re queer and/or trans, you definitely know many people who have no relationship with their family-of-origin (maybe you’re estranged as well.) I never figured out an actual angle for this but I’m interested when something as ancient and human as “family members not speaking to each other” is spun into a recent phenomenon.

Searingly honest breakdown of my income and finances: I love personal finance content and appreciate it SO MUCH when artists and writers are transparent about how they support themselves. Writers, especially, have such different situations and career trajectories and there’s so much cloudiness around how anyone makes this work. Ultimately this feels too personal and emotionally loaded to share. You gotta have boundaries!!

Searingly honest breakdown of my income and finances

“Hot Shaker Facts”—“Hot Shaker Facts“ was a post where I listed all my most interesting facts about SHAKERS!! But what is a Shaker, you ask? The Shakers are an American utopian movement and separatist sect of Christians who practice celibacy and communal living. They’re called Shakers because from the late 1700s to the Civil War, their worship included ecstatic singing and dancing. After the Civil War, they got really into nature and started doing more contemplative worshipping outdoors. I don’t know what accounted for this shift.

You may have noticed that I’m talking about the Shakers in present tense and that’s because there are still 2 living Shakers. You could move to Maine and be their 3rd.

More Hot Shaker Facts

• The Shakers view hard work and craftsmanship as spiritual practice; one of their sayings was, “We can do hard things.“ Just kidding, that’s Glennon Doyle! It was “Hands to work, hearts to God.“

• The Shakers consider Mother Ann Lee, an illiterate factory worker who was born in Manchester, England in 1736, to be the second coming of Christ. In 1774, Mother Ann and eight followers left England and came to New York to worship in peace and find more disciples. They were successful, but their dancing and refusal to take sides in the Revolutionary War aroused suspicion (Shakers are pacifists and don’t identify as citizens of any country.) In 1784, Mother Ann was attacked by an angry mob and died one year later from her injuries.

• Mother Ann is being played by Amanda Seyfried in an upcoming movie musical called Ann Lee. I hope it renews interest in Shakers because a lot of their communities and buildings are in rough shape.

look at this round barn at the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfiel, MA! no one had built a round barn before!! the barn had trap doors that allowed manure to fall into the basement, where it was used for compost

• Shakers believed in gender equality and their communities reimagined what society could look like without heterosexual marriage. Men and women ate, slept, and worked separately, but came together to worship and hold leadership positions

• They believed in celibacy and propagated their ranks by adopting orphans and taking in wayward women and their children at a time when women weren’t allowed to be economically independent and divorce was illegal (lawsuits from angry ex-husbands trying to get their kids and wives back are one of the reasons the Shakers went into decline after the Civil War, as well as the inciting incident behind the only Shaker murder.)

• On YouTube, there are a handful of videos of actors recreating Shaker dances and they are all pretty anemic. I really believe the real thing was a lot more raucous (just look at the illustration below). If you lived at a time before recorded music and sound amplification, stomping and singing with a hundred other people probably went so hard.

• Shaker communities and worship services were open to the public. Prominent 19c writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville visited and wrote impressions that were like, “This village is really beautiful and everyone is so nice, but the singing and the dancing is too much.“

  

  dancing! image courtesy of NYPL

• They thought it was wrong to cut across the grass or take shortcuts.

• Their residential houses only locked from the inside. They organized their days with strict schedules and routine, so no one was outside at night.

• The Shakers founded 19 communities from Maine to Kentucky, as well as a house in Philadelphia run by two queer Black women named Rebecca Cox Jackson and Rebecca Perot.

• For a movement that only ever had 20,000 or so total members, the Shakers were massively influential and changed life for everyone on Earth. They invented the circular saw, condensed milk, and an early version of the washing machine. They redesigned and improved many practical items like cloaks, brooms, wood stoves, and farm implements. If you were any kind of person living in the U.S. in the 19th century, it’s likely your household purchased Shaker-made medicine and seeds—if not furniture, pens, clothing, storage boxes, and candy. They also wrote SO MUCH music, including the evergreen bop “Tis a Gift to Be Simple.“

• Their name for Satan was “Old ugly.“

• Their name for someone who joined the community out of destitution and needing shelter was a “winter Shaker.“

• They invented the term “burn out” for when you’re tired and don’t want to do your job anymore.

• The years 1837 to 1860 were referred to as the Era of Manifestations or Mother Ann’s Work, During this time, many young Shaker women and children had spiritual visions that they used as inspiration for dances and "gift drawings.“

AND I COULD GO ON!!!