What Happens When A TSA Agent Clocks Your Plastic Surgery
Plus: Memorial Day Weekend, the brownies you need and Ohio insults Spike Lee
I hope everyone had an amazing holiday weekend! I had to work because the third draft of my book was due on Tuesday which meant that I was under house arrest for most of the holiday. I hate to be that person, but I honestly love being a writer so I feel stupidly lucky that I get to tinker around in a word document even when it’s the alleged “start of summer”. Can’t say I hated it! Ultimately being trapped indoors was a very good thing for me since it was freezing and cold here in Milwaukee until Monday and by then, I had gotten enough done to be able to take a little mental health walk to the lake which was lovely. See! I am getting out.
Speaking of getting out, on Friday I had dinner with my friend at Cassis and then on Saturday, we hosted Ryans’ family at our new apartment. His cousin recently had a baby so we rightfully dedicated most of the day to fawning over a newborn as one should. If you feel despondent about anything, I do recommend gently rocking a three month old to sleep as a remedy. It’s very effective.
We are still not done decorating yet (kind of my fault) but I wanted to take my time with this place more than I did with the last one so we haven’t had our big house warming, which we will do later this summer. Hopefully then we can use our roof space and play with this giant beer pong game that Ryan convinced me to get while we were at Home Goods. The verdict is still out on whether or not that was a waste of money. (I believe it was.)
In the meantime, it’s also the end of the school year so there’s been a lot of events lately for Ryan’s kids. I am always pretty nervous about what to wear to these things because kids are easily embarrassed and I acutely remember dreading what my mother might show up to a school event wearing. I was an early tyrant image consultant in that way. But my mother was not particularly interested in fashion or beauty and did not seek to compete with the other moms at school over outfits. I haven’t been to a place yet in Wisconsin where competition over what one wears is the cultural norm but you can understand that growing up in Greenwich, CT, a school event was a gauntlet. Plus, as you know, I was raised in a post Devil Wears Prada (1) industry, so it is difficult for me to not think of every outing as my personal runway, mostly because I really don’t go anywhere anymore but my word for 2026 is restraint so restraint I must have.
I was explicitly told to NOT “dress up” but frankly, by Wisconsin standards, that would mean that I would wear the same thing to Pilates as I would to say, the 5th grade musical and that just feels wrong. I am doing my best to find a happy medium. My Birkin stays at home but I mean I am who I am! Even outside of school sanctioned events, people will (and do) openly stare at me everywhere I go here. I like to think it is because they have never seen someone in archival Alaia but honestly, I know it’s probably because they haven’t been in such close proximity to a Black person. I did my best to try to find the MOST BASIC things I could wear while also retaining my dignity. It is still a work in progress but I am feeling good. The warm weather helps me get my mojo back. Here’s what I wore this week:
Now that we’ve covered the clothes, how about some recommendations?
Highly Recommend:
New Face, Who Dis? I genuinely laughed out loud when this crossed my desk last week. The ex-girlfriend of the late One Directioner, Liam Payne, who is named Kate Cassidy (I know, sorry, this requires that much context) posted on TikTok last week that she had been stopped by a TSA agent because her new face did not match with her passport. I have often thought about this scenario with the rise of biometrics and face scanners as the primary form of identification in airports and now I don’t have to wonder anymore. Kate, who seems to be an influencer, described the incident by saying, “So, I’m at the security line, and I gave the guy my passport, and they obviously do a photo view. And if it matches your passport, you get the green light, and if it doesn’t match your passport, you get the red light, and I got the red light because my photo, I guess, didn’t match my appearance.” She guesses. One of the most fascinating parts of this whole thing is that she doesn’t seem to agree that she has altered her appearance so much that she is unrecognizable in relation to her old self. She goes on to say, “I’m literally so fucking embarrassed. She then goes and calls three different men over. One guy was like, ‘Do you not have a work ID?’ And I was like, ‘I can pull up my Instagram, I don’t know what to do.’” Girl, Instagram is not an ID??? I thought that she might be doing a bit but it’s not a bit. There’s probably some extreme form of dysmorphia at play but I try not to think of things as so dark and Kate herself has already moved on so it feels fine to talk about. At the time, she was very offended and distraught over the incident but the feed has refreshed now. I don’t really know how to editorialize this beyond recommending that it’s worth a watch for chuckles.
Niggas In Paris!: It’s time again for the French Open and though clay is my least favorite of the slams, I still get excited about tennis no matter the surface. As everyone descended upon Roland Garros for the next two weeks, Taylor Townsend and Naomi Osaka pissed off a lot of people by hosting a dinner for their fellow tennis competitors, the Black ones, at Soho House. Predictably, this got a lot of people really upset. Tennis is a hotbed for a lot of racism and has been since Venus and Serena snatched every last trophy there was. (Arthur Ashe and Athena Gibson notwithstanding. Please, I know my tennis history! I was making a point about the modern era). But anyway, folks were so mad, Osaka had to take to threads to make a post defending her right to have this dinner. This is distinctly a problem on the third Trump admin timeline because he and his buddies decided to make DEI a swear word. Predictably, a lot of the comments were like “Omg what if white people did this?”
“Can you imagine if there was an all-white dinner?” Yes, actually, I can. It’s called every wedding, birthday party, baby shower and fucking dinner of a white person’s life. This kind of nonsense discourse raises my blood pressure but it really looked like a fab party and I hope that Coco takes it all the way again so they can continue to crash out. And if I was Miss Osaka and Miss Townsend, I would throw an even bigger, Blacker party at Wimbledon.
Lemme Get My Broom: To celebrate another Knicks SWEEP! Is this becoming a sports newsletter? Wow. I barely had time to even write about the Knicks run in Cleveland because it was over so…swiftly. Over the weekend, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce made a courtside appearance at the Knicks first game in Cleveland where the Cavaliers lost (HAHA!) and Kelce chugged a beer and maybe fell asleep? Ok, I know I made it my New Year’s resolution to stop hating her. I have failed. Idc. But that’s not even what I am trying to talk about, that just irritated me! What I want to talk about is during game 4, you might have noticed that the stadium was filled with Knicks fans, probably because a flight, hotel and game tickets were cheaper in Cleveland than at the Garden where currently, the cheapest seat for the finals game is around $3,600. But I did a double take when I saw courtside mainstays like Spike Lee, Fat Joe, Timothee Chalamet and his girlfriend…in the 2nd row. And then Ryan told me this is because the Cleveland arena BANNED them from sitting courtside and further BANNED courtside ticket holders from re-selling their tickets in an effort to block Knicks fans. Eeeeyuck. Every time I watch a game not in LA or NY, I am struck by the drastic swag deficit when they pan the camera to the audience but these Ohio people are obviously haters of an unnatural level. Funny enough, I will be in Ohio this upcoming weekend, I’ll report back on the reception I get.
Brownies From A Box: I got invited to my first Sedar a few weeks ago and I was thrilled to attend! It has been my dream ever since I saw the Rugratz Passover Special. Also, we were a Prince of Egypt household and as a first born, Passover is no joke to me. It was a fantastic evening and I learned so much but at the end of the night, dessert was on the table and my friend Allie had made it. “Kosher brownies”, she said and I LOVE me a brownie so I dug right in. Also, we were kind of drunk because Sedars involve more wine than I thought. Anyways, best brownies I’ve ever had in my life. I despise a cake-like brownie and these were perfect because they were incredibly rich and fudgy. I spent the next week googling Kosher brownie recipes and collecting ingredients and then the next week trying to convince Ryan’s daughter that it would be a good idea to bake them. I tell Allie all of this the next time I see her and she was like…”Girl, they are from a box!”. Ryan wants me to lie and tell people they are from scratch but why would I do that? I have yet to try them with cannabis but that might be next! Here’s the box and the brownies:
Do NOT Recommend:
Girl, I Guess: Huda Mustafa released a music video last week. It lowkey feels like AI because she’s so stiff and robotic. The best artists really GO there but Huda is afraid to show herself except for in incredibly specific angles and it’s a tough watch. Arguably, this is a lot of people’s issue with Ariana Grande’s acting. Bringing it back to the plastic surgery conversation, I think that this is a side effect of getting a new face and body that you’re not totally comfortable with. The song is not good and neither is the video. I mean it’s probably fine if it were 2012 but it’s not! I don’t doubt this will be successful for her though. The bar is in hell.
It’s Almost Over: I have refrained from talking about the Summer House scandal because I simply know too much and I am not a clout chasing weirdo who is going to spill it in print but I am happy to say that part 1 of the reunion aired last night and it was fantastic television. In the end, I do not think that any of us are getting any “closure” especially because the two people that were supposed to have the most to answer for are continuing to lie and perhaps are medicated into another dimension. I have felt incredibly triggered by the whole thing. I mean not to make it about me but this is MY newsletter…10 years ago I was the Ciara when a midwestern white man played me so bad and started dating my friend after we had a situationship for 4 years. A friend I was in a Hamptons sharehouse with!!! It’s a canon event, I fear. It really kicked off my Saturn return in a major way. Sometimes you lose friends and lose losers at the same time. Looking forward to this saga coming to the end for us all because it’s not light or fun. It’s really dark and sad. There are too many layers and the Bravo fandom loves to be willfully ignorant. If it wasn’t clear, I’m team Ciara.
The AI Doc: By the way, if you want to take a break from your regularly scheduled Peacock programming, and watch a horror film, I suggest The AI Doc which is a feature length documentary on said streamer that spiked my anxiety over the weekend. The first part is incredibly bleak and details that we are heading for impending societal collapse. The second part felt like a weird detour on a mushroom trip where all the AI sycophants tried to justify their inflated salaries by emphasizing just how crucial AI was because it was going to solve disease, poverty and hunger. The thing that no one pointed out is that almost no one is using AI to do any of those things and people right now, a lot of whom are heavily invested in AI, have the money to be able to pay humans to do all of those things and yet…are not. It gave me debilitating anxiety and then I had to ask Chat GPT if something that I wanted to pick up from Facebook Marketplace would fit in the back of my car. So yea.
I am heading to Ohio but when I come back, we will chat about books, Evil Ralph Lauren as a snake exterminator and how the Allegra x Pepcid combo is working out. This will be the last free post until the paywall is turned back on so subscribe if you want to see more! Thanks for reading!
so glad you're back !
Those King Arthur GF brownies are 100x better than they have any business being!!