(Early) Friday Five: May 30, 2025
Suprise!
Consumers! I’m here a day early, because you’re worth it and you deserve it. In all honesty, I’m dropping the Friday Five a day early because the next edition of ‘My Stories Are On’ comes out on Sunday. With great power (a small but growing Substack following) comes great responsibility: I feel conscious of my presence in your inbox and it should always feel like a little treat! Spacing things out helps, I think.
I’m thrilled to see all your responses responses to my newsletter on things that seemed chic in childhood— some interesting additions to the list were Pepperidge Farm Milano’s (hard agree), Special K cereal (I can see the vision there), a specific brand of chocolate-covered blueberries (even more brands are on this scene now and making it seem chic for the next generation), and strangely, having with your shoelaces intentionally untied in middle/high school (from a dear friend raised in Saudi Arabia). Maybe there’s enough material for a part two…!
Anyway, let’s get into your roundup of joy and catharsis ahead of the weekend:
Song + Band: My friend Leena took me to a music festival last weekend, where we got to see the pure magic that is Ezra Collective live. I was a relative newcomer to their music and I left the festival levitating. Their presence, their energy, their joy… it was one of the best live sets I’ve ever seen. They opened their set with a clip with Ian Wright (which is in the performance below) and from the second they appeared on stage, the crowd was bouncing. Anyway, you can listen to their music on any streaming platform but I’d encourage you watch their live performances to get a real feel for them. Also, another reason to love them: they’ve long been advocating for the continuity of youth clubs in the UK which are in steep decline. The band met at a youth jam session at the Southbank Centre, and brought young people from that very same program out on stage in this performance at the BRITs.
Instagram Account to Follow: I’ve been obsessively scrolling the @nightopenings, feed which features an array of movie premieres from the 80s through the early aughts. Premieres do not hit the way they used to (and I’d love
’s brilliant take on this / if she even agrees with me!). I seldom pay attention to them now, I’m not interested in who showed up or what people wore. Maybe it was watching Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight as a child that instilled some sense of importance to these things back then. Anyway, this account brings back those memories and then some, like this carousel for The Distinguished Gentleman that features Sheryl Lee Ralph (looking impeccable as always), Gilbert Gottfried, Chris Rock, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, Eddie Murphy, Russell Wong, and Heavy D all at once! The page isn’t updated super often but it’s worth a nostalgia scroll (or several)… in the meantime here’s Kenny G, his ex-wife Lyndie Benson, and Nicolette Sheridan at the premiere of The Bodyguard. Kenny set-up Nicolette with Michael Bolton right around this time, who dated on and off from 1992 - 2008… when a man loves a woman, I guess?
Short Read: This essay by Chris Gayomali in The Believer on “Like a G6” is a delight. I unabashedly love this song. This is what my bestie Ariana and I listened to on repeat after my mom taught us threading (yes, the hair removal technique) and we spent an entire afternoon threading all of our limbs with this as the soundtrack, taking periodic breaks to wince and sing about popping bottles in the ice (my mental image of that lyric is popping champagne in a down jacket at the north pole fyi). Far East Movement, you deserve your flowers and you were under appreciated at the time! I’m glad to see someone giving it the poetic reflection it deserves.
Hyper-Specific TikTok that deserves its own shoutout aside from the below category: The top comment on the post is fitting: “this is proof the human imagination will always be worth more than ai.” I don’t fully understand the minions but I admire and respect their cinematic universe, and watching this makes me want to see a Despicable Me film.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Joyful Internet Content:
My friend Erika reminded me of Bringing Down the House this week and this clip is now living in my head. The cool points are absolutely out the window. What a film!
One of my favorite Creators (and an iconic Consumer!!!)
interviewed cast members from And Just Like That, and she’s asking questions that should have been asked for the past two decades. Love her, love this, love Steve aka David Eigenberg.
I’m both intimidated by and in love with this panna catta — which is honestly a clever way of making the dessert without worrying about even vanilla speck distribution. When I make this in my dome-shaped molds, those vanilla bean speckles at the bottom look clumsy, here they look like perfectly placed fur markings. Although, I couldn’t help but wonder if the vanilla taste isn’t evenly concentrated throughout… *cue sultry SATC closing saxophone riff*
Instagram stays showing me cool restaurants in Oceania that I’ll never be able to get to. This mango sticky rice brulée looks like it would solve all my problems.
Someone on Twitter posted snippets of their community college’s non-credit continuing education courses, and I would immediately sign up for this, followed by Greek Pies:
This feels like a moment to confess some wrongdoing: when I was 15, I was squeezing every avocado at the grocer on my quest for good guacamole. As I grabbed my third or fourth, the avocado softly burst right as another squeezing shopper made eye contact with me. We looked at each other and the deflated avo back and forth for 30 seconds, and I put it back in the pile as she nodded. I left the store with avocado flesh on my hands.
Meatballin’ out of control,
Roya
can i interest you in the 1996 Blockbuster(!!) Entertainment Awards
https://www.instagram.com/p/DEgmp8gpdsa/