Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, June 9-15

Last Sunday Dispatch until July 14th, love you and miss you!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

This is the last Sunday Dispatch for a month!!! I am traveling the next three weeks on a residency to get some non-Fran Magazine writing done. While there will be free-to-read regular issues on Wednesday, the Sunday Dispatch will go on a month hiatus. Please don’t unsubscribe, xoxo.

Tk tk tk

I love encountering the ice cream truck in the wild, wild world. There are few greater joys in this life! Though the ice cream trucks have been popping up here and there for the past month, this past week was the first time I actually got something. I’d otherwise been missing the truck — which zooms past my apartment on weekday afternoons — or purposefully passing up overpriced Manhattan cones ($10!!!!!!! they should be no more than $5, ideally $4 + $1 tip). A few of us were headed out to the bar one muggy night this week and the ice cream truck appeared out of nowhere. Phil chased it halfway down the block and then we all got ice cream, including some local kids who were not coming to the bar with us because they are children. Thank you, Phil!!! For those wondering, I have no preference between rainbow and chocolate sprinkles which do taste different and my decision towards one or the other is totally dependent on mood.

This has obviously been an insane week as I’ve been trying to get through the last of my obligations prior to departing for residency as I will be this very morning. I published my first piece in the Wall Street Journal about stilettos and I also had a conversation with Emma D’Arcy prior to the House of the Dragon premiere. I am not starstruck by celebrities that often but speaking to D’Arcy did make me feel nervous in a way I hadn’t felt in a while.¹ I am behind on a lot of my web reading and subscriptions but I loved this piece from Jonathan Nunn in

Vittles

about how restaurants are now. Speaking of how restaurants are now, there’s also

Meals Meals Food

on cool group dinners. Last winter I wrote for The Cut about how no one should ever put down more than one credit card at a restaurant and then accidentally went viral with 22 year olds on TikTok who said they don’t wanna be responsible for their friends having champagne and oysters while they only have a salad. My take then and now is that if your friends are having champagne and oysters and you’re having a garden salad… why not live a little?

Anyway! Now there will be nothing from ME PERSONALLY for a month. There will, however, be three great guests posts in my absence on Wednesdays while I try to avoid tick bites, and hopefully there’s a lot to catch each other up on come mid-July. Here’s the last week of everything, plus a bonus picture of my most fruitful day of pea harvest.

bonus Marian plate