Juice and mouse

Fran Magazine: Issue #183

📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). Your subscriptions are welcome and encouraged for regular updates sent to your inbox (email, Substack, or both). Feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd. 📝 Everything I write for Vulture can be found HERE!

My book, THE FIELD GUIDE TO NEPO BABIES, is out in the world!!!! It’s available at Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and also hopefully your local bookstore. 📓

Two podcasts

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of last-minute guesting on Critical Darlings, Vulture’s movie podcast, to talk with Richard Lawson and Alison Willmore to talk about a little movie by Christopher Nolan called The Odyssey. You can listen to that on Apple Podcasts here or on Spotify here. Spoiler: I liked the movie! Kind of a lot, actually. People keep texting to say, “you only gave it four stars on Letterboxd,” as if that’s a system that makes sense to me .02 seconds after I make the decision. I am hoping to see again at some point so I can laugh at Robert Pattinson.

You can also listen to me on this weekend’s Patreon episode of Who? Weekly, far and away my most-listened to podcast. We talk about so much stuff: opera, movies, Letterboxd, my revived passion for going on amusement rides, and my two books. Plus a lot of other stuff. It was so fun to record and I’m always honored to be thought of in any way by the Wholigans.

Three questions

You can always write in and ask questions so long as they are appropriate and normal. I’ll let you be the judge of what that means, but the Fran Magazine commenting and question-asking community is frequently behaving, for which I take no responsibility but am proud nonetheless. Here are three questions from the well.

How did you meet your husband?

Phil and I met on Tinder. We have worked for years to come up with alternative funny stories for how we met, but the truth is that we met on an app, which is not really that crazy even though people are often like, “Whoa…” I have always liked Tinder the best of the myriad dating apps or sites I’ve used¹ because the limited character options in the bio actually force people to lie less and to possibly be a little funnier. I found Hinge, especially, to have a dearth of good-humored people. Everyone was giving LinkedIn on there in a way that used to make me feel sick to my stomach. That’s not to say Tinder is, in and of itself, good. Phil and I matched not long after I spent a week on the app talking to a woman whose location was Greenpoint and then she was like, “You should come up to Boston, where I live, and hang out with me and my wife.” And I was like, okay, kms… We went on a cold-weather park date because it was early 2021. I went on one more app date after meeting Phil with someone whose vibe was so profoundly intolerable to me who said their best friend was a critic I can’t stand² and I said, “enough of this.” Phil and I went on another date that week, and now we are married.

What are the things you most like to eat and drink in the summertime heat?

credit martinelli’s lol

Here’s something nice you can do when it’s hot out: you can have a juice. Specifically a Martinelli’s apple juice out of the little glass bottle. What a treat! I am often guilty of grabbing a Powerade or Vitamin Water or electrolyte beverage when I am feeling hot and robbed of energy, but those are so packed full of sugar as to not really help beyond in a superficial sense. You can basically get the same effect from buying a juice, and the juice tastes so much better.

My thoughts on Outshine Popsicles and ice cream are well-documented on this blog, but trust that those are always in the mix. I have been kind of slacking on the ice cream front this summer, in part because I’ve been busy, and in part because the good ice cream locations in this city are drifting away from Brooklyn and into Manhattan, and sometimes I just don’t have the energy to haul ass to the West Village to stand in a line. The best new-to-me ice cream flavor I’ve tried so far this summer is Salt & Straw’s Goat Cheese Marionberry Habanero.

I am feeling disheartened by “the parasite” — something I was indifferent to, then callous about, then worried about, and now feeling completely neutral about. I do not want to get “the parasite” from eating salads, but eating a big salad for lunch twice a week is a big part of my routine, and I don’t like not doing it. The crunch of a raw vegetable can be so satisfying when it’s hot and you’re in a bad mood. In light of forgoing salad, I am loving a cold noodle as of late. Regular pasta salad, yes, sure, but specifically naengmyeon or cold udon. Sydney and I went to Raku in the East Village on Friday night, and I got the kani maze, which has crab roe, butter, cucumber, yuzu, and toasted seaweed. Probably the best thing I’ve had all summer. I am also really enjoying eating shrimp lately: in tacos, roasted, cocktail, whatever.

How is Bandit?

Here’s a story about Bandit. Last Sunday, I made the mistake of finishing a glass of wine that Phil was not liking because it tasted “too much like minerals.” I didn’t disagree, but I sort of like that taste. Bad idea: it gave me an immediate and very unpleasant headache and I had to go to bed at 10:30 with both an ice roller and a hot sock to counteract the pressure behind my eyes. I was then up at 2:30 in the morning, as often happens when I take medication for a migraine and then go right to bed. The migraine will be gone, but the lingering effects of the caffeine in the medication keep me up. I sat up until 4am reading Lifeguard: A Love Story by Janet Fash and my friend Clio. I then went back to sleep and woke up at 6:30. I noticed while I was brushing my teeth that Bandit was acting particularly insane around the edge of the couch, burrowing under the rug and throwing his body around. This is not particularly abnormal behavior. He is kind of a crazy guy, and mornings are a great time to behave crazy. I kept poking my head in and out of the bathroom so as to not drool toothpaste on myself, and one of the times I peeked out to check on Bandit, he was sitting and staring at me with a mouse in his mouth. I can’t remember if I ever wrote about it here, but Bandit caught and killed a mouse three weeks after we got him last year. That’s the last time we saw a mouse in the apartment, which is a great endorsement for Bandit. I screamed “oh my GOD” and moved towards him and Bandit got scared and dropped the mouse, which was alive and ran under the couch. I then went to wake up Phil while Bandit tried to get the mouse out from under the couch. At one point, he had a good grasp on the tail, but the mouse fully ran away. It is hopefully no longer in our apartment, but in someone else’s.

Here is what Bandit looks like, in case you forgot.

One announcement

Fran Magazine is taking an August hiatus, which feels very French of me. Some of that is because I will literally be in the south of France for what is very overdue vacation and an only slightly overdue honeymoon.³

There will be a series of guest posts by friends of the magazine, many of whom have written for the blog before. I’m in the process of editing and curating those posts right now, and they’re a lot of fun. Excited for you all to read those! I may even schedule something out myself because sometimes I cannot turn off my own ability to blog. You also may see me in the comments still, because sometimes vacation means you are still on phone. Anyway, have fun with all the guest posts and enjoy the waning days of summer. I, for one, am already excited for winter. I’m sick of seeing my legs every day and I know everyone else is too.

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Is anyone else taking fun vacations this summer? Can you tell I used this post to procrastinate not one but two big writing projects I need to be working on? What’s everyone cooking these days and how afraid are you of the parasite?

1. brief dalliance with OK Cupid (memba her) right out of college — people used that place like their personal blogs, it was kind of insane — and then on/off Hinge usage thru grad school

2. ok blind item

3. any and all recs for Antibes, Cannes, Nice and the surrounding area — much appreciated. I want to go to the Dua Lipa museum and recreate these pics.