@JSJdarling I'm unsure. Something seems off. He's attracting a lot of attention now, but what kind of opportunity will he get next? His decision to skip the press for the end of Queer Eye was bold. However, he doesn't seem dependable now.
Joan Cusack has spent the last eleven years running a gift shop in Chicago. The red carpet she stepped onto this week for Toy Story 5 was a day pass to leave the shop and come back to Jessie for one afternoon.
The shop is called Judy Maxwell Home. She opened it in 2014 and named it after a character from What's Up, Doc?, the 1972 Barbra Streisand comedy. It sells curated home goods, small art, weird knickknacks she picks out herself. She works the floor. She picks the stock. She has been telling interviewers for over a decade that retail is the thing she actually wants to be doing.
In her words from this week: being a celebrity actress isn't that fun, over and over. Not that great of a world, except for being exposed to cool sets and talented, interesting people.
The Toy Story premiere was her first red carpet since September 2015. She did not attend Toy Story 4 in 2019, even though she was in the film. Her last on-screen acting role was a TV guest spot in 2020. The interviews where she talks about Hollywood with the most affection are the ones where she is also explaining why she left.
What I keep coming back to is the math of her career. Two Oscar nominations by 1997. School of Rock in 2003. Shameless from 2011 to 2018. She earned the right to keep working at the level she was working at, and she chose a gift shop in her hometown instead.
The line she gave reporters this week, about why the shop matters: if you're a woman now, it's so fun to have a shop of your own. You hone your instincts in the world, versus at home. This is a little lab of my own instincts about being in the world.
She made an exception for Jessie because Toy Story 5 finally makes the yodeling cowgirl the lead. Twenty-seven years after she first voiced the character. The carpet was for that, and only that.
The framing that she came back is the part worth correcting. She has been gone on purpose, doing the thing she actually likes, and a six-day press tour for a Pixar movie does not change that. The shop will still be there on Monday. She will be in it.
Patrick Dennis (born Edward Everett Tanner III on 18 May 1921) was an extraordinarily popular American satirical novelist who became one of the best-selling authors of the mid-20th century. He is best known as the creator of the iconic, free-spirited fictional character Mame Dennis from his 1955 masterwork, Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade. In 1956, he became the first author ever to have three books simultaneously on the New York Times bestseller list: Auntie Mame, The Loving Couple, and Guestward, Ho!.
Through Mame Dennis, Patrick single-handedly introduced and popularized the concept of "high camp" (and Iβm not talking about backpacking in the Rockies) to mainstream American readers. Auntie Mame spent 112 weeks on the bestseller list and was adapted into a hit Broadway play, an academy-award-nominated 1958 film starring Rosalind Russell, a stage musical (Mame, starring Angela Landsbury), and a subsequent (notoriously polarizing) musical film starring Lucille Ball. Other books also saw adaptations. In 1962, Little Me was turned into a musical with a book by Neil Simon; Guestward Ho! with Joanne Dru became a sitcom of the same name (1960β61); and House Party was the inspiration for the TV series The Pruitts of Southampton (1966β67), starring Phyllis Diller.
Dennis published 16 novels in total, four under the pseudonym Virginia Rowans β Oh What a Wonderful Wedding! (1953), House Party (1954), The Loving Couple: His and Her Story (1956), and Love and Mrs. Sargent (1961) β and the rest as Patrick Dennis, including Around the World with Auntie Mame (1958) and The Joyous Season (1965). He also published two books with collaborators β Guestward, Ho! (1956) with Barbara C. Hooten and The Pink Hotel (1957) with Dorothy Erskine.
Dennis lived a double life that mirrored the eccentricities of his characters. He came from a Midwestern Presbyterian background, and in 1948, married socialite Louise Stickney with whom he fathered two children. He was also a raging bisexual, well known in the gay bars and private βgentlemenβsβ clubs up and down Manhattan. In the early 1960s, in a bathhouse, Dennis met theatrical costume designer Guy Kent, with whom he had a turbulent love affair. His book Tony (1962) was based on Kent, and the characterization was far from flattering. The weight of maintaining his family life alongside the pressures of his affair took a major toll on Dennis' mental health. At the height of his fame, he attempted suicide and was subsequently committed to a psychiatric facility near White Plains where he spent several months.
Despite earning millions from his massive literary success, Patrick squandered his entire fortune on a lavish, extravagant lifestyle. By the early 1970s, with his last two novels critical and commercial failures, Dennisβ books had quickly gone out of print, and his writing career had ended. In an extraordinary final act of reinvention, he abandoned the literary world entirely and spent his final years working incognito as a domestic butler to some of the wealthiest families in America, including McDonald's founder Ray Kroc. His employers remained completely unaware that their butler was a former world-famous, best-selling novelist. And one can easily imagine, with his taste for the high-life, Patrick knocking back the house liquor and swanning around in his employerβs smoking jacket and cravat when the family was out of town.
On November 6, 1976, Edward Everett Tanner III, known to the world as Patrick Dennis, died from pancreatic cancer in Manhattan at the age of 55. At the turn of the 21st century, there has been a resurgence of interest in his work, and subsequently many of his novels are once again available. Read one if you want to be thoroughly entertained.