MAJOR BREAKING: Epstein survivors just announced they will release their own list of names.
“We know who abused us. We saw who came and went. This list will be survivor-led—for survivors.”
The government stalled.
Now the victims are doing it themselves.
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.
Alexia literally said in her video, “I have always said that this jersey cannot be defended halfway. And I admit that I have emptied myself.”
And some of you still think it’s the club’s fault or are even calling Alexia “a rat.” She’s leaving because she’s given everything. She’s also a perfectionist who completely drained herself over the last 14 years. Because this is the club of her life, it made everything even more emotionally exhausting for her.
She has always made it clear that when the time came, she would make way for the new generation and that she wants to leave on a high while still playing at her best.