This is The Friday Post, Hung Up’s weekly roundup of celebrity mess and miscellanea. If you like this kind of thing, why not subscribe?
The United States House Select Committee cannot decide on a timeslot, but that hasn’t mattered: Every hearing to investigate the Capitol insurrection January 6th reunion episode, I am present and accounted for. It’s giving comedy, drama, intrigue, unreliable narrators and third act reveals; it has made for incredible television.
Congressional hearings — or at least these congressional hearings — are exactly what Veep and Succession promised they are: Interrogations full of evasive non-answers, hilariously noncommittal confessions, some people stumbling through their words, some people pretending to not have understood the question. One hundred years ago, John Oliver called Trump’s Russian collusion scandal “stupid Watergate.” But Watergate, even a show as misguided as Gaslit showed, was not actually all that smart; the insurrection was even more obvious clownery. In its wake, the events have left only finger-pointing and flop tweets from the GOP. Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is a month away from penning his own If I Did It.
I know these hearings are serious and we should furrow our brows and take them seriously but stop for a moment and consider that anyone who needs 30 hours of hearings to prove what was obvious on the day, that the United States President was trying to pull off a coup, might not be acting in good faith. (What’s more: there is nothing more serious to me than small, petty interpersonal dramas!) The January 6 Reunion Episodes have been dramatic and frightening and sometimes hilarious: They got Josh Hawley — honorable fuckhead from Missouri — lacing up his Tom Cruise 10s to flee the chaos.
People were even laughing in the room:
The January 6 reunion episodes are Bravo, and they have been edited as such. Someone lies; cut to someone else correcting them. Cut to three more people piling on to that correction, embellishing the co-sign with their own flair, and then wanting to be patted on the head for being the start student of doing the absolute bare minimum. (Mike Pence … hero?? Girl. Please.) The only thing missing is Andy Cohen gleefully taking shotskis with the latest episode’s big players. I cannot wait until they resume in September.
What Paying Subscribers Got This Week
I now pronounce you husband and wife Bennifer and … well, Bennifer. There was a “dress from an old movie” — many are saying Jersey Girl, and Mrs. Affleck is just corny enough to actually do that, I fear — and a sleeping Elvis. America’s first couple is now honeymooning in Paris, per People.
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News Briefs
Her Majesty Tree Paine: Haim brought out Miss Swift in London! And where was I…
Shonka Dukureh, Elvis’s Big Mama Thornton, was found dead in her home in Nashville. (The Tennessean)
I said my man came back from daddy duty and he hasn’t disappointed:
💌 Burning Questions, Love Notes, Hate Mail 💌
I’m planning a mailbag newsletter for next week (or maybe the week after, depending on how many submissions I get) — send along any questions you have for me, people you want to talk about, theories you want to share, “random” “musings,” etc. I will answer/reply to/share a handful of them here! Send notes to hunteryharris@gmail.com by Thursday night.
All Keke Palmer Needs is A Porch, Chile
Aunties, assemble! All Keke Palmer needs is a porch and a church fan and some of those candies in her purse. I can’t remember who I was ranting about this to lately, but Wired Autocompletes were, for a long time, my favorite of the videos where Condé Nast locks famous people in a white box and makes them talk directly to camera. (Vogue’s “Beauty Secret” videos, revealer of who has charisma and who does not, have a different designation.) But lately it has been in a flop era: when I was coming up (sitting a desk and blogging four to six times a day) they had a suite of stars; lately it’s been everyone from all the Netflix shows I’m not watching. Until now!
So I’m biased: I mean, you know, whatever — I can be an auntie when it suits me. I don’t like people just running around my house. I have a bedtime. NeNe Leakes is my favorite Housewife. I start the day with Kirk Franklin and end the night with “The Tour.” When I get excited I start doing the finger-pointing and saying, on repeat, Let me just say this!
Keke Palmer is so thoroughly — so spiritually — an auntie. Every Keke Palmer press tour is a treat; her daytime TV hosting career was short lived, I believe, because she can do anything in front of a camera, but most importantly, she can do nothing in front of a camera. She can use the simplest, loosest prompts: asking her how old she was in 2004 turns into a story about her crush on Michael Ealy. (Black people know who Michael Ealy is; for everyone else, he’s either the untrustworthy lightskin boyfriend in various thrillers, or he’s Beyoncé’s boyfriend in the “Halo” music video.) Keke Palmer over everyone! Yes I will be seeing Nope this weekend.
Drake-ly
Just when I was read to open a Google doc to write a post titled “I Was Wrong: The Drake Album Is Good, Actually” … what has a man done but go ahead and embarrass me? The rapper is on a hoe trip in St. Tropez with his friends. He has been spending time with a 21-year-old model and YouTuber named Sage Brooks, per Page Six. (They are nothing officially, P6 says, but mutual friends are “rooting for them to hang out more.”) The vacation has been, at turns, amusing, annoying, trollish — that is to say, it has been very Drake.
On this one issue he is correct: we should all be bullying Joe Budden actually:
This is so stupid and invasive and also — let’s not forget — corny. It’s actually radical how nothing about Drake is sexy.
And this what happens when you’re in the studio with Beyoncé but drop your dance album first:
Something about Drake is giving that type of person who just kind of talks and talks and talks and you nod along and drop completely out of the conversation thinking about how many Sephora points you have, and they don’t notice, and then all of a sudden you don’t know what the hell they’re even talking about so you just start peppering in “No way” and “You’re so right though” randomly and they don’t notice. Anyway!
The Bless His Heart Beat
Bennifer … Drake … also on vacation is king of summer Leonardo DiCaprio, also in St. Tropez. Accompanying him is Pussy Posse sergeant at arms, Tobey Maguire.
“In the few days before that, Leo and Tobey were spotted on a private yacht enjoying the warm weather in the tropic location, alongside Tobey‘s ex-wife Jennifer Meyer,” Just Jared reports. This is important to me because I have been thinking about the Maguire-Meyer divorce for some time. "It's been the most beautiful experience of my life having this beautiful breakup," Jen said recently on something called The World's First Podcast.” It took a divorce to take this man from Molly’s Game to, like, the ex-husband in a Nancy Meyers movie. Powerful!
That’s all this week. It’s short because it is not God’s plan for me to talk about that pink too on TikTok. Thank you for reading! This weekend … don’t let me get in my zone … and by zone I mean sitting in bed watching F-Boy Island. I’ll leave you with this:
“Pussy Posse sergeant at arms, Tobey Maguire.”
I am dead. Six feet under. Distribute my non-existent assets to my nearest and dearest.
“anyone who needs 30 hours of hearings to prove what was obvious on the day, that the United States President was trying to pull off a coup, might not be acting in good faith.”
This right here is why I read your analysis before anyone else’s. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️