Best Of Dais

10 Alter Egos from the Baby Name Tinder App

No Comments

I like Dais. It’s gender neutral. It’s fun to say. It’s very punnable. It’s unique. My mom already uses it. For a very confused gender fence-sitter, it does the job. I’m writing under it, directing under it, even my professors use it now. But sometimes I wonder, if I went full-time boy and transitioned completely…what kind of boy would I be? What name would suit that?

In order to find some answers, I downloaded Kinder, which is like Tinder, but for baby names. I selected my categories: English (England), English (New Zealand), English (United States), English (Australia), English (Celebrity), English (Celebrity kids) Irish (Ireland) and Mythology. And then I got to swiping.

As I kept swiping left on name after name, I imagined who I could possibly be with a name like…

Jaxson Johnston

Likes: Miller High Life, saying “cool cool cool no doubt no doubt no doubt” and thinking it’s my cool thing that I made up when it’s clearly Andy Samberg’s

Dislikes: Professors who don’t understand my “worldview,” Girls who post selfies with Lana Del Rey lyrics as the caption

Twitter Handle:@jaxandviolence

Chandler Johnston

Likes: Those belts that have like…crabs embroidered on them, Huge Teas from Cookout, going to Five Points on the weekend, Hard Rock Cafe T Shirts, The Doors

Dislikes: FRIENDS. MATTHEW PERRY. BEING CALLED CHANANDLER BONG.

Twitter handle: @notsarcastic

Flannery Johnston

Likes: Pat Conroy novels, Instagramming pictures of lakes, poetry slams, calling girls on Tinder “madam,” quote tweeting Trump’s tweets with a cutting quote from The Office.

Dislikes: Southern Gothic Short Stories, STEM majors, peacocks, Starbucks, people who call me “Flan”

Twitter handle: @hardtofind

Caden Johnston

Likes: The collected works of Charlie Kaufman, Folding Ideas video essays, complaining about how feminism is ruining Hollywood, Fred Armisen

Dislikes: Country music, the Marvel franchise, people who say they will be a “smidge” late and then a “smidge” turns out to be a half hour, Oscar bait

Twitter handle: @cadenable

Archie Johnston

Likes: Quoting That 70’s Show in conversation, highlighting my hair, wearing button downs over t shirts, retweeting tweets about how terrible straight men are without a hint of self awareness

Dislikes: Riverdale as a concept, people who wear shorts even in the winter, Lifetime movies, girls who don’t like being called “Fair Maiden”

Twitter handle: @IdesofArch

Jax Johnston

Likes: playing bass clarinet, tweeting pictures of tattoos with the caption “one day…” even though I’m terrified of needles, hats, trying to make people call me “JJ” or “J Squared” when I’m feeling fancy.

Dislikes: wearing shoes, banana pancakes, fake punks, buttoning shirts, the Establishment, Mark Zuckerberg, reading books, the Ras Trent SNL sketch

Twitter Handle: @JaxPoetic

Mathew Johnston

Likes: Daily Mass, snapchatting pictures of trees, John Mulaney, retweeting stuff from The Dodo, harboring a lot of crushes on girls that I “love like a sister” and encouraging them to pray for their future husband.

Dislikes: Girls going for terrible boys when the perfect boy is right in front of them all along, readers who mess up location names during Mass, singing hymns

Twitter Handle: @nojustonet

Kyler Johnston

Likes: quote tweeting things with #hottake just to get more attention, yoga, journaling, those hoodies that look like they’re dirty even tho they are clean, being contrarian in philosophy classes, making up deep quotes and crediting them to “anonymous”

Dislikes: phonies, people who let others’ opinions get to them, meat, the way the world is just…so online all of the time, labels

Twitter Handle: @touchtheky

Ricky Johnston

Likes: Bo Burnham, vine compilations, tweeting screenshots of my own twitter draft folder, claiming to be soooo drunk when I’m completely sober, podcasts, karaoke

Dislikes: Ellen DeGeneres and everything she stands for and has been involved in, she knows what she did.

Twitter handle:@yeahareallygoodbook

Arie Johnston

Likes: Attention from girls named Lauren, stock car racing, stealing kisses, slowly building up someone’s trust and then tearing their world apart in front of millions, Arizona, mailing journals to my ex after they dumped me, real estate

Dislikes: decision making, commitment, perfectly good 22 year old girls with eyes like the amber the mosquito got trapped in in Jurassic Park

Continue Reading

Best Of Dais

We Should All Be Working In Aprons

No Comments

Chefs do it, artists do it, why can’t writers?

I write in bed.

(It is a beautiful library, I do love it all 5 times a year I visit to print scripts)

I know, I know, I go to a beautiful school with a beautiful library there for the express purpose of being a quiet place to work. But I don’t work in the quiet. I usually have a record playing, or Doctor Who scores, or, most often, Netflix playing in another tab.

If I were to write in the library it would require getting out of bed, putting on tights, then pants, then probably my binder, then a flannel, then a number of ponchos and scarves, then my combat boots, then packing my very heavy weighted blanket and laptop and filling up my yeti cup. It’s a lot of effort to sit in a less comfortable chair for a few hours and then packing it all up again just to go to bed.

Not to mention it’s now 2:08 am, my creative schedule spikes after midnight. So I write in bed.

It sucks.

Mike Birbiglia said in his seminal work Sleepwalk With Me that the key to good sleep was making sure your bed was just a space for sleeping. My bed is my space for everything. I don’t know what a work life balance is.

Enter: The Apron.

I’m not going to convince myself to get out of bed to write, that’s not happening. But I will do whatever is possible to keep my Sleeping Time and Writing Time separate.

When it’s time to write, I turn on my heating pad and put it at my feet, kick off my duvet and just rock the weighted blanket, and soon, when the mailroom at my college processes it, I’ll put on an apron.

Artists wear aprons, chefs wear aprons, dads wear humorous aprons that say “Kiss the Cook,” it’s the perfect outer-uniform to assume a Job.

An apron is the lowest maintenance way to go from non work mode into work mode. It’s an article of clothing that is purely functional. Just the clear barrier I need to go from Work Dais to Fun Dais. So then, the question remains: which apron?

I could go with the canvas-y ones that GBBO contestants wear, or a pinstripe Bradley-Cooper-in-that-Bourdain-show number, or the yellow ruffle daisy print one I had as a child that serves as a nostalgic metaphor for my misplaced femininity.

But no, one night while watching Bon Appetit videos I saw my dream apron: a single piece of fabric, crossed in the back. A quick google led me to The Strategist, a vertical of NYMag, my media boyfriend I fight with but still love.  Lo and behold: this linen blend Japanese apron:

And it has POCKETS! Pockets!!!

Seriously, try it. Put on an apron before you it at your desk job. Taking it off at the end of the day, though a simple gesture, is enough of a ritual to trick your brain into going out of work mode. Plus, it keeps your outfit cute, or makes a casual ensemble look a little more put together.

Before you say “But Dais! Writing in bed is still bad!” I live in a dorm. A single room. My idea of a home office is moving to the hard plastic chair next to my record player. I wrote this in bed, I wrote a play in bed, I wrote a piece my nemesis in nonfiction class called “gimmicky” in bed, I’m okay. When I get rich enough to live in more than one room, then I’ll try moving. But for now, I’ll write in bed in my apron.

Continue Reading

Best Of Dais, Uncategorized

A Catholic Review of Janelle Monae’s “PYNK”

No Comments

From Torch, the Catholic Music Reviewer:

Janelle Monae, known for often wearing suits and men’s clothes, takes a comfortingly feminine lens to her new video for PYNK. Cruising through what looks like the hills between Victorville and Barstow (color-corrected to be pink) in a pink Corvette hovercar with her own personal #girlgang, they pull up to a restaurant with a sign out front: GRRLS EAT FREE AND NEVER LEAVE.

Already, this music video is promoting generosity between women: they are offering to feed and house any woman who needs it.

Monae then appears in uber-feminine frilled pink pants, meant to blur the line between masculine and feminine, because they may be pink and frilly, but they are still pants, and therefore masculine. She sings “Pink, like the inside of your baby” honoring the sacred role of women to be mothers. “Pink, behind all of the doors, crazy” obviously referring to a woman’s terrain: the home, and whatever “craziness” it may include. “Pink, like the tongue that goes down, maybe” in reference to the tongues of fire from Pentecost.

Tessa Thompson, close friend of Monae, appears between her legs, a celebration of the divine feminine and the power of birth.

“If you got the blue, we got the pink” in the chorus emphasizes the role of Eve as a counterpart to Adam.

The rest of the video is a blur of women celebrating their close friendship.

Exercising together…

Having a sleepover and discussing biology…

There are also a number of images that refer to penetration, perhaps the penetration of the Holy Spirit during Pentecost, as referred to previously?

There is a frankly worrying sign labelled “PUSSY POWER” but fortunately a cat was shown previously, so this is a clever joke meant to subvert a political message.

DISCUSSIONS TO HAVE WITH CHILDREN:

Before showing this video, talk with your child about Theology of the Body and celebrating the female form without undermining the Church’s teachings.

There are a number of images referring to Pentecost, so perhaps show this to any Confirmandi you may know. How does Confirmation mix the blue of the profane with our mundane pink?

Rating: 6/10

Catchy, but it’s no Oceans.

Continue Reading

Portfolio

The Bachelor: The Movie

No Comments

My favorite class I ever took here at Agnes was Dramatic Writing II, Intro to Screenwriting. It was incredibly labor intensive and the grading was merciless, but if I could take that class every semester I would.

We were supposed to come in with three movie ideas, and I spent hours laboring over three pitches: A teen adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro, a teen adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew where Petruchio was a trans lesbian, and a romantic comedy wherein a lesbian blackmails her way onto The Bachelor. We submitted the ideas anonymously, but I may as well have written my name all over them. They were very on brand.

The Bachelor idea was far and away the most popular, so I set about working on it. I interviewed past contestants, I cast it in my head, and begun scripting the first half. The work was slow, my professor would hold a ruler up to my script and hand it back if the text was 10.5 cpi (characters per inch).

I wrote 10 pages of script a week. I began to love my characters, Tasha, the headstrong lesbian, Jackie, her love interest who everyone seems to fall for, Gary, the fame-hungry bachelor, even Spatula, Tasha’s cat. They grew with me over the course of the year. As I matured, my characters matured.

Now I’m working on the screenplay as my senior seminar, and I keep falling in love with my work over and over.

Continue Reading

Portfolio

From Screen to Stage and Back to Screen

No Comments

Between my dual passions of theatre and film, I’ve always been torn between being on stage and being behind the camera. I was either acting or directing in plays or writing, acting in, and producing my own webseries. It wasn’t until Fall of 2017 that I was able to combine my two passions.

In Fall of 2016, Shipwrecked Comedy released Edgar Allan Poe’s Invite Only Murder Mystery Casual Dinner Party for Friends Potluck, known affectionately as Poe Party. It was a lavishly filmed webseries, paying homage to movies like Clue, while also nodding to classic literature. It was based on Edgar Allan Poe and his ghost manservant Lenore hosting a murder mystery dinner party for his author friends, only to have them get killed off for real.

Characters involved included Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, and other authors. George Eliot was my favorite. Author of Middlemarch and born Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot was portrayed as a woman trying (and failing) to pass as a man. She was played by Lauren Lopez, known for portraying Draco Malfoy in A Very Potter Musical. She was a delight in a too-big Indiana Jones hat and fake mustache. I was so sad when she was killed off.

The show ended around Halloween 2016, and lo and behold, by Halloween 2017, I was playing George Eliot on Agnes Scott’s stage. As soon as the school year started, I was approached by two students who had received permission from Shipwrecked to adapt Poe Party for stage. They asked me to adapt the script, as I had previous scripting experience from my webseries. I spent weeks slowly slicing away at the script until it was a tidy 1 hour. I immediately texted my best friend, the biggest poe party fan I knew, that she had to play Poe. Auditions were held, and we just baaarely had enough people to make it work. We had a cast. And me? I got to play George Eliot.

Rehearsals were so much fun. Everyone cared so deeply for the work we did, it was a student-led, student-directed performance. Costumes were scrounged up, I invested in a real hair fake mustache, everything felt perfect. But resources were limited. We could only perform this once, on Halloween night, and then never again. We were so proud of our work, we wanted it to live on. So I decided to film it. Over the course of many rehearsals, I slowly built close ups of as many scenes as I could. Then, on the actual performance, I set up a camera in the back of the theatre. The footage from that camera was electric. When our passionate cast got in front of a smart, enthusiastic Agnes audience, everything was funnier. The laugh as I died and finally dramatically “revealed” my true identity will always stay with me.

Cutting together that footage made me realize how similar my two passions were. Sure, it can be difficult to bridge the gap between the mediums theoretically, but in practice, it’s just a matter of staging. I can write a script and it would do just as well on stage as on film. I could study theatre and find a career in film, I could study film and find a career in theatre. It’s all storytelling, it’s all one.

Continue Reading

Portfolio

Getting Serious About Comedy

No Comments

Freelance writing is HARD. I still, technically, haven’t become a freelance author, I haven’t yet gotten paid for my work. It’s that cutthroat of a business. Almost all of my peers on Twitter are freelancers and get bylines all the time. I struggle to publish one or two pieces a year, but I have much more prolific success on my own personal Medium page.

By self-publishing, I can talk about whatever I want, which, 90% of the time, is television. I recap The Bachelor, I discuss Frasier, whatever. In June of 2018 Netflix released Nanette, a sort of anti-comedy comedy special by Hannah Gadsby. I had heard about Nanette from its run at the Edinburgh Fringe festival but when it was released on Netflix it took the Internet by storm. Everyone had a hot take about it, including me. But my hot take included references to a whole other work.

James Acaster’s Repertoire, a series of four connected stand up specials, was released on Netflix in April. I watched it maybe four or five times a day, discovering something new each time. It was low key, it was whimsical, it was silly, everything that Nanette was not. But I still found myself comparing the two.

At three AM one June night I started writing my thoughts of the works, about how Nanette is made for the cisgender and heterosexual, how it reinforces the hate I face every day, and how Repertoire is my escape into something else. I didn’t edit it at all, much to my own detriment. I had to retroactively correct many typos in the following weeks.

I published the piece at 8 am the next morning. My peers in publishing read it and started recommending it in threads debating the worth of Nanette. It easily became my most read piece on my Medium page.

In the early hours of the fourth of July, I weirdly woke up, not my usual routine at all. Groggily, I checked my phone. James Acaster just followed me on Twitter. The creator of Repertoire himself. I quickly gathered my thoughts, trying to figure out what to do next. Because he followed me, I was allowed to send him Direct Messages. I carefully composed a message with a link to my piece and how much Repertoire meant to me. Before my eyes, I watched him text a response.

He read my work. He loved it. He saw Nanette and it made his work seem frivolous, but my piece reminded him why he does comedy and why it’s worth it.

My work did that. My work encouraged someone who encouraged me. Skills that I learned and honed here at Agnes put me in touch with someone who saved my life. In the future, all I want to do is chase that feeling of worth I got when James responded to me. It means everything to me.

Continue Reading