Rosa & Rasputin & Me.

Television

Earlier this year I worked at a restaurant that had amazing cookies and I would always eat one at work.

On Easter Sunday, the kitchen told me I was not allowed to have any cookies because “we need to have enough for the customers…”

This (and Easter) took place in April.

Men telling a woman she can’t have a cookie, 9 days after Women’s History Month ended? Misogyny.

This restaurant also had TVs on every wall, and an open kitchen, so the customers could see the cooks and vice versa. Customers often asked us to turn the TVs off.

The kitchen staff worked 14-hour days for nothing, no sick days, no vacation days, no benefits, and these Park Slope yuppies who averaged 2 nannies per child, wanted us to turn OFF ‘La Rosa de Guadalupe’!

To them, I’d scream* “You want me to take that away from the kitchen? And also me? Have you seen this angelic television program!?”

*Say in my head

We reluctantly complied and turned it off, but I’m still mad. That show is fearless.

In the 8 minutes I watched it, I saw a kid go from being on life support in a Halloween spirit hospital gown to SPRINTING up a flight of stairs 1 scene later. He went from a coma to HIIT training in 1 scene. The healthcare in telenovelas is innovative.

That said, I googled the below to try and find the scene I watched and I have some news:

I don’t think seeing a hospital scene was all that revolutionary after all.

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Music

Last year I heard the song ‘Rasputin’ for the first time, and was entranced.

I was calling it the song of the summer, I was requesting it be played at weddings, I thought this was a song only I discovered.

I recently learned…

That song came out in 1978 (the same year as my favorite track and field movie, ‘Grease’.)

I walked around for an entire year recommending this hot “new” song from 1978, I might as well have also pitched my new favorite boy band, ‘The Rolling Stones’.

To which everybody would reply: “Boy band? Everyone in your “boy” band will be on life support by Wednesday.”

I am not wishing that upon them, I just think calling them “a boy band” at this point would, fairly, raise some eyebrows.

I must add, I do find it fun that a German-Caribbean vocal group in the late ‘70s decided, it’s about time we release a bop about the hemophilia-curing, bearded sex wizard from the Russian empire.

And I’m so glad they did.