#304
Demi Moore's face, summer salads, and pretty much everything else
I’m challenging myself to get this newsletter scheduled before my self-imposed noon deadline, so let’s get right into it: I recently saw an ad that bugged me. It was for a Lancôme skin cream, one that is supposed to reverse “skin’s visible biological age.” Do you know who was shilling it? Demi Moore.
This is some real horseshit. First of all, nothing can “reverse” aging. You are aging. Every day you go to bed older than when you woke up in the morning. That is how time works. You can stave off the appearance to some extent, you can exercise to keep your bones strong and your joints limber. You can color your hair, you can get fillers, you can get surgery. You cannot stop aging and you cannot reverse it, no matter what that one techbro creep with the complexion of Data from Star Trek and all the rizz of canned vanilla pudding might tell you.
You surely know the guy I mean? I forgot his name, which is why I Google-bullied him:
All that aside, it is a new level of fuckery to put Demi Moore in an ad for an anti-aging product, given that whatever is going on with Demi Moore’s face is not down to some fucking lotion. That is a college education’s (at least a master’s degree, at a private university) worth of medical procedures. She is not dabbing on some $175 serum and looking like that.
I know this is not philosophically all that different than the long tradition of using 25-year-old models to advertise anti-aging creams, but it feels a lot worse, somehow. It is the opposite of a secret that Demi Moore has had many very skillfully done things performed on her very famous face, so how is it that a bunch of people sat around a conference table at Lancôme world headquarters (or whatever) and decided this was the right move? It seems unusually cynical, even by normal advertising standards. Like, how much of this nonsense do you really expect me to absorb? I guess it boils down to it being exactly as insulting as the rest of the experience of Being A Woman, and that’s why it’s so deeply depressing.
It seems like so long ago that I first kicked off the Summer of Salads! It’s creeping up on too-hot-to-cook season here in northeast Ohio, and I am proclaiming salad season OPEN with a slight update: it’s the Summer of Pasta Salads.
My first exposure to pasta salad (I am not talking about macaroni salad, which is its own thing and not something I’ll be discussing further) was in the late 1980s when Suddenly Salad burst onto the scene. One night, my mother left me, a bona fide latchkey kid, in charge of making the Suddenly Salad to accompany dinner, and that is when I learned that you start pasta in boiling water rather than in cold water. That Suddenly Salad was Unfortunately Inedible, but I never made that mistake again.
Suddenly Salad is still available, by the way! I think at this point it’s more Still Salad.
Anyway, I made Caroline Chambers’ charred corn and green onion miso pasta salad (paywall, but linked below!), which was great, and I’ve saved many a salad-girlie recipe on Instagram. I am frankly surprised that the salad girlies fuck with pasta salad, but I don’t need to understand them; I just need to screenshot their recipes and then forget where I saved them.
I also made Caroline Chambers’ grilled chicken and coconut rice with mango crunch salad, and it was good, though not a bona fide do-again like this pasta salad, or her gringa cochinita, which we ate outside on the patio with generous glasses of rosé. I like that recipe because you just chop everything up, throw it in a pot, squeeze some citrus over it and forget about it for three hours. No searing or browning, which I hate doing ALWAYS and most especially when it is hot outside.
Today, before it gets a bit too warm, I am going to make Christopher Kimball’s cowboy cookies, mostly because I have a gigantic box of Rice Krispies I would like to dispense with before 2027. Christopher Kimball also paywalls his newsletter, which frosts my ass because I already pay for his silly magazine and website. (He does offer a seven-day free trial, however.) But if you want to make these cookies, you can always just get the Laura Bush version from Southern Living. That whole sentence is so retro! Her recipe does not call for cereal, but Chris Kimball and his bow tie include either Corn Flakes or Rice Krispies.
I am not sure what I will do with myself this week. I am waiting to hear back about a couple of jobs and I have already knocked out all of the laundry. I sent off the weekend’s Poshmark sales and will probably make a grocery list later today; if it’s small (and light) enough I might walk down to the store. It feels like a good day to grill something, maybe?
I have more freedom than usual today. My dogs are at daycare for no particular reason other than the mild and extraordinarily pleasant weather seems to have driven them entirely crazy. They zoom around all day and avoid their afternoon Big Nap entirely. Admittedly, they sleep very soundly at night, which is always a good thing. But by the time dinner rolls around, they are a lot like overtired children in that they really! want! your attention! and if they don’t receive it, they create situations that demand it, such as standing on the couch barking at the neighbors or trying to eat a bee, at the very moment when you want to be relaxing into the shank of the evening. So, ideally, they will tire themselves out at school today. (FYI, this rarely works as planned.)
Finally, some true crime notes: Having exhausted most of the Dateline oeuvre and not having the appetite for anything much more lurid than major network sensibilities and Keith Morrison’s dulcet tones, I’ve been reading a lot of entries from the Bizarre Unsolved Cases Substack. There are quite a few Ohio cases (I linked one below), including some I’d never heard of before. You can almost always find deep Reddit rabbit holes on these cases, too.
If mysterious disappearances are your thing, The Vanished has an incredibly deep archive and sometimes does follow-ups if there are developments or if people are eventually found. And I also recommend the podcast about the Sneha Philip case. Generally, I prefer cult documentaries to murder documentaries, but I do find it wild that people just…disappear without a trace. Sometimes I like to imagine these people simply pulled a Ladder of Years and started over from scratch. There are days when it sounds tempting!
(If I ever mysteriously disappear, this entry will obviously be cited on my Vanished episode.)