Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 16

Cazzie and Larry David, green jackets, McConaughey, Trebek, Willie's wisdom, pizza & the death of the $15 salad.

Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.

This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.

Check out the introduction post here and the entire archive of previous newsletters here.

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Here’s a great Cazzie David profile

She is Larry David’s daughter, and they share more than just a last name. This profile from the LA Times is a fun look at perhaps the most anxious person on the planet. And the quotes from Dad are amazing.

“We have the same low opinion of ourselves,” Larry says. “We are in a contest as to who is crazier. I can’t smoke weed because of what it does to me physically, but she can. So I said, ‘There’s proof — I’m definitely crazier.’ And then I find out she can’t sing when she’s by herself, because she’s too self-conscious. So now I think she wins.”

The piece also goes into her relationship with Pete Davidson. And, wow. This is an all-time bad breakup story.

David did eventually build up the courage to initiate a break, only to call him back days later and say she’d made a mistake. But Davidson said he was “the happiest he had ever been,” and definitively dumped her two days later in a text message. The following day, she learned that he was with Grande. He’d uploaded images of himself to Instagram showing that he’d covered his Cazzie tattoos.

She was devastated. On the plane to her sister’s college graduation, David was held by her dad as she “shook uncontrollably in his arms for the entire flight.” She curled up in the hotel’s bathroom, crying and sucking on her weed pens. She woke up “screaming in agony,” her dad pulling her from the bed to stop her spiraling.

“CAZZIE, COME ON!” Larry David told her. “YOUR ANCESTORS SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST!”

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Cazzie David on Cuffing SZN

Here’s some more from Ms. David. Writing for GQ, she offers some strategies for the lonely.

Cuffing season, as the hunt for companionship between November and early March is known, is hook-up culture’s antidote to seasonal depression. After a final hurrah as a hoe on Halloween, the goal is to find that special someone who makes you want to delete your dating apps and settle down by a fire... at least until the sun comes back out, and you’re back in your bikini, single and posting thirst traps on the grid.

This year things have of course been different - thanks to the global pandemic, 2019’s cuffing season never came to an end. Many of us who were single coupled with the closest person to us - and I mean physically the closest person to us - and held on for dear life. We have remained stuck in quarantine with our original covid lover for months, and a six month lockdown relationship is like a three year real-world one. And usually when you’ve been together for three years, it’s about time to break up or commit for life.

Check out the rest. It’s funny.

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Augusta’s Green Jackets: For Winners, Members (and Buyers) Only

The Masters was held this weekend. It was spectacular. You can hear the music in your head right now. Even in November, it felt good. Dustin Johnson won. Shouts to him. This story from the NYT details the long history of the legendary green jackets worn by winners and club members. It’s filled with history and secrets, much like Augusta National.

The club’s green jackets — awarded to its members and Masters winners — are not supposed to leave its grounds. A rare few have, becoming an expensive holy grail for memorabilia collectors.

A spokesman for Augusta National declined to comment. The club, though, has long asserted that it owns the jackets and loans them to members, who first began to receive blazers in 1937, and winners. In a filing last year with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, lawyers for the club said it had “instituted firm control over the wearing of the Green Jacket through the propagation and enforcement of strict rules in order to protect the brand” and that the blazers “cannot be sold or given to third parties under any circumstances.”

“The green jacket to Augusta is the Statue of Liberty to New York or the Mona Lisa to the Louvre,” Jim James, a club official, testified at a hearing, according to a contemporaneous Dallas Morning News report.

O’Brien was perhaps a decade into collecting sports memorabilia when the Alexander jacket surfaced for sale. He had grown up watching golf on television alongside his father, with the Masters an intergenerational rite of spring. And a green jacket, he reasoned, would be the centerpiece of a golf collection, much like a baseball signed by Babe Ruth can anchor a gallery of baseball memorabilia.

It arrived by mail — “just like you bought a suit at Saks Fifth Avenue,” he said — and took its place on the mannequin.

In Connecticut, O’Brien, who will sometimes let children try on one of Shaquille O’Neal’s enormous sneakers, another item in his collection, treats the green jacket with undisturbed reverence. He appeared aghast at the thought of regularly donning it himself, as others who have purchased jackets sometimes have.

“It would be like taking your Babe Ruth baseball and going outside and hitting it around,” he said. “For me, there’s something very special about it that says winner or member or nobody.”

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Curry got McConaughey

I used to work with a kid named Curry at a previous employer. He wrote under an assumed name and was universally disliked by the audience. I always loved his work. (I learned quickly to NEVER read the comments.) Anyway, Curry writes for a University of Texas sports blog called Burnt Orange Nation. Somehow, this obscure blog you’d never heard of before the last sentence managed to book an interview with Hollywood A-lister Matthew McConaughey. Every local media company has McConaughey at the top of their wish list, so shouts to Curry for the big get.

The interview is pretty good. Curry actually read the book Matthew is promoting and asked some interesting questions.

You talk a lot about growing up as the youngest of three boys and throughout this book, your brothers play a big part in it, showing up throughout your life as these foundational guys that keep you grounded. I would say the ultimate protagonist in this book ends up being your middle brother Pat. Every time he shows up in this book, it’s like an iconic scene.

MM: [Laughs]Dude, I’m so glad you see that. When I was dealing with my editors, they were like, “I’m not sure these Pat stories hold.” And I said, “No, no, no, no, no. The Pat stories are like your favorite uncle that just shows up to the party sometimes. You know, the holidays where you are like ‘Oh shit, Pat’s here.’”

Did he enjoy these stories ending up in the book?

MM: [Laughs] He’s not a reader, he won’t read this book. He’s never seen any of my movies. It’s part of our relationship. He just loves me. You know, he’s not a media guy. He’s not a reader.

Here is how I’m going to hear from Pat. He’s going to call me up some time in the next couple months, “Man, did you have some conversation or tell someone about me telling the Delta State golf coach I was going to kill him if he called dad about me smoking marijuana? Did you write a book or something?” I mean, that’ll be the conversation.

And look, he knows I wrote a book. I told him, “I’m going to put these stories in this book.” And he says, “Yeah, fine.” But no chance he will ever read it. He will come to me confused, as he has for like the last 20 years.

Thankfully, Curry asked the most important question to UT sports fans. And the answer he received is just about the most Matthew McConaughey answer possible.

One last thing, and I don’t mean for this to be a ‘gotcha’ question. People have noticed that you throw the Horns up backwards. Why is that?

MM: They are not backwards! I am so glad you asked me this. They are not backwards.

And look, some people are going to go, “What? I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

OK, look man. Let me give an example. I’ve got a wedding ring, man. It’s a symbol for my wife and it’s got my favorite bible verse on it, Matthew 6:22. “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” Now, I wear that 6:22, where I can read it. It’s for me, not you. You follow?

This is the other thing about the Horns, okay. It’s a four-dimensional symbol! It’s for me and everybody behind me as well.

Well, that is a good point. There are people behind you as well. I hadn’t considered that.

Yes. It’s four dimensional. It’s not two dimensional. It’s from every angle, man. It has a front and a back side. I don’t have it up backwards, though. You may be looking at it from the backside of it, but it’s the front side to me and everyone else behind me. You know, the other half of the world.

What a fucking weirdo.

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R.I.P. Alex Trebek

There were a lot of words written about the passing of Trebek this week. I enjoyed this piece from The Atlantic titled, How Alex Trebek Made a Mundane Game Show Brilliant.

Throughout his time on the Jeopardy stage, Trebek made a mundane game magnificent, and the people who played it stars. He coaxed personal stories from the quietest contestants and revealed unexpected dimensions to the most factoid-obsessed players behind the podiums. These players shone because they were sharing the spotlight with a host they respected, while playing a game they loved—and that glow inevitably reached audiences sitting on their living-room couches. Trebek managed the trickiest of feats: He made trivia nerds look cool.

Trebek understood, in the end, that he was hosting a game show in which knowledge matters, and he wanted to convey disappointment when contestants missed obvious answers. But the pedantic tone Trebek took toward wrong responses made the right answers feel even more special. If a contestant was good enough to impress Trebek, the viewer knew they must be extraordinary.

Trebek never set out to be a star—in fact, he hated being called a star. He wanted viewers to focus on the material itself and on the show’s inherent stakes, how a person could become a winner with one right move, or a loser with a wrong one. He loved Jeopardy for the people who played it and for the competition. But Trebek’s efforts to deflect the affection of contestants and viewers were in vain.

Dhruv Gaur, the 2019 winner of Jeopardy’s college tournament, ended his time on the show by writing, “We ♥ you, Alex!” as his response to “Final Jeopardy.” Trebek, who usually read answers without hesitation, stopped in his tracks after seeing Gaur’s response and, in a quiet voice that sounded nothing like the one I had grown accustomed to, said, “That’s very kind, thank you.” He had tears in his eyes, as if he’d just been reminded of why he was there.

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Weekly Willie Wisdom

This week, we get a new extended Q&A from The New Yorker. Go read the whole thing. Some highlights:

In “Me and Sister Bobbie,” you write that you were “born restless. Born curious. Born ready to run.” Has it been challenging for you to be grounded these past few months?

It’s been a real challenge. I’ve never really run into anything like this before—but neither has anyone else! We’ll have to sweat it out, I guess. I’m here in Texas now.

You’ve done a few virtual broadcasts since quarantine started. As someone with a couple million live shows under your belt, how have those felt?

Well, it works all right. [Laughs] But it’s not the same thing, you know? I miss the audience. And I know the audience misses the music—whether it’s me or someone else up there, the audience has come a long way and paid a lot of money to come in and clap their hands for somebody. There’s a great energy exchange that we just can’t have right now. I can remember the last show that we did, at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. That was back in early March—that’s the last time we got to play music. We had eighty thousand people there. I’ll never forget that show.

This year has been so tough—people are out of work, trying to figure out what comes next, trying to stay safe and healthy in the midst of a pandemic. I’m curious how you think about the musician’s role in a moment like this.

Well, people love to hear music. And we, as musicians, love to play music. So we do it however we can—if it’s virtual, O.K. Whenever we can get back together personally and play the shows, that will be the best, you know. Everybody remembers going to live shows. We certainly don’t want them to stop. The good book says this, too, shall pass. And it will.

God bless Willie.

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The Death of the $15 Salad

Here’s a look at how pizza won the pandemic—and Sweetgreen got left behind.

We are a nation in the throes of an unprecedented eight-month pizza binge that shows no signs of abating. Multiple pizzerias in Los Angeles reported a 250% rise in sales on Election Day, and on Thursday, Papa John’s reported quarterly same-store sales growth of 23.8%. For months now, the underlying forces for the sustained pizza craze have been as hotly debated within the restaurant industry as the election results have been parsed by professional pollsters. Stress eating is a major cause; quarantine-induced failure of imagination and the return of three major-league sports within weeks of one another over the summer certainly didn’t hurt.

But the actual reason that doesn’t get nearly enough notice is that pizza is one of the few genres of food that is actually more profitable than — and almost as addictive as — booze. Fries and fried chicken — not wings, but tenders and drumsticks — are the only other foods that come close. If that reminds you at all of the suggestions that await you on Grubhub and Uber Eats, well, that’s what’s left of the menu when restaurants lose their alcohol sales and are forced to fork over a third of their gross revenues to delivery app commissions. There are not a lot of foods where taste collides so perfectly with profit: Pizza stands alone.

Things don’t look good for salad chains.

The losing side of this stark new restaurant reality is a virtually endless list, but the unequivocal biggest loser has probably been the so-called $15 salad genre embodied by the fast-food chain cum tech unicorn Sweetgreen, which recently announced it would be laying off 20% of its corporate staff in its second round of post-outbreak job cuts. Hard numbers on this mostly privately held category, which includes Chopt Creative Salads, Just Salad, Fresh & Co, and True Food Kitchen — all of which have at one point been hailed as the “next Sweetgreen” — were easier to come by in more prosperous times, but the few out there are ugly. Sweetgreen sales fell about 60% during the eight weeks after the first shutdowns, according to Sense360, and the one publicly traded chain in the salad business, Toronto’s Freshii, reported a 51.4% plunge in its second-quarter sales.

In the end, pizza always wins.

“Pizza triggers deep, deep, deep childhood memories.” she says. “Melted cheese in any form just takes you to a certain place” — whereas boxed salads remind you of “the office.”

Amen.

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Next Week: Lots and lots of Thanksgiving recipes.

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Where else can I find Micah content?

• Podcasts: Mind of Micah, Back Door Cover, Too Much Dip

• Twitter: @micahwiener & @producermicah (Why two twitters? It’s a long story)

• Instagram: @micahwiener

• LinkedIn: @micahwiener

• Peloton: #badboysofpelly@micahwiener

• Email: micahwiener@me.com

Until next time, buh-bye.