Shannon Cannon

When I heard that Molly Shannon had written a memoir, I thought, oh, that'll be hilarious.  And it was, crammed with all the outlandish childhood and SNL anecdotes you'd expect.  But Hello, Molly! is so much more than a punchline.  It's ultimately Molly's story of her relationship with her dad.  Her mom and baby sister were killed in a car accident.  Four-year-old Molly and her older sister were also in the car, and their father was the one driving.  I'm going to pause to let that sink in for a moment because it's extraordinarily heavy. 

But -- and I cannot stress this enough -- Hello, Molly! isn't a downer.  It's the bittersweet, clean kind of sad that makes you appreciate life and remember that everything happens for a reason.  Like This is Us, plus comedy.  In other words, it has a good tone (and you know how much I value that).  Molly describes the highs and lows of life with her dad -- and her struggles to make it in showbiz -- with the straight-from-the-heart candor of a coming-of-age novelist.  She always sees the best in everything, even when audition doors are slammed in her face and her father acts more like a child.  Because it all really happened -- and made Molly the lovable, no-holds-barred performer we know today -- it's much more engaging than fiction.      

Of course, you can't talk about Molly Shannon without mentioning Mary Katherine Gallagher.  Or, as Shannon calls her, MKG (not to be confused with that other Irish icon, Machine Gun Kelly).  Shannon created the character while she was at NYU, almost a decade before she crashed into Studio 8H at SNL.  And it turns out that everyone's favorite painfully earnest, awkward Irish Catholic teen is based on Shannon herself.  Shannon joined SNL in 1995, so I remember the MKG years vividly.  And the sketch that stayed with me the most is the one where she's reenacting a scene from A House Without a Christmas Tree.  Not only is it cringeworthily funny, it's heartbreaking, showing Mary Katherine at her most vulnerable, reminding you that she's just a kid from a dysfunctional family who wants the world to love her.  After learning about her life, it rings even truer.  

Raw and sweet and hysterical, Hello, Molly! is an American tale (and no, not like when Fievel goes west; although, on second thought, maybe?).  It embodies timeless themes that readers hold dear: Midwestern girl makes good, optimism in the face of incredible odds, and an unorthodox but unbreakable father-daughter bond.  It's universal, its magic extending far beyond SNL.  At the end, I felt like hers was a life well lived (not that it's over yet!), brimming with love and adventure.  

No doubt about it, she's a Superstar.

Day One, Fun Run: Sneakers That Ignite a Spark

Sneakers: PUMA, Zulily

Despite this title, I'm not running for charity -- or for any other reason -- this New Year's.  Still, I did get some new sneakers.  I've never been much of an athletic shoe girl, but I must admit that the architecture of the sneaker offers ample surface area for the kind of color and pattern play I enjoy.  Also, I thought that these neon numbers might motivate me to do more than the occasional jumping jacks.  

Not so with Trevor Benson in Nicholas Sparks's latest, The Return.  That's right, I'm segueing from shoes to a book review.  Then again, it's probably not the first time.

Trevor runs six miles a day even though he hates it and passes up most of his French fries because he can imagine his arteries hardening.  Which is to say that he's as tightly wound as any Sparks hero -- even if, in the first few pages, he insists that he's not a hero in that aw-shucks-yet-unreliable-narrator way.  Still, Trevor has good reason to be uptight.  He's an ex-Navy doctor who came home minus an ear and with PTSD.  So, he's literally running from his problems.  The book's called The Return because Trevor's back in New Bern, North Carolina -- the setting of many a Sparks saga -- to fix up his late grandfather's house.  Yet as he refurbishes the old cottage, he discovers that he doesn't know the whole truth about his grandfather.  Lovely but odd cop Natalie Masterson and troubled teen Callie, no last name, are key in helping him solve the mystery.  Both are running from something, too, connecting these three souls in their struggles.

The Return flirts with romantic suspense even more flagrantly than earlier Sparks novels The Guardian, Safe Haven, and, more recently, See Me.  Although sleepier than any of those barn burners, The Return features the most mysterious -- and at times eerie -- of budding romances.  It also includes that less-oft-discussed but nonetheless noteworthy Sparks staple of low-grade stalking, a phenomenon that gives me the creeps even as it makes me laugh (neither, of which, I surmise, is a response that Sparks was going for).  Finally, Sparks-speaking-as-Trevor vacillates between the usual corny and a new hint of jaded, but then divorce (Sparks's, not Trevor's) will do that to you.  Snarkiness aside, I liked The Return.  Sparks is a classic storyteller.  The way he describes idyllic yet haunting small towns and weaves past and present to show true love delivers.   

That said, let's take a brief break to look at my second pair of new sneakers.  They were a Christmas gift from my sister, and the reason that they're popping up now is because they're called The Fuzz, and love interest Natalie is Johnny (Janey?) Law.

Sneakers: Katy Perry, Amazon

As usual, this sneaker sidebar is my way of making light of something serious -- even if the something serious in this case is fiction -- something, ironically, that Trevor's therapist says he does, too.  But humor -- and funky footwear -- make life's icky stuff easier.  And The Return is crammed with icky stuff, making good on its promise of Sparks's signature sadness.  As for the ending, about half of Sparks's books end happily, a gamble that keeps readers coming back to find out if they'll need that economy-sized box of tissues or if they can save it for This is Us.  I won't spoil the ending of this one, though.  Consider it my New Year's gift to you.

On that note, this year, more reading, less running.  Even if reading is just running in place.

Office Flowers are Always Open

T-Shirt & Jeans, Amazon

LC Lauren Conrad, Kohl's

Betsey Johnson, Macy's

This post is about flowers and fruits and veggies and purses (see above carrot barrettes and veggie sweater.  For the record, fashion is the only way I let peas infiltrate my life).  It's also about my home office (a.k.a. the cactus room) where I write these posts, online shop, and pay bills with stamps like an old lady.  But you already knew that, right down to the stamps. 

Flowers make great metaphors.  Especially roses.  As in, "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" and "Every Rose Has its Thorn".  Even this week's episode of "The Unicorn" (a sitcom about a widower named Wade [Walton Goggins] that I once watched ironically but now genuinely like) had a game called rose and thorn in it.  In an effort to help Wade's seventh-grader daughter Grace open up, his friends Delia (Michaela Watkins) and Michelle (Maya Lynne Robinson) suggest this exercise in which each person shares one good thing that happened that week -- that's the rose -- and one bad thing -- yes, that's the thorn.  And although it didn't ultimately work out -- Delia and Michelle had to reminisce about their own middle school misadventures before Grace finally spilled about her boy troubles -- I found the idea appealing.  So here are some of my roses and thorns from this week.


Roses:

I sold two brooches, one to someone in Arkansas and one to someone in Pennsylvania.

I got a box of free stuff from Kohl's.  No, they haven't decided to reward me for all the blogging I do about their products.  The loot was gratis because I had a "big fat check" from Rakuten and opted to upgrade it to a Kohl's gift card.  Which means it technically wasn't free because I had to spend a lot to get the cashback.  But it made me happy.  So, rose it is.

Thorns:

"This is Us" wasn't on.

My left thumbnail tore below the quick.  Ouch!


Playing rose and thorn is a good way to get stuff off your chest.  Or, even if you play it alone, a way to remain grateful.  For me, it comes in handy when life hands me something more seemingly insurmountable than a week without Jack Pearson's wisdom.  It reminds me to stay positive.  And open to the good stuff.

Like roses.  And '80s hair bands.