Easy to please. Difficult to impress.

Monthly Recap {July 2026}

2022 venice film festival

My roommate bought a bunch of Anaïs's albums from her and had her sign them at her little merch table after the show. She played them over and over and got kind of obsessed, so maybe 10 years later I was bored at work and wondered, "Whatever happened to that singer?" I Googled her and several results were about this musical she had written. Hadestown was in the middle of a successful tour of Canada, and their next stop was the West End of London, where they hoped to build up enough buzz to make a bid for Broadway after that.

Jump a couple years later, and I am about to celebrate a big birthday with my family in NYC...so of course we're gonna see a Broadway show. I waffled between Avenue Q, which I'd wanted to see for years, and Hadestown, which was new and getting some really good reviews, and finally decided on Hadestown.

I said to my mom and sister, "Remember that singer at my college Parents Weekend performance?"

"Oh, the lady with the voice and she did the stepping thing?"

"Yeah, remember she talked about writing a musical? I got us tickets to that!"

We just managed nosebleed seats in the highest mezzanine, and the performance was excellent. A week or two after I bought the tickets, the Tony nominations for that year were announced, and Hadestown got a slew of them; if I had waited another week or so, I'd never have been able to afford the tickets. I got to see the original Broadway cast and Patrick Page was freaking delightful. That number sounded so good in his deep, deep baritone, and people's reaction to it in 2019 was...very different than it had been in that obscure little college amphitheater in 2007.

In 2007 we sort of smiled indulgently at a super-indie folk singer with cowgirl boots and a big dream about a folk opera, and had a good laugh at the absurdity of this businessman and his bizzarro little plan about building a wall and when was he going to quit running just because he could afford to?

In 2019, watching that song performed on Broadway by a veteran actor and a chorus of professional actors with award-winning sets, three years after the inconcievable election of that stupid businessman and all the vile actions and change in the mood of the country that happened in his first term, but not knowing we were a year away from the start of the COVID pandemic...people in the theatre sort of looked around at each other uncomfortably, like wow...damn....

Well, you can't never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo.

Some belt bag commissions from this month.

For any one who doesn't know the Arthur Conan Doyle Room is a massive collection of ACD, Sherlock Holmes, and related books (there are 25000+ books) located on the 5th floor of the library and completely open to the public. You can take items right off the shelf and read them. The library was pretty quiet that day so we had the whole collection to ourselves.

Part of the collection is in this wonderful little room. Themed after Holmes' study.

There's even a piece of the Reichenbach Falls.

Of course we have the "Watson going through it" Sidney Paget print.

When I was first told about the collection I was told to be on the look out for the copy of The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes they have, which we found on the shelf to the left of the fireplace. My friend was delighted to read a section of it out loud in that very echoey room for our amusement.

I found this Japanese language novel featuring what I can only describe as "Shonen Protagonist Sherlock Holmes" that I just needed to share with everyone.

We spent a good couple of hours looking through things, they have a lot of various editions of the canon in a number of different languages, as well as a ton of parodies, pastiches, and Holmes adjacent items. My friend and I are planning another visit later this summer as we barely scratched the surface of what the collection has.

So if you do find yourself downtown Toronto, I highly recommend stopping by.