This starts out so strongly. It has a crispness to it — in fact, it reminds me of Meghan Markle’s recent suit — and I’m into the weird lipstick, which her face carries with surprising ease, and giant colorful earrings. It’s all going so well.
And then suddenly she’s a 4-year old who got into the costume closet at school. Seriously. When Dylan was four, we got his official school portraits home, and in the class photo he was sitting front row in his normal shorts and t-shirt and these massive white leather cowboy boots. He was the only person whose shoes were even visible, and it looked so amazing, like his bottom half had time-traveled to a John Hughes movie. This is the face I made, both then and now.
We asked him about it, and he was like, “Well, there’s my Lightning McQueen shirt, and there are my orange shorts, and THERE’S MAH BOOTS,” like he himself became a cowboy as soon as he spoke of them. I actually think, in the end, it turned out that he borrowed them from a classmate just for the photo. No one knew why, and he just kind of blinked it off like, “What? MAH BOOTS, big deal.” That child has Ideas. And Tracee, too, has Ideas. (They’d probably get along like a shoestore on fire.) Many of Tracee’s ideas work, and maybe in another context these might have, too. But here, they just totally destroy the vibe. Friend, just because you’re at an event with Molly Ringwald, it does not mean you need to clothe yourself in relics of her fame.
Oh, and speaking of Molly:
She’s doing just fine, thank you for asking! She’s well-accessorized, picked good lipstick, is still a redhead, doesn’t appear to be beholden to any future Riverdale appearances (which can only be good news, what with how terrible that show has gotten — I cannot even speak of its casting for Betty’s brother, except you know I totally will, and at length) and has even figured out a pretty darn good beige shoe. Rock on, Ringwald.
