An interview, a Nordic Better Things, a summer shoe dilemma
Hello friends!!
1. I'll get movie updates out of the way first. Where in the Hell is playing the Full Bloom Film Festival, in Statesville, NC, September 11-13, 2025, and the Santa Cruz Film Festival, October 8-12, 2025. Precise dates and times TBA. Also, an interview I did with NewFilmmakers LA is up on MovieMaker. I’m really happy with it. I think I achieved speaks candidly about her moviemaking process and also hey here’s a person you’d want to hang out with! Click here to read the full piece about the April festival, with brief but flattering coverage of Where in the Hell, or here to skip directly to the interview on YouTube.
2. I promise this won't turn into a ’sletter about birds/birdwatching, but… will it? R and I can’t stop talking about the owls we encountered on a recent twilight walk in the woods. After consulting Birds of Southwestern British Columbia, we identified them as barred owls, though the vocalizations we heard were more like the “long hiss, [and] serious of metallic clicks” the book assigns to a barn owl than the “loud hoots including who cooks for you, who cooks for you allll sequence” the book describes for the barred. Very possibly the barred owl is a mimic.
3. I received several complaints that there was no TACO in last month's newsletter, and while I cannot promise to include one every time (not while I'm in CANADA 😳), I do have a top notch rec for you today. The food menu for Off the Hook in Comox, BC, is entirely gluten-free, and their fish taco is delicious. Basically it's a piece of fish from The Perfect fish and chips (which they also serve) wrapped in a corn tortilla, topped with delicate but just-spicy-enough pico de gallo. 5/5, no notes. Get the “OTH” salad on the side, and eat half of your dining companion’s chips.
4. The algorithm knows me, sometimes. Netflix served me up a Norwegian show, Pernille (or Porni, as it's titled in the original language), created by and starring Henriette Steenstrup, that is precisely up my alley. It's a Nordic Better Things with a healthy dash of Happy Valley, about a single mom in her 40s who works in the child welfare system in Oslo. Steenstrup’s performance is great, the TV-making is great, the complicated mother/daughter middle-aged/teen/tween angst stuff is great great great.
5. I need hike-y, water-worthy shoes, which until a few weeks ago might have been Mary-Kate Olsen’s Tevas, but I've seen too many mentions suddenly to pull the trigger. OR: Am I worried I'll look too matchy matchy next to R in his black Chacos? Yes. And then there are This Summer’s Mary-Kate Tevas [Which] Are a Pair of Keens, but I fear if not impeccably styled they will just look like, y’know, Keens. I dunno, you guys.
xoxo,
Laramie
p.s. Here's your trusty taco map.