#68: Mamma Mia! on Broadway is gay psychosis
Death By Consumption
8/19/25 - 8/25/25
Today was the first morning I felt a near-chill in the air in months, and I could practically levitate. The tyranny of summer is nearly over! The only bad news about this is that the subways are back to filling up with terrifyingly self-confident teenagers at 3 pm every weekday. I dread riding the train between 2:30 and 4:30 pm. (When I first moved to NY, I was on the G train when an old lady shushed a group of rowdy teenagers, and one of the girls turned to the woman, looked her dead in the eyes, and said, "You're going to die alone." I've never so much as looked at a subway teen in the 14 years since.) Summer had its fun, but I'm ready to start wearing layers again. I'm so, so, so tired of choosing between keeping my wallet in my pocket or bringing a bag. I miss jackets!
This week, I briefly became a Broadway gay, I discovered my new favorite bar in the depths of Midtown hell, I enjoyed some corn, I could not get enough of our hysterical NYC mayoral race, and I read a very good new book.
Mamma Mia! — on Broadway
When we heard that Mamma Mia! was returning to Broadway for a "limited engagement," 11 of us immediately booked nearly an entire row of seats. This was the event of the year, one we knew we couldn't miss (a friend literally flew cross-country for this — we were not fucking around) and as we settled into our seats, clutching plastic cups filled to the brim with overpriced Broadway liquor, we were all practically vibrating with anticipation.
And, look, I don't love Broadway. The overacting, the bursting into song without warning, the Disney Channel positivity... it all tends to wear on me. Why are they always screaming in each other's faces? I can't help but always think about how loud it must be when you're on stage. And Mamma Mia! is one of the worst offenders, full of hyper-manic performances, as if the cast is forced to do a couple lines of coke just before stepping out on stage. But, you know, this is Mamma Mia!, a jukebox musical mashup of ABBA songs and a Maury Povich DNA test. The whole thing is deeply insane by design. It is the dumbest show ever made, on purpose. It's infectiously brainless, a homosexual fever dream.
Which makes it kind of the perfect Broadway show? It's not pretending to be anything more than it is, and if you genuinely love ABBA (and if you don't, it's really your loss!) you know that every single song in the show is an absolute banger. We laughed, we cried ("Slipping Through My Fingers" straight into "The Winner Takes It All" is an undefeated gut punch), we gasped when one of the daddies took off his shirt and revealed a ridiculously sculpted 61-year-old chest, and at curtain call we stood up and danced and sang with the rest of the audience. By the end I was completely exhausted, as if all the dopamine in my brain had been squeezed out into the gutter. And, well, while we're here and being cheesy, ABBA already said it best: if I had to do the same again I would, my friend.
Cherry-infused vodka — at the Russian Samovar Restaurant and Piano Bar, Manhattan
There is no worse fate than realizing you're hungry in Midtown. As our group spilled out of Mamma Mia!, all of us drunk and riding an ABBA-powered high, we all had the horrifying experience of remembering — wait, we're on Broadway? Disgusting! The experience felt like we had just gone to space with Katy Perry, only to step out of the capsule and realize we had landed in Joe Rogan's podcast studio. Everything had been gay and silly, but now I'm suddenly surrounded by people who are red-faced and swollen and wearing the kind of too-tight pants worn only by Europeans and JD Vance. It was scary!!!
We spiraled for a few minutes — "where can 8 people get a decent dinner at 11pm on 50th and Broadway?" is an SAT-level question — and seriously considered throwing in the towel and just going to Applebee's. Cooler heads prevailed, and our friend Hannah mentioned a coworker had recommended the Russian Samovar, a random-ass Russian restaurant hidden in the 5th circle of Hell on 52nd street, so we stumbled down the block, desperate for relief. And boy did we find it, in the form of this dimly-lit, weirdly expansive Russian restaurant and bar, where the blonde-and-boobs hostess stuffed into a napkin of a dress sternly asked us if we were going to eat dinner or "just drink" before she and her 6-inch stilettos teeter-tottered us back to a booth in the nearly empty dining room.
This place's menu is absurd, all Russian classic dishes (so: lots of cold fish), and nearly half the menu dedicated to the bar's speciality: infused vodkas. We briefly panicked at discovering a rule on the menu, that anyone who doesn't order an entree will be charged $35, but our delightfully gay and drunk waiter said, about the hostess, "Oh, she cares about that, but I don't." So we ordered a selection of shared plates — mostly just a lot of dumplings, which were honestly pretty good! — and dove into the infused vodkas.
When I hear "infused vodkas" I picture the bottles of Fleischmann's we'd "infuse" with Skittles in college, but, thankfully, the Russian Samovar is actually not trying to kill you. They seem to use real, high-quality vodka ("This feels like clean drinking!" we kept reassuring ourselves, the way drunks lying to themselves do), and their flavors are deeply insane. Some are delicate and genuinely nice, like lemon, while others seem weirdly healthy, like ginger. But others are simply evil — horseradish, pepper, garlic, to name a few. Our waiter, who had taken a liking to us, kept dropping more vodkas off at the table, free of charge, encouraging us to taste everything. While we sipped our vodkas, he'd treat himself to a shot of whiskey.
"I'll bring you a carafe," he said, out of nowhere, and we all thought: a carafe of vodka? I've truly never heard of such a thing, but next thing we knew a carafe of cherry-infused vodka was plopped on the table. The cherry vodka was surprisingly delicious — delicate and sweet, like a well-mixed cocktail, with almost no taste of vodka. Throughout the night, various musicians played: a piano player, followed by a guitar player, followed by an accordion player? I never knew if it was all one musician, swapping instruments, or different musicians taking turns. Someone would show up, play an instrument for a couple songs, and then disappear. I quickly learned that, much like in Mother Russia, you never question what's going on at the Russian Samovar.
Massive groups of people would spill in at all hours of the night and, like us, they always found room — at one point, I watched a group of 25 arrive without a reservation and get seated immediately. Inside the Russian Samovar, we felt outside of time and place; we were no longer in the city, no longer in the country, no longer on the planet. It's my new Midtown safe space, a twisted Russian Cheers where no one knows your name, but there's always a table for you and 2-20 of your closest friends, where the kitchen will whip up some dumplings for you at 1am, and the carafes of vodka never stop coming, even if you want them to.
New Jersey corn on the cob — at Debra and Philip's
My friend Debra had a group of us over Friday night, and amongst the selections of cheeses and dips to nibble on, she had placed a bowl of corn on the cob. It was such a baffling and bold choice that, honestly, I didn't even process it for the first couple hours I was there — like that theory that, if aliens landed on Earth, our brains wouldn't even be able to process them, so our eyes would literally just graze over them, as if they weren't even there. But, finally, I was able to see it and I was like: wait, is that a bowl of corn?
Debra and family had just come back from New Jersey, bearing bushels of the famous Jersey produce that makes you remember "the Garden State" is, in fact, a real nickname, rather than a cruel, mocking joke forced on New Jersey by the other 49 states. As the night went on, I finally got tipsy enough to no longer care about becoming the guy randomly eating corn at a party. I come from the Midwest, where our corn is garishly bright and yellow, almost cartoonishly so, so when I saw the pale, nearly white kernels of the Jersey corn, I knew I was going to have to awkwardly pretend to like it in front of Debra, while secretly knowing that Midwestern corn still reigns supreme.
But, just like a mobster lurking in the corner of your apartment with a garrote, Jersey produce will surprise you! It may have been my first time ever eating corn without first slathering it in butter — another horrifying strike against my proud Midwestern values — and, you know what? It really didn't need it! With just a little bit of salt, it was some of the best corn I've ever had, and after my first bite I no longer even cared that I was tearing into corn on the cob while standing in the middle of a party. I learned some valuable lessons that night: New Jersey has great produce, and if someone is daring enough to include ears of corn in their charcuterie, trust them that you should try it.
"Eric Adams Advisor Winnie Greco Handed a CITY Reporter Cash Stuffed in a Bag of Potato Chips" — in The CITY
As you may or may not be aware, New York is currently undergoing one of the most insane and hilarious mayoral races of all time. After Zocialist Zaddy Zohran's massive upset in the primary, most of the attention has stayed on Cuomo, who, as always, heard a "no" and took it as a "yes." But this story last week brought Eric Adams back into the spotlight where he belongs, after one of his most cartoonishly insane and corrupt advisors was caught forcing a bag of half-eaten potato chips into a reporter's hands, into which she had stuffed something like $140.
This whole situation is so perfectly, beautifully Eric Adams – a poorly thought-out scheme, executed by a bumblingly inept long-time friend of his, where the benefits to the mayor are unclear and not at all worth the risk. What did they think $140 with no strings attached was even going to get them? Eric Adams just loves bribes! It almost feels like they're just bribing for the sake of bribing now. They don't even want anything in return for their bribes; it's just bribery for the love of the game.
My favorite part of the story is Winnie Greco's response, when asked why she awkwardly shoved $140 covered in grease into a reporter's hands before literally running away:
Am I sick or am I now feeling... kind of bad for Winnie??? "I just wanted to have one good friend," is an all-timer political quote, one that I know is going to keep popping up in my head for decades, but I also love "Please don't do in the news nothing about me." This whole story is so pathetic, so awkward, so baffling, and so perfect. Greatest fucking city in the world, baby!!!! They should extend the mayoral race to run until November 2026, just for the laughs.
Flashlight, by Susan Choi (2025) — hardcover
This book, about a couple generations of Korean-Americans, is hard to talk about without dropping spoilers, so I'll keep it simple: it was really good! It somehow feels deeply intimate while also like a sweeping epic, spanning decades of international politics and family drama, while slowly unfolding a mystery that doesn't even feel like a mystery. It's a genuine achievement of a book, a dark story in which people do horrible things to each other, that somehow doesn't leave you in a dark place. It's sure to be one of the biggest books of the year, and I can already tell it's reignited my interest in North Korea — don't be surprised if, over the next month, all I end up reading are books about the DPRK.