The truth about June

Glasses. Balcony. Rosé. Daddy.

[Photios: YouTube/Netflix]

Flaming June – what a month it was, eh? And how luck we were to survive it. The way things are going, July might be somewhat trickier.

Regular readers will know that my Mood Ring posts are short essays on stuff that’s happening right now – to me, to the world, to celebs, whoever. From next month, paid subscribers will get a Mood Ring roundup of the month just gone – a post mortem, if you like. Regular Mood Rings will continue as and when, and monthly ones will pop up like a bad penny twelve times a year. My commiserations and congratulations to current paid subs who will now suffer an extra post from me a month. And I really want to stop saying Mood Ring now.

Anyway, the first one is a taster for everyone. Now the admin is out of the way, it starts here:

GLASSES

Barely had we recovered from the gargantuan press tour for Wicked and its many red carpet delights, than Jonathan Bailey was back on the première circuit causing new eruptions. This time, instead of his sartorial wows (and short-shorts), his eyewear was getting online commentators frothing.

Bailey is the latest actor to be christened ‘the internet’s boyfriend’ – which fails to consider that maybe the internet is an introverted lesbian who likes to sit at home reading Julia Armfield books. As holder of this title, Bailey must endure collective lusting over almost every nook and cranny of his body, and now he has to contend with a meme fuelled by the nerdy professor specs Bailey wears in the new Jurassic Park movie. Yes, it’s the Slutty Little Glasses.

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Coined by Blakely Thornton, it’s been around a while, but reached peak levels in June. Social media editors and sales directors at Vision Express and SpecSavers must be rubbing their hands in glee – or vigorously buffing their specs with a cleaning cloth – as the masses flock to their nearest branch in the hope that they’ll be elevated to iconic beauty status simply by wearing the kind of bins that look like something a geography teacher would remove just before doling out his sixth detention of the day.

Brushing aside the rather disquieting increasing levels of objectification famous people now suffer in the name of TikTok content, it is time for a reality check. I say this as a hopelessly average-looking specs-wearer myself: the slutty little glasses look good only because they’re balanced on Jonathan Bailey’s near-perfect face. Were I to put them on, I’d look like Herr Flick from ‘Allo ‘Allo.

JB has put his specs appeal to good use however, collaborating with snoot opticians Cubitts on his own range of SLGs to raise money for his LGBTQ+ charity The Shameless Fund.

BALCONY

The hottest theatre ticket in London in June, other than The Mousetrap (make sure you do three lines of ket in the interval if you want to get through it) and that one with Jack Lowden in, was Evita at the Palladium, starring the preternaturally talented Rachel Zegler.

This latest rejig of the infamous musical is a Jamie Lloyd production which, as those who saw his Sunset Boulevard and Romeo and Juliet reimaginings already know, usually indicates minimal sets, scant costume changes, one character heading for a stroll outside that’s beamed back into the theatre, and the leading man ending the show half-naked and covered in gunk – three out of four of those characteristics can also be found on most Pornhub productions, funnily enough.

With Evita, there’s a slight twist. In a nod to previous productions, Zegler does briefly don a blond wig and a ballgown for Eva’s big speech on the balcony at the Casa Rosada, to sing the show’s most famous song ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ – however, as tradition dictates, she does piss off outside to do it.

@emwilieAfternoon performance times for Evita Rachel Zegler Crowds start to get heavy around 3.45pm Performance starts at 3.55pm Information: One song in the second act of Evita is performed on the balcony of the theater, visible to the public. This is Don't Cry for Me Argentina and it is performed by Rachel Zegler. This is performed live every day and is broadcast back to the audience on a screen. The show is only running for 12 weeks from the 14th June. The show is on evenings from Monday to Saturday and there are afternoon performances on Thursdays and Saturdays. All are performed at the London Palladium on Argyll Street #rachelzegler #evita #evitabalcony #londonpalladium #london #westend #live #westendlive #evitabalcony #snowwhite #freeevents #freeeventslondon #londonshow #musicals

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The gimmick of famed working-class heroine Eva calling out to the non-paying crowds gathering on Argyll Street while the ‘elites’ sit inside and experience it from a distance was met with fury by many ticket buyers who had yet to see the show, but by all accounts, Zegler’s performance of what is quite a ridiculous and mawkish song is electrifying no matter where you are when you hear it – although it’s no Madonna, let’s be real.

However, every time it pops up on my socials, I think not of Eva’s beloved descomisados, but the bar in the room behind Zegler as she sings. Perhaps Eva has actually wandered out there by mistake, looking for the two rum and cokes she ordered for the interval, knowing there was more chance of contracting and dying of smallpox in the queue for that bar than getting served before the orchestra starts up again.

PEDRO

Internet boyfriends are like buses – you wait ages for one to come along, and suddenly multiples start rounding the corner. With the aforementioned Jonathan Bailey reaching 37, and Pedro Pascal now clocking up a half-century, it seems the internet has begun to prefer their bananas a little riper.

Chilean-born heartbreaker Pascal is no newbie, but his star has risen to stratospheric levels, thanks in part, maybe, to gamely humouring the demands of social media culture, much like Bailey. You can basically get Pedro to say almost anything – he’s asked to assert his status as a ‘daddy’, on camera, several times a day.

Not only that, but he has been fantastically vocal about trans rights and supporting the queer community. Such is his saturation, he’s in danger of ending up the subject of arguments that always blow up with, ‘Oh, you love him so much? Name three of his earliest films’ that people who’ve never been in love adore having so often.

Here he is in one of the many SNL sketches he has elevated.

JENNER

Despite circa 25 years of living every breath and fart under a camera’s glare, the Kardashians show no sings of running out of steam. Causing sizeable crowd noise as the month kicked off was Kris Jenner’s face. Usually, when talking about cosmetic surgery, or ‘work’ as it’s called by people imagining they’re This Morning’s celebrity reporter, it’s to crow at a procedure gone wrong, complain of unrealistic beauty standards, or note how everyone kind of looks the same now.

Mogultriarch Kris Jenner’s facial reset, however, received a rapturous response. While I’m not a huge fan of picking apart how people change their face, it’s true that facial tinkering rarely makes you look younger. It’s a kind of strange preservation – in the same way that taxidermy can’t make you look any less dead. Jenner’s new mug, however, was that of a… I don’t know, in the photos I saw, she looked about 29, forty years younger than her actual age. So, a success, I guess?

Before we high-tail it to our nearest nail bar/tannery/injectables emporium on the high street, it should be pointed out that Kris’s rejuvenation was engineered not by a guy in black scrubs called Daryl who got his beauty qualifications on a Groupon – it cost £250,000 and some surgeons claim that the impressive photos doing the rounds are actually AI, not magical knifery.

I’m afraid I am not including the photo here because I have seen photos of the Kardashians’ matriarch more than I have my own mother and we have to draw a line somewhere.

MEGHAN

After a month or two of relative obscurity, the emotional dartboard of the craziest people on the internet, Meghan Markle, returned to the spotlight to announce a new rosé wine – launching today (July 1). No big deal, you might think, but perhaps you have forgotten the large population of irrational headbangers who patrol the internet like drain flies feasting upon that one baked bean you accidentally swilled down the sink three weeks ago.

The first of July, you see, is also Princess Diana’s birthday. Well, it was; she tends not to celebrate them any more. Meghan’s detractors have accused the Duchess of attempting to capitalise on this very important date – one very few people outside her immediate family would remember if it weren’t for keyboard lunatics pretending that Diana’s death is current affairs and not an event that took place a generation ago.

If anything, Meghan’s hun-petrol launch is a fitting tribute to the princess. I’m sure fun-loving Di would have been rapt to spend a birthday getting lit on a lovely blush wine with her son and his wife in the grounds of a Californian mansion. And this way, Harry gets to do some respectful commemoration in the morning, and get blitzed on his wife’s wine in the afternoon.

I do hope Meghan sent a case to Charles and Camilla – just so the date doesn’t pass by unremarked.

See you for another one of these at the end of July – if you want one, upgrade to paid now! x

In need of some new books to read that aren’t written by me? How DARE you. Anyway, here’s everything I read in June (filmed in 30º heat in my garden after a very long walk in the sun, wearing a hat, in case you’re wondering why I look 70):

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