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Kate McKinnon's new middle-grade mystery is for all her fellow misfits

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Kate McKinnon's new middle-grade mystery is for all her fellow misfits

Emmy Award winning SNL star and Weird Barbie Kate McKinnon can now add novelist to her resume.

Her first book, The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette For Young Ladies of Mad Science, is a middle-grade mystery full of oddball characters, creatures and contraptions.

The novel, which hit shelves Tuesday, is part of what she calls her “private mission to give a wink and a nod” to young people who might feel “different,” like as she did, growing up.

McKinnon, whose characters and impressions on SNL are legendary, fully admits she was a “weird” kid. She wore a Peter Pan costume to school every day for a year. Later, she dressed like Pippi Longstocking. “I would go to school in these outfits because I felt more confident … and somehow more myself. Go figure,” she told NPR.

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As a kid, McKinnon shared her room with an array of pets including Madagascar hissing cockroaches and an iguana named Willy. “It’s not something I would do again. And I don’t recommend it for anyone,” advised McKinnon. “That said, oh my gosh, we had fun me and that iguana. And by ‘fun’ I mean we had a contentious relationship that felt like a bad marriage that we’d entered into because one of us was pregnant.” McKinnon says eventually her mom, a social worker, sent the iguana to a reptile rescue organization in Boca.

Even though her parents fully supported her eccentricities, McKinnon said she often felt like an outcast among her peers: “I just felt very wrong. Like, I was not good enough and was wrong.”

Then she found her people. “In fourth grade we started a Honeysuckle Eaters Club on the playground. So we would go into a corner while all the cool girls were watching the guys play basketball. We would go and eat honeysuckle and try to understand the correlation between flower color and sweetness of nectar. And we made notes,” McKinnon laughed. “So that’s what I had cookin,’ and luckily, I was not alone.”

Small wonder one of her favorite authors was Roald Dahl; she especially like his book The Witches, in which the title characters turn children into mice.

“I love a delicious villain. And who’s more delicious than the Grand High Witch,” McKinnon declared. “But I loved also that it started with a set of instructions about how to identify real witches. And I was so taken by that because I thought, ‘I know it’s fantasy, but like, he’s talking to me.’”

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In similar fashion, McKinnon breaks the fourth wall throughout Millicent Quibb, telling readers they can “take a short break” and that she’s going to hand the story “over to the illustrator… and go watch TV.”

The Porch sisters are the stars of Kate McKinnon's new novel.

The Porch sisters are the stars of Kate McKinnon’s new novel.

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Little Brown

The novel, the first in a series, begins with a warning:

“The situations contained in these books could cause:

Instant death
Extremely instant death (bad)
Semi-instant death (worse)
Burning in the upper extremities
Burning in the lower extremities
Permanent intestinal parasites”

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And so on.

McKinnon narrates the audiobook with help from her sister, comedian Emily Lynne.

Comedian and author Kate McKinnon.

Comedian and author Kate McKinnon.

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Set in 1911 in the fictional town of Antiquarium, tween sisters Gertrude, Eugenia and Dee-Dee Porch have passions that include slugs, bats, rocks, explosions and building machines. Suffice it to say they do not belong in snooty Antiquarium where girls attend etiquette school and the official dog is the bichon frisé. They’re teased by classmates and shamed by their teacher.

Enter Millicent Quibb, the ostracized, disorganized, well-meaning mad scientist who trains the Porch sisters to help her save the town from the dangers lurking underground.

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Quibb’s hair is described as “a chaotic nest of salty, windswept fibers that were thick as sea rope.” She wears a lab coat “splattered with stains of all colors and textures-a neon green smear, a dribble of oatmeal, a matrix of dried intestines.”

Despite rewriting the first chapter “like 500 times,” McKinnon said she loved “writing about these three little weirdos and their Willy Wonka-esque mentor in this stuffy turn of the century town.”

It took her more than 10 years to write Millicent Quibb. She got the idea before joining SNL in 2012. At the time she was doing sketch comedy for free in the basement of a New York supermarket with the Upright Citizens Brigade.

“Sketch comedy and middle grade literature have a lot in common, namely funny names and big hair,” McKinnon said, “And so it just felt for me like a way to perform when I didn’t have to be at a show at the basement that night.”

McKinnon said she hopes her oddball heroes make her fellow misfits feel less alone. She’s a big believer that weirdness can be its own kind of superpower, “That thing that makes you weird. That’s actually the thing that you can use to save the town, save the world, save yourselves. That’s a message that I find true.”

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Broadway stars campaign to get out the vote

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Broadway stars campaign to get out the vote

A still from Broadway Votes’ “Carrying the Message” video. The video is part of a campaign that engages New York theater talent to encourage audiences to head to the polls.

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Jenny Anderson/Broadway Votes

A new video encouraging Broadway fans to vote has being popping up on social media feeds lately.

Set at a workers’ rally at the turn of the last century, the musical number called “Carrying the Message” plays off the 1990s musical Newsies, about a group of disenfranchised newsboys.

The original creators of Newsies, including composer Alan Menken and director Kenny Ortega, are behind this new take for the 2024 election. It also features a slew of Broadway talent such as Nikki M James, who starred in the Tony Award-winning political musical Suffs.

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This music video is one of a number of ways — both online and on stage — in which the new nonprofit Broadway Votes has been working to inspire Broadway audiences to head to the voting booth.

“Because Broadway in particular is a commercial industry, very little partisan work gets done, it felt like this incredible opportunity to leverage the talents of people who work in the industry and encourage people across the country to get out and vote,” said Catherine Markowitz, theater producer and co-founder and director of Broadway Votes.

Broadway Votes has also been mobilizing New York’s stages and stars to engage audiences lately through curtain-call announcements about the importance of voting at shows like Once Upon A Mattress, Hadestown and Little Shop of Horrors.

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The nonprofit also organized a get-out-the-vote concert in New York’s Times Square, a music video featuring Tony Award winning performer Alex Newell and the Broadway Inspirational Voices singing group in a performance of a new arrangement of “Keep Marching” from Suffs, and various online giveaways and contests, including a costume contest judged by Broadway celebrities Betsy Wolfe, J Harrison Ghee and Rachel Bloom. The winner will be announced on election day.

Data shared via email with NPR from the arts-focused voter registration nonprofit Headcount shows these efforts have so far led to thousands of voter registrations.

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Broadway Votes has also inspired some formerly reticent theater insiders to become politically engaged.

“I’ve always found myself in between two worlds,” said performer Tommy Bracco, who said he divides his time between his mostly red-leaning family on Staten Island and blue-leaning entertainment industry colleagues in Manhattan. “And because so many people close to me are so passionate about this, I have kind of felt afraid to use my voice [for political causes].” 

Now he’s playing one of the leads in the “Carrying the Message” music video.

“Broadway Votes encouraged me to use my voice for the first time ever,” Bracco said. “In a world where everything is so divided, Broadway Votes is bringing people together.”

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L.A. Affairs: We learned L.A. together. Could our love survive us being 700 miles apart?

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L.A. Affairs: We learned L.A. together. Could our love survive us being 700 miles apart?

Long Beach is not Los Angeles. The suburb, if that’s something you can call the seventh-largest city in California, is geographically close to the City of Angels but emotionally distant. The hometown of both Snoop Dogg and Billie Jean King — a set of Long Beach Polytechnic High graduates with pretty disparate skill sets — is culturally its own.

As such, growing up in the LBC meant trips into Los Angeles were an occasion, the kind of pack-the-car event that is normally associated with a road trip: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays that might have been spent in the city exploring the still-striking Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad or the cliffs of Malibu.

When I was growing up, L.A. felt far from me: I had great memories there, but my heart was in Long Beach.

I went north for college — to UC Santa Barbara. UCLA had waitlisted me, and the prospect of going to USC hurt my wallet just thinking about it. At the midpoint of my fourth year in Santa Barbara, I met Becca.

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Introduced by our mutual friends, she was pitched to me as “tall and blond, with curly hair,” a historically winning phenotype for me, even if that “blond” mention was an elaborate brunette farce. We hit it off pretty quickly.

She was brilliant, the kind of smart that has the answer to every question. Gorgeous, the kind of beautiful that looks as good in a ripped Carhartt jacket and Dr. Martens as in a ballgown. And she was caring, the kind of person who would answer your phone call in a hurricane.

Becca was from Salt Lake City and had not spent much time in Los Angeles. Perhaps ironically, we had this in common. Nonetheless, I was her go-to for local information on the city.

Once I graduated, she spent time with me back in Long Beach. My charade, as her wealth of Los Angeles information, was doomed from the start, exposed during a particularly brutal bout of freeway traffic. Sitting at the bottleneck where the 10 Freeway meets the 405, Becca asked me whether I had been to the Last Bookstore in downtown L.A. With the glow of taillights illuminating my obvious answer in the negative, she insisted that we go.

So off we went, with Becca expertly navigating the streets that I was supposed to have known by now. The Last Bookstore proved more interesting for her in its vinyl collection than in its volume of volumes. She perused grotesque album covers while I investigated the indie art studios upstairs. We reconnected for a kitschy Instagram flick under the store’s arch of books.

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The experience made me realize that I had much to learn about Los Angeles from this Utah girl.

She moved back to Salt Lake City after she finished school at UC Santa Barbara and we began dating long-distance. Every month, Becca would visit me in Long Beach, and like clockwork, she would take me into L.A. It got to the point where she was my tour guide to the city that I grew up next to.

On one outing, we packed a couple of poke bowls and headed to the Hollywood Bowl to see Weezer and Alanis Morissette. When the former’s song “Beverly Hills” was played, my mind drifted to what life would look like if I did in fact live in Beverly Hills, and I was “rollin’ like a celebrity.” In my visions of the future, Becca was with me.

Another outing had us deep in the bowels of the popular Melrose Trading Post. Flanked by overpriced band tees and 20-somethings who somehow managed to all look like the same type of hipster, we hunted for bargains. I picked up a briefcase of all things, for 20 bucks, for my shiny new job in Santa Monica. Money well spent. Becca ended up inevitably with some vintage sweater bearing a college logo. “I’m gonna crop it,” she would later announce. (What’s a flea market purchase without a tasteful amount of midriff?)

Becca showed me a side of L.A. that I had never explored.

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But distance took its toll on our relationship. I felt the pressure of my new job, working long hours and sitting every day in traffic for the length of a James Cameron movie. She, for her part, was adjusting to life at home in Utah, on the hunt for a job and with no near future plans to move to Los Angeles. Conversations about our relationship reared their ugly heads.

Maybe the two of us had run our course. There is only so much time realistically that a relationship can last when its participants are 700 miles apart. We began to bicker more frequently, sometimes it felt like just for the sake of it. She planned a trip out to L.A. for us to assess how our relationship would move forward.

I picked her up from Los Angeles International Airport, and we headed to Santa Monica. Dinner was hand-rolled sushi, nice cocktails and a lot of “I” statements. Then I made my first L.A. decision in our relationship. We walked to the Santa Monica Pier.

As with many clichés, there is something comfortable about an oceanfront boardwalk. The sounds of laser guns from the nearby arcade join the predictable arc of the Ferris wheel in something that feels between nostalgic and therapeutic. I woefully underestimated the difficulty of the rigged three-point basketball shootout, and she, likewise, misjudged her stomach’s resilience after we went on an irresponsibly fast rotating roller coaster. We strolled the length of the pier, people-watching, then I took her hand in mine.

Amid the chaos of children screaming, buzzers ringing and neon lights blinking, we felt a level of certainty — a kind of quiet calm that I haven’t felt before.

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In that moment, we were never so sure.

The author is a freelance writer and media professional living in Long Beach. His byline has appeared in Business Insider, Yahoo! and other publications.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

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What's Making Us Happy: A guide to your weekend raking, listening and gaming

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What's Making Us Happy: A guide to your weekend raking, listening and gaming

It’s raking season! Above, a man tends to fallen leaves in Sieversdorf, Germany in 2017.

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Patrick Pleul/AFP via Getty Images

This week, statues proliferated, we lost a great actor, and being animated was no protection from being incarcerated.

Here’s what NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was paying attention to — and what you should check out this weekend.

Raking leaves

I am enjoying raking leaves more than I can say. We have a dogwood tree in the front yard that has recently released all of its leaves. They are coming down in reds and yellows and greens. I remember going around in elementary school and picking up a pretty leaf that I would take to school to put in a book or on a page, and I loved it. I love the smell of the falling leaves. In two weeks, I know I’m going to hate it but right now, I am enjoying this. It’s heaven. — Bob Mondello

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‘Songs of a Lost World’ by The Cure

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Any time a band takes kind of a long break from recording, say, 16 years, I don’t expect the subsequent album to be among an artist’s career highlights. But I absolutely love the new album by The Cure, Songs of a Lost World. It is this lavishly produced, very cohesive and coherent collection of songs. Lyrically, it is very dark. It is, after all, The Cure, which is a band known to inject their songs with a little bit of bleakness. But it’s also very beautiful. The song “Alone” for example is not peppy but is leavened by the beauty of the arrangements in ways that make it feel not oppressive.

When I interviewed Robert Smith of The Cure for Morning Edition, I asked him if he’d thought about what he wants his final music statement to be and he replied, “Good grief! This is a bit bleak, isn’t it?” It felt like a true endorsement to have Robert Smith think that something I asked him was bleak.

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Lawn Mowing Simulator

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We have a big election next week. There’s a lot going on in the world. The main thing that is giving me comfort right now is playing video games on my PlayStation 5, including one called Lawn Mowing Simulator.

I am enjoying an imaginary lawn where I sit on a lawn mower and drive it around, mowing the lawn. It’s very satisfying. Sometimes I’m very efficient and I try to get the job done and earn my money and a bonus for getting it done in a normal period of time. Other times I just ride and do little circles in the lawn mower and make pretty patterns in the lawn. It’s giving me a lot of warm fuzzies as I try to maintain my equilibrium in these tense times. — Linda Holmes

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More recommendations from the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter

by Linda Holmes

The second season of The Diplomat has arrived. I really loved the first season, and this one is very good, too — although at six episodes, it’s shorter than I wish it were. Like the third season of The Bear, it feels less like a season and more like half of a two-part season. But Keri Russell remains excellent, and the addition of Allison Janney is a masterstroke. And check out Eric Deggans’ review of the new season.

Have you been playing Astro Bot? I have. (Just ask all my other responsibilities how neglected they feel.) A platformer for PlayStation 5, it allows you to become an adorable little robot who runs through various levels, punching and jumping and pulling on things, and it’s wildly entertaining. If you’ve played Mario games on a Nintendo device, Astro Bot’s aesthetic (which has appeared in a couple of previous games starring the same robot) will remind you of those, but it has a vigor and a kick all its own.

Rachel Martin is such a good interviewer, and Seth Meyers is somebody I’ve admired for a long time. So I was delighted to see him on Wild Card talking about all manner of things. In one section of the conversation, he essentially says he had more ambition than talent when it came to acting in movies – which is the kind of thing you don’t hear from very successful people all that often.

Dhanika Pineda adapted the Pop Culture Happy Hour segment “What’s Making Us Happy” for the Web. If you like these suggestions, consider signing up for our newsletter to get recommendations every week. And listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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