Monthly Archives: September 2026

“But if there isn’t time to breathe, mistakes are made, anxiety sets in, and teams never bring lasting, meaningful change.” Feature on yours truly by Aleksander Tomalski and Counsel Collective

25 September 2026

2 Comments

Thank you, Aleksander Tomalski and Counsel Collective, for this absolutely lovely feature. Hands down, this is one of the damned nicest articles anyone has ever written about me. I truly feel seen. Someone please take note … read this this whole thing at my eulogy one day! 😅

Read article here.

Hopefully, other legal leaders, marketers, business development professionals, humans will find some inspiration in the thoughts, concepts, and experiences detailed here. And even more importantly, my dream is that more and more young people still deciding what to do in life will see in this piece what a desirable and rewarding career path legal marketing can be.

To my dear friends Iris Jones, Diana Lauritson, Jenna Schiappacasse, and Ashley Stenger, what you said about me here has touched my soul in ways words can’t properly express. In my deep down, only child heart, I’ve always (erroneously) felt myself to be a perpetual outsider in life, practically phobic about overstaying my welcome anywhere. I know that’s anything but true. However, reading what you said about me was truly a tonic for my neurotic inner saboteur. 🥹

As Alex writes in the article, “Trust, in his telling, is built by honoring what came before, learning what actually drives the people already there, bringing forward opportunities that fit them, and then following through on what you said you would do.”

“I’m just so happy the sad man has friends.” Spider-Man: Brand New Day

12 September 2026

2 Comments

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is as close as Hollywood has ever come to replicating the true mainstream comic book reading experience, while still remaining artfully cinematic. And I’ve seen a LOT of superhero movies.

Like a thoughtfully developed six issue comic book story arc, the film is episodic but never stilted. Events and moments and guest heroes flow thoughtfully, naturally, intentionally, logically from one to the next.

This also feels like the first time the Marvel Cinematic Universe has fully realized the promise of its integrated concept, moving away from EVENT FILM-thinking where cameos of heroes and villains from prior films pop up willy nilly (perhaps chiefly to sell action figures and t-shirts) toward a deeply immersive world where common sense and natural order dictate superhero interactions. 

This tracks given that Brand New Day’s director Destin Daniel Cretton also helmed the equally winning, warm, funny, poignant Disney+ Marvel series Wonder Man. Cretton just really gets it, leveraging all the toys in service to narrative and heart, first and foremost.

The plot picks up deftly from Jon Watts’ excellent Spider-Man: No Way Home (a film that was EPIC!, not necessarily to its detriment but definitely with commercial designs sharing the driver’s seat with more artistic notions). After a veritable multi-verse of Spider-Men (and villains) in that film converge to make Tom Holland’s MCU Peter Parker’s life a living hell, Parker convinces Dr. Strange (an arch and world-weary Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase all knowledge of Parker’s existence and secret identity from the world, including those who know and love Parker most.

Brand New Day could have ended up a mopey slog as Parker tries to navigate life without the safety net of friends and family, notably his girlfriend MJ (the soulful and sparkling Zendaya) and his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon, still reveling in his second banana status but bringing more nuanced and layered reactions this go ‘round). The film does a fine job balancing the tragedy of Parker’s isolation with the whiz bang pyrotechnics of a superhero using high-flying crimebusting as the ultimate coping mechanism. Yes, the first quarter of the film is filled with a literal rogues’ gallery of lesser-known Spider-Man villains but it never feels indulgent. We get our popcorn and eat it too.

Into this vigilante mayhem, a shadowy new antagonist enters the scene, nameless and faceless (at first), jumping telepathically from body to body of one innocent bystander after another, eluding our wall-crawler as the unknown villain executes a masterful scheme to infiltrate government agency Damage Control, a group ostensibly helping superheroes by mitigating the “damage” potential of other supes less heroically inclined. You can likely predict where this is going … but the film gets there in a way that is refreshingly unpredictable.

On top of Parker’s pre-existing woes, his arachnid-infused DNA starts to mutate (that will be important later methinks), confounding him with sensory overload and organic web-shooters that have a life of their own. As Parker attempts to unravel both the mystery of his failing powers and his insidious new opponent, he enlists the aid of Bruce Banner/The Hulk (the ever-dependable Mark Ruffalo, a cozy woolen sweater of an actor in all the best ways), Frank Castle/The Punisher (a delightfully low-key unhinged Jon Bernthal, who brings some of the film’s funniest moments in quintessential off-kilter buddy cop comedy schtick with Holland), and Yelena Belova/Black Widow (the dynamite Florence Pugh who takes her deadpan “Boris and Natasha/spy who came in from the cold” characterization to slyly hysterical new heights here).

At this point, you could be thinking (if you are one of the three people who HASN’T seen this film yet), “WOW, that sounds needlessly complicated and overstuffed.” And yet refreshingly, the movie is anything but. Each of the guest heroes has a distinct purpose to play, in commitment to the plot, moving it along logically, and with very neatly and distinctly drawn relationship ties to Parker. These characters aren’t just showing up to show up, kill time, or distract the audience. They enrich the film’s perspective and meaning, illustrating in part that Parker isn’t as alone as he fears himself to be and more importantly that none of us can save our world on our own. At one point, Belova observes in a video call with Parker, now reunited with Ned and MJ, “I’m just so happy the sad man has friends.” Trust me, you will laugh heartily when you hear how Pugh delivers that line.

The film is shot in gorgeous, golden light, never garish, evoking the look of a comic book in a dreamlike way, mirroring Parker’s lost state. The many, many, MANY fight scenes are never tedious as, again, they serve to propel Parker along his tortured path of reclamation and rediscovery and healing. The battles are choreographed and stylized to maximize Holland’s dance background. This is comic book mayhem staged as ballet.

Michael Giacchino turns in a score that is less burbling and percolating than he usually delivers. Awash in 80s synths, the soundtrack (also peppered with some fabulous pop rock deep cut needle drops) echoes, like a sweepingly symphonic, swirling stomach ache, the inescapable nightmare-scape in which Parker finds himself.

And I really, really, really don’t want to squelch the surprise around the film’s unseen telepathic assailant. Spoilers already abound on the internet – from the production team itself. The film has been released for nearly a month and half now. Nonetheless, I’m not going to reveal more than that a spiky and mournful Sadie Sink introduces a Marvel legend back into the MCU fold in a way that creates both heartbreak and feverish anticipation for the next 83.5 cinematic installments that are likely to come.

This is a film about finding oneself, and it could have devolved into a mess of maudlin cliches. It never does. That is in great part due to director Cretton’s empathic craftsmanship and especially to Holland’s heart-wrenching turn. Yet, Holland never loses the boyish adventuring joy he has always brought to the part. In some parallel universe, there would be serious Oscar conversations about the film and notably Holland’s performance. There were moments in the film where I found myself sobbing and giggling, practically simultaneously and utterly unexpectedly. THAT is rare and why I dearly love movies.

Dying is easy, comedy is hard. Comparably, keeping summer blockbuster butts in seats while also giving us a true hero’s journey from his shattered ground zero to his world-weary but hopeful affirmation, while still making us laugh and gasp, and, yes, marvel is a true high-wire act that deserves recognition. Doing so, while leaping and bounding through two-and-a-half hours in a red and blue leotard is nothing short of remarkable.

 

“Always travel with an emergency poem.” Jane Don’t wows in “Don’t Does America” at Chicago Improv

10 September 2026

2 Comments

“I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. … To talk about camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves.” – Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp

Too many people think they can do camp. They can’t. They really can’t. Sontag in her seminal work Notes on Camp defines camp as “a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’, of things-being-what-they-are-not” but does so with affection rather than mockery.

It’s that last part that people miss. Those who fail at camp arrogantly co-opt flippancy and disdain as a way of attempting to connect with an audience – as if we are all in on one contemptuous joke. That doesn’t work. At best it falls flat and rings hollow, and at worst it feels cruel and alienating.

Good camp is love, first and foremost – affection for the absurd as a lens for embracing and, yes, critiquing our common human condition.

At least that’s my pretentious opinion.

Jane Don’t does camp exquisitely. And when it’s done this well, the work is in an intoxicating league all its own.

Don’t just launched their Don’t Does America tour, and we took in one of the early stops in Chicago … well … Schaumburg at Chicago Improv, located in Woodfield Mall. Don’t made GREAT hay out of performing in a shopping mall in suburban America. And their exaggerated pronunciation of Schaaaaaummmberrrrhg was offered frequently as a wry punctuation mark on their self-effacing observations of life in America 2026.

The show is in essence a cabaret in the guise of a travelogue. Don’t learns some devastating news about fellow Drag Race Season 18 contestant and frenemy Athena Dion (who has a delightful, very Athena Dion cameo). Don’t is then sent on a cross-country scramble to fulfill their friend’s “final” wishes.  

(FULL DISCLOSURE: for those who have been anywhere in my orbit the past few years, Athena is a dear pal … after being forced to sing “Born This Way” with me at 8:30 in the morning in Hollywood, Florida, before 1500+ gobsmacked legal marketers in 2023. But I digress…).

This narrative conceit deftly ties up any loose ends for those Drag Race superfans presuming the show will be a six-months-past nostalgia trip/confessional. It ain’t. The “plot” (which is being charitable – and that is clearly by smart design) sends Don’t to a handful of landmark American cities, as conveyed by John Waters-meets-Sesame Street video projections.

In each locale Don’t features one of their many talents: e.g. stand-up comedy (Don’t really slays with comic timing that is impeccable – both zingers and dad jokes), lip syncing (Celine Dion wept), and Broadway belting, among others. I REALLY hope Don’t releases a digital EP of the catchy AF songs delivered during the show. All are textbook definitions of earworms, particularly the deliciously torturous title theme song which repeats about 83 times during the 90 minute run time.

Don’t does playfully land a well-deserved jab at the corporate entity that drag has become in the Mama Ru era, an epoch that has elevated and mainstreamed the art form while also turning it into a revenue machine for everyone but the queens. At a “slam poetry” night, Don’t savagely reads some verse that only a scatalogically inclined Mad Libs could love. “I always travel with an emergency poem,” Don’t intones. The punchline? The poesy in question is RuPaul’s less-than-stellar, sophomoric rap on pop icon Miley Cyrus’ forgotten ditty “Catitude,” with a side-eyed aside that the lyrics were written at the height of Ru’s popularity. Well played, Jane Don’t.

BUT the centerpiece of the production occurs when Don’t’s car “breaks down” in Amish country and, to gather cash to pay for the repairs, Don’t delivers an Amish … burlesque. Basically a riotously zany strip tease … in reverse. I dare not spoil too many of the visual jokes here because I haven’t laughed that hard in ages – but there IS a butter churn.

What Don’t does SO effectively is walk that razor’s edge of incisive satire and good-hearted sheer goofiness. At the meet and greet, I told Don’t that the show felt like Pee Wee’s Playhouse if hosted by Bette Midler. Don’t responded that they felt seen. 😊 But the deep cut cultural influences don’t stop there – Sophie Tucker (of course), Mae West, Kathy Griffin, Carol Burnett, Elaine Stritch, Rosalind Russell, Kay Thompson, Jonathan Winters, Angela Lansbury, Joan Rivers, Bea Arthur, Don Rickles, maybe even a smidge of Mary Tyler Moore and Marlo Thomas all seem to haunt the stage around Don’t. Plus, the show comes with a heaping slice of agitprop, Brechtian technique. (Lord, I REALLY do sound affected.)

Kindness and compassion, inclusion and equity are clearly critically important to Don’t. (Footnote: all merch is sourced to small businesses.) Don’t celebrates their Seattle-bred values, and all of those progressive queens who preceded Don’t. Don’t never shies away from clear-eyed analysis of the fraught times in which we are living, but, through the absurdity of the narrative’s circumstances and the brassily confident yet tenderly winsome way Don’t frames herself, you still walk away feeling hope. And THAT is the power of camp done properly, with a messy precision that welcomes us all in.

Don’t flashes a QR code at one point, encouraging attendees to donate to local causes near and dear that could use a helping hand. (Full list here.) Don’t features local queens at each whistle top – offering them extended featured moments. Yet it all still clearly remains Don’t’s world. And what a gift it is for us to be living in it.

Check the schedule and buy tickets here – and spring for the meet-and-greet if available. Don’t is as accessible and real offstage as on.