24 Comments
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JoAnn's avatar

This was beautiful and deeply relatable. Also you've convinced me to finally watch Cabaret

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Michael Rance's avatar

yessss!! i’d really recommend starting with the movie from the 70s. Let me know what you think :)

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Diana Heald's avatar

This was lovely and I too have often considered selling feet pics as side hustle/day job.

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Michael Rance's avatar

feet pic collab between Three Chairs/ Champagne Socialist? could happen when we need to raise cash quickly.

Feet pics earnestly seems like so much work

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Diana Heald's avatar

THATS what no one tells you! it actually is a lot of work! But yes maybe paid subscriber benefit… the feet people must be out there

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Michael Rance's avatar

it seems like a crazy amount of work. Unfortunately I legitimately looked into feet gigs and I was like... hmm, too much work for me. But i'm excited to collab with you, someone out there is yearning for it

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CCB's avatar

"Everything complicated within me was evil and had to be eradicated. I began envisioning myself not as a body, but rather a pearl; perfectly symmetrical, glimmering in the water."

What a lovely, and/though profoundly sad, image. Thank you for writing this.

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Michael Rance's avatar

thank you :)

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Cat Jones's avatar

I feel like I asked this when you wrote about Cabaret before but have you read Goodbye to Berlin? The way you end this piece is eerily similar to the way it opens! “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

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Michael Rance's avatar

I finally just read it this summer!!!! I was definitely referencing it there :) that line you just quoted has been one I have been thinking about so much... it's really influencing how I'm thinking about writing and moving through the world during this time

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Cat Jones's avatar

It’s so good. Is it the same passage where he talks about being in his room at night and hearing people down on the streets whistling up to others in the apartments around him? That scene has really stuck with me too.

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Michael Rance's avatar

yes!!! it was awesome. It was also super interesting to read the parts about Sally Bowles and other characters and see how they differed from the book to Cabaret. I love love Cabaret, but I also really liked how incomplete some of the stories from Goodbye to Berlin feel. Some characters are in Isherwood's life, and then they suddenly drop off for no reason at all -- it feels like a really honest way to write about people.

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Katie Besgrove's avatar

“I was afraid of slipping into a kind of drinking which had become increasingly common in my life; drinking as spiritual coping, drinking as solely a means of feeling something, anything.” I feel this at the moment, so well put

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Michael Rance's avatar

hope you’re doing well, Katie <3 I appreciate this comment.

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baby dragon's avatar

Thank you for always stoking a fire I often neglect.

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Michael Rance's avatar

<3 love this comment

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lala thaddeus's avatar

I love the way you touched in the pressure/culture we’ve created of needing to be a perfect person and live a frictionless existence … anything that deviates is “toxic.” You’re right, to love is to cause pain to yourself and another.

Have you read Raine Fisher Quan’s essay “no good alone”?

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Michael Rance's avatar

I actually haven't read that, even though I really love her newsletter... brb, time to go read

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Emma Benshoff's avatar

I really loved this

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Michael Rance's avatar

oh thanks Emma :) appreciate you reading it

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Martha Bayne's avatar

This is absolutely gorgeous and chilling. Thank you for writing it. I hope you keep dancing. It really is the only way.

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Michael Rance's avatar

thank you!! i hope I keep up with it too!

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rebecca kitba's avatar

🤍🤍🤍

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Michael Rance's avatar

<3

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