Happy Mother's Day to Total A** Clown David Zaslav and His "Love for Working"
An epic worst-mother moment & how my daughter totally nailed you (by nailing me)
Hello, Lovelies, How the hell are you?
Things have been a little wackadoo over this way.
There is the writers' strike, which is making everybody poor and angry. Two of my shows are on hiatus, which means I am writing jokes for Mommy blogs while I crank out a book. But now, of course, they are trying to get rid of those too because here in America, we cannot have nice things like, oh... literacy. Or empathy, which is what reading to your child actually teaches more than vocabulary or subject-verb agreement. Doofuses.
But first, happy Mother's Day to those of you who celebrate—never mind how f*cked up and fabricated a holiday it has become due to crass commercialization and the total crazy-ass nature of momfluencers forcing their kids to cry on camera for free trips to Disney and bespoke handbags or trying to be so impossibly perfect it sends you reeling into despair when you cannot even get your own kid to comb her hair.
I find one of the best gifts you can give your mom on Mother's Day is a card telling her exactly all the things she was RIGHT about. Believe me. It is SO satisfying for her. And a mother can do the same thing for her daughter. You will both sit there reading them, glancing over at each other every five seconds going, “REALLY?” and “I KNEW it!”
I'm going to tell you the story of my worst mother moment EVER and how it involved our current writers' strike villain, David Zaslav, the evil and still somehow perpetually embarrassing head of HBOMax, who recently announced on an earnings call that the impasse would end because of "a love for working” and how my daughter inadvertently saved me from this total ass clown. It's a doozy, so strap in!
Fade in… Hollywood, well... technically Venice Beach, where we lived in a great little bungalow with a garden that I was barely hanging on to. It was the 2007 writers’ strike. I’d just finished an indie feature film set in Bali—a modest thriller that would keep the rent paid for three more months if we lived on Annie’s Mac & Cheese, Smart Food, and Tofu Pups, which, fortunately, we were fine with. That white cheddar powder is universally beloved in our household—you could sprinkle it on cardboard, and we’d be like... ooh, delicious! Can we have more?
So, with the strike on and no scripted programming selling, a friend of mine arranged a pitch for a reality show I had at Zaslav's house. It was actually at a party he was hosting, and the kids were supposed to come, and they were all going to hang out, and I was going to pitch the show to David.
We were about to head over when my ultra-intuitive 10-year-old, Olivia, announced that she wanted no part of the festivities and was not going because he was… “a bad man.” This made no sense. She’d never met him, so in my typical manic Gilmore Girls style, I desperately tried to reason with her about how much we needed to go and how it would be fun and how I needed to do this meeting, how critical it was to our staying in our house and having food and maintaining normalcy and life being good in general and that there was a lot at stake that she may not realize and that we wouldn't have to stay for very long and that she might actually enjoy it. None of it worked.
I'm not sure how I got her into the car, probably bribery with cheese powder, but we were just pulling up to Zaslav's house and as she sat beside me in the passenger seat, I could FEEL… literally somatically sense (in the way only a mother can) the very palpable rage roiling up inside her as though she might erupt at any moment.
I should note, for the record, that Liv is on the spectrum and very much an HSP. And I, as a responsible parent, should have known better than to push her that day or on any day because crowds, parties, and the world have a way of overwhelming and triggering her. But it was too late for a sitter at that point.
Anyway, I was saying something about Zaslav like, “He's really not that bad,” when OUT OF NOWHERE her FOOT flew up and struck me BAM right in the nose.
I heard a crack midway down the bridge, like a pencil breaking. Blood started to gush everywhere. Of course, I was wearing cream. It's my one good color. It has a way of making me glow. And, boy, was I glowing. Ha! It was like a scene from Carrie. I clutched my face in agony and said things NO mother should ever say to her child. Ever. And at such a volume. If I am honest, I still feel bad. Words matter to kids, especially kids like Liv.
The show did not get pitched that day or made. Not long after, Zaslav fired or canceled almost everyone I knew and loved. Little did I know it, but as I sat there howling like a wounded wildebeest in his driveway, my highly intuitive daughter had just spared me a great deal of grief. So, yes, kiddo, you were right. He is that bad. And I love you for knowing it. But in the words of my dearest, Grant Ginder, “Please, let’s not do that, again?”
If I could have teleported us all back to Ponders End, Vermont, that day, where we could breathe once more as a family, I would have. The house, itself, was far from perfect, but the woods were full of fairies and space to roam. And no kid should ever have to endure LA or Zaslav. He’s like a Dalek in a pasty old guy flesh suit. Exterminate!
So no, David, we are not showing up and having our very cute noses broken because of a “love for working.” We do love the work. It is profoundly gratifying to get paid to do work you love with people you respect, but we also need to feed, clothe, house, and insure our families. And I'm pretty sure that if HBOMax suddenly stopped paying your bloated $250 million salary, you wouldn't show up out of a “love for working."
Happy Mother's Day, you complete and utter ass clown.
Stay rad, Lovelies, and know that I’m thinking of you always – xoxo, gotham girl
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Fuck that guy all the way to the sun! And yes, the universe has strange ways of protecting us... I love her so deeply and wholly, it defies articulation, but man, that hurt like hell, lol. It's so important to tune into to what a kid can handle and jeez, did I learn.
Fuck that guy so much. HE should have gotten your daughter's foot! Weird how life does things like this, how it sometimes "warns" us about our psychological and physical safety. Nose kicks count!