Moms Club Film
Helloooo, Poppets! ’Tis I yet again, commandeering this column whilst Lady W herself is indisposed. Rumor has it that she’s somewhere near Palm Springs with a pool boy, 17 gallons of alcohol and one bag of trail mix. But I’m not a gossip so I can neither confirm nor deny.
I’m here to regale you all with a recap of the latest underground happening in our fair Glendale. This week’s hottest club had everything, if by “everything” you mean reasonably comfortable seating, a cash bar (boo!) and a smattering of local citizens who don’t suck. It was a screening of “Moms Club,” which is a documentary film currently making the rounds of private screenings.
I’m in a bit of a sticky wicket trying to describe the film for you all, because two contradictory things are true about it. First, it is a Very Important Film. And second, it’s the kind of film that is too important to ignore, even when you really, really wish you could at least take a break from it - if only to drop another hundo at said cash bar.
To paraphrase one of Lady W’s most scandalous exes, Mr. Lloyd Bridges himself: Oh, Poppets. I picked the wrong week to quit smoking. I picked the wrong week to quit drinking. And I definitely picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
The film transports us back to the bad old days of the riots at Saticoy Elementary in NoHo, and then at GUSD four days later. Fortunately for all of us, myself included, these two events were noticed by a group of ACTUALLY local moms, who had been tracking Right Wing Nut Job behavior for the better part of a year. As one of these capeless heroines states, millennial women came of age on the internet, and they have a very particular set of skills when it comes to finding people online.
We are then taken on a well-documented path that starts with a then-active duty Navy Seal who really doesn’t want you to know that his real name is Bryce Henson, through the current Republican nominee for State Superintendent of CA Schools, Sonja “I can’t read” Shaw, to the dark money conservative billionaires who have been quietly seeding their hateful ideology since the days of Brown v Board of Education. I know - I KNOW - that this sounds like I’m wearing a very stylish tinfoil hat as I type, but the film connects these dots in a way that brings clarity to the chaos of it all. It shows proof that the hysteria over trans kids, “grooming,” and the sanctity of girls’ sports was literally workshopped and chosen because it scares Old Whites.
TL/DR: See this movie anyway you fucking can. And then vote like the lives of queer people depend on it. Because they do.
