#betty en new york fan fiction

[fcukyeahbettyenny]

From:  bettyrincon97@hotmail.com

To:  bettyrincon97@hotmail.com

Subject: "Hindsight is twenty-twenty”

I am in Florida!  I had accidentally left my iPad at home and I didn’t want to download my diary app onto the work computer Señorita Catalina had given me today, which is why I’m emailing myself this diary entry to copy-paste into my diary app later on.

Betty of the Future, if you are reading this, you might be wondering why Betty of Today decided to write this entry in English. That is because you are in a beautiful place so far from home and yet your mind wants to go back to New York for a trip down memory lane.  Memory lane -- what a warm and fuzzy image that makes!  This recounting will be anything but.  This will probably be more like being dragged by the hair through broken glass. No, broken glass would be less painful.

Today’s nightmarish recollection is about my birthday this year which was both the best and the worst because of Armando. That seems to be a theme with him.  He is both the best and the worst thing to ever happen to me.

I remember not being able to write about my birthday on the day itself because that time was such a busy and tumultuous time for me in both my professional and personal lives.

Anyway, here goes.

On my birthday I was surprised to find letter balloons that spelled out “Happy Birthday”, a musical birthday card, and a small frosted cupcake on my desk.  They were from El Peloton.  My birthdays are always a big deal at home but that was the first time people from outside of my family did something like that for me.  I was so touched I couldn’t help but cry.

I remember feeling so happy when Armando came in yelling and asking everyone what the commotion was.  I should have been offended, really, but I was so happy to see him that I guess I forgot. I am so in love with him -- was so in love with him -- that I told myself I didn’t mind that he didn’t know why El Peloton was there.  I told myself I didn’t mind that Aura Maria had to explain to him that they were there to wish me a happy birthday. I bet he remembers Marcela’s birthday.  I bet he remembers important dates in their relationship.

Speaking of Marcela, she stampeded in a few moments later, also yelling at everyone and telling us all to go back to work before dragging Armando out the door with her. For a woman who grew up in high society, she sure can’t read a room.

Later that day, Armando popped back in to see me.  Instead of apologizing for not knowing when my birthday was, he chided me about not telling him (yes, red flag).  Loca that I was, I told him that it was okay that he did not know and that as long as things were okay between the two of us, I was happy. You know what he said next?  He said we should put the matter of the erotic poem behind us and then he asked me to dinner. No apology and again, everything was about him. I think that even back then I knew he wasn’t being sincere but I chose to believe in him. He didn’t need to build me castles in the air -- I built those castles myself and locked my brain in one of them.  That’s the only explanation I can find for my foolishness.

Anyway, after that conversation, I called home and told my mother I was going home late.  That was when my mother told me that Papa was out shopping with Nico because they wanted to celebrate my birthday with me at home.  I wish I had called Armando back and told him to go take a long walk down a short pier.  If I had known... well... hindsight is twenty-twenty.

Let’s zip forward to that evening.

I remember being so happy being seated there, being sang to by my friends.  It was the first time anything like that had happened to me.  That is the part I want to treasure forever.  Before I could blow on my candle, Sandra put her hand over my mouth and asked if I had made a wish.  I told her that it had already come true.  As I said that, I reached for Armando’s hand (he was standing beside me) and at that time, I had only thought that I had lost my grip.  Now that I think about it though, I realize at he had moved his hand away.  How could I not have known he was only playing me?  The signs were all there!

Let’s zip forward again to when the party was really over.  I remember feeling sad because I was hiding my relationship from my parents.  That and because I was la otra -- the sidepiece walking two blocks down at night in a bad neighborhood in NY to meet her engaged “boyfriend” at his car like a cheap woman.  I can’t ever let my self-respect go like that ever again. 

I had thought that he was going to bring me to that dingy little karaoke bar again.  I was actually kind of looking forward to singing to and with him again.  That wasn’t where he brought me though.  He brought me to a seedy motel. What a weird feeling that gave me!  I was excited to be with him -- I was happy!  But then my mind kept going back to my moment of humiliation with Freddy as I was brushing my teeth.  That should have been a sign.  Someone  once said that suffering comes from doing what your spirit tells you not to do.  I should have known. All the signs were there.  All of the signs.  Then again, hell could have literally broken loose outside and I would not have noticed because when I opened the bathroom door, before me was the sight of Armando with his shirt half-unbuttoned.  He may be evil to the core but did he look like an angel at that moment!  Heh, angel.  Like Satan.

To be fair, he was gentle with me.  Or at least, he pretended to be. He smiled at me, held out his hand, and led me to the center of the bed.  As we knelt and kissed in the middle of that lumpy motel bed I thought I could do just that for the rest of my life and not need anything else.  If he had said, “I can’t do this.  You’re too ugly, Betty,” I would have been fine.  That is why I was surprised when he started taking off my top.  Even Freddy hadn’t bothered.  He had just buried his face in my neck, got between my legs, and raped me.  Maybe Armando was thinking of Marcela or some other model because he seemed like he was enjoying himself.  I felt happy because I thought he was enjoying himself because of me.  At that exact moment, all my bad memories of prom night came rushing back to me. I jumped out of bed, scared of Armando.  Afraid in general. Next thing I knew, we were in his car and he was driving me home.  I don’t remember much else.  I think my brain has blocked the rest. Now if only my heart could block Armando, too.

[weekendwarriorblog]

Weekend Warrior Home Edition – April 3, 2020 – Slay the Dragon, Tape and More

Well, things sure have gone to hell since I last wrote this weekly column that I’ve now been doing in some form or another at one place or other for over nineteen years! For the first time in those 19 years and probably a good 80 or 90 years before that, there were no movies in theaters. In fact, there were no movie theaters. Because of this, the last two weekends have been the first in history with ZERO BOX OFFICE. It’s kind of tough to write a column about the box office and theatrical releases when there are none, n’est ce pas?

So I’m going to try to evolve for the time being, and we’ll see how that goes. I’m not too thrilled about having to watch movies as screeners, let alone writing about movies that will probably never get a theatrical release, but I’ll try to make the best of it. (Oh, and Disney’s Onward, which opened in theaters less than a month ago will be available ON DISNEY+* tomorrow.) (*corrected)

This week’s “Featured Movie” that you absolutely must see, especially if you’re reading this from one of the “red states” and feel like government just isn’t doing things the way you’d like them to do, is Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance’s political documentary SLAY THE DRAGON (Magnolia).  It covers how gerrymandering is being used in census years (like this one) to maintain a Republican majority in local and state government.  Goodman’s doc begins in Michael Moore territory of Flint, Michigan and shows how gerrymandering was used to create a Republican majority that led to the town getting water from the nearby Flint River which contaminated the pipes and leaked lead into the system.

The film does a good job explaining gerrymandering in an easy to understand way by following a few specific cases of people fighting against the policies.  Counties and voting districts in different states aren’t just a straight grid on a map. Instead, the districts are drawn up to cause an unfair advantage to a party. This was especially true of the REDMAP program instituted in 2008 by the GOP after Barack Obama was elected President to make sure Republicans could dominate Congress as well as politics on a state level.  

Much of the film deals with Katie Fahey’s group Citizens United that has decided to take on the politicians with its grassroots campaign to allow the people’s voices and votes to start counting. (One of the programs that grew out of REDMAPping was that thousands of voters were not able to vote since a few states passed a law that ID was required to vote, thereby keeping black and brown voters from the polls.)

Yes, it’s a rather complicated situation but it’s one that people in the primarily liberal states like New York, California and others really need to know about, since it’s why we have a reality TV host as our President right now as well as why we have a Republican Senate that just prevented him from being impeached. All of the bigger politics goes back to the individual state politics and how gerrymandering and REDMAP unfairly sways the vote against those who win on the state level in census years (essentially every ten years including 2020). Originally, this was going to get a theatrical release in March but now it will only be available on digital and On Demand, so you can find out how to see it on the official site.

I also want to give a little extra attention to Deborah Kampmeier’s TAPE (Full Moon Films), which skipped its theatrical release instead to do an interesting “virtual theatrical run,” playing every night On Demand via CrowdCast. It’s available every night at 7pm eastern followed by discussions with the filmmakers and then will be on Digital and VOD on April 10. Again, these are changing times, but this is a haunting and powerful thriller based on true events, starring Anarosa Mudd as a woman trying to catch a sleezy casting agent (Tarek Bishara) who is preying on actresses and one in particular, played by Isabelle Fuhrman (Orphan). Both of their performances are pretty amazing, Mudd playing a shaven-head whistleblower and Fuhrman playing an ambitious young actress who think she’s finally gotten her much-needed break, but finding out there’s a lot darker side to the business than she expected. While a lot of people have raved about The Assistant as a response to #MeToo, this is a much starker and direct look at the abuse of power to take advantage of young women. The movie is not going to be for everybody, because it takes some time before you realize what Mudd’s character (who could just as easily be Rose MacGowan) is up to, but the way how things play out in the film makes it unforgettable. It’s a fantastic new movie from Kampmeier, who famously had an underage Dakota Fanning have a rape scene in her earlier movie, Hounddog.

A movie that was released last week that I didn’t get to write about (but it’s still available On Demand and Digitally, as many movies currently are) is Lorcan Finnegan’s VIVARIUM (Saban Films), starring Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots. It’s a virtual two-hander in which they play a couple who look at a house in a suburban housing complex where every house looks the same. They soon learn that they can’t escape and things get weirder and weirder from there. I can’t say I loved the movie, because it just got weirder and weirder, almost to a fault at times.

Polish filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska’s THE OTHER LAMB (IFC Midnight) is another movie about a religious cult, this one a group of women that live in a remote forest commune led by a man they call “Shepherd” (played by Michiel Huisman from Game of Thrones and The Haunting of Hill House). It follows a teenager named Selah (Raffey Cassidy) who begins to question her existence when she starts having nightmarish visions. This was okay, but I really have hit my limit in terms of movies about religious cults. They’ve just been overdone.

Mike Doyle’s rom-com ALMOST LOVE (Vertical) is about a group of middle-aged friends trying to navigate love and relationships with a cast that includes Scott Evans, Kate Walsh, Patricia Clarkson, Augustus Prew and more. Some of the characters are having marital issues, others are dating or getting into early feelings of possible love. It’s a nice distraction from all the serious stuff going on in the world today.

A great music doc now On Demand, digital and other formats (Blu-ray/DVD) is Brent Wilson’s STREETLIGHT HARMONIES (Gravitas), which takes a look at the early doo-wop vocal groups of the ‘50s and ‘60s that predated and formed the basis for Rock & Roll, Rhythm & Blues and other music genres as we know them today. It deals with acts like The Drifters, Little Antony and the Imperials, The Platters, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. It includes interviews with some of the more recent acts influenced by it including En Vogue and N’Sync as well as Brians Wilson and McKnight. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this despite doo-wop not being my preferred music style. (For the sake of transparency, I helped out with a little bit of publicity on this film.)

Also, Olivier Meyrou’s fly-on-the-wall doc Celebration (1091) is a movie that was commissioned by Yves Saint Laurent’s former lover and business partner, Pierre Bergé, more than ten years ago but was shelved for being too revealing. It was filmed over the course of three years where Laurent was at his most frail and mostly separated from the world as we get a look inside one of the last great haute couture houses. It’s now available On Demand and digitally.

Jon Abrahams directs and co-stars in Clover (Freestyle Digital Media) opposite the great Mark Webber, playing bumbling Irish twins trying to pay off their father’s debt to local mob boss Tony Davolo, played by Chazz Palminteri. Things get more complicated when a teen girl named Clover (Nicole Elizabeth Berger) shows up and the brothers need to protect her from Tony’s “hit-women.” Looks like a fun dark comedy.

Unfortunately, Saban Films didn’t offer advance review screeners of the action sequel, Rogue Warrior: The Hunt (Saban Films), directed by Mike Gunther, but it stars Will Yun Lee.  I’m not sure if this is a sequel to 2017’s Rogue Warrior: The Hunt, but I haven’t seen that either. It involves the leader of an elite team of soldiers being captured by terrorists, so his team needs rescue him. Oh, and Stephen Lang (Avatar, Don’t Breathe) is in it, too.

STREAMING AND CABLE

This week’s Netflix offerings include the streaming network’s latest true-crime documentary series, HOW TO FIX A DRUG SCANDAL, directed by Erin Lee Carr (Dirty Money), which covers the 2013 case of Sonja Farak, a crime drug lab specialist who was arrested for tampering with evidence but also accused of using the drugs she was supposed to be testing.  (It’s on the service as of this writing.)

Stuber and Good director Michael Dowse helms the action-comedy COFFEE & KAREEM, starring Ed Helms as police officer James Coffee, who begins dating Taraji P. Henson’s Vanessa Manning while her 12-year-old son Kareem (Terrence Little Gardenhigh) plots their break-up. Kareem hires criminal fugitives to kill Coffee but instead ends up getting his whole family targeted, so the two must team up. Also starring Betty Gilpin, RonReaco Lee, Andrew Bachelor and David Alan Grier.

Also on Friday, Disney Plus will stream two Disneynature docs, Dolphin Reef and Elephant, in honor of Earth Day taking place later this month. Previously, one or both of these movies might have been released theatrically but hey, earth is going to hell right now.

Now playing on Hulu is the latest installment of Blumhouse’s “Into the Dark,” Alejandro Brugué’s Pooka Lives, which ties in with “Pooka Day” (no idea what that is) but apparently, Pooka is a fictional creature like “Slender Man” that was created on Creepypasta  by a group of friends that goes viral but then manifests into creatures that become real. It stars fan faves Felicia Day, Will Wheaton, Rachel Bloom and more.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or send me a note on Twitter. I love hearing from readers!