Episode 67: Sisyphean Endeavor

This week’s prompts: Automatic, Peach, 88

Neal and Lauren brave snow, slush, and Sisyphean car scraping for a cozy winter episode filled with musicals, surrealism, and just the right amount of existential dread.

Neal kicks things off by greasing the wheels of nostalgia with Grease (1978) — the leather-clad, pop-perfect, Chicago-born musical that became a worldwide phenomenon. He dives into the scrappy origins of the stage show at Kingston Mines, its wild Broadway success, and the unlikely road to Hollywood superstardom. You’ll learn how Travolta stole a solo, how Olivia Newton-John got sewn into her pants, and why half the cast was pushing thirty while pretending to be in homeroom. From the palm-tree fights to the palm-sweat dance scenes, Neal proves that Grease remains the slickest high school fantasy ever committed to film.

Meanwhile, Lauren spotlights British surrealist Eithel Colquhoun, a painter, writer, and practicing occultist who turned the mystical and macabre into fine art. She explores Colquhoun’s lifelong obsession with alchemy, magic, and androgyny; her expulsion from the British Surrealist Group for being “too into the occult”; and the recent Tate St. Ives retrospective that finally gave her due. From her saturated pastels and coral-toned dreamscapes to her fascination with the body as landscape, Colquhoun emerges as a forgotten visionary who painted femininity as both spiritual and subversive.

PLUS:

🩰 Why Grease began in a Chicago trolley barn

🎤 The hickeys, heartbreak, and heat exhaustion behind Rydell High

🎨 Surrealist spellcraft and the art of “automatic” painting

🔮 Eithel Colquhoun’s occult feminism and androgynous visions

🕯️ When artists are literally too witchy for the art world

Next week’s prompts: Charcoal, Record, 1265, Story

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