Jessie

EASTENDERS actress Jessie Wallace has made her social media comeback after darting out of the NTAs after-party in tears.

The soap star left partygoers at The O2 Arena stunned when she fled the venue inconsolable.

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Before she was left in tears, she was seen dancing with her co-stars and being labelled as the “life and soul of the party”.

Now, Jessie has taken to Instagram to share a collection of snaps from the evening and has made no reference to the reasoning behind her tearful exit.

The Kat Slater star, 53, shared images from both before, after and during the NTA ceremony in which she could be seen beaming from ear-to-ear.

Keeping coy about her tearful antics, Jessie captioned the snaps: “What a great night! Thank you to everyone who voted for @bbceastenders and my pal Steve and the gorgeous @jacjossa you are AMAZING!

“Love all me EE faaaaaaamily.”

Jessie cuddled up to many of her co-stars in the pics including Michelle Ryan and Jacqueline Jossa.

She even included a shot from the after-party in which she could be seen with Love Island host Maya Jama.

Jessie’s night turned eventful unexpectedly when she was seen running through the after-party in tears.

Jessie, 53, had been seen in high spirits during Wednesday night’s ceremony at London’s O2 Arena.

She was later spotted at the official after-party with her colleagues, including Scott and former co-star Charles Venn.

An onlooker said: “Jessie was the life and the soul of the party and was on a high after they’d picked up their big award.

“She was seen chatting with Charles and a few other people and was having a real laugh.

“But then suddenly out of nowhere she just burst into tears in front of everyone.

“Scott was like a superhero and just scooped her out and took her out of the party.

“No one could work out why Jessie was in tears. People just looked a bit baffled.”

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Ham and Cheese

By Steph Cha

Author Steph Cha in the kitchen at Louisa’s Trattoria in Larchmont Village.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Marlowe Lee was off the clock, 12 more hours in the can, but Call-Me-Jessie had changed the closing procedure, and now, for the second week running, Marlowe had to do final cleanup and lockup after clocking out. It was 9, and she was starving, with another 15 minutes of unpaid work ahead of her. She hadn’t eaten since her lunch break, and as sick as she was of Charcuterie Girl’s sandwiches (The Best Deli on Ventura Boulevard, Human-Owned and Operated!), it was torture making and serving them on an empty stomach.

Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.

She set two slices of baguette on the counter and stared at her options. Roast turkey and mortadella, vegan salami and imitation tuna salad. It was depressing, that fake tuna, the best on the market but still a vaguely unsavory amalgam of fish paste and seaweed powder — nothing like the tuna she remembered. It made her think of all the things she missed, those lost treasures of the recent past. Avocados, panda bears, temperate weather.

Her eyes landed on Charcuterie Girl’s crown jewel: a whole leg of ibérico ham in its own bespoke rig. How much longer would the world have black Spanish pigs, fed nothing but acorns and chestnuts? The jamón cost $70 an ounce, but rich people were too rich — they bought things because they were expensive, and those pigs were in higher and higher demand. Jessie named the sandwich the Trillionaire’s Ham and Cheese at the suggestion of the richest man in Los Angeles, who personally requested to see jamón ibérico on the menu. He bragged about it online, and now it was every local billionaire’s favorite sandwich in town.

Marlowe had yet to try the jamón — she wasn’t allowed to touch it, except to slice it by hand for high-value customers, who liked to record her slow, methodical movements as she handled the special ham knife. It came off in thin red ribbons that she piled onto baguettes with manchego and grated tomato. She tried to imagine the taste, and her mouth watered.

She eyed the camera, which transmitted footage to Jessie’s iGlass, with any irregularities flagged for immediate review. An irregularity could get Marlowe fired, never mind that the camera also logged hours and hours of labor violations.

She was lucky, she knew, to have this job — any job at all, when she was only 23. Just that day, a customer had asked how long she’d spent on the California Hourly Employment.

Marlowe answered, truthfully, that she’d gotten on when she was in college. The customer shook his head. He’d been waiting for two years — how could anyone be expected to go that long without work? Marlowe didn’t mention the exemption for small business owners, who could circumvent CHEW if they were willing to invest in superfluous human labor, or that her mom and Jessie had been classmates at Wellesley.

Marlowe looked back at the camera and picked up the ham knife. It slid easily under the oily meat, again and again and again. She worked until she had enough jamón for a half-dozen sandwiches, then pulled a last slice right off the leg and popped it into her mouth. She closed her eyes and laughed. Oh man, she thought. I could get used to this.

Steph Cha is a critic and author of “Your House Will Pay,” winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy.

Allnight Supermarket

By Ivy Pochoda

Ivy Pochoda, right, a novelist, and writer/activist Linda Leigh in Skid Row.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

I’m here to tell you a few things. Some are triumphs and some are facts. But first — let me welcome you to the first official meeting of the Skid Row Neighborhood Council. Doesn’t sound historic to you? Well, let me say, we’ve been trying for decades to get recognized. As a neighborhood. As a community. As people. The BID stopped us. The Downtown Neighborhood Council stopped us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a succession of supposedly helpful mayors hadn’t a hand in stopping us.

Let me also say there was a moment when I myself lived in the elements. That’s what I told my daughter. “I’m living in the elements.” Nevertheless, it’s part of my story — this story that brings us here today. Thirty long years after we first tried to get a neighborhood council of our own. What’s the big deal? Let me tell you the big deal. This is a real neighborhood — an actual community. We all know each other and what’s what and what’s up. Did people in Hancock Park know each other? Did folks in Beverly Hills help one another out? Nothing doing. Just strangers in big houses. It’s different down here. Always has been.

It took some doing to get recognized. We are the last ones not driven out by climate and prices. That’s what sent the rich people away. They gave up and made this city a ghost town of heat and poverty. But we stayed. Climate and prices don’t mean a lot when you don’t have a lot of choice. Not much we can do about the elements. Fact is — we are used to the elements. The elements are our thing. And rising prices don’t matter when you can’t afford anything anyway.

So when everyone up and fled, we got our neighborhood council charter. We are Skid Row proud — climate and cash be damned.

Things happen by default, you know. I got sick. I lost my home. I wound up on the streets. I got housed for good. So be it. That was a long time ago. Same with this council. We tried. We tried again. We got denied. The city got hot. The city got wet. The city became the climate crisis’ ground zero. Prices shot up. People didn’t want to pay for water rights. They didn’t want their kids suffering at recess. They didn’t want to pay soaring gas prices for their private jets to take them north. So came the great abandoning.

We could have moved into their houses. We could have swept into the Hollywood Hills and Brentwood. But that’s not a place. That’s not a home. That’s not a community. We are who we are and where we are. And with no one left but us, we got our council. And now we have plans, and plans are happening. You might think our plans are simple. But these small things are everything.

And so I’m proud to set in motion our first community market. All these years, and this is the first time Skid Row has an exclusive place to shop, hear music, get your hair cut. A place to get trained up to work, a place to give back. A place from which we will rebuild this blessedly emptied city in our own image.

Ivy Pochoda is the author of several novels including “Wonder Valley,” “Visitation Street,” “These Women,” “Sing Her Down,” which won the L.A. Times Book Prize in 2023, and “Ecstasy,” which was released in June.

2047: Meet David Allen, the Minister of Commemoration

By Jonathan Lethem

Author and MacArthur Fellow Jonathan Letham against a backdrop of Mt. Baldy in Upland.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Stanleg and I had long planned an expedition to meet the Minister of Commemoration. Very few people knew as much as we did, which made Stanleg and me famous frenemies. Stanleg was the Emperor of Dead People Hill. I lived in Bonelli with the Boaties. He liked org as much as I liked disorg, but we both remembered the floodtimes from when we were children, so the little amnesiacs liked to flock around and pepper us with queries, but our information was nothing like Minister Allen’s.

You could get by gondola up to the mouth of the Euclid trail, where the donkey trolleys dragged the sledges up toward Baldy. That was where the Minister lived. He liked the high places and never went by water. David Allen was made and lived in the Dry and still saw it all with the Eyes of the Dry: the Gabriels and the Wetness below. They had once named some of these places for the water, like Riverside, or the Wash, before the water came. But those who truly remembered the Dry wanted no part of the Wetness.

So Stanleg and I packed in and portaged through the Pomonliest swamp and then crossed the Downland gondoliers’ palms with bribes to get us to the shore where the mule sleds waited, and then we bribed the mule sledders. They had no interest in our tales.

The Minister of Commemoration waited in his temple, only lightly guarded by amnesiacs. He was deep and surprisingly tall, though crooked and bald, and his robes hung long. He greeted us with a magnificent smile. The lenses as well as the repairing tape on his spectacles were thick.

We had brought waterkale cakes and wild bird hand-pies, because we had been encouraged to believe David Allen liked these things. Perhaps he did, though he seemed to take no notice of our gifts.

“Stanleg is from Dead People Hill,” I said before Stanleg could get a word in. “He likes org, and he orgs those dead people pretty good. Maybe the amnesiacs not so good.”

“Fitchly hails from Bonelli Underwater Park,” said Stanleg, returning the favor. “He is an expert in disorg and keeping it real. I had to bake you those hand-pies myself.”

“Org and disorg were sitting on a fence,” said David Allen. “Org fell off, and disorg felt the bump.”

We were humbled by his wisdom, and all the rancor was relieved from our bodies. We wanted only to be suffused with his powers of Commemoration.

“Is it true,” asked Stanleg, “that where there is now a beach there was once a forest and a lawn?”

“It was a forest lawn, yes, on the top of the hill, when the lands surrounding were dry. But it took much watering to keep the Forest Lawn from reverting to yellow scrub. I know this might seem preposterous to you…”

“Watering is one of the old mysteries. Was it the watering that brought the flood?”

“Not in a direct sense,” said Allen.

“Will you give us a Commemory?” I asked.

“I have been thinking much about the Beach Boys,” said Paul Allen. He seemed to draw deep inside of himself to summon the Commemory. Perhaps he mused upon the chosen theme because Stanleg had mentioned his own beach, there at Dead People Hill. “There were many debates,” the Minister intoned, “back in the dry times, about the extent of their Inland reach. Some scant evidence suggests they came to Riverside in 1962. An autographed glossy or two. But did they actually perform?”

“What miracles might the Beach Boys perform?”

“At that time, they might have performed ‘Don’t Worry Baby.’”

“This would have been a consolation.”

“If they made it to Riverside and performed ‘Don’t Worry Baby,’ it would have been a terrific consolation, yes.”

“We thank you for this Commemory,” said Stanleg. “We don’t want to ask too much of you.”

“I am old.”

“Yes.”

“It may or may not have happened. Go now.”

“Yes.”

“And remember, and speak it to your amnesiacs.”

“Yes.”

“Tell them this. Tell them they are all Beach Boys now.”

Jonathan Lethem, a MacArthur fellow, is the author of several novels, including “The Fortress of Solitude,” and “Motherless Brooklyn,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and several short story collections. “A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories,” will be published in September.

For about two months when she was a kid, Jessie Murph wanted to go to Harvard.

“I watched ‘Legally Blonde,’ and I was like, ‘This is lit,’” the 20-year-old singer and songwriter says of the Reese Witherspoon law-school comedy that came out three years before she was born. But wait: Growing up in small-town Alabama, Murph was a talented and dedicated cheerleader. Does Harvard even have cheerleaders?

“They probably do,” she says, tilting her head as she considers the question. “I don’t know if it’s like the main thing, though. It’s true you don’t really hear about it. They have all the expensive sports: lacrosse, polo, horse riding.” She laughs. “Horse riding would be lit too.”

Whatever the case, Murph soon cast aside her Ivy League aspirations — not to mention her devotion to cheer, though that’s come back more recently — and refocused on her first love of music. Now, instead of preparing for sophomore year, she’s just released her second major-label album, “Sex Hysteria,” which includes the top 20 pop hit “Blue Strips” and which — true to the LP’s title — has set off a minor internet controversy with the racy music video for her song “1965.”

An Amy Winehouse-ish retro-soul number with a ringing malt-shop piano lick, “1965” is about longing for romance the way they did it in the old days: “We’d go to diners and movies and such,” Murph sings in her scratchy Southern drawl, “We’d just hold hands and I’d love every touch.” Elsewhere in the song, the nostalgia darkens as Murph acknowledges that “I might get a little slap-slap” from her man and that “I would be 20, and it’d be acceptable for you to be 40.” (“That is f— up, I know,” she adds of the age gap.)

The song’s NSFW video goes even further, with traces of pornography and suggestions of domestic violence that have invited criticism that Murph is advocating (or at least aestheticizing) a kind of tradwife oppression at a precarious moment for women’s rights. Murph addressed the blowback in a video on TikTok, where she has 11 million followers, writing, “This entire song is satire r yall stupid” — proof, perhaps, that her point didn’t quite land as she’d hoped.

Yet this week, “Sex Hysteria” debuted on Billboard’s album chart at No. 8, not long after Lana Del Rey — a key influence on Murph with a long history of online outrage — posted a video of herself pole dancing to “Blue Strips,” whose title refers to the security marking on a $100 bill that might be tossed at an exotic dancer. All the attention has combined to put Murph in the conversation for a best new artist nod at February’s Grammy Awards.

“Writing this album, I was in the studio every day for like six months straight,” she says on a recent afternoon near Venice Beach. “Didn’t go out, didn’t do anything — was just grinding.” We’re talking at the end of a long day of promo for “Sex Hysteria”; she’s wearing jeans and a Hysteric Glamour T-shirt, her inky-black hair hanging loose around her face. “But it’s so cool because you go in there with nothing and you make something out of thin air,” she says. “Then you get to listen to it, and it’s therapeutic for what you’re feeling.”

Though it opens with a track in which she attributes her becoming a songwriter to “my father and the f— up s— he did,” “Sex Hysteria” is a more playful record than last year’s “That Ain’t No Man That’s the Devil,” which Murph says exorcised “a lot of anger and hurt that I needed to get out, even just for myself, before I could move on to the next phase.” (A representative lyric from “Dirty”: “I woke up this morning kind of mad / Flipped the switch, I had the urge to beat your ass.”)

Here, in contrast, she’s singing about her interest in “whips and chains” in the sock-hoppy “Touch Me Like a Gangster” and bragging about the Malibu mansion she just bought in “Blue Strips” — a mansion, she clarifies, she does not actually own.

“Not yet,” she adds. “That line was just the first thing that came out of my mouth when I was writing the song. It feels so glittery, the thought of living in Malibu. It’s always been something I’ve wanted to do.” What shaped her ideas about the storied coastal enclave as a child in the Deep South? “I’m a really big fan of ‘Property Brothers’ — I’m sure I saw it on there.”

Murph moved to L.A. about a year and a half ago from Nashville, where she established a foothold in the music industry with collaborations like “Wild Ones,” a duet with Jelly Roll that has more than 300 million streams on Spotify, and “High Road,” a No. 1 country-radio hit by her and Koe Wetzel that led to a nomination for new female artist of the year at May’s ACM Awards.

“Sex Hysteria” dials down the explicit country trappings in favor of thumping bass lines and woozy trap beats; her guests on the album are Gucci Mane and Lil Baby. Yet the album demonstrates a certain stylistic blurriness that’s comes to define country music no less than any other genre in the streaming era.

“Whether it’s country or pop or whatever, I think Jessie Murph is just Jessie Murph,” says Bailey Zimmerman, the Nashville up-and-comer who teamed with Murph last year for the rootsy “Someone in This Room” and whose own music shares a casually hybridized quality with Murph’s. “It may not sound country, but what she’s talking about usually is.”

Like many in her generation, Murph found her voice posting covers of popular songs online. The oldest video on her YouTube is titled “11 year old sings titanium” and, sure enough, shows a young Murph squinting into the camera as she performs Sia and David Guetta’s 2011 stadium-rave jam. At 16, having built a following on Instagram and TikTok while in high school in Athens, Ala., she signed to Columbia Records and started releasing singles; by 2023 she’d dropped a mixtape called “Drowning” and recorded songs with Diplo and Maren Morris.

Jessie Murph

(Annie Noelker / For The Times)

For “Sex Hysteria,” she drew inspiration from Patsy Cline, Wanda Jackson and both Presleys — Elvis and Priscilla. Murph says her mother told her that when Jessie was 3, she came into the kitchen and announced that she’d been Elvis in a past life. Has Jessie been to Graceland?

“No, but my mom went there when she was pregnant with me,” she says, widening her kohl-rimmed eyes.

She titled the album in reference to the dismissive way women were described as “hysterical” in the 1950s and ’60s — “women who were depressed or anxious or just feeling normal emotions,” she says. Does she think women are more free to express themselves half a century later?

“I definitely feel free if I’m feeling some type of way — obviously I’m saying it in songs and not holding anything back. But I think everyone’s experience is very different. I’m sitting in a different spot than somebody three doors down is, you know? And different countries and different political settings — I’m sure it’s something that’s a problem in places.”

To a degree, the backlash to Murph’s “1965” has overlapped with the criticism Sabrina Carpenter drew when she revealed the cover of her upcoming “Man’s Best Friend” album, which depicts Carpenter kneeling before a man who’s pulling her hair.

“The weirdest part about it is that it’s a lot of women who are hating,” Murph says. “But I think some people are weirded out by my age. A lot of people met me when I was 16 or 17 and a much different person — which, thank God I’m a different person.” She sighs. “I don’t know. When people find you at a certain age, it’s like you need to be frozen in time. Let me live.”

This week, Murph launched a world tour behind “Sex Hysteria” that she previewed with a buzzy performance at April’s Coachella festival in which she brought some of her old cheerleading moves into the choreography she’s emphasizing for the first time. (She’ll circle back to Southern California for a Sept. 27 stop at the Shrine Expo Hall.)

“Certain things come naturally to me and certain things don’t,” she says. “The dance stuff is one of the things I’m grilling myself on.”

Another of her goals this year: spending less time on social media. “That s— is terrible for your mental health,” she says even as she admits that YouTube and TikTok have been crucial to her ascent. “I’m on World War III TikTok right now, where they’re talking about World War III. And I just keep scrolling, because now I’m nervous about World War III.

“I think it’s scary how young kids are getting phones,” she adds. “That YouTube video you brought up — I could have posted something crazy at that age, right? Even being 16 and having TikTok — I look back at some of the things I posted, and I’m like, Why would you post that, bro?”