November 13, 2020

Don’t Fear Friday the 13th or Steve Buscemi

Andrew Toth/Getty

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Looming disaster and imminent peril get all the love, but there’s a stack of good news in today’s archives: It was Friday the 13th when Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins recorded “Friday the 13th” in 1953. An eerie start: Rollins was delayed by a car accident, and trumpeter Ray Copeland fell sick, so Julius Watkins filled in. The 10-minute jam was written on the spot, and it was one of Rollins’ most fulfilling collaborations. Full track here; Monk’s solo here.

It was Friday the 13th when Evelyn Brier became the first woman to receive an airplane instructor’s license. And Friday the 13th when President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order banning gender discrimination in federal employment.

And Friday the 13th when Super Mario Bros. entered the world, and Steve Buscemi entered the world. Beyond bloodbaths Fargo, Reservoir Dogs, and The Sopranos, Steve’s good! He was a firefighter in New York City in the ’80s. One day after 9/11, he volunteered with his old firehouse to work 12-hour shifts digging through rubble in search of missing firefighters. “Very few photographs and no interviews exist because he declined them. He wasn’t there for the publicity,” a firefighter community wrote in solidarity. Ten years later, he joined protests against firehouse closures under Mayor Bloomberg and has supported labor rights on a firefighters’ advisory board.

The first dinosaur eggs were discovered on Friday the 13th.

NASA announced water on the moon on Friday the 13th.

World Kindness Day was Friday the 13th last year.

Share a word about kindness shown to you or by you at recharge@motherjones.com. And if today bellies up and Steve Buscemi knocks at your door, there’s always Saturday the 14th, unless you answer that door.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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