#but I have massive personal beef with the sentiment “you have to love yourself before you can love someone else/someone else can love you ” | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ts1989fanatic · 5 years

Text

Todrick Hall's Comments About Taylor Swift Are All About Support – EXCLUSIVE

Todrick Hall has some famous friends and co-workers. His YouTube channel (which has close to 3 million subscribers) has gotten him worldwide recognition and into the room where it happens with the likes of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. He choreographed Beyoncé's "Blow" music video after she saw some of his own videos, and his friendship with Taylor Swift got him a featured cameo in the "Look What You Made Me Do" music video. Todrick Hall's comments about Taylor Swift prove that working and being close friends with the star is not what you may think.

Hall and I are on the set of his "Glitter" music video when we sit down to chat about his career. He had already met T. Swift by the time he starred as Lola in Kinky Boots on Broadway in 2016, but it was during this stint in Harvey Fierstein and Cindy Lauper's Tony-winning show that his friendship with the "Delicate" singer really solidified.

"When I moved to New York, I went out to eat with her when I was doing Kinky Boots," Hall tells Elite Daily, "and I had done shows in New York before, but it had been so many years and I felt like I had lost my friend circle. And so I was so happy that she was [living in New York]." Hall says their friendship was a casual one, so he didn't expect her to come see him in the Broadway show.

"She said that she was going to come and see the show and I was like, I'm never going to ask her to come and see it again because I know she's busy, I don't want to pressure her. And she just showed up to the show one day." He says Swift not only saw the show, but she stayed for two hours after meeting, speaking, and taking pictures with everyone in the cast and crew. From then on, he knew he had a solid friend in her.

Hall reveals that, like many on the internet, he believed Swift's niceness was just a front she put on for her famous persona. But he maintains that niceness still holds true in their personal and professional relationships.

"Huge things will happen and she'll be like, 'OK, great. This is what we have to do, this is what the universe has given us, this is what we're faced with. How are we going to fix this?' I would love to handle my minor issues the way that she handles some of her huge issues that billions of people are going to see and judge." He doesn't hint as to what any of those "huge issues" he's talking about are, but her public beef with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West comes to mind, as well as incessant tabloid coverage of her past relationships. (Miraculously, she and actor Joe Alwyn have managed to keep their two-year relationship under tight lock and key.)

"I think that one thing that I really love about her is she has been burned by a lot of people," Halls continues, "and you would think in a lot of ways that she would be totally OK with being a princess locked in a tower that nobody was able to enter. But she's willing to get back up again and trust people again, which is a very scary thing when you're somebody in that position."

Hall has proven himself to be a loyal friend to Swift as well, going to bat for her frequently against Kanye West.

When Swift finally voiced her political opinions in what the internet felt was a long overdue Instagram post, Hall posted on Instagram as well, showing his pride in her decision.

He explained in the lengthy caption that Swift being so guarded for so long about her political beliefs was part of the reason he kept their friendship casual at first. He echoes the same sentiment in our conversation.

Referencing her complete lack of a public political stance over the years, Hall tells me, "She has such power that I don't even think she realizes how much of an affect it would have on people."

He continues, "I was explaining to her that, as a gay person, I didn't know for sure how you felt about gay people and I was a little bit nervous to talk to you about my love life or whatever." And he recognizes the criticism she would receive for not voicing her political opinions before the 2016 presidential election.

Many people justifiably feel that Swift, with such a powerful influence over newly 18-year-old potential voters, could have done much more political advocacy in 2016 than just posting a picture of herself with an "I Voted" sticker. When you have a platform as large as Swift's, it's easy to see how not using said platform in a tumultuous political time would garner heavy criticism. Some of that criticism, Hall says, was pointed at him as well.

As a gay man of color, Hall tells me that people online occasionally placed the onus of getting Swift to "come out" as a democrat on him.

"Sometimes, people would give me flack online that she wasn't doing certain things," he tells me. "I love the fact that she has grown and evolved in her own time, as every artist has to do." He continues, "It can be very scary to potentially risk your career or your reputation to stick your neck out for something when you don't have to do it. You don't have to stand up for gay rights, you don't have to voice your opinion, and you'll sell the same amount of records. But somebody who truly cares about the way this country is falling apart and will take it upon themselves to use their voice to do something — that, I believe, is just the right thing to do."

She did that when she officially endorsed democratic candidates running in Tennessee elections in 2018 (and there was a massive surge in voter registration as a result). But Hall recognizes this was overdue. But Hall knew that being a good friend meant supporting her decision, regardless of how late it was.

So when Kanye West tweeted that he was "distancing" himself from politics, Hall couldn't help but laugh (and call the rapper out on Twitter).

“Well well well Miss @kanyewest," he said, "while I’m thrilled that you claim to have hopped off the Trump train, I cannot help but bask in the irony that you are now ‘distancing yourself from politics’ while the girl everybody was dragging is now promoting a blue candidate like it’s her job." Look what you made him do, Kanye! Elite Daily reached out to West's team for comment on Hall's tweets, but did not hear back by the time of publication.

All tea and shade aside, Hall tells me that Swift is one of those friends who is basically a therapist for him, and vice versa.

Throughout their entire friendship, however, they never had the chance to work together. That is, until Swift asked him to be in the "Look What You Made Me Do" music video.

"I feel like I owe her money for the amount of therapy that she's given me for the boys that I've dated," Hall quips. He reveals that he hasn't always approved of her past relationships either, although he stays tightlipped on just which of her famous exes he's referring to. (Booooo.)

"I think that it's easy to be surrounded with a lot of 'yes' people," he says, "but with Taylor, there was somebody that she was dating that I didn't necessarily approve of and I was definitely very honest with her about how I felt about it. She just would always be like, 'Thank you so much for your honesty.'"

"I feel like it is the most expensive music video that's ever been created in history," Hall jokes.

Outside of working with his bestie on the video, Hall says it was a wonder to see director Joseph Kahn at work on the video. Kahn has directed a large number of Swift's videos in the past, including most of the videos from Reputation. The biggest were "Look What You Made Me Do" and "...Ready For It?" both of which Hall was on set. To perform in the former, and just observe the latter.

"It was amazing to watch [Joseph Kahn] work and to see everything," Hall says, adding, "I was also on the set of '...Ready For It?' to watch that as well. And it was just really, really awesome and to be able to hear the song and to see the sets. I make videos for a living, but to see the budget of how these sets were built and how amazing they look, it was just insane. I had never seen anything like that before in my life."

He brings up his choreography for Beyoncé on the "Blow" music video as a comparison. Beyoncé's self-titled surprise album was famously more low-budget than some of her other videos because it was being kept as such a huge secret, so seeing Swift's massive budget for her Reputation videos was an eye-opener.

"When I did the video with Beyoncé, we went to a location, a roller skating rink, and that's where we did it, so that was the aesthetic of that video," he explains, "But I've never been somewhere where they built an entire world and a cemetery and a thrown and all these things. It was just really crazy to see it and to be a part of it was just really, really awesome."

As for her dancing in the video (people have always trolled Swift for dancing even though she's not near someone like Beyoncé's level), Hall says she's doing it for the joy it brings her.

"Taylor Swift doesn't have to ever dance," he, a professional dancer, says. "She'll still sell the same amount of tickets. She just loves to dance." She danced alongside Hall in the "Look What You Made Me Do" video, and Hall sees it as a huge moment of pride. He tells me, "She was scared at first, she was for sure nervous. But once we saw the playback and I was like, 'You look amazing,' she just kept going in more and more and more and more. Every single time, she'd give it more energy, more performance, and now I see her dancing in [the Reputation stadium tour] more than she's ever danced before. And I'm just so proud of her."

This is why he gets his own membership card

12 notes · View notes

sidenotelife · 5 years

Text

A match day running diary

A running diary of the day when I find out where I will do my residency training (post-graduate medical training). For those not familiar with the medical training process, briefly, medical students send out applications for post-graduate medical training to become board certified physicians, and this occurs sometime in the fall of senior year. Then over the winter medical students interview with these programs, and then in February all the progams rank the students they want and the students rank the programs they want. This all gets thrown into a computer somewhere that optimizes all the rank lists and spits out assignments for students and employees for residency programs. This post is a running diary of March 15th, the day we get our residency assignments. This post is loosely based on a true story.

7:27 AM. Depart breakfast at Sunrise Bistro. Great corn beef hash. Would highly recommend.

8:55 AM. The costume theme for match day was “fictional characters” so we decided to dress up as son’s favorite thing which is Thomas the Train. Wife painted these shirts. Pretty legit.

9:10 AM. Prepare vegetarian chili in crockpot for maximum efficiency. I found a recipe that suggested putting quinoa in vegetarian chili to give it a little extra volume to it. I also put in my fave secret ingredient which is Dr. Pepper.

9:28 AM. Kids + Costumes ready.

9:28 AM. Son: Can I see the picture?

9:43 AM. Ken costume ready. I had to cut out a v so you could see my Sir Topham Hatt tie. Wife did not approve on my t-shirt cutting job. Can you blame her.

10:07 AM. Walking to Charleston Music Hall with family and friend.

Friend: Can’t wait to cheer really loud when you walk across the stage.

Ken: Wait I’m not walking across the stage.

Friend: *Massive disappointment* What why?

Ken: I don’t like the attention. Also I don’t like things with lots of people. Introvert probs. 🤷‍♂️

11:56 AM. Kids getting too crazy. Break out emergency Belgian waffles. It is truly an art to keep kids quiet and contained at any event.

12:00 PM. Open envelopes... Sioux Falls Family Medicine!

Hmm. I don’t look thrilled here. I think the exact emotion I had was how-should-I-feel-about-this, if that can be considered an emotion. Sidenote - Before I go further I feel the need to explain myself. I don’t want this to be conceived as disappointment that I matched where I matched. Sioux Falls was our #2 choice and honestly the only reason I didn’t rank it #1 was because of the weather. It is truly my privilege to have the opportunity to train there, but I feel it is of importance to analyze this emotion. This how-should-I-feel-about-this emotion.

Match has, for better or worse, come to represent the culmination of the whole med school experience. If you match at the place you wanted, your #1 program, your emotions are those of elation. You feel everything was worth it. All those days suffering in the library, all the shit you had to take from residents that were out of line, all of it. If you don’t match at a desired place or worse yet, if you don’t match and have to scramble, it’s a nightmare. But I worry that this is an oversimplification of the process, and I worry that med school has become nothing more than a way to ensure you get a desireable job than a place where you learn to care for sick people. I fear this sentiment about match is driving the Step 1 mania. (Currently being covered beautifully by @jpcarmody on his blog, The Sheriff of Sodium).

I think my emotions are also complicated by a personal change of heart I had sometime during the end of graduate school and the beginning of medical school. For so long I had worshipped at the throne of academia. When I came to medical school I dreamed of becoming the dean of my own medical school. When I started graduate school I dreamed of having a 30-person HHMI-funded lab/machine that would draw the envy of graduate students and postdocs everywhere. For so long I dreamed of my match day when one day I would announce that I was going to a sexy program like Stanford or Harvard or Duke. But I think during graduate school I started to understand the reality of academia, and especially the kind of academia that incentivizes the Cell/Nature/Science/NEJM rat race. My greatest frustration was that it was so hard to be ethical in academia. The academic system is fueled by the C/N/S/NEJM rat race, which in turn is fueled by stretching your data to look like it’s saying more than it actually does. It’s also fueled by outright lying and people producing fake data to get the data to fit the elegant hypothesis. I hated seeing mentors take advantage of students and postdocs, milking every last bit of productivity out of your underlings because that was truly the only way to survive. By looking out for yourself at all costs. I love science but I didn’t want to condone this sort of philosophy. I wanted to pursue physician-science in a way where I was not at the mercy of for-profit journal editors. I wanted to live in a world where we as a research team pursued science out of a desire to further the pursuit of knowledge and not just the next publication with a big impact factor. Maybe I was imagining a pipedream but it just didn’t feel like the right thing for me to jump into the traditional route of padding my resume at a top 5 med school.

When I went back to med school for my clinical years, I initially felt tentative but still willing to enter my hat into this foray. Gradually several little things gearshifted me off this track, most prominently working with one attending in particular. I worked with this attending during my addiction psychiatry rotation, and I watched him work for six weeks. He is a genius, but I admired him for more than that. More than any other physician I’ve ever met, the compassion he had for his patients was palpable. You could feel his frustration with the system that made it hard for physicians to help patients. You could see the depths to which he pushed himself in order to provide true patient-oriented care, and not just the cheap talk that often gets thrown around. I acknowledge that some of these tendencies are dangerous, and risky, but it’s also beautiful. That’s the sort of feeling that fundamentally pushed me into going to medical school. Other people’s suffering pained my heart and I had to do something to relieve this pain, if only to relieve my own pain. I don’t know exactly what happened to this attending, but he no longer attends on the addicion psychiatry floor. As far as I know he’s taking a break from seeing patients. My best guess is he burned out and gave up his fight against the system. Hopefully I’m wrong. I don’t know. Frankly, I’m too afraid to know the answer. But when I saw that someone who had such compassion and such raw talent couldn’t make it in academic medicine, I knew I had to do something different. I saw that something different in Family Medicine. I saw that this specialty, one that is treated by some as the specialty that you pursue when you can’t get good enough Step 1 scores to pursue what you actually want to do, I saw this specialty as the one that could offer a true path to patient-centered care. I saw the flexibility offered by the diverse skillset you could obtain during family medicine residency. I saw the potential for real long-lasting relationships with patients. I saw the value in being a generalist in a medical world that’s becoming overpopulated with specialists. I’m still convinced family medicine is the right specialty for me, and I feel it offers the possibility for me to pursue physician-science my way. Yet, there’s also a part of myself that’s grieving that I didn’t match at Harvard or Stanford, that I’m not working in the HHMI-funded lab, that my home isn’t the building with beautiful modern architecture looking out at the beach. It’s not a part of me that I like but regretably it’s still a part of me, and I think that moment when I opened my match envelope and saw the official match result it was the first moment it was real. I was really choosing to give up the glamors of a top 5 med school to pursue this off-beaten track. Am I crazy? Am I being too self-righteous? Did I make the wrong decision? I think that’s what gave me this feeling. This how-should-I-feel-about-this feeling.

12:23 PM. Kids too crazy... we need to leave.

12:57 PM. Get home.

Ken: Kids what do you want for lunch?

Kids: *opens fridge* Dad why is there so much beer?

1:03 PM. Looking up South Dakota-themed food. I remember when I went to interview there I asked them what the most South Dakota food was, and they told me it was Chislic. I don’t know if I’m spelling that right, but basically it’s fried chunks of meat. Sounds pretty legit:

1:15 PM. Daughter makes a sign. You may not be able to understand this sign so let me do a little interpreting. At the top it says South Dakota Bound, except the BOUND is backwards. Then the square-looking thing is the shape of South Dakota. Sidenote - The little divot at the bottom right corner kind of looks like Florida, which kind of makes the state of South Dakota look like a mini-version of America. The thick blue lines are water falls, which we drew because Daughter really wanted to draw something in Sioux Falls, so I said water falls! The four faces below that were commonly misinterpreted as Ken, Wife, Daughter, and Son but actually it’s Mount Rushmore.

1:57 PM. Son goes to rest time. Daughter cleaning up blankets from floor. Asking me, “Why do I have to be cinderella? Why do I have to clean the bathroom and the living room and the kitchen??” So basically we are raising a little martyr.

2:30 PM. Wife is already looking at real estate. I think she knows the stats for every single rental property in Sioux Falls. 🤣

4:13 PM. Recruit kids to help. Before this they were carrying cans of beer which was even funnier. 👶👧🍻

5:13 PM. Commence low country boil. I’ve always loved the idea of the low country boil and I’ve always wanted to do one but for one it’s real expensive to buy all the supplies, and for two I didn’t have the proper equipment for it. Fortunately my friend lent me his turkey frier and burner which made for the perfect low country boil setup. In retrospect, the low country boil was one of the funnest party meals I’ve ever made and I would recommend it 10 out of 10 times. At the same time, shrimp is one of my least favorite seafoods and I don’t love to eat low country boil. I feel like this makes sense.

Ok, those are the last pics I have so I’ll wrap up this post. Shoutout to everyone who was feeling how-should-I-feel-about-this.

See you on the other side,

From ken

1 note · View note

makistar2018 · 5 years

Link

Todrick Hall's Comments About Taylor Swift Are All About Support – EXCLUSIVE

BY KELLI BOYLE January 6, 2019

Do your friends tell you you're "celeb obsessed"? Do you follow your favorite celebs' every move? Know their Instagram histories so well that you can rattle off their inner circle by name and IG handle? If yes, Elite Daily's new series, SideClique, is just for you. We're bringing you everything you've ever wanted to know about the people living their lives right alongside our favorite celebs.

“I FEEL LIKE I OWE HER MONEY FOR THE AMOUNT OF THERAPY THAT SHE'S GIVEN ME FOR THE BOYS THAT I'VE DATED.“

Hall has proven himself to be a loyal friend to Swift as well, going to bat for her frequently against Kanye West.

When Swift finally voiced her political opinions in what the internet felt was a long overdue Instagram post, Hall posted on Instagram as well, showing his pride in her decision.

Referencing her complete lack of a public political stance over the years, Hall tells me, "She has such power that I don't even think she realizes how much of an affect it would have on people."

As a gay man of color, Hall tells me that people online occasionally placed the onus of getting Swift to "come out" as a democrat on him.

So when Kanye West tweeted that he was "distancing" himself from politics, Hall couldn't help but laugh (and call the rapper out on Twitter).

All tea and shade aside, Hall tells me that Swift is one of those friends who is basically a therapist for him, and vice versa.

“TAYLOR SWIFT DOESN'T HAVE TO EVER DANCE, SHE'LL STILL SELL THE SAME AMOUNT OF TICKETS. SHE JUST LOVES TO DANCE.“

Throughout their entire friendship, however, they never had the chance to work together. That is, until Swift asked him to be in the "Look What You Made Me Do" music video.

"I feel like it is the most expensive music video that's ever been created in history," Hall jokes.

As for her dancing in the video (people have always trolled Swift for dancing even though she's not near someone like Beyoncé's level), Hall says she's doing it for the joy it brings her.

Elite Daily

#taylor swift #todick #2019.01.06

3 notes · View notes