Thank You

Happy Alexandria Thanksgiving everyone! We’re so excited to kick things off tomorrow with our city’s signature holiday tradition—a fun family road race that’s 2 miles longer than anyone wants or needs it to be. You should be statutorily barred from using “trot” to refer to anything longer than a 5K. We do not have a turkey “trot” in this city—a short happy little jaunt around outside before the eating commences—but rather we have a turkey slog, a turkey death-march, a turkey oh-shit-I-actually-needed-to-train-for-this. There’s more walking in the 4th mile of this race than in an entire season of Nationals bullpen work. In Alexandria people fall asleep before their meals—well in advance of any tryptophan-induced napping—because we ran five fucking miles in the morning. Turkey trot, our ass.

This turkey is a sadist and a menace.

Well, with that out of the way (five fucking miles!!), we wanted to take a break from our regular programming to keep things a little simpler and a little shorter. Not that there’s any shortage of local issues to cover, but it’s a holiday week and we wanted to slow things down (plus Vernon already beat us to all the good spanking jokes and we’re kind of sore about it). As strange as it feels to say, the debate around Zoning for Housing has reminded us why we’re thankful to live here. Yes, things have gotten heated at times (and very weird at others), but it’s also given us cause to bring into focus and articulate what it is we love about this city, and what we need to do to shape its future in ways that go far, far beyond land use. 

Many people have stood up over the past week and said incredibly moving things about what a beautiful community this is. We’ve heard how much Alexandrians value living in a place where they can run into a half-dozen people they know while running an errand or walking the dog, where their kids can gain confidence and independence by walking and riding DASH to school, where our diverse mix of buildings and people set our neighborhoods apart from so many others and give our city a special sense of place. We’ve heard gratitude for elected leaders who represent us with thoughtfulness and care, and for access to services and amenities that make our lives easier. We’ve heard that people actually like their neighbors—so much that they wouldn’t mind having more of them! (Pizzerias, on the other hand…) Throughout it all, we’ve heard Alexandrians express optimism for the future, which is easy when the present is already pretty fucking great.

So let’s take a few days to focus on those sentiments and ignore the sturm und drang and all the rest. Let’s take a few days to be thankful. For us, that gratitude starts with you readers. It continues to be a marvel to us that this newsletter is finding an audience, and an audience that is smart and funny and kind and curious and all of the things that writers hope and imagine the people that read their work might be. So—from the bottom of our hearts—thank you. Thank you for letting us take up space in your inbox each week, thank you for sharing the newsletter with your friends, and thank you for the notes and feedback you leave us—it means more than you know [Editor’s note: WHERE DID ALL THIS DUST IN HERE COME FROM??].

Alexandria’s Hottest Club is… Green Yard Signs

It’s been so exciting to watch over the last few days as homes across the city have proudly joined the “we’re not dicks (at least about this one particular thing)” club. Look at these beauties! The luscious green color, the crisp fonts, the surprisingly controversial pro-friendship message. Graphic design: is it actually our passion?! We have a few left, so it’s not too late to get yours. After all, will your Thanksgiving really be complete if no one accuses you of being a developer stooge?

That’s all for this abbreviated holiday week edition, but before you go carbo-load and stretch in preparation to run five fucking miles tomorrow—in the words of TV’s most famously rumpled detective, there’s just one more thing…

Exciting ALXtra Housekeeping Update

As we’ve grown the newsletter these past three months (how has it already been three months??) something we’ve been wanting to eventually build toward is an actual reader community. We know many of you are connecting on other platforms (helloooo Bluesky buddies), but that’s not true for everyone. As we thought about how to better foster these connections, we realized the simplest way would be in the comment section of the newsletter itself (which we’ve had turned off until now) where you all can converse and chat and conspire amongst yourselves. But as internet natives and hardened veterans of the Blog Wars, we are much, much too familiar with how quickly comment sections can become an absolute cesspool (for real, have you looked at the comment section under any Washington Post article recently? Go ahead—we dare you, take a look. It’s like looking directly into the gravity drive of the Event Horizon).

So we’ve decided to turn on paid subscriptions to the newsletter, the primary benefit  (and currently only benefit) of which will be access to the comment section. The newsletter will still be completely free to read for everyone every week! That’s not changing. So if all you want to do is keep reading our hilarious, brilliant, and insightful [Editor’s note: for fuck’s sake Jesse] takes every week, great news! You don’t have to change a thing. But if you’re interested in commenting and meeting other readers, or if you just otherwise want to support the newsletter, you now have the option to do so. And down the road we’ve got some ideas [Editor’s note: do we?] for additional paid subscriber content that we think you all might enjoy, but that’ll be a housekeeping announcement for another day [Editor’s note: it’s not a book club] [Editor’s Editor’s note: but what if it was a book club???].

As for what we’re going to do with the funds from paid subscriptions, we think it’s important to be transparent with you all about that too. We’ve got three things planned: 1) about a third of money that comes in will go into a separate fund, and every time that fund hits $500 we’ll make a donation to a local charity in the name of ALXtra’s readers and we’ll feature and write about that organization; 2) another third of the money will go toward investments in the newsletter, things like paying for graphic design (which as noted above, is our passion now) and maybe a set-aside to commission freelance pieces from time to time; and 3) the final third of the money will go toward the various ways we have to engage in self-care after thinking and writing about you maniacs all the time [Editor’s note: no seriously, you all are great—we couldn’t imagine more amazing maniacs].

So that’s the announcement! Paid subscribers will have access to the comments, but the newsletter is still free to read. If you decide to pay, please know that we’re deeply flattered you’re putting your trust in us to meet your local news and entertainment needs (and we take that responsibility seriously). If you know someone that might enjoy this newsletter but isn’t subscribed, there’s a gift subscription option, and the gift of ALXtra is something sure to put a smile on the face of anyone* in Alexandria (*offer not valid for CLA members).

Ok, that’s really actually all for now. If this shorter [Editor’s note: was it really though?] holiday edition of the newsletter has left you hankering for additional ALXtra content, please enjoy this video clip of Becky’s public testimony that she refuses to watch:

And this video clip of Jesse’s public testimony that he’s probably watched forty or fifty times already, plus a half-dozen more just while you were reading this:

Happy Thanksgiving!

You can follow Becky @beckyhammer.bsky.social and Jesse @oconnell.bsky.social on Bluesky, or you can e-mail us anytime at alxtranewsletter@gmail.com.