They drive up to Woodstock for a film festival. The wife has adapted her first novel into a film and it’s showing at a festival in Woodstock that isn’t too far from their house, so they hit the road and plug in the music and they pick an excellent mix of upbeat driving-to-see-your-own-movie pop songs curated from across the last several decades, Rose Royce and the Manhattans and Queen and even some NSYNC and some Bieber, and they sing along and dance in their seats and the wife makes them into Instagram stories because that’s what she does, and they laugh and hold hands and sing all the way to Woodstock. They go out to dinner with the cast and crew in Woodstock, they watch the movie, everyone loves the movie, or they lie convincingly about it, anyway. For the drive home they put on a more low-key playlist from across the last several decades, Linda Ronstadt, Elton John, Carole King, and even Bradley Cooper singing “Maybe It’s Time” from A Star Is Born, which is a bit of a sneak attack because she’s just been saying she wasn’t so sure about Bradley Cooper singing and since it makes her cry she’s forced to concede that it’s a very good song indeed, and it’s definitely a case where she was a wee bit attached to some contempt she’d formed prior to investigation.
The first song on the way up, his pick, is CeeLo’s “Fuck You.” The wife laughs and laughs.
Because it isn’t the husband and wife, it’s the wife and one of her oldest and dearest friends and his teenage kid. They go back to her house upstate after the movie and they eat ice cream and they stay up late talking and laughing. At one a.m. the kid says she’s tired and the wife and her old buddy tell her she can go to bed, and the kid, who seems way too cool to want to hang out with her dad and his friend for long, says she doesn’t want to go to bed because she will have FOMO and the wife says Me too, and so they all stay up until three a.m.