Free Home Entertainment During Covid-19
This is taken from an email from Lesbian Connection Magazine April 17, 2020. If you are not familiar with the magazine, I highly recommend it!
MARGY’S MISC NEWS
I’m sorry to report that last week on April 9 lesbian icon Phyllis Lyon passed away. According to reports, she died peacefully at her San Francisco home at the age of 95. We’ll have lots more about her in the next issue of LC. In the meantime, if you have Amazon Prime you can watch the 57-minute documentary directed by JEB called “No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon.” I hope you enjoy it.
Speaking of women’s movies, due to the coronavirus, through May 31, Women Make Movies is hosting a free Virtual Film Festival of movies by and about women. Sign up at https://bit.ly/3c7I9AJ and you’ll get a link and password to access the festival. Once on the page, just click on the image next to the film you want to watch.
A number of other websites and Facebook groups are currently offering a variety of performances by women musicians, speakers, comedians, authors and more. On Facebook, search for the group Women’s Community Events Online to see what’s coming up – their page highlights upcoming live shows we can all watch together, but there are also links to many performances that have already taken place in the last few weeks. Starting two Sundays ago, Lisa Vogel, producer of the Michigan Womyns Music Festival, has been reading some of her Fest stories at 4pm Pacific Time (7pm Eastern). To watch go to her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.vogel.587.
Olivia Travel is putting on some wonderful virtual concerts, dance parties, and talks as part of their At Home With Olivia series. I heard that they were even putting on a special Pandemic Password game featuring a lot of their favorite comedians. On Facebook, search for Olivia Travel and look for “videos,” or try this link: https://www.facebook.com/OliviaCompanies/videos . And on weekends through May 31, Curve magazine is putting on what they’re calling a Global LGBTQI Virtual Festival. Most of the events seem to ask for a suggested donation, but several of the earlier ones can now be seen for free on YouTube (search for “curve virtual festival”).
A number of mainstream companies also have special deals to help us all get through this stay-at-home period. Comcast/Xfinity (say “Free” into your voice remote, or go to On Demand and look for “Free”), Roku (look for “Home Together” in the Roku Channel), Spectrum and Dish all have been letting their subscribers watch a selection of premium channels for free, including Showtime, Epix, Hitz, Hallmark Movies Now, Lifetime Movie Club, Stingray Classica, Docurama, The Great Courses, History Vault, Acorn TV, and more. Which channels each service is offering, and their expiration dates vary. I know Showtime ends soon (4/19/20), but that might still give you enough time to catch the latest rendition of the “The L Word” series. During the past few weeks, I’ve also watched several of the movies on Showtime right now, including “On the Basis of Sex,” a fictional bio-pic about Ruth Bader Ginsberg; and “Tell It to the Bees,” about two women living in a small town in Scotland in the early 1950s. The silly but enjoyable movie “Poms” is currently available on Showtime, too.
Right now, many premium channels are offering extended free introductory periods to all new subscribers, often going from the usual one week free up to a whole month. This includes CBS All Access (sign up by April 30 with the code ALL), and I’m looking forward to catching the two seasons of “The Good Fight” I haven’t seen yet, as well as checking out the new “Star Trek: Picard” series. By the way, I just read that when your free month is ending, you might be able to get a second free month by entering the code ENJOY on your account payment screen. But remember, when you sign up for these channels, you’ll usually be asked to create an account and include a credit card #, so you may want to put an alert on your calendar so you remember to cancel the channel before the month is up.
Some of the other channels with similar deals are Acorn TV (commercial-free British TV – use the code FREE30), Sundance Now (use the code SUNDANCENOW30), and Shudder (for fans of horror – use the code SHUTIN). Hulu is also offering a 30-day introductory period, and they just began showing the highly-rated film “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (there is a short review of this movie in the latest issue of LC (May/June). If you like documentaries, you should check out the Dox Channel. In addition to its usual 7-day free trial, it is cutting its annual subscription price in half to $14.99 for the year. Quibi is a brand-new streaming service that just came online in April, and it features a variety of original programming that it presents in 10-minute segments made specifically for your phone or tablet. It plans to charge $4.99/month, but you can sign up now for a free 90-day trial.
For something less mainstream, there’s www.meditainment.com/free-meditainment. They say that for the duration of this global crisis, they are giving everyone free access to their library of guided meditations in order to help us all “de-stress, beat anxiety, and boost our mood.” And while the site www.BroadwayHD.com is only offering a 7-day free trial, it has an impressive library of over 300 performances of Broadway musicals and plays. Some that I’m looking forward to seeing are “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” (about Billie Holiday), “Ann” (Holland Taylor stars as the former governor of Texas, Ann Richards), “A Night with Janis Joplin,” and the all-female Shakespeare Trilogy.
During the coronavirus pandemic, The Metropolitan Opera is offering free nightly streams of operas at 7:30pm ET. I’ve only been to one opera in my life, but I may try out a couple of these just to see.