Agent Palmer

Authors Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack have captured the heart of Aaron Sorkin’s goal to have the first few seasons of The West Wing serve as a “love letter to public service.” They should know it well. Fitzgerald and McCormack portrayed Carol Fitzpatrick and Kate Harper, respectively, in the watershed political drama and released “What’s Next” in 2024.

This book may be the first in a long line of others to come. It fulfills its subtitle and then some, which is appropriately length as “A Backstage Pass to The West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service.”

Do you like art? Collecting stuff? Anime, cartoons, or animated films? You don’t have to like all of those things, because enjoying just one of them is enough for you to consider collecting animation cels.

Before I dive into why I think this is great for anyone and everyone, let me first define what exactly an animation cel is, as it isn’t exactly the technology of today, though most of us grew up on it.

Everything’s coming up Earnhardt, and for Dale Jr, that’s great. For NASCAR, it may be a different story.

Dale Earnhardt Jr, AKA Dale Jr, is featured heavily in what was Amazon Prime’s summer coverage of races in June. He was prominent in advertisements and as a featured commentator for those races. He’s also featured in a new IHOP commercial. And a new Amazon Prime docu-series about his Dad, recently released to acclaim.

I can’t recall if I’ve discussed them here before, but I’m the proud owner of a few animation cels in my personal art collection. They’re pieces of a whole and reflections of the things I loved as a kid. Their existence on my walls grows even more special with each year as cels are part of a dying art.

Cel is short for celluloid, which is the transparent sheet on which the “animated” drawings were once painted or drawn on.