Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most

Earlier this morning, the sky was filled with pink clouds, and crocuses were bursting through the ground, and the grass in Central Park was the color of emeralds. Yes, finally it's spring, when the world is puddle-wonderful, and the goat-footed balloonman is calling to me over the heads of the nodding swaths of daffodils.

Yesterday, I went across the park to the Metropolitan Museum to see the Pierre Bonnard exhibit, interiors and still lifes. Bonnard once wrote, perhaps in one of the small datebooks that held his sketches and grocery lists (also on view at the Met) that “There is always color, it has yet to become light.” He spent the latter part of his life in a villa on a hill near Cannes transforming the former into the latter, adding the occasional creature of light - the figure of memory you see in your mind's eye sitting in a familiar chair, or crossing the street.

Sometimes, at this time of year, I see my younger self as just such an apparition. One of my dearest friends always remembers me at 19, in a sheer white-dotted, full-skirted vintage lavender dress and roller skates, careening down a hill near the boat pond, simultaneously ecstatic and terrified. (Which is not really a bad way to travel, as the former makes up for the latter.) We had only met a few days earlier, and she says that's when she fell in love.

(Bonnard's 1927 "Flowers on the Mantelpiece at Le Cannet," at the Met until April 19th; post title from the song sung most memorably by Ella Fitzgerald.)

Among The Amortals

It appears that I have attained amortality, defined by my very favorite new blog, Schott's Vocab, as "A state of hopeful agelessness wherein one acts the same from adolescence to the grave."

Ben Schott, brilliant though he may be, did not coin the phrase. Time's London bureau chief Catherine Mayer did, for a feature called "10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now." Of my fellow amortals, she says:

In their teens and 20s, they may seem preternaturally experienced. In later life, they often look young and dress younger. They have kids early or late — sometimes very late — or not at all. Their emotional lives are as chaotic as their financial planning. The defining characteristic of amortality is to live in the same way, at the same pitch, doing and consuming much the same things, from late teens right up until death...

They prop up the tottering music industry, are lifelong consumers of gadgets and gizmos, keep gyms busy and colorists in demand. From their youth, when they behave as badly as adults, to their dotage, when they behave as badly as youngsters, amortals hate to be pigeonholed by age.

It all describes me very well, depending on your definition of bad behavior. But Mayer's tone is dour, and she mutters about acting "age appropriate." Which is funny coming from someone married, according to Wikipedia, to Andy Gill, guitarist, producer and founding member of Gang of Four, one of my top ten bands of all time, who are still recording and touring, as seen in the 2008 video below. My guess is that at home he's a tourist.

If You're Gonna Bump It

I am now a trained ecdysiast, though I never expect to make a living from it, nor to perform in public again.

However, I just completed a series at that legendary institute of higher learning, the fabulous School of Burlesque, where I learned the secrets of the tassel twirl, the fan dance, the stocking peel, how to make love to a chair and much more, all of which will be very valuable to me in my personal life.

The redoubtable, charming and patient instructors were the witty Darlinda Just Darlinda, the saucy Gal Friday and the school's forthright Headmistress Jo Weldon, a fount of information who works with the Burlesque Hall of Fame.

Since age five, I have taken many dance classes: ballet, modern, jazz, tango, flamenco. This was by far the most fun, and the most practical.

The students were an interesting mix of women, from the tall blonde in Louboutins (we bonded; I was wearing Manolos) to the petite brunette with the spectacular back tattoo to the shy bride who wore a Luis Sojo Yankees jersey for the "How To Strip Out Of Street Clothes" class (apparently at her husband's request). Each one revealed new facets of her personality, as well as her physique, when she got up on stage.

One of my classmates, a vivacious painter, will be performing as Naughty Botticelli at the Slipper Room this Friday. I bet she's got one heckuva gimmick. You gotta, as the veterans explained in Gypsy:

Regrets, I've Had A Few

For nine years now, this has been a sad time of year for me, because it's when I say Kaddish for Lily, the daughter who died before she could be born.

I had ideas about who she would be, and what we would do together, and in some way I envisioned her as a mini-me, with all of my and her father's virtues and none of our flaws, the Labradoodle of children, which I suppose is what all first-time parents imagine before birth. Most of those parents, however, have the opportunity of seeing those dreams destroyed as their child matures and takes to slamming doors. I never did, so for me she will always represent an otherwise unattainable perfection.

There is a saying in Hebrew,"May her memory be for a blessing." But because I have no actual memories of Lily, my memory of her will always be of the hopes I had for her, and hope, even when foolish, is always a blessing.

And, of course, it's spring, when the world is reborn, and hope blooms, copiously. So tonight, when I light her yahrzeit candle, I will think once again about how I can live my own life to be worthy of what she meant to me.

I'd Rather Be Boss Than President

Last night was quite the night for talk shows, what with Bruce Springsteen on The Daily Show and Barack Obama on The Tonight Show. It reminded me how much I love being on TV, something I haven't done lately. I've been everywhere - on CNN and MTV and PBS, and also on lots and lots of talk shows, national and local, daytime and nighttime. Some hardly seemed worth the trouble (a morning show in Baltimore comes to mind) and others definitely were (Oprah, the Holy Grail of talk shows).

This was over the course of several interesting and occasionally provocative jobs, and because I look good on camera, speak with reasonable intelligence and am not shy about expressing my opinions, success begat success (working with smart PR people didn't hurt). And the multi-guest panel of daytime shows was the perfect format for me - producers always encourage guests to "jump in," and as anyone who's ever had a conversation with me can attest, that's never a problem.

Of course, some hosts are better than others, even (and perhaps especially) when they're with those they most admire. Jon Stewart is a masterful interviewer, and with Bruuuuce he was at his very best: honest about being a fanboy, funny, and getting to the heart of who his guest is. It didn't hurt that the Boss, whose TV appearances are few and far between, was also funny, and charming, and sincere - and looked great.

Jay Leno, on the other hand, seemed a bit intimidated (who wouldn't?), and the President (whom I think of as "Barack" because he writes to me so often, addressing me by first name), while of course displaying his own intelligence and charm, seemed slightly ill at ease, and his body language, in which his legs pointed one way and his torso another, was a tad off.

My favorite hosts of those who've interviewed me? Phil Donahue tops the list. Joan Rivers was surprisingly warm and perceptive. Matt Lauer had a nice twinkle.

And Oprah? Terrific on the show and great to talk to, and of course I'd love to be her guest again. But all that empathy and connectedness? As soon as the cameras go off, it does too. Which is not a knock; no one can be "on" all the time. But it did leave me feeling like she somehow didn't mean it. Which, having had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Springsteen, is not how he is - he always seems to mean it.

The Emerald Aisle

Yesterday, I participated in St. Patrick's Day by bringing Irish soda bread and Kerrygold butter to my office. Magically delicious!

I also had steak-and-kidney pie from the Chip Shop for lunch. I know, that's English food, but I was thinking about Irish Jew Leopold Bloom and his kidneys.

My wearing o' the green was confined to the dark emerald at the center of what was once my engagement ring, bought at an H. Stern in a mall in Salvador Bahia, Brazil.

It was the Ash Wednesday after Carnaval 1994, and my ex and I were exhausted from a week of dancing and partying, in costume, behind the giant trucks on top of which incredible bands like Olodun played as they wound through the narrow streets of the 16th-century Pelourinho district and the city's broad boulevards. All the stores had been closed for a week, and we thought we'd find some Carlinhos Brown CDs and a souvenir dental-floss bikini before we traveled back to LA.

After those acquisitions, we wandered by the jewelry store (Stern, a luxury brand in the U.S., is apparently the Zales of Brazil) and were captivated by the green gleam of the emeralds in the window. I tried on a ring, and he suggested we get it. I expressed surprise, and refused to wear it until he asked me properly. Which he did, in our hotel room overlooking the beach. We were married five months later at a drive-up chapel in Reno, and officially divorced by the end of 2004.

Not long ago, he sent me an envelope of odds and ends, including a photo of that beach. It's pinned to the bulletin board in front of me, and my apartment holds many other reminders of him besides the lovable dog snoring at my feet: the velvet cape I bought for opening night at the San Francisco Opera, the spangled dress I wore for my birthday at the Gritti Palace, and a host of memories of wonderful, impulsive, absurdly extravagant adventures. The ring is one of them, and I do not regret anything about it, or much about the decade I spent with that charming, well-read, well-bred, profligate man.

Did I mention that he is part Irish, and that nothing makes him happier than a visit to San Francisco's legendary O'Reilley's, with its mural of Wilde, Shaw, Beckett, Joyce and other prodigious drinkers?

(Image of the Pelourinho from Brasil-Turismo.com.)

Across the Twitterverse

Like most girls, I like small, cute things - puppies, babies, dollhouses. So it's not surprising that I'm enjoying Twitter. Its very microblogginess makes it adorable and also makes it feel manageable, unlike MySpace and Facebook, where there are too many things to track and stay on top of to have any kind of real presence.

I've also set myself the task of ensuring what I write there is interesting, in form if not in content, by following haiku format. Sticking to 17 syllables - 5/7/5 - is much more challenging than just staying with 140 characters, which is a piece of cake (or should I say a piece of pi?) for someone who's spent her working life writing headlines of one kind or another.

This may not be quite as impressive as the person tweeting in the style of Ernest Hemingway, but it serves my little aperçus reasonably well. I have been coming up with them for a long time - at one point in my teens I had a whole list of aphorisms I thought were clever, which I preserved along with the poems and stories I'd written in a folder titled "[My Birth Name]: The Early Writings." I'm not sure where that folder is now, but I'd guess the contents are largely cringeworthy.

I am, of course, mindful that Twitter is also, and perhaps primarily, a marketing tool. And so, when it seems appropriate, I've been pointing people here, which creates a measurable uptick in traffic. And I've also set up a Twitter account for my company, which already has a sizable natural network of its own. This is all mostly about audience, not money. But that's what I find interesting.

So here I am again, doing the new new thing. We'll see where, if anywhere, that leads me.

She Blinded Me With Science

Happy Pi Day! Yes, it's 3.14, so the annual celebration of the irrational (an everyday occurrence chez moi) presumably began today at 1.59 a.m. I, for one, plan to eat pizza and go to Columbus Circle, and to play "That's Amore" on a digital keyboard constructed from pi's first 10,000 digits.

In other science news, Cassie and other bitches wishing to explore the wonders of quantum mechanics won't have much longer to wait: How To Teach Physics To Your Dog will be out in in December.

Science, of course, takes many forms. Which is why my new educational ambition is to attend Icelandic Elf School.

Exit, Followed By A Queen

I saw a preview of Exit the King on Wednesday. This Broadway production stars Geoffrey Rush, Susan Sarandon, Lauren Ambrose and the incomparable Andrea Martin, whom I have adored ever since her days on SCTV. They didn't have to bring their Oscars, Emmys and Tonys; their performances were strong, and the play itself, translated and adapted by Rush along with director Neil Armfield, is fierce and funny, as one would expect from Ionesco. It also felt strangely topical - a fun-loving despot neglects his country and brings it to ruin, then doesn't understand when it's time to go.

Rush, making his Broadway debut, was brilliant, and Martin owned the stage whenever she was on it, as she did when I last saw her as Frau Blucher in Young Frankenstein. Ambrose, whom I saw in Awake and Sing a couple of years ago, did well in a thankless role as the king's ingenuous second queen. But Sarandon, a role model for how to continue to look hot as one ages (though her clothing choices at this year's Golden Globes and Oscars could have been more flattering), hadn't been on stage since 1972, and it showed. Though she had great lines as the imperious, cynical first queen, she seemed oddly tentative - and, at play's end, as she encouraged the king to accept death, sounded for all the world like a droning yoga teacher.

By the way, if there is a more beautiful theater on Broadway than the Ethel Barrymore, I haven't been in it.

Happy Birthday, Barbie

Dear Barbie,

When I was a little girl, I loved playing with you. You were who I was going to be when I grew up: you were perfectly coiffed and made up, wore an incredible wardrobe and fabulous shoes, enjoyed the company of your friends and your handsome boyfriends, and always had an interesting job.

As it turned out, I was right on all counts. I even wound up with the busty/leggy combination most women deem impossible, though not anywhere near your unlikely proportions. So imagine my surprise when I wound up working with you. Those were good times; I benefited from your image and accumulated knowledge, and you from my creativity, ambition and management skills. Together, we helped millions of little girls find new ways to play and dream themselves into who they were going to be when they grew up.

You turned 50 on Monday, and I'm writing to wish you a happy birthday and to thank you for being an inspiration. I've seen all the jokes about Divorce Barbie and Menopause Barbie, learned about your pre-Barbie history as a sexy companion for lonely men (we have that in common too) and read the fulminations of angry women about your inappropriateness as a plaything.

I don't care. You taught me that we girls can do anything. And I'll always be grateful to you for that.

Love,
Glamourbrain

P.S. Of course, I always liked you best as a brunette. This is the only version of you I still have, called "Busy Gal":

(Image from the Images Journal article "Rethinking Barbie.")

It's In The Bag: Shopping For Twits

Today felt like spring, so I broke out my adorable new bag for the first time. It is, of course, black and white, and I bought it via Twitter, when Raquel Gonzalez followed me. I liked her style, and wound up visiting her Handbag Cave on Etsy. Two days later (she lives a zip code away), I had a well-made, well-priced new accessory and was supporting stylish local handicraft.

Technology - enabler of vice (shopping) and virtue (creativity)! Thanks, Raquel! Que le vaya bien!

Check it out:



I wore it with this vintage YSL jacket - way too bright and too puffy, but aren't big shoulders back?

The Writing Life

I spend most of my day writing and reading, which is part of my job, but is also what I love to do. At my office, I write things for my clients; I read things my clients and prospective clients might be interested in; and I read what my staff writes for my clients (and edit it, usually heavily). At home and on the go, I read websites, books, magazines and newspapers. And I write for myself and readers like you - here and on Twitter, as well as working on my sixth book and the occasional poem or piece of light verse. I used to teach writing, which is essentially what I try to do when I'm editing, and someday I'd like to do that again.

This started a very long time ago. I've previously mentioned a report I wrote for school, on lined paper. In pencil. My handwriting was then, and still is, fairly large, so it was 20 pages long. I was four.

But what do I, sadly, spend most of my writing time on? That's right, email. I have three e-mail accounts I check frequently, and I send hundreds of emails (and IMs) a day. And I can't bring myself to write ungrammatically, or to send a long message when a short one would be better (which, as with anything written, is almost always true). It has taken over my life, and my Blackberry (I've had one since 2001) is simply an enabler.

Hello, I'm Glamourbrain, and I'm an email addict. It's taken over my life, and it takes away precious time that could be spent writing things that actually matter. Not to mention how much effort it takes to stay on top of the incoming deluge when curiosity (or distraction, if one's writing time is devoted to prescriptions) is a defining trait.

So I was very pleased to see this helpful New York Times article. It has some ideas I plan to try. There are only just so many writing hours in the week, and I'd like to spend fewer of them trying to find some message I meant to respond to.

I like this list of books on writing, too. Though my problem has never been the "how" of writing, nor the "why." I write for most of my waking hours. It's "what" I write "when" that bedevils me.

Food, Glorious Food

My sister is crazy about Top Chef, so when I read that top judge Tom Colicchio was cooking small dinners every third Tuesday at an adjunct to Craft, I knew instantly that I had to take her to one as her belated birthday gift.

Reservations are taken six weeks in advance of each dinner at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays. As there are only a few dozen seats, it took several months to set it up. We went last night, and it was worth the trouble.

There were 11 delicious small courses (menu below) - standouts were the roasted scallop (I'd never had pine cone syrup before, and its Christmasy taste and resinous texture were a perfect foil to the sweet flesh of the perfectly sauteed scallop and the herbaceously crunchy slices of brussels sprouts), the plump gnudo festooned with porcupine-like black truffle shavings, the spiced rack of lamb and the chocolate caramel torte, which had an Earl Grey cream that amplified each flavor.

All of this was amplified by the lovely setting, the attentive service, and the wine pairings, which included a spectacular Hungarian gewürtztraminer, a delicate Seresin pinot noir from New Zealand and a Spanish Clos Erasmus Garnacha, which made me feel smarter just drinking it.

I've been privileged to dine in many fine restaurants, to have chefs Daniel Boulud, Wolfgang Puck and Charles Phan stop by my table, to visit Thomas Keller in his kitchen at the French Laundry and to have professional and amateur chefs cook remarkable food for me in their own kitchens. And I have eaten in many restaurants with open kitchens and admired the chefs' work in progress. But I have never seen anything quite as theatrical as the framing of Chef Tom and his large, gleaming head as he garnished, plated and directed his staff. Not surprisingly, the view into the kitchen reminded me of nothing so much as a very large flat-screen TV.

Which is to take nothing away from the very high quality of the meal. But it did taste like celebrity. You'll note that the menu is signed (it came that way). It's an expensive but very tasty autograph.

Your Perfect Offering

Snow is falling right now on Central Park, and just a few minutes ago, I was out in it with ma chienne (I am teaching her "Asseyez!"). I brought a tennis ball with me, but the powder was so fresh that every time I threw it, it disappeared, swallowed up in the vast whiteness. She couldn't follow it, so I wound up going after it. Which one of us is the retriever here? Eventually, we just ran around.

Walking home, I looked at our tracks and felt that somehow we had ruined the snow's perfection, just as I was sure that we we got into the apartment, paw prints would sully the kitchen's white tiles.

And then I thought of these lines from Leonard Cohen's "Anthem", which I'd never really appreciated until I saw him live:

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

The unblemished sacrifice mandated by Leviticus is not perfection; the desire to make things whole, while recognizing that they will always break, is where dawn begins.