In this very specific class, we learned things like how to lobby the city for a stop sign at the intersection behind our school, which sorely needed one, how to have a new historical marker created, and how to take parts and parcels of the city that were underutilized and make them into thriving spaces. It taught us how to engage with the city and think critically and act civically. It was unlike most of my high school classes as it had a purpose beyond aiming for the highest possible scores. I’m pretty sure I took this class in place of an AP science class, because, well, I had already taken every science I could possibly need as someone who had less than zero interest in any of the words within the STEM acronym. It was a great class and I wish every single citizen had an opportunity to learn how to engage like this on a more formal level.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. And I knew the piece was a mess because I was editing it until I hit publish. I was moving things around, fidgeting with the narrative, and honestly? Just wanted to get it out. Last week was a long week, and on top of work pressure, I felt a self-imposed pressure to get a new piece out. My brain has been feeling incredibly foggy lately, and well, it’s showing. As you all know, I subscribe heavily to the philosophy of “progress over perfection,” but I never want to clog your inbox with anything sloppy.

So, as a thematically charged mea culpa, I’d like to bring an exquisite fig recipe to your attention. This recipe is from David Lebovitz, whose baked goods are always simple and absolutely delicious. I’ve made some changes based on my own taste, which I have noted below. Otherwise, it’s a pretty perfect recipe.

Fig Cake by David Lebovitz

7 ounces unsalted butter, cubed, at room temperature (LCF note: I use half butter, half olive oil)

1 cup granulated sugar

3 large eggs, at room temperature

7 Tbsp. Plain Greek yogurt (LCF note: I used nonfat, but I’m sure full fat would be delicious)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (LCF note: I am generous with the vanilla, always)

1 ¾ C almond flour

¾ C all-purpose flour

1 Tsp. baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon five-spice powder (LCF note: I used coriander instead)

10-12 fresh or frozen figs (if using frozen figs, don’t defrost them first)

1. Line the bottom of a 9-inch cake pan with a round of parchment paper. Butter the sides of the pan or coat with nonstick spray.

2. Preheat the oven to 400ºF

3. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or by hand, beat the butter and granulated sugar together on high speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.

4. Stop the mixer, then add the eggs one at a time, mixing on low speed and stopping after each addition to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Mix in the yogurt and extract.

5. Whisk together the almond flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, and five-spice powder in a medium bowl. Stir the dry ingredients into the butter mixture just until combined. Scrape the batter into the prepared cake pan and smooth the top.

6. Quarter the figs and place the figs in concentric circles, cut side up, around the top of the cake.

7. Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 325ºF and bake until the center just feels set, about 40 minutes longer.

8. Remove from the oven and place the cake pan on a cooling rack. Let cool a few minutes, then run a sharp knife around the outside of the cake to loosen the sides of the cake from the pan.

9. To remove the cake from the pan, it’s easier to do while it's still slightly warm. Run a knife around the outside of the cake again, then place a dinner plate upside down on top of the cake pan. Holding the cake pan and the plate firmly in place with both hands, turn both over simultaneously and the cake will release. (If it’s a bit stubborn and doesn’t come out easily, you can place the cake in a warm oven for a few minutes or set it over the low flame of a gas burner for a few seconds.)

10. Remove the parchment paper from the bottom of the cake, invert a serving platter over the bottom of the cake, then turn the cake and the platter over simultaneously.

Concord grapes are a fun fruit to eat. They have a much thicker skin than most table grapes, meaning that when you get to the interior, the juicy, slimy, grape texture becomes all the more prevalent. Add to that the significant seed that sits inside of the grape, and the experience of eating just one grape is extremely multi-faceted. I’m not big on spitting in public, so usually I swallow the seeds. My deepest hope is that I do, in fact, have Concord grapevines growing around my organs.

It wouldn’t be the first place I’ve lived with them. Growing up, my grandparents had Concord grapevines in their backyard. I remember plucking grapes with my grandmother in the fall, these being the only grapes she did not peel before she ate. She ate them directly from the vine, and so did I.

Today, I live in the house with that backyard. The grapevines didn’t survive a repaving of the yard. In their place, I planted a tiny fig tree. I think that, for me, Concord grapes are a sense memory, a way to bring the abundance of the past to me right now in the present.

While Concord grapes are an emotional Achilles' heel for me, they also happen to be the source of fake grape flavor for everyone. Side by side, the real thing and the fake flavor taste almost exactly alike, which explains why both the grape and the flavor are extremely polarizing.

When I was growing up, there was a pizza shop around the corner from us (this corner is now home to a Wawa, a CVS, and a Starbucks (and the mom and pop Thai restaurant that has somehow outlasted nearly every other independent in the neighborhood), but that is another post for another day). This was the kind of pizza shop where you could get two pizzas for $10. The kind of pizza shop with plastic pizza tables inside of the boxes. The kind of pizza shop that probably went through cases of napkins, served up in metal holders, just by way of people dabbing the grease off of their perfectly medium crust pizza. I would be remiss here not to mention that, as a society, we have completely lost the plot on pizza and that we have become accustomed to paying $50 for two pizzas (even before the natural wine!) is, as my husband would say, a shanda. My favorite thing in the pizza shop? Welch’s grape soda.

Later in life, Welch’s would become one of my very first clients. Welch’s is a farmer-owned cooperative dealing nearly exclusively in Concord grapes. They have a chokehold on the grape juice category (it should also come as no surprise that I love grape juice so much that when they launched an ill-fated unfiltered version, I was the first and only person in line to buy it because who doesn’t want their grape juice thick and sedimenty?).

I hold a deep belief that Welch’s grape soda is so good because it is not just an artificially flavored soda, but it is actually a soda that is derived from true Concord grape juice concentrate, made from grapes on family farms up and down the East Coast and into Canada. This doesn’t make it healthy, but it does make it extremely tasty. There is something almost musky about the sweetness of the Concord grape and the way it takes shape as a soda. I loved it as a kid picking up pizzas, and I love it now as an adult walking aimlessly through the farmers market.

Welch’s grape soda was also immortalized by Biggie in his 1994 anthem “Big Poppa,” when he accounted for his breakfast order of “A T-Bone Steak, Cheese Eggs, and Welch’s Grape.” Although his breakfast order is not particularly relevant to the matter at hand, it is very relevant to my life in that it was one of the first music videos I ever saw, and that before we even started REALLY dating, I made my husband “cheese, egg, and Welch’s Grape” hamantaschens for Purim. They had a cream cheese and grape jelly filling, and I have to say, they were extremely good. It is also relevant in that I like to think that if my grandma and Biggie meet wherever they are in the afterlife, they have something to bond over. ANYWAY.

Concord grapes are also the model for the fake grapes that sat on the kitchen table centerpieces of Jewish and Italian grandmothers everywhere. It’s strange to me that these grapes, with such a short season and such a specific flavor, are the grapes that inform the language of “fake grape.” Grocery store grapes don’t look like the plastic grapes in a centerpiece. They aren’t dark enough; they aren’t round enough. They are normal; Concord grapes are special. It’s interesting that in reality, Concord grapes aren’t for everyone - people don’t like the taste, they don’t like the skins, they don’t like the pits - but as the muse for fake grapes, they become the grape most associated with grapes.

I like that Concord grape season overlaps with our holiest season in Judaism. Actually, one of the coolest things about Judaism is that our New Year falls over the harvest season, in the fall. It makes more sense to me to think about renewal on a walk during golden hour in September as the leaves change than it does to think about renewal hibernating inside of my house while the city of Philadelphia can’t figure out how to work a snow plow appropriately.

American Judaism has a strong connection to Concord grapes, historically. When Eastern European Jews started arriving in the US in the late 1800s, the US wasn’t the worldwide wine producer it is today, and they had to make do with what was available. On the East Coast, the main option was Concord grapes. There is a lot more to the story (if you’re interested, some good thoughts here), but ultimately Concord grapes became the default grape for the larger producers of kosher wine like Manischewitz. There will always be a place in my heart for Manischewitz - and by the way, if you mix it with sparkling wine, you get a delightfully refreshing spritz, a Shtetl Spritz, even.

I love that a fruit chosen solely because it was what was available could become so inseparable from American Jewish life. Maybe this is what tradition is: making meaning from what grows where you are. Which brings me to the fig tree in my backyard. The one that I planted after the grapevines were torn out.

Of course, a fig tree has biblical leanings, too. You know, using fig leaves as modesty measures and all of that. But figs and grapes both fall into the grouping of the seven species traditionally brought as offerings to the Temples. In Judaism, figs symbolize peace and safety, and Kabbalists assign a corresponding attribute to each of these seven species. Figs are for perseverance and eternity. This year, just three years after planting it, we harvested nearly 6 lbs of figs this weekend, and they just keep coming. Talk about perseverance.

My Bubby used to keep a bowl of dried figs on one of the beautiful antique tables in her living room. She lived in a tiny house that was exceptionally appointed. She had great taste and even better sourcing through her friends Gene and Eddie, who in my mind's eye were essentially Albert and Armand from The Birdcage, although I know that is not an accurate remembrance. Anyway. She always had a bowl of whole walnuts that you had to crack yourself and a bowl of dried figs. She was so elegant, my Bubby, and she was the best cook. And while there are many foods that remind me of her (Edy’s frozen yoghurt not least among them), the bowls of figs and walnuts really stand out. Maybe because it was the first time I can remember seeing food used as both sustenance and beauty. Food as a part of living, not meals as a way to survive.

I didn’t plant the fig tree because of my Bubby. At least, I don’t remember thinking of her when I planted it. I planted it because I like figs, and because, as a family, we have a predilection for planting invasive plants (ask me about my mother's bamboo). But now it grows in the same patch of earth where my grandmother’s Concord grapevines once grew, producing a fruit that reminds me of my other grandmother. I’m not sure I could have planned a more obvious metaphor if I had tried.

As we were harvesting the figs this weekend, I started reading about how grapes and figs become fruit. Concord grapes are self-fertile. Each flower contains the parts it needs to pollinate itself. The fig varieties that grow in Pennsylvania are stranger still: they generally don’t need to be pollinated at all. They produce fruit parthenocarpically, without fertilization (I HAD TO LOOK IT UP TOO). The tree simply bears fruit.

It turns out there is more than one way to bear fruit.

The grapevines are gone, but every year, for approximately eleven minutes, the Concords return. And now, in the same backyard where I once ate them with my grandmother, a fig tree taller than I am produces more fruit than two people can reasonably eat.

At the farmers market, I buy two quarts of Concord grapes: one for now and one for later.

By the time I get home, more figs have ripened.

My journey begins with a day in the New York office, an early train to Boston where I sit next to a boyman who sucks on Zyns the entire ride while he is editing lacrosse footage. He is undoubtedly following Phish from MSG to Fenway. I rent a car in Boston, because for heaven’s sake, you cannot rent a 1998 Camry in Maine for less than a grand during high season.

This is where the story begins: to rent a car, I need a valid license.

My birthday was in March, and my driver’s license expired at the exact same time as my thirties. Very poetic, I know. If you are doing the math, you realize this is 4 months ago.

I have been halfheartedly trying to get a REAL ID for about six months, but every time I go to the DMV, I appear to need a different document from the many documents I have brought. At this point, it feels like the bureaucratic equivalent of knocking on a rabbi’s door three times with the desire to convert.

In the 4 months since my birthday, I have not acquired a REAL ID. Nor have I acquired what I now call a FAKE ID: the very pedestrian driver’s license that does not come with the added layer of governmental security.

My husband is appalled that I have not been street legal for four months. I am appalled that he does not know me well enough to understand that I have only ever been intermittently street legal. I have made a habit of driving for months at a time on expired licenses because who can possibly remember to get a new one, and, even more pressingly, who can possibly prioritize it?

Before I was diagnosed with ADHD, this was a quirk that drove me crazy, an absolute flaw in my blueprint. Now I understand it as something structural: part of the same mind that allows me to do the things I do well, well. If you don’t understand, take a look at the extremely well articulated ways my brain does or does not work below:

is my favorite ADHD guru on Substack. I never feel more seen.

Being street legal is one of those rules that does not make intuitive sense to me. Why should my ability to drive, or my record of clean driving, become less valid because the date printed on a piece of plastic has passed? More importantly, a valid license does not enter my direct line of sight until I need to do something like rent a car and am suddenly required to produce one.

Passively rejecting rules that do not make sense to me is something I understand much better through the lens of ADHD. I am the same person I was before the diagnosis, but I have a much different understanding of my own behavior.

I think about this a lot lately. I have grown, I don’t think I am fundamentally a different person than I was ten years ago, but I am able to understand myself differently, I am able to frame my own story differently. I can reinterpret the things that I used to hate about myself in a way that at the very least, neutralizes them. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we are constantly reinterpretating ourselves as we grow. Maybe it’s because Pisces is in a deep growth mode this year. Maybe it’s because I turned 40 this year. Or maybe it’s because I am noticing reinterpretation and reimagining everywhere I turn.

I take myself to see Cats: The Jellicle Ball, a reinterpretation of my favorite childhood musical. I drag my husband to see The Odyssey on opening night without telling him that it is three hours long before we arrive at an old theater devoid of the comforts of a suburban multiplex. I write an essay for work about the revival of the cigarette break that receives more engagement than nearly anything else I have written.

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I am, lately, extraordinarily interested in what happens when, instead of discarding or blocking out what’s old, you make it into something new.

One of my earliest memories is of being home sick, not homesick. I grew up in the kind of house where a cough and even a trace of malaise could put a sick day on the table. It was also the kind of house that permitted mental health days long before they became part of the culture.

Looking back, I was occasionally Albert in The Birdcage: deeply unwell because someone had hurt my heart by accident, and how could I POSSIBLY go on without some rest and a Pirin tablet?

Anyway.

One of my earliest memories is of one of those days when I absolutely was not sick but was home anyway. I’m sure there was orange juice, white toast with butter, and daytime television. What I remember most is dancing for hours to two albums: Donna Summer’s Bad Girls and the original Broadway cast recording of Cats.

As much as I loved “Dim All the Lights,” I LOVED Cats.

The yellow eyes, the black background, the dancer’s silhouette inside the pupils: that iconography is one of the immediate backdrops my brain connects to childhood. We saw the show several times, if I remember correctly, and during one of those visits we must have bought a Cats beach towel. It remained in my mother’s beach-towel rotation until about three years ago, when it finally ran out of lives.

I know Cats is polarizing. I also know it is one thing for a six-year-old to love Cats and another for a 40-year-old to openly love Cats. But it is part of my DNA.

I get chills every time I hear the prologue. I am obsessed with the lore of the original production: how over budget it was, how some songs were not written until the literal eleventh hour. I love thinking about how a collection of T.S. Eliot poems could inspire a synth-heavy musical requiring bolts of spandex and hours in a makeup chair. I love reading about how the original choreographer, the late Dame Gillian Lynne, interpreted the poems through movement that did not fit into any singular box, but became something entirely its own.

From the moment it was born, Cats was a literal reimagining of a text (even though I’m sure my 8-year-old self did not know that)

A few weeks ago, I took myself to see Cats: The Jellicle Ball because nobody wanted to see it with me. The only way I can describe the performance is full-body emotion. I have always loved Cats, but I had no idea it was capable of what it was asked to do in this interpretation.

I think The Jellicle Ball is Cats in its most perfect form. Which means I think that it’s finally found its apex the third time around. Not as a book of poems, not as a musical about alley cats, this as a story that directly meddles in what it means to belong, or to not belong.

To me, this setting makes the longing to belong that much more visceral. The longing was always at the center of the story, but only within the ballroom setting did I really feel it. Until this new context, Cats was Cats, a series of silly vignettes, character studies, notes on society by way of a feline underbelly. The ballroom context doesn’t impose something new on Cats so much as release what was already there.

I’m wondering if changing the context of something doesn’t change the thing itself, but might actually make you see the thing more clearly?

Later in July, we see The Odyssey. The story has existed for thousands of years and still has no shortage of people eager to explain what it really means. Before Christopher Nolan released his interpretation, I had no idea there were so many Homer scholars among us, especially on social media, but hello, that is beside the point.

We do not even know exactly where the story came from, and still we demand a definitive reading of it.

I think about Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which came out when the internet was still an infant. Luhrmann more or less preserved the original text but moved it into a modern world. Mercutio danced in drag to “Young Hearts Run Free,” and Leonardo DiCaprio broke my young millennial heart in an open, tattered Hawaiian shirt.

At 12, it was the perfect interpretation of Romeo and Juliet for no reason other than that it made me interested in the text. It made me want to read more and know more.

I am sure Shakespearean scholars had mixed feelings, but they did not yet have social media, so their opinions did not dominate the mass discourse. In fact, I am not certain there was a mass discourse outside of Vanity Fair’s Young Hollywood issue and the Tiger Beats still lining grocery-store checkout lanes.

This is what I find unsettling about the conversation around The Odyssey - for this, we have decided that fidelity is the most important thing an adaptation can achieve when there are so many examples to the contrary.

I find the obsession with fidelity odd, especially for something like The Odyssey. The Odyssey has survived thousands of years because people keep reimagining it. Every reading is an interpretation. Every adaptation emphasizes one thing and refutes another. I’m less interested in whether Nolan has preserved the text correctly and more interested in whether it creates a new way into the story for me, for the kids in highschool who will undoubtedly ChatGPT the story of the Odyssey instead of reading it in CliffsNotes like we had to.

I guess my real question is - what if we stopped looking for purity in everything we do? (Also relevant to politics, but a different story for a different day)

Stories don’t survive because they go untouched. On the contrary, they survive because people keep touching them, keep molding them into other forms. That’s how storytelling works, that’s how storytelling survives.

In thinking about reinvention and revival, I sometimes catch myself thinking about what is better left untouched or even, what can’t be reinterpreted. This feels a lot like grief when I really get down to it - because everything can be reinterpreted, but not always through the lens you desire. I think about whose interpretation I want, but cannot have. My mentor moved through culture more effortlessly than anyone I have ever known. It has been more than seven years since he died, and I still catch myself wondering what he would think at the center of a cultural moment.

I miss him, and I miss his takes.

I want his take not on The Odyssey, but on the influx of Homeric Scholars on the internet. I want his take, not on the Jellicle Ball, but on the conversation that Andrew Lloyd Weber must have had with his innermost circle when he was first approached. I want his take on John Leguizamo’s career arc between Romeo + Juliet and The Odyssey.

Those takes are unavailable to me. I can remember him. I can revisit him or reinterpret conversations we’ve had. But there is no new material from him, no reinterpretation from him.

There was a lot of reinterpretation from him when we used to smoke cigarettes together behind the office. I learned a lot smoking cigarettes with him, but then again I think I have learned quite a lot in life by smoking cigarettes with older men full stop.

I recently wrote an essay for work about why cigarettes are having a revival. I am the first to make the morbid joke about how cool cigarettes look, but I do not think the revival is really about looking cool. I think it is about human proximity. It is about the places where people are allowed to linger together and talk about things like revival.

The piece began as a short video about young people’s descent into nihilism. But as I took it more seriously, as I read, wrote, and tried to understand, the act of making revealed what I actually wanted to say. As I crafted the piece, it’s not like I abandoned the original idea; I just ended up molding it differently because I started writing the piece before I fully understood it.

It was only through the act of making it that I understood what I was actually trying to say.

I get to Maine by way of Boston in a rented car, using my not-REAL ID.

Mackworth Island is about a mile and a half away from the home that made me a homeowner before I turned 30. Mackworth Island is a moody island, even on the sunniest of days. We would walk there often, Stanley and I. I go to Mackworth Island carrying some of Stanley’s ashes and expecting, I think, that the place will tell me what to do with them. Or what to feel. Maine has often returned me to myself, but this time it does not. The island is just the island. The ashes are just dust. I am standing inside this moment that I thought would feel so enormous, and it just feels kind of normal.

Stanley, my little puppy of a muse, died just over a year ago. His death has not made me a different person, but it has certainly changed my context and allowed for a reinterpretation of what life means.

People ask me, “Will you get another dog?”

How should I know?

How should I know what my next revival or reinterpretation should look like? This is where these threads of both start to break down. I’m not a piece of source material waiting to be reshaped like Cats or The Odyssey. I am a work of constant revival. I am the material and the interpretation. Some contextual changes are in my control, and many are not. But I think that’s the whole idea. That change doesn’t require rejection, that there’s always an opportunity to build upon, not break down.

I have no interest in becoming someone different. But I am interested in continuing to find new ways to reimagine the layers that make me who I already am, street legal or otherwise.

Today marks a year, and I don’t know how I mustered the below a year ago, but I’m so happy I did, because if you knew Stanley, you know the below sums him up perfectly, and I am really grateful to myself for having the wherewithal to capture how I felt about this being that I loved and continue to love so deeply.

It is deep, irrational dog mom love, but whenever I think about my dear Stanley, Candle in the Wind plays through my mind. In putting together my annual collage book for the year, I incorporated the below, which is insane and loving and, for whatever reason, I am choosing to share with you today. Because I hope Stanley and Marilyn and Diana are up there taking care of one another.

So today, we remember Stanley James Fox, and the legend he remains in my heart, every single day.

—

Stanley James Fox died today, July 21, 2025. He was 11 and a half years old. He died with the cough of a 2-pack-a-day Marlboro Red smoker, caused by a heart that wouldn’t stop growing. He and I grew into adulthood together in a lot of ways. He was, and will always be an unconditional source of love and inspiration for me.  This is how I want to remember him, unedited, written through tears, defiant and full of love.  

You were born on the side of a road in Arkansas in late January of 2014. “Timber” by Kesha was at the top of the charts and I owned four different pairs of Tory Burch Reva flats. You were one of four tiny puppies to a mother who was likely treated like most female animals are in America, poorly at best. I still think of her and your brothers often and wonder where they are. 

I cried at dinner when I saw your face pop up on petfinder. I had to have you and nothing, not even a partner who really didn’t want you was going to get in my way. Me, always seeking something more, had pushed my desire for motherhood way down by that point. It was all I ever wanted until I realized all that it entailed. But a dog, I hoped, would be just what the doctor ordered. Something I could smother with love and adoration. A greater purpose in a life where nothing felt purposeful. I could have never imagined the depths of how true this turned out to be. 

A dog, of course, isn’t a child. I cannot speak to the love of a mother to a child, because I am not a mother. What I do know is that when I held you for the first time, my heart got bigger. As it turns out, yours did too. 

—

You died on July 21, 2025 of an oversized heart. A heart that got bigger and bigger and took up so much space that the other parts of your body couldn’t do their jobs. But that was so very you, Stanley James - you were never good at very much other than the biggest, deepest, most genuine love. 

But you were discerning with that love. I respected that about you. You chose the recipients of your big love wisely. It was never a given that you would love someone. There were other dogs for that. You, who were born on the side of the road, you never just took what was given to you - be it love, treats, whatever. What was mediocre was not for you. You believed that you were worth more - And you were.  You were also kind of a jerk and I loved that about you.

Together, we lived across the street from the North Atlantic and traipsed the wine studded countryside of Northern California. We even came face to face with a cow in the wild. You made it across the country twice without ever stepping foot on a plane. Commercial travel would have been beneath you, I knew that from the beginning. 

When we moved back to the house that was once owned by your beloved great grandmother Reba, it seemed you were at peace with your place in life. A nice brick home in a good neighborhood. You loved the parks, some of the neighborhood dogs and the proximity to your Granmere. You felt so comfortable in this house that you figured out a way to let yourself out a few times and took a stroll around the neighborhood all by yourself. For all of your anxiety, you had so little fear. I imagined you just wanted to go buy a baguette and smoke a cigarette in the park. The inner monologue that I was so sure you had running at all times was one of my favorite things about you. 

Your side eye was your greatest feature. And you made people know immediately where they stood in your view. All it took was one passing glance. You had the attitude of a woman who covers her sofas in plastic and serves every meal on the good china. You had the style of a Blue Blood on a grass tennis court.

You were Fran Fine’s mother and Jackie Kennedy in the same breath. 

You loved to borrow my Hermes scarves - they made you look even more regal than nature had. You knew exactly the look to give me as if to say “Mother, would it kill you to put on a swipe of lipstick?” You felt as much at home on a lounge chair at the Fairmont in Santa Monica as you did on the rambling rocks of the Wissahickon trail. Your favorite food was tomatoes, but you wouldn’t eat them from the Supermarket in the winter, unless they were sundried, of course. You never lived like a dog, you lived like Stanley. 

You were the muse for more songs and nicknames than I can count. You were the lord, the baby, the baby lover, the king, the prince, the demon barber of van pelt street, the demon full stop, the maniacal baby, the snuggle butt, the lover boy, the cutie baby, the Stanley baby, the Stanlertinis. But most of all, you were mama’s best boy. That was you. That is you. 

And for all of your beautiful traits, there were the other ones too. The ones that I know I couldn’t have given to you, but felt too real to consider otherwise. The anxiety. There was so much anxiety. Door frames mangled by separation anxiety. Deep, vicious whines that could be heard down the street. The Trazadone. The Fluoxetine. The safety blanket. The skin to skin. I think about what happened when they took you away from your brothers when you all were so little. Was that the source? Was it just your Chihuahua blood? Could it be me? Your anxious Jewish mother with a penchant for leaving things before there was the potential of separation anxiety? 

You were impossible to train and terrible at mealtimes. You assumed every meal was yours. And that always ended up being the case. You were stubborn and often refused to pee when we walked, only to pee the minute we got back to the house. 

You took up more room in the bed as a 25 pound dog than either your father or I did. I never had the heart to move you and for the past eleven and a half years, my sleep has suffered for it. I always knew something was going on in your little mind when you chose to sleep at the crown of my head instead of what we lovingly called - the birth canal - that you needed to be even closer, even more loved. 

I knew it last week when you slept on my head all week. After it became obvious that the steroids weren’t working and your cough was getting worse and for the past few days I could hear the horns section of a film that is supposed to foreshadow the end. 

As it turns out veterinary care is a wildly inexact science. I wanted much more for you. But in the end, I hope, as you often were in life, you left us in a state of reverie. Of what could be and what may be and transatlantic voyages in First Class. I hope that wherever you are there is a mountain of marrow bones that you can eat without getting fat. I hope there are too many lambies to even count. I hope you have found our friends who have left us too soon and that they are taking care of you and you can, also, take care of them, like you took care of me for all these years.  

You’ve only been gone for 8 hours and I miss you. The house is too quiet. I miss how your paws would clank against the pine wood floors and I miss the sound of your hind legs coming down the stairs as a fast follow to your front legs because the stairs were just the tiniest bit too steep for you. I miss your big sighs and your little farts. I miss the sound of your heartbeat when I could snuggle my head onto your tiny little body and just listen to the thunder within your chest.

It was there - it was that wild snare drum of life that really made me understand what the most primal love was. 

I love you and I miss you and you’re my very best boy.

Stanley James Fox, January 20, 2014 - July 21, 2025

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This week, one of my wildest frozen delight dreams came true AND I had to challenge my own beliefs about frozen delights. Let me explain.

Porco’s Soft Serve Program

Porco’s is an incredible concept, full stop. It is both a porchetteria and a bakery that boasts a window of some of the most beautiful pastries you’ve ever seen. They are conveniently located right next to the beer distributor where we stop once a week to buy our weekly 4 cases of Vintage seltzer. We all have our things, I don’t know what to say. My husband loves the sandwiches and the breakfast sandwiches at Porco’s. I love the the fennel salad and believe that they have the best Pasta Fagioli in the city. But my favorite thing about Porco’s is that every week they have a new soft serve combo. This is an absolutely inspired idea. A labor of love. I want more people to talk about it and to love it. This is a true gift to the city of Philadelphia. I’ve never had a flavor that I didn’t like. But this weekend was different. This weekend, they had a flavor on tap that I believe is an undervalued, under available ice cream flavor.

MINT. No chocolate. Just Mint.

I don’t love things in my ice cream. When I eat rum raisin, for instance, I’m eating around the raisins. I find that most mint chocolate chips are just too chocolatey, which ruins the refreshing quality of the mint. But you can’t just buy mint ice cream unless you are spending $14 a cup in the Hudson Valley somewhere. In my mind, someone at Porco’s is trolling the aisles of local grocery stores listening to people complain about the flavors they can’t find. They have most certainly heard me complain about the lack of PLAIN MINT ICE CREAM and answered my prayers.

The problem with this soft serve program is that it’s fleeting. And while I can’t wait to try the strawberry and mascarpone, I will dream about the mint until it comes back again (hopefully) next year. In the meantime, get yourself to 22nd Washington, you can thank me later.

MANONG

We had a great dinner on Saturday night with friends at Manong, a new Filipino restaurant in Fairmount. Manong is owned by the same folks as Tabachoy, a lauded restaurant where the Ube soft serve changed my life before you could get Ube soft serve at every ice cream shop in HCOL cities. So, there is a track record here. But let’s get back to the meal on Saturday. Manong is housed in a corner building that used to be an all day cafe of sorts and kind of has an industrial feel. Manong is actually an all day cafe as well - serving breakfast and lunch 7 days a week. First of all you should know that there is a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game in this restaurant. Second of all, you should know that the back wall of the restaurant is home to an incredibly inspired bottle shop full of real gems. Third of all, there is a neon sign from Applebee’s (in my head it is from the Applebee’s (RIP) that once was a neighbor to the Gold Club) on the ceiling of the bathroom.

Good News, though, is that it’s not all novel. The food is fantastic. There were six of us, so I think we got a bite of 80% of the menu. For me, in a dinner where everything was incredible, there were two standouts. First, their take on a bloomin’ onion - but made with Enoki mushroom. Here’s a thing about me, I love fried food and I can’t eat much of it anymore because most of it is glutenous by nature. So when there’s a fried option made without gluten, especially one mirroring the iconography of something like the bloomin’ onion, I am all in. I also happen to love mushrooms and there is a romance about the how separate yet wildly entwined an enoki mushroom is. They kind of remind me of the Oysters in the Walrus and the Carpenter. Tiny little whimsical guys wanting to explore the world and leave their oyster bed, but constricted to it. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to you, but it makes sense to me. I will be the first to admit, however, that more things than are probably normal remind me of this particular story.

Yet again, I digress. But like Alice (of Alice in Wonderland, where I have pulled this vignette), this meal made me challenge my own long held belief about water ice, which if you’ll remember, is that there are three real flavors of water ice - lemon, cherry and chocolate.

I appreciate when a Philadelphia institution respects the sanctity of other Philadelphia institutions. If you are a sit down restaurant and you have a gelati on your menu, I have no choice but to engage. So I did. Pandan ice cream and Calamansi Water Ice. This Calamansi water ice broke me. It’s been four days and I can’t stop thinking about it. We walked to get frozen yoghurt last night and I was disappointed with every bite because it wasn’t the calamansi water ice.

What is calamansi? Well, here's where I may have been right all along. Calamansi is a small citrus fruit. Other names for it (according to Wikipedia) include lemoncito or Philippine Lemon. If we are using the dad from My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s English to Greek math for this, Calamansi water ice is Lemon water ice and I was right all along.

I don’t know what to say about this outside of my life is better for having had it. The tartness of the water ice paired with the verdentness of the pandan ice cream, made for a flavor that defines summer. It’s lush, it’s sticky, it’s refreshing, it’s fleeting. The owner told us that he is hoping to be able to sell it by the pint and I will be filling our chest freezer with it. Take yourself for a meal at Manong. Get dessert. It will change your life just like “New Slang” did when you were 16.

The Americano is my Cocktail of the Summer

But of course I have to screw with it because I can’t just let it be. I really love how the juice from a half of a lemon adds so much brightness to the bitterness of the Campari and the sweetness of the vermouth, it’s a magnificent trio. I also know that crushed ice is trashy, but I happen to love it and for a summer drink, this cannot be beat. I care not what kind of sparkling water you use, be it fancy or ShopRite brand seltzer. I do care that you serve it in a cool glass.

A New Piece of Animal Furniture

I love a piece of animal decor. As I write this, I am staring at a table lamp with a bird on it. If I were in my other writing nook, I would be next to a snake table lamp, staring at a flamingo side table. My powder room is covered in Scalamandre Zebras and we have a lion menorah. There are more portraits of our dearly departed Stanley in the house than there are of anything else. Until my husband moved in, my headboard was covered in a velvet jungle print and my dining room table sat atop a cowhide. We have a life-size ceramic dog that sits under the sofa because when I bought this house, my grandmothers house, my mom told me I had to keep Lucy. Lucy is the ceramic dog. My husband doesn't enjoy the aesthetic value of animals as much as I do, so as a compromise in marriage, I have to be thoughtful about the animal decor I bring home. But when my mom texted me a photo of a Hollywood Regency Green Chinoserie Elephant side table / plant stand / ash tray holder, what was I going to do - tell her I didn’t want it? Of course I did. So now I have it in all of its Sunset Boulevard, Palm Beach before Trump, Maximalist Aunt energy. And it couldn’t make me happier. And that’s it, that’s the whole story.

Being used for a promotional video about pilates and not having a conniption fit about the way my body looks in it.

Everybody has an opinion about pilates right now because it is very popular and carries a lot of baggage around exclusivity, method, aesthetic, etc. It’s all fair conversation. But for me, it’s been nothing less than a healing experience.

I know it sounds crazy because it was such a long time ago, but I carry a lot of shame about the way my body looks full stop. I have vivid memories of being in ballet class and not looking like the other girls, of having our Russian ballet teacher openly discuss the way my stomach stuck out. I was stocky, I am still stocky. For me, any kind of working out in the presence of others has come with a lot of shame. Shame for what my body looks like, shame for what working out doesn’t make my body look like, shame for doing it too often or not often enough. For my entire adult life, I would go out of my way in a workout class to find a spot where I could not see myself in the mirror. Ignorance is bliss.

For me, getting back into pilates after 10 years has been a way for me to get in touch with my body in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever felt. For the past two years, I have made pilates a priority. And I am forced to look at myself in the mirror, there’s no way around it. There have been days where I hate the way I look in the mirror next to the woman who has a new set on and visible abs. There have also been days where I look in the mirror and see an absolute powerhouse who can do anything. I am happy to report that the latter days are starting to happen more often than the former.

I couldn’t believe it when one of my instructors asked me to be her “body” for a promotional video she had to do for the gym. Not because the body had to be good at pilates - that wasn’t the assignment - but because a body like mine would be used as an example of what a body that does pilates can look like. I am proud to be stronger than I’ve ever been before, to have muscles that I didn’t know existed. But I’m even prouder that seeing what I looked like on screen didn’t cause me to melt down completely. Maybe that’s growth, or maybe it’s a great pair of compression leggings. The world will never know.

I love opening my home in the summer. The free-flowing train of people coming and going. The kids who end up completely bare down to their diapers, splashing in water tables, overwhelmed by the joy of bubbles, and seemingly never-ending access to popsicles. I love the smell of Coppertone and Light beer and charred hot dogs. Mostly, I love that a summer gathering somehow always feels more like local tenderness than it does big American pride.

This year, the country celebrates 250 years. Flawed from the beginning, as so many of the best laid plans are, she’s really starting to show her senility lately. I mean, have you seen the reflecting pool?! All jokes aside, I think for many of us, it is hard to want to celebrate a national holiday that celebrates the birth of a nation that we’re kind of lukewarm on at the moment. I think it’s fair to feel that way. I also think it’s fair to reframe the holiday as a celebration of the country you’d like it to be. As my dad said well before the internet did, Patriotism has been coopted by the far right, and we need to do a better job of taking it back (or at least sharing it, which of course is the most neo-liberal thing we could do) (for better or worse).

While I understand it is more traditional to spend July 4 near a body of water (which I did, for many, many years up north), it is becoming somewhat of a tradition for us to host the city orphans in our house, smack dab in the middle of the city. People come and go throughout the day and we are usually in bed, a bit sunburnt, by 9pm. To be honest, I don’t love the shore at July 4. I’m not a fan of fireworks, I don’t like crowded beaches, and I don’t really want to wait 2 hours for a pizza delivery. A lake? Better. But that’s not the culture here. So until we hit the jackpot and can buy the Maine house, here we are. Performing our civic duty of telling people to bring a friend and reminding them that it does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty.

And anyway, for me, hosting is an act of care. It’s about ritual AND revitalization. On July 4^th, it is a way to take patriotism back in a way that works for me. It’s a way to celebrate our little community in America’s smallest big city, Philadelphia. And the reality of the situation is that the entirety of my summer wardrobe is red, white and blue. I need to make it work harder for me without feeling like I am stuck on a Lee Greenwald album on repeat.

Although did you see the video where Las Culturistas note that “Proud to be an American” is a song that isn’t a gay anthem that should be? Now we’re getting closer to taking back the Patriotism.

Anyway, I told you I would give you some hints on how to host a Fourth of July party when you don’t love America right now, and instead, I am giving you hints on how to reframe your feelings toward America. It’s never a linear line to the good stuff here, folks.

Décor

When it comes to décor, I believe in utilizing red, white, and blue to their fullest, but don’t necessarily need those colors to come in the form of a flag or a flag cake. I have been in my craft paper era, where things are wrapped and covered in craft paper and given extra flair with whatever happens to be available – ribbons, herbs, stamps. I suggest this approach as an economical way to be prepared for anything. I do, however, believe in the *right* disposables for the event. So, though I have a basement full of amber plastic, I will be using blue and white plastic plates, red plastic silverware, and red solo cups, which, as an adult, I believe are appropriate only on very specific occasions. This is one of them. I have a lot of rules when it comes to disposables, what can I say? I also personally like to make sure that the guest towels in the bathrooms are on theme. This year, I managed to score some red-and-white stripes and some blue bandana print. The majority of my décor, however, comes from the food.

The Food

Look, if you want a Fourth of July barbecue menu, you aren’t coming here for that. Burgers, dogs, corn, and potato salad are great options. Crowd Pleasers. But for me, food is a part of the experience. And part of the experience of living in America today is throwing the term “fascism” around. People will say there’s nothing more accurate, and people will guffaw at the mere thought. The truth is meaningless (HELLO, IT'S 2026, WE DON’T CARE ABOUT THE TRUTH ANYMORE). So I might start with a nod to the Fascists that came before us. Last year, we were gifted a leg of Serrano ham, which we used as a nod to Franco. This year, I’m thinking about a mile-high mound of Mortadella. Though there is no data suggesting that Mussolini ate Mortadella, we can suspend our disbelief. Then we build around it. A board of cheeses and fruits set atop fig leaves from the backyard. Cold salads. Home-made biscuits. Bowls of chips everywhere. Bowls of dip everywhere. Gummy salad. Astro popsicles. Ice Cream Sandwiches. And I guess, burgers and dogs and wings. Fine.

All that to say – there are no rules. Have fun with food. Just because the cover of Good Housekeeping shows a gingham tablecloth with a burger on it, you could just as soon eat a Corned Beef special on a toile tablecloth. That’s the beauty of America.

I will say – the Good Housekeeping in me will put out a huge tank of homemade lemonade with bottles of vodka, gin, and tequila for the drinker to spike at their own pace. A big jug of something refreshing that can be spiked? This is never a bad idea. Hot tip: Don’t waste your time with the glass, get the big plastic guys that have a place for ice down the center. I know we’re talking about a lot of plastic for this party, but there’s a conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift is using MSG as a guise and flying all of her guests to her wedding in Big Sur by way of a secret set of tunnels. Your plastic plates are fine.

The Activities

I wish that the video of JD and Usha Vance, where he slaps her knee like an old pal, had come out closer to July 4. I can think of nothing more patriotic than gossiping about their interior lives. More than likely, you can expect a few topics of conversation to come up. I would have prepared your POV on the following:

• Weighted jackets for dogs (My sweet baby Stanley was afraid of everything except fireworks, so I never had much to contribute but it does seem to come up more frequently than not in settings like these)

• The best hot dog you’ve ever had (Mine will always be at McGlincheys RIP because there is no hot dog like a hot dog eaten in between drags of a cigarette while “Where is My Mind” by the Pixies is playing)

• Your hot take on Bruce Springsteen (There’s always someone at the party that’s like “Unpopular opinion: Bruce Springsteen isn’t great.” While this isn’t at all true, it does make for a great conversation starter.)

• Where you are thinking of moving your family to in Europe, and why

• Your favorite article of confederation (I have a soft spot for the first few words of the third article “The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other” A FIRM LEAGUE OF FRIENDSHIP)

• An ill-thought-out take on a piece of pop culture. For instance, my husband, an attorney by trade, has been moonlighting as my law professor as I seek to understand if Tyra has any chance of winning a defamation suit against Netflix. As someone who is now intimately familiar with Times v. Sullivan (by way of a 12-minute video on YouTube), I’d say slim to none.

Aside from the intellectual stimulation cultural conversation provides, I’d say make sure you have plenty of bubble vessels, a pinwheel or two, maybe a Jenga set, or something for those who need to keep their hands busy. And because we are professional Childless Friends ™, we have a water table, a box of arts and crafts, and a million other things to keep the little ones busy. But for the most part, quick witted friends and a decent amount of alcohol (OK, and bubbles) should do the trick.

Attire

As previously discussed, I am ill equipped to dress myself for summer. And while maybe one day I will look like this:

The reality is, for the most part, I look like an amalgomation of all the male characters from Wet Hot American Summer across all eras.

Never met a denim cutoff or mens white ribbed tank top I didn’t love. Will never say no to an earth mother boho situation. Flip flops always. I will readily wear a shmata on my head. Is there a better summer sunglass than a plastic aviator? I think the epitome of formal in the summer is a navy blazer with gold buttons from the Husky Boys dept. at Lands End. And a high sock protects you from ticks. Essential.

I say all of this to say, I am much lighter on rules when it comes to summer. I appreciate the direction of a dress code. But to me, one of the greatest parts of east coast city summer is the wildly varied styles you see on any one given block. So will I be absolutely envious if someone walks in in that fabulous Andres Otalora pink set? Yes. But will I feel most myself in a pair of cutoffs and an old Ralph oxford? Also yes.

In Summary

Listen, I am trying to find more peace in my life. I am working on allowing myself to believe that a nation is a complete abstraction, but your friends and neighbors are not abstract in the slightest. I am never going to solve the nation’s problems, no matter how much I worry about them. What I can solve is how to spend a day that brings mixed feelings by clouding them with good food, good company, and good booze. I can make sure we have enough ice, find ways to be snarky about the state of the world with a pile of mortadella, and make sure that if someone needs a sneaky cigarette, I can provide it AND a place to smoke it. And if I can do it all in cutoffs and Havaianas, I have no doubt you can too.

So go ahead, put some Woody Guthrie on and have yourself a nice time on our lil nations birthday. I even made you a playlist.

I really do loathe this part of things - but here’s when I say to you - if you like it, you should have put a ring on it. No, that’s wrong. If you like it, share it. You might have other weirdo friends who want to read the musings of a stranger who is on a mission against sweaty taffeta summer pants, right?

Anyway, onto the things that have been bringing me joy lately.

Bandsplain Month-long deep dive on Madonna

I haven’t found myself looking forward to anything culture-related more than the weekly drops of this miniseries. If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that Bandsplain is one of my favorite podcasts, but this takes it to a whole new level. Yasi Salek, the host, brings a new pal each week to deep dive into the life and career of Madonna. Some of these episodes get to the 4-hour mark, and I can say without doubt that every minute is worth savoring. Madonna somehow has become a punchline instead of the legend she is, and this podcast, all twentyish hours of it, reminds us of that. It helps, too, that Yasi is a True Blue stan like yours truly. I also think that for some of us born in the 70s / 80s, this is kind of a walk through our own formative style/culture history. Highly recommend for summer walking material.

Bleed American turns 25

Over the high holidays, this year, I wrote a piece inspired by the Bandsplain commentary on Bleed American, specifically on the track “A Praise Chorus.” I love this album, and it has carried varied meaning to me for, apparently, 25 years. Last Friday, I was lucky enough to see the band play the album start to finish on the most perfect evening, void of any humidity, at the most perfect venue, the Mann Center. Standing in the midst of a huge gaggle of people who also grew up with this album, some of whom brought their own kids, who are probably the same age we were when we first heard it, was a really incredible thing. I have seen Jimmy Eat World at least a dozen times since I was 15, and this may have been the best yet. There is something magical about the enduring quality of the music, and maybe even more so, the impact of the music, and maybe even more than that, standing in the shared experience, not just of this particular night, but of a lifetime of people who have found meaning in the same things you have. Music is spiritual; it always has been.

Sour Cherry Cake

Sour cherries are shtetl food. There are few things that make me happier than when I spot sour cherries at the farmers market for the first time each summer. They remind me of the blintzes my grandmother used to make. And when I mention them to people who have Eastern European roots, without fail - they mention their grandmas sour cherry cake, or blintzes or soup. Yes, soup. We, Eastern Europeans, love a pink soup.

For the past few summers, as I have been living Gluten Free, I have been trying to figure out how to recreate the traditional sour cherry cake. But here’s what I realized, recreating something rarely works. So this summer, I set out to evolve it. And while it’s still not perfect, I have received feedback such as “Are you kidding me with this cake?” and “I think I am 80% sour cherry cake at the moment.” So in my constant pursuit of progress over perfection, I thought I’d share it with you. The tapaoica flour gives this cake a mochi-like texture, which is so addictive, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Jerusalem Peonies in my favorite vase from Mexico City

We’re past peony season at this point, but I had to shout out my favorite flower, the Jerusalem peony. You can keep your pink and white peonies, I want these deep, lush peonies that resemble the juiciest pomegranates you’ve ever tasted. That’s it, that’s all I have to say about that.

Black Havaianas

A few summers ago, I convinced myself that I was too old to wear Havaianas, my trusted summer shoe, and I stopped wearing them. In those few summers, I realized there was no other casual summer rubber that came close to my trusted Havaianas. So I bought a new pair this summer and haven’t looked back. I am not too old, and neither are my joints. Many have tried, and many have failed, but the original Havaiana is the greatest of all time when it comes to a flip-flop. I feel like myself when I wear them. They are chic with a summer dress, work with a summer jean, and aren’t as on the nose with a pair of Umbros as Birkenstocks are.

BONUS: Taking on Big Taffeta Pants

Rachel Tashijan, one of my favorite style journalists, writes a newsletter for CNN called Big Style. Last week, she took on Big Taffeta Summer Pants. She asks the same question I ask - WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO WEAR IN THE SUMMER WHEN EVERYONE IS TELLING US TO WEAR BAGGY TAFFETA PANTS AND SILK ROBES IN SWELTERING HEAT? I only tell you this because I feel validated.

What is bringing you joy?

My entire Substack feed is full of women in bright taffeta pants for summer and all I can think is: do you know how much butt sweat I would have in those?

One of the things I brought up in talking about Fran Lebowitz Summer™ was personal style. I’ve been thinking a lot about personal style lately, and about how, if you are online at all, knowing what you actually like has become its own kind of psychological labor. There is what you like, and then there is what you are being told to like because the algorithm has decided that every woman with disposable income and your general search history should be wearing lime green taffeta pants with a grey Asics running shoe.

This might be the most prevalent lewk in my feed right now. It is also something I would not be caught dead in.

Partially because lime green is one of the only greens I can’t stand.

Partially because the phrase “fancy pant with running sneaker” is an easy way to short-circuit my brain.

And partially because I am 5’3” and zaftig, and the idea of adding swish, shine, volume, and the general bulk of that seemingly fashion forward hefty orthopedic contrast to the lower half of my body feels at odds with the whole way I live my life. For better or for worse.

So here we are, at a topic I can never fully run away from. A thing that will always take up too much real estate in my mind: how much my relationship with my body has dictated my own personal style.

But the summer adds an additional layer to this. It’s not just my emotional relationship to my body. It is the actual functionality of my body in the summer.

It is my predisposition for sweat, everywhere.

It is my thighs, which rub together even when the scale says they shouldn’t.

It is my feet, which are flat enough on their own and do not need a gladiator sandal-induced case of plantar fasciitis to remind them of the fact.

It is my hair, which, in humidity, stops being hair and becomes a weather vane. This is something I am trying to lean into these days, but leaning in does not make it any less humid.

It is the fact that some fabrics are beautiful in theory and absolutely, positively punitive in practice.

I would be lying if I said it wasn’t also about aesthetics. About the way I see the width of my arms before I see the muscle underneath, which has grown in spades. About how much I hate not having the ability to hide under a blazer. About how strange my nonexistent waistline looks in most summer dresses. About how a skirt has to be the exact right length to not make me feel like my legs look like tree trunks.

This is all true whether I say it aloud or not.

But it is also about 80% less true than it has been in the past.

Lately, I feel much freer to be who I am. To embrace it. To not treat every photograph of myself like a FORENSIC DOCUMENTATION OF MY SHORTCOMINGS. But multiple things can be true at once, and freedom does not mean I don’t still wince once in a while or have a mild breakdown about the way my arms look in a photo.

I AM A MILLENNIAL WOMAN AND THIS IS MY BIRTHRIGHT.

So the first challenge is that my summer self is generally sweaty, frizzy, and chafy.

And the other challenge is that I spent the formative summers of my adulthood as a camp counselor and have never really figured out how to dress like an adult in the summer.

Or rather, an adult on a normal day.

I can dress for a meeting. There is nothing I love more than a billowy summer suit with a towering platform.

I can dress for a wedding, where I usually go the Bianca Jagger route because it is the only thing my hair will reliably cooperate with.

I can dress for travel, for dinner, for a themed event, for an occasion where the brief is clear.

But a Tuesday in July? Are Umbros appropriate?

A normal errand? Will a tie-dye caftan work?

A coffee meeting that may become a walk? Will there be wicking shorts and arch support?

A day where I want to look like a person with taste but also have to survive 89 degrees, humidity, multiple forms of transportation, an office, a subway platform, and the possibility of inner thigh betrayal? The beautiful mind of it all is too much IN THIS HUMIDITY.

As a person who has a pretty well-defined personal style, a person who almost went to college for fashion design, a person who can mark specific moments in life by way of what was worn, it is a brutal reality that summer style, for me, is not just about what looks good. It has to be about what holds up.

What doesn’t get smelly with sweat.

What doesn’t cling.

What doesn’t, God forbid, require a strapless bra. Although I had to wear one for a recent wedding, and, while I hate to admit it, I am now a SKIMS convert. We’re all doing great, sweetie.

What doesn’t immediately turn transparent with boob sweat.

What doesn’t give me blisters within the first twelve minutes of leaving the house.

What doesn’t look like a shoe Johnny Knoxville doing the old man schtick would wear.

Mainly, what doesn’t demand that I be a completely different species of woman than the one I am.

I think that’s why so much online summer style feels absolutely alienating to me. It is presented with such ambient ease, but it often requires a body that is already at ease. If you’ve been here long enough you know that my body is, unequivocally, not at ease. It requires a body that does not overheat immediately outside of an air-conditioned ice box. A body that does not chafe. A body that can wear a barely-there sandal without orthopedic consequence. A body that can pair a voluminous pant with a tiny tank and look architectural instead of sweat-drenched.

In the summer, especially, I find myself see something enough times and start to wonder: what am I missing here?

Would I think those lime green taffeta pants were chic if I had a body that functioned properly enough to wear them? Are athletic sneakers the absolute apex of a style society that I have somehow been locked out of? Has literally everyone else evolved?

Why am I still standing here in my black shmata?

But the thing is, I’m actually not worried about missing something, nor do I really think I’m missing anything. I think as I get older, the reality for me becomes that my personal style has so much more to do with opting out than opting in.

I am perfectly comfortable looking at lime green taffeta pants and saying: I’m good.

I’m not opting out because I’m not stylish enough, thin enough, or cool enough. Or at least, not only because of those things, because I am still a human woman raised in the late 90s and early 2000s, and I’m not in the business of lying to you.

I’m opting out because I know my climate and my thighs and my feet. I know the exact difference between an outfit that looks good in a screenshot and an outfit that can get me through a Tuesday in July without becoming a full-body injustice.

So no, I have not solved my summer dressing problem as I thought I might when I sat down to write this piece. I have not solved anything.

But I do have a little more peace in my heart and Bodyglide between my thighs, which is not nothing.

And for the record, no I don’t know if I will ever think lime green taffeta pants are chic and I think that the internet should be ashamed of itself.

The truth is, I generally love what I do for work and feel pretty lucky to get to do it. The problem is that I pour too much of myself into it. I don’t set boundaries. I am a true product of the graduating class of the recession - 16 years later, just grateful for the opportunity. So I do too much. Always. And though I know it’s very of the moment to be burnt out from corporate life, I don’t think that’s what this is. I think what this is is a reckoning with myself. Putting myself in charge of my time, my life, my priorities.

Anyway, one thing that I love to do that I haven’t been doing enough of is reading. I have always loved to read, our home is full of books that I just can’t seem to part with and I don’t think there is a greater gift in the world than giving someone a book you have loved. So, though I’m not big on goals, I thought I would commit to a summer of reading. Maybe I’ll buy myself a pan pizza at the end to celebrate if I’ve made it through my list (Pavlovian for those who know, right?)

So here it is, The Desperately Seeking Schmaltz Summer Reading List

1. Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer

2. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

3. A World Appears by Michael Pollan

4. Dekonstructing the Kardashians by MJ Cory

5. The Danger to Be Sane, Creativity and the Eccentric Mind by Rosa Montero

6. Land and It’s People by David Sedaris

7. Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

8. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

To Begin:

To be fair, I finished the first two during my week off. I really enjoyed the strangely scandalized biography of Judy Blume. It brought me both a lot of joy and a lot of inspiration. Blume has risen to the age old question of “what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” and has kind of followed her bliss after realizing that the life that was set out in front of her wasn’t the one she wanted. The imagination is a beautiful thing and hers was endless. Her ability to take the seed of a lived experience and turn it into something so universally relevant is still nearly unmatched. The books author, Mark Oppenheimer, hosted a podcast that I listened to for years and so I have a pre-exisiting parasocial relationship that leads me to trust the narrator here. The book itself makes me want to revisit some of Blume’s books that I haven’t been back to since I was younger. Maybe that’s a project for the fall.

It is the 30th anniversary of the release of Into Thin Air and I haven’t read it since I was in highschool. After listening to an interview with the author, I realized that either I didn’t remember quite a bit about the story or a lot of it went over my head. In re-reading it (or really, listening to it), what I am finding so striking is the way we told stories of real events before we could get every play by play in social media. We had to wait to be told someone’s recounting, inclusive of their human biases, after the fact. Biases and all (and at the time Krakeur did get a lot of slack for his retelling), I have found myself maybe overly nostalgic for a time where we waited for someone with deep expertise and experience in something to provide perspective, even a biased one. I think this is a worthwhile read or re-read that explores the connectivity between human ambition, the commercialization of the natural world and the reality that we as humans, probably shouldn’t be getting real time updates when disaster strikes. Even the Everest summiters among us are not build for it.

Next Up:

I have been opening and closing “A World Appears” by Michael Pollan since my husband gave it to me for my birthday (next to Wheelock’s Latin, but that is a different story for a different day). This is a book about consciousness. As someone who is, for better or worse, expected to use AI regularly for my job, and who often gets stuck in exestential rabbit holes on the internet about what this means, the idea of consciousness has come, well, back into my consciousness in a more meaningful way lately. I love Pollan’s writing, but find that I need to be locked in to really get the most of it. The past six months haven’t seen me locked into much outside of work. So my hope is that this will be a great book to get back to on a rainy weekend day where I can give it my full attention.

Yesteryear is pervasive and so, I figured I should read it. After waiting for weeks on Libby, I decided to bite the bullet and listen to it on audiobook. This has turned out to be a great decision, because though it’s not a memoir or a strict cultural commentary, it feels like both. And these are my two preferred genres for audiobooks. (You haven’t really lived until you’ve listened to Ina Garten talk about her charmed life for 12 hours)

Anyway, I’ll let you know how things progress. Tell me - what’s on your reading list this summer?

I have a hypothesis.

Stay with me.

Every summer has a vibe that, in retrospect (or as it happens because the internet refuses to give anyone any time for reflection), you can name. I think these vibes are specific to summer, rather than say, every other season, because we’ve been so deeply programmed to think of summer as fleeting, as temporary, as both deeply consequential AND deeply frivolous. The internet has programmed us to name things to create culture, to create the need to keep up, to create new framings of old ideas. Usually, the themes of my summers don’t correlate with the vibes of the broader summers - for me, last summer was angsty and sweaty - my Phillip Roth summer. But this summer, I think my own personal sentiment and the sentiment of I don’t know, my side of the internet, seem to be aligning. I think this is going to be our Fran Lebowitz summer.

I’m going to explain what I mean, and then I’m going to explain what I really mean.

FRAN LEBOWITZ, FOR THE UNINITIATED (HOW DARE YOU), is a writer, a cultural commentator, and a New Yorker.

She has publicly experienced a bout of “writer’s block” since the early 1980s, which has created space for her to make a living by being vocally opinionated. She wears the same thing every day. She does not have a smartphone. She has opinions about everything and delivers them at a pace and a sharpness that makes you feel like you have been both insulted and educated, which is frankly the best thing anyone can do for you. I, on the other hand, end every sentence with “Sorry,” and “Does that make sense?” Fran Lebowitz couldn't care less if what she says makes sense to you, and she certainly isn’t apologizing for anything. So, she is, in essence, “Writer and Woman with many opinions.” This is the professional title I hope to carry one day.

Somehow, Martin Scorsese convinced her to do a Netflix series, and in it, someone asks her to describe her lifestyle. And she replies that first, she WOULD NEVER USE THE WORD LIFESTYLE. This is exactly why we need her right now.

WE ARE SO TIRED.

Everyone is tired.

Literally everyone.

It’s the first thing anyone ever says when you ask how they are - either tired or even worse, FINE.

I don’t think anyone is talking about the kind of tired that a $300 sleep routine can fix. Mostly, they are talking about the kind of tired that comes with perimenopause, performative wellness that we’ve kind of normalized, keeping up with cultural conversation, even and especially the ones you don’t care about. And that’s not to even note the forced optimism that we are now supposed to carry with us every day. A thing I love about Fran Lebowitz is that she is a proud cynic.

But my real hypothesis is that we are actually tired because we’ve removed all the friction that used to make us tired. Our frictionless lives - everything is one click, everything is streamlined, everything is catered to US and our personal preferences. You don’t have to speak to one real human over the course of the day if you don’t want to.

I don’t think this frictionless life has given us any energy back. I think it has made us smaller, more contracted, and dried up like tiny little raisins swimming in a bowl of homogeneity. We are shriveled up with our piles of stuff and things and content all served up to us just the way we like it.

We have become uninterested and interesting.

We as a society are deeply suffering from the absence of friction. And Fran Lebowitz lives for friction. Like, actually. She hates the things that get in her way, and she talks about them ad nauseam. Her career is talking about friction and creating more friction from it. But I suppose that’s the general job description of a cynic, and more so of a critic.

She will not soften the point to make you comfortable.

She’s not asking how your weekend was unless she knows you have something better to say than “fine.”

She will not ask how you’re doing before she tells you what she thinks.

She’s going to be open about her deep disdain for and judgment of most people, and then she is going to move on.

It’s terse but not transactional. And in this moment where everything feels transactional yet weirdly whimsical, there is something almost medicinal about her coarseness.

She uses plain language to remind us all to DO BETTER: “Think before you speak. Read before you think.”

Just in case you haven’t caught on, OUR FRAN LEBOWITZ SUMMER IS NOT REALLY ABOUT FRAN LEBOWITZ.

It is about Fran Lebowitz's sensibilities. I’m sure she would also reject the use of her name and likeness as any kind of descriptor. So instead, what if we just talk about a summer marked by a return to a specific set of values we abandoned and now desperately miss?

Personal style above all. This one is self-explanatory. I AM EXHAUSTED by the micro-trend cycle, by the color of the year, by the way a particular pair of jeans can go from cool to cringe in the span of a few months. I refuse to engage with any new “cores.” (Again feel the need to point out that this thought is deeply contradictory to the idea of using any one person to help define a season) They are not cores - cores suggest that they are deeply ingrained. We are using the word incorrectly if we are using it to define a fleeting trend of any kind. Honestly, I don’t even try to keep up anymore. My closet is full of button-downs, blazers, and white t-shirts*. And sure, teenagers have always chased the trends, but what I don’t love is how many grown-up women I see season to season who look like they have transformed from one meme to another. Like this summer, we’ve all decided to dress like Adam Sandler, but instead of a t-shirt, we’re wearing a button-down over our gym shorts? I don’t get it. Fran has worn basically the same outfit for 40 years and looks better than everyone. This summer, maybe the goal is not to be of the moment, but to make the moment meet YOU where you are? Ok, but I’m not just talking about what you wear. I’m talking about what you believe. What you like. Who your favorite artist is and for the love of God, why. I want to know what round of trivia I should bring you in for. (For the record, I’m good for most rounds, but a ringer for Name that Tune). I want to know what I should have ready for you to drink when you walk into my house because I know it’s what you drink. Honestly, your personal style makes MY life more interesting and much, much easier.

Wit over wellness. Wellness, as an industry and as a cultural posturing, is generally a scam in my opinion. Because wellness, unlike science, has no governing body. AND YET, we have all decided that wellness is somehow the most important thing. I’m talking about mental and physical wellness. We have taken liberty with the amount of supplements AND boundaries we need. We have learned too many words that actually mean nothing at all, and have let ourselves be convinced that moon powder is a thing that we should be ingesting. If you’ve been reading for a while, you may have a sense that I am not generally a well woman. And that certainly, if I had been born a few generations prior, I would have lived my life in a sanitarium of some kind. Wellness has also given us the innate idea that a healing journey is a content strategy, and that we should regard those who step into the sunshine at 7 am with a glass of melted beef tallow in a weighted vest to remove their trauma as bastions of a life well lived. Fran would not have a healing journey. She would have a cigarette and an opinion that doesn’t necessarily take someone else’s trauma into account. She would know that, though the medical professionals in her life don’t believe that her smoking habit is good for her, nothing will keep her alive longer than her wit. Not a pill or a powder, and especially not a weighted vest.

Analog over digital. She doesn’t have a cell phone. She most certainly doesn’t have an iPhone. She doesn’t have a Twitter, an Instagram, or a Substack. She has a landline and a library card, and she walks (AND like me, she gets very annoyed with people who aren’t city-trained). The fantasy of this (AND I KNOW HOW IRONIC IT IS SAYING THIS WHILE TYPING HERE) feels almost radical right now: that your thoughts could exist without a platform or an audience or metrics. That a conversation could just be a conversation worth getting lost in, A conversation that would evaporate without any evidence that it had happened outside of your own faulty memory. I know how ridiculous this sounds and how beholden we all are to our phones. So maybe it’s about going to places where you can’t look at your phone for a few hours, or getting lost in things that make you disregard it altogether. Maybe all I mean is that we all need more hobbies (but please don’t tell my husband that I will be taking on more hobbies, I am really at my limit).

Friction over Velvety Smooth. Character occurs where there is friction, where there is inconvenience. It does not occur whilst sitting in your house waiting for your Amazon deliveries. The universe shifts a little bit when things require a little effort: when you sit in the park with nothing in your hands, or have to wait for a library book to be available instead of reading it immediately by way of robot delivery to your house, or take the sidewalk instead of an Uber. Fran’s entire existence is an argument that the friction IS the point.

Manners over self-indulgence. This might be the most controversial one. We have spent a lot of years in the era of radical therapization and self-expression, which has given us many beautiful things and also a general collapse in the understanding that other people exist and have to share space with you. We have so many boundaries to protect our personal peace that we refuse to let anything close to us that could possibly hurt us. Again with the lack of friction. Fran is one of our great complainers, but she complains with a specific kind of rigor: she is not complaining about her feelings; she is complaining about your behavior and lack of adherence to societal rules. (I have an entire post in me about manners, or lack thereof, but for another day) We are all so precious about ourselves, our individualism, that we sometimes forget that it’s really not OK to be barefoot on an airplane.

I want to be very clear: I am not saying this is the summer we become Fran Lebowitz. We cannot. There is one of her, and she is already doing it, and she is doing it better than any of us ever could.

What I am saying is that this summer, we should grant ourselves permission as Fran Lebowitz does.

We should grant ourselves permission to have a point of view and educate ourselves about it enough to argue it without having to ask if it makes sense. We should grant ourselves permission to get rid of the things in our closet that feel like they belong to somebody else. We should grant ourselves permission to take the time to get to know what feels good on our bodies, what we like to wear. We should grant ourselves permission to be interested in things because they wake a piece of you up, not because everyone else is interested in them. We should grant ourselves permission to get a landline for the summer, or to let our phones’ battery drain, or fine, permission to at least put your phone on airplane mode in another room. Can we grant ourselves permission to be a person rather than a personal brand.

Do you remember the first month of the summer of 2021? The month when everyone was vaccinated, and nothing could hurt us? The month where we stayed out late and where every interaction was sweaty and human and each one was better than the one before it? We didn’t even pretend to optimize, we just wanted to be human again. I think, this summer should be more like that one. Go out dancing. Let your phone die. Get deeply interested in something one day and learn about it. ACTUALLY STOP AND SMELL THE ROSES. Read a book. Paint a picture. Laugh over one too many drinks. Have an opinion.

My opinion? We’ve spent too much time letting other people’s opinions influence our own. (Again, I understand that this statement is a contradiction in itself, considering the context) This summer, may we all live a life worthy of crafting our own opinions.

---

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,

LCF

“THE BERET”

For those of you who don’t know. John Travolta has always been my biggest celebrity crush. When I was little, I watched Grease nearly every day I think. I certainly watched Saturday Night Fever before I knew what I was looking at. We watched re-runs of Welcome Back Kotter and I could sing the theme song verbatim before my 10th birthday. I wasn’t allowed to watch Pulp Fiction, which came out two years prior to said 10th birthday, but I did listen to the soundtrack which included many very inappropriate interludes in my dad’s car, which had a six CD changer and a bullt in car phone. It is a fatal flaw of mine that I cannot go to Europe without repeating “Le Big Mac” in my head or aloud a la Samuel L. Jackson multiple times.

My mom once cut out the faces of a bride and groom on a Bride’s magazine cover and replaced the faces with mine and John Travolta’s, and framed it for the bookshelf in my room. Just the other day, she asked me where it was, as if it were a family heirloom that I would still have after 30 years and almost as many moves.

I just recently got a trivia question right because I knew the name of the person who sings “Spirit in the Sky.” The only reason I knew that was because John Travolta was in Michael, where he plays a chainsmoking Arc Angel and if you’ve been here long enough, you know that Michael might be one of my all time favorite characters in fiction, that we can learn a lot about life from him and that this movie is one of the reasons I still have cable, because it is a movie made for watching with commercial breaks.

It’s Norman Greenbaum, by the way.

Just a few months ago I was out with a group of colleagues and clients, all women. We were going around the table announcing our celebrity crushes, but everyone had to guess first. One of my colleagues guessed “George Costanza,” which I’ll be the first to admit COULD be true and I can understand why she would say that, but it was really the first time in my life where the question was posed and my answer, “John Travolta” felt benign in response.

(At my last job, my dear coworker used to delight me with weird John Travolta ephemera on a fairly regular basis)

Usually, I am met with eye rolls from the people who have known me the longest, or bated breath from the new folks in my life, as if this is a bit they are waiting to be let in on. And in some ways, it is a running bit, but only because it’s one of the things Ive had the most conviction for for the longest amount of time.

Pretty sure this is the bathroom at POPE in 2011.

I know, he’s a Scientologist. Yikes. Yes, and the L Ron Hubbard Movie. Double Yikes.

I know, there’s that stuff about his personal life. In the immortal words of Weezer, “Everyone’s a little Queer.” I am unconcerned either way.

I know he has a weird hair situation and sometimes wears hair pieces and is sometimes bald and sometimes wants to look like PitBull? I don’t know, we’ve all got our things.

I know his facial hair often looks like it was patched on by an etchasketch. Ok.

I know, the Gotti movie. I have no excuses.

I don’t know what to tell you.

And yes, my husband knew EXACTLY what he was getting into.

But here’s the real thing about my decades-long parasocial love affair with John Travolta. It has made me take getting on a plane seriously. When I get on a plane, unless it is an overnight flight, I wear real clothes. I wear real clothes because I associate the airport with John Travolta and his very public love of planes, and though I know that he is not flying commercial and I will definitely not see him in the F terminal at PHL on my bi-monthly trips to Cincinnati, I MIGHT. And if I do, you better believe that I will not have pants with an elastic waist on.

So, how do I feel about BeretGate and the accompanying commentary? Like me at the airport, he is just dressing for the job he wants. I respect the earnestness. I respect it all. For a man who has lived through so much loss in his life, I celebrate the joy he is finding in a new role, a new endeavor. You may not want to hear this, but he has always been a style icon, on the fringes, maybe. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing berets show up on men who will quickly say “I had it before the whole John Travolta thing.”

But my real response?

I DON’T CARE, I LOVE IT.

And yes, my all time celebrity crush? Still John Travolta.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,

LCF

PS - Also, though my husband DID know what he was getting into, I’m not sure he realized that he would be living for the foreseeable future with this book prominently featured on his living room bookshelf:

THERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHEN IT COMES TO PASSOVER.

Passover commemorates our exodus out of slavery in Egypt. The text I suggest for this is the Rugrats Passover Episode, which was the first mass market animated show to depict a Jewish holiday of any kind.

We celebrate with long dinners called seders that have us tell the entire story of passover before we can eat a single thing outside of a piece of parsley dipped in salt water, a small piece of matzah or two, and a whole lot of wine.

There are plagues! There are symbols! There are songs!

The passover seder is WILDLY interactive and requires engagement from everyone including the youngest among us, who are required to build their credibility as Jews by asking four questions about why the seder night is different from all other nights. Maybe they ask them in English, or more likely they sing them in Hebrew. How we all know these in Hebrew with the same melody from the time we’re born, I’m not sure, but it’s a reality. But this is an easy one because they ask these four questions and get four answers back - little do they know that as they grow up and start asking questions, all they will get are questions in response. We have to start slowly.

During, we sing a song called Dayenu. Dayenu means “It would have been enough.” And for 15 stanzas, we sing about how each one miracle that happened throughout this exodus would have been enough. DAYENU. BUT THERE WERE 15! The oil was only supposed to last for one night ,AND IT LASTED FOR EIGHT. Ok, a different holiday, but I digress, you get the point that my dad made at the top.

Our history is miraculous. I say this without an ounce of sarcasm.

Frankly, I love Passover. I have a lot of really vivid memories of seder as a child, when my great-aunt would host 1 million people at her small house with an even smaller kitchen for the holiday. The house had a sunken living room (DAYENU) where my great uncle Tom would sit with his guitar and make up songs about all the cousins. He was a folk singer by trade and had some minor success as a kids' songwriter with the smash hit “On Top of Spaghetti” (Spaghetti is unequivocally not kosher for Passover, FYI).

But my favorite passover memory comes from the time I moved to Maine. Maine, as it turns out, isn’t super Jew heavy outside of the summertime. And when I was generously invited to a seder by my new friends who WERE Jewish, I knew I had to go above and beyond to thank them. So I did what anyone would do - bring the dish that everyone loves to hate.

Let me start here: My Bubby’s mother, my great-grandmother Sophie, would keep live fish in the bathtub to make gefilte fish. For those unacquainted, Gefilte fish is essentially a fish patty that tends to be shelf-stable, served cold, and often kept in gelatin. As it turns out, gefilte fish originated in Germany and was adopted by both Jews and Catholics for its ability to adhere to specific religious commandments. Catholics for Lent, Jews for Shabbat. According to one of our litany of rules, you can’t debone a fish to eat on the Sabbath, so this was a way to not only eat fish (a symbol of fertility), but also to make the fish (bound with onions and matzoh meal, etc) stretch further. What is tradition if not birthed from a place of scarcity and rules?

Though my great-grandmother, along with her peers, made it from scratch, it has been more widely available as, like I mentioned before, a shelf-stable delicacy found on the small sliver of shelf with the rest of the kosher products. Gefilte fish is a polarizing dish and one that I don’t believe will ever be assimilated in the way of hummus or brisket. I LOVE gefilte fish.

My Bubby, Sophie’s daughter, who would have been 99 yesterday, taught me how to cook. I vividly remember standing on a stool in her kitchen with a very dull paring knife, cutting cucumbers on a glass cutting board that when put on the smoked fish platter, came with a pride like I haven’t felt since. Bubby could feed an army with whatever she had in the house at any given moment. Her basement freezer (IYKYK) was full of hefty cuts of meats AND Edy’s frozen yoghurt. She always had a bowl of DIY Walnuts and dried figs out and she always found the best deals at Marshalls. Why she was taken from this earth so soon, I will never comprehend. She was my favorite.

And I think that she would have been really proud of what I’m about to tell you next. So, let’s go back to my friend’s seder. I was determined to channel Sophie and bring scratch-made gefilte fish. In the tri-state area, this time of year you can easily acquire the fish it requires to make gefilte fish - carp and pike. But in Portland Maine? Not so much.

So I did what any Jewish woman with working hands like mine would do. I called in a favor. You see, another friend of mine, whose Jersey lineage and deep knowledge of the tribe made her nearly Jewish, was married to the top fish guy in Portland. Like, so high at the top, Anthony Bourdain broke bread with him for one of his shows. George, of blessed memory, was one of a kind. He wore round glasses and suspenders for every event. He had a smile so bright that, after meeting him for the first time, my mom asked me if his teeth were real. George was the first one to the party and the last one to leave and boy oh boy did he throw a party. George was above all, generous - with his spirit, his laughter preceded him, with his mind, his knowledge seemed unending and with his time and energy - you need something? He’s got you.

And George had me. When I told him about my pike/carp predicament, he laughed and said, “Let’s see what we can do.” As KP, my dear friend, his widow, tells the story:

“But it takes a shtetl…And GP wanted you to know about all these righteous people in the seder chain. George called it into a kosher fish retail shop in Boston, Wulf’s Market. His guys at Red’s Best (owned by nice Jewish boy Jared Auerbach of Newton — grew up with Andrew Taylor — named his biz after no-relation nice Jewish boy Red Auerbach) picked it up and put it on a truck to Browne Trading (no transport charge), who held it for Niles to pick up, all to help a nice Jewish girl (as George was telling these dudes). It’s the pay-it-forward Passover mitzvah. Take a gefilte pic and post so George can share the results! Xoxo.”

I don’t remember how the gefilte fish tasted or if anyone even ate it at the seder. What I remember is the feeling I had being invited to the seder (DAYENU), the pride I had in evoking the matriarchs (DAYENU), and the overwhelm I felt in all of these strangers doing their party (NO CHARGE) to help out a nice Jewish girl, a (gefilte) fish out of water, in Portland, Maine. DAYENU.

Photo by Blackberry c. 2012

I have been doing a lot of reflecting lately, as is my right turning into this decade, and so much of it is feeling this sense of Dayenu. That each piece of the journey is worthy of appreciation. That contentment is not laziness, but a worthwhile emotion. It is enough.

Happy Passover.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,
xoxo LCF

We’ve both been through a lot when we meet a few weeks ago. Divorces, life-changing moves, creative ups and downs, big wins, big losses. We know the fringes of each other’s stories, but we are excited to dig into the meat. There is a shared admiration. Two Jewish women who are angry and elated and have a whole lot to say. Before I even sit down, I know that our relationship has shifted from teacher and student to “Yes AND,” both of us teachers and both of us students. We stay in touch because we admire each other’s minds. Because we are interested in what and how the other thinks.

Yet when we sit down, the first topic of conversation is not the work we’ve done, but the work we’ve had done.

There’s no apology to it. We are speaking the same language fluently. What we’ve done, what we’re each considering. What small changes look like at forty and seventy. It doesn’t feel vain, it feels more so like maintenance, as if we were talking about dentistry or podiatry. Two women who admire each other for the architecture of our thinking, reviewing the architecture of our foreheads instead.

The conversation moves easily into our writing and our projects and the big lives that house our smooth foreheads, but that initial exchange lingers with me. Not because it feels wrong, absolutely the opposite - it feels so easy.

That ease, the fluency of it, how naturally we’d arrived at this shared language of upkeep, stayed with me in the weeks that followed, showing up in unexpected places, the way a song does after you hear it for the first time. A few weeks later, James Van Der Beek dies.

Though it is well known that my first celebrity crush was John Travolta, James Van Der Beek may have been my first age-appropriate celebrity crush. I watched Dawson’s Creek all throughout high school, mesmerized by the words of it all. And while most of my peers were firmly on Team Pacey, I loved Dawson with his earnest introspection erring on narcissism, his embarrassing seriousness, and more than anything his conviction that if you narrated your feelings carefully enough, you might outrun confusion. I loved that his interior life seemed to matter. I loved that he believed thinking deeply could save you. To be clear, I didn’t know how to articulate any of that love when I was watching him on TV. But in hindsight, it must have been such a salve for my little emotional self to see those emotions reflected back.

James Van Der Beek dies at forty-eight, which is not old. Forty-eight still feels like an age in the realm of optimization. For deciding to do something new. To start over again. It feels just in time for a second act, to start a tequila business or in his case, probably run for public office as a problematic Libertarian. Forty-eight does not feel like a number for endings. But forty-eight is an irrelevant number anyway, as reruns will keep him twenty-three in perpetuity.

Around the same time, my husband and I are flipping through the channels and stumble upon Jerry Maguire on cable. I don’t remember Renée Zellweger looking this young, but then again, I was much younger the last time I watched this film. Her face is youthful in a way money cannot buy. She looks like a butterfly: completely unguarded, impossibly earnest, as if she might flutter away the moment she feels at all threatened.

The movie cuts to a commercial, and a menopause ad fills the screen.

The voice-over promises regeneration, regulation, and restoration. All solutions for a body entering its next phase seem to start with R. I am staring at women in bad polyester blends and boxed hair color and supermarket wine in glasses with thick stems, like the wives in Goodfellas. There is no narrative bridge between Renée’s face and whatever it is I am looking at now. Just the abruptness of actually unbridled youth gushing into extreme and expensive hormonal recalibration.

The sequencing feels very abrupt and I start crying on the sofa in a way that physically surprises me, but I realize I feel like I am being directly addressed by what comes next and that it feels like I am being pulled into a part of life for which I am not yet ready and in the presence of my 18 months younger husband, it feels too intimate and slightly humiliating. I stain the white pillow cases with my hormonally imbalanced tears and cringe as the divorcee support group looks on in jealousy/awe/desire as Jerry and Dorothy reclaim what, in the throes of middle age, seems like a very unlikely to succeed relationship. I stayed on the sofa for a while after the movie ended, aware that something had shifted, that I was no longer really a witness to these women as much as I was now a woman being witnessed.

We’ve become very good at tending to the surface of aging. We know about injections and supplements. We know what to monitor and when to intervene. We know the exact aesthetic we desire for our faces at every decade, and we know what to do in order to achieve it. We are fluent in the preservation of skin and practiced in the art of dying beautifully. We are trained to believe that the longer you can remain beautiful, the longer you can retain relevancy.

But optimization has a limit. We’ve rehearsed every decade of staying relevant and left completely unscripted the one event that is, in fact, guaranteed. We are fluent in living and almost entirely illiterate in dying. Death used to be awash in ritual. It still is. But like so many other parts of a life that doesn’t regard institutional norms in the way generations previous did, death becomes another thing we have to think about, to put our mark on. In the place of ritual, we have options. And options, choice, feels empowering until they feel overwhelming, and even more so when they require you to imagine them only happening in your own absence.

Maintaining a relationship with religion in some fashion removes some of these options, but in the way I choose to practice, not many. I still find coffins too suffocating to imagine my own eternity in one. Months earlier, one of my best friend’s moms told me I should consider starting a Shiva business. She spent her career in the business of weddings and banquets and saw a great white space in the business of death, but could never bring herself to do it because it’s one thing to arrange the logistics when someone has lived a full life, but couldn’t imagine having to do it for the grieving mother of a child, especially as a mother herself. She thinks I have the demeanor for it, not in a way that suggests I lack empathy, but I believe, in the way that I am able to manage grief, discomfort, and still show up. I take it as a compliment and wonder if a shiva lady has to maintain the same air of youth that a middle-aged middle manager does. I find myself thinking about what a Shiva for Instagram looks like. Whether people will start writing their aesthetic wishes into their wills the way they write their medical wishes.

Shiva, in its truest form, requires stillness in and deep proximity toward the thing that most of us try to keep at arm’s length. The thing that none of us can truly say we understand. I wonder how many of us, trained to refine and optimize and move forward, will tolerate that kind of slowness when it’s our turn.

Like everyone else, I’ve been watching the miniseries about Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr. Like everyone else, I’m fairly entrenched. But there’s also something a little nauseating about it to me. Maybe it’s the voyeuristic way the camera lingers on her face, the same way cameras always did. Maybe it’s the desire for privacy that, even in death, can’t seem to be honored. Maybe it’s the fact that brands find it appropriate to use her style to sell things nearly 30 years after her tragic death. Maybe it’s an unease that these things make me uneasy, but I still can’t help but watch. And so, I find myself watching it the way you watch something you know you should look away from. But I can’t look away. I can’t look away from her youth, despite the Parliaments. I can’t look away from her restraint. I can’t look away from her stillness. And I most certainly can’t look away from the head of perfect blonde hair that, in the end, became her entire public biography.

I pass women on the street wearing exact replicas of her outfits. The internet writes think pieces about the exact moment her hair went from darker to lighter. As a society, we speak fluently about her surface. We have studied it, and replicated it, and preserved it. We are doing to her in death what we did to her in life, reducing her, albeit lovingly and carefully, to the thing it is easiest for us to talk about.

Carolyn Bessette never got the chance to become harder to describe. To become more complicated than her beauty. And I watch us preserving that, and I feel gross about it, and yet I also continue to speak the language. I am fluent in it too. No one seems particularly interested in what it would have meant for her to turn forty.

In less than two short weeks, I will turn forty. The number itself doesn’t feel seismic. Stranger is how rehearsed I already feel in talking about it. I have, without really meaning to, already developed a performance for this birthday. I know my cues, I know my lines. I know how to apologize for both grieving it or celebrating it, depending on the audience. And for the time being at least, I know exactly how many units of Botox I need to keep my eyelids from collapsing onto themselves.

—

LCF

Jif Dark Roast Peanut Butter

I was a little sick over the weekend, and you know what they say - starve a fever, feed a cold. The only thing I wanted was rice cakes smeared in peanut butter and Breyers mint chocolate chip ice cream. And ginger water. Lots of it. Luckily for us, I grabbed a jar of peanut butter on sale because I am a sucker for new products and even more of a sucker for garbage peanut butter. Please don’t try to convert me to your "no sugar added" oil-on-top nonsense. I want 90s peanut butter, but now I want it to be dark roasted. I can’t tell you how good this product is. It feels like a product that I will never be able to find again, but if I see it again, I will buy everything they have. I suggest you do the same.

A comment on the article about hot takes on air travel.

Turbulence doesn’t bother me as it used to, after a wonderful woman sitting next to me on my first solo international flight told me that it was just “nature’s rocking chair,” but I wouldn’t say it’s my preferred way to travel through the air either. There is family lore that we were on a tiny plane heading to my cousin's bar mitzvah in West Virginia, and as we made our way through the Appalachian airspace, climbing and falling in equal measure, that my mother and I were huddled up together, and my dad and my sister couldn’t get enough. I don’t like roller coasters or anything of the like. According to a New York Times article, some folks, like my 3-year-old sister, love it. Another thing folks purport to love in this article? Airplane food. While I love the pomp and circumstance of airplane food in a premium class, I wouldn’t say I love the food. One thing I do love, however, is a comment on this article about how to make your airplane bread more enjoyable by sliding the ice cold puck of butter under your thigh the minute it lands on your plate so you can be sure it’s warm and malleable by the time you’re ready for it. PEAK HUMANITY.

The Music from Love Story

Being sick this weekend allowed for A LOT of time in front of the TV. I caught up on Love is Blind, The Pitt, and the internet’s new obsession, Love Story: JFK Jr & Carolyn Bessette. You can’t take one step on my side of the internet without a piece about how to capture Carolyn Bessette’s style. One thing most of these pieces fail to mention is her bone structure, as some of us look like zoo keepers when we put a pair of khakis on, not a style icon. I digress. I am pretty entranced by this series for a lot of reasons, but the music is something we’re not talking about enough. This is an exceptional survey of what I imagine it was to be in your 20s in New York in the 90s, awash in CK1 and eau du Parliament Light.

The white feather outside my hotel room door.

I got to Nashville tonight, and immediately outside of my hotel room was a small white feather that reminds me of the opening sequence of Forrest Gump, and the opening sequence of Forrest Gump always makes me emotional. Actually, there are few Alan Silvestri Scores that DONT make me emotional (I’m looking at you, Father of the Bride)

The Book on my Nightstand, aka my Libby Shelf

The Wild West Village by Lola Kirke. Sue me, I’m in a 90s, pre-internet, state of mind (we spent about an hour going down a 90s nostalgia rabbit hole last night), and I will never tire of reading stories about it. This is a fun, quick read with a well-written milieu that makes you feel like you were there, too.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,
LCF

Taco Night

My husband and I had a 90s taco night the other night. Ground beef, hard shells, lots of cheese. He took the time to warm the shells up in the oven, a very inside baseball trick that my friends at Old El Paso always wanted people to do, but never really became much of a part of the routine. My husband, however, refuses a cold shell. Have we lost the art of a cheap taco night? It was so delicious and warm and comforting. Completely inauthentic to an actual taco, but completely authentic to growing up in 90s America.

Ballet X

A dear friend celebrated her 75th birthday with a celebration at Ballet X this past week. As a board member, she is not only passionate about the art itself, but passionate about the success of the art and it’s impact within the city. She had us join her for a night of improved choreography and a spectacular full company piece in their rehearsal space. For those outside of Philly, Ballet X is a contemporary ballet troupe that we are reallly lucky to have here. I was so moved by the performance that I have made a pact with myself to make it to every show of theirs I can this year. I hadn’t been in such a long time, and I’m so grateful to have been re-introduced.

The Hideout in the Poconos

Guys, I went skiing for the first time in 20 years this weekend on a trip to the Poconos with my husband’s side of the family. 10 people and a dog in a little mountain house. We stayed in this gated community built in the early 70s, and my guess is it hasn’t changed much since. Im obsessed with both the 70s branding and the fact that they haven’t caught onto efficiency as a KPI.I have spent a long time being a snob about the mountains, preferring Maine and the Catskills to what is basically just outside my door. Now I am convinced that I need to purchase a second home in the Poconos, in this development, and name it “Mishegoss Manor,” because everyone there has a name for their house and the Jews are seemingly few and far between, so you know, representation matters.

Mel Auberty Art

I am writing from Dallas where I am on city one of a three southern city tour. Last night I got to spend some time with a friend since 5th grade who recently moved here. He moved into an artists enclave of a neighborhood - it gave me big Sebastopol vibes when I pulled up. So after we had exceptional barbeque, we went to a gallery opening for one of his neighbors pals. I was absolutely blown away. The artist, Mel Auberty, is quite literally, a horse whisperer. She has been painting horses for decades and runs The Blue Horse Sanctuary, a space for Equine elders. This exhibit celebrated the Year of the Horse and I found myself negotiating a purchase internally. I happen to think one of her large format pieces would look perfect on the large, unadorned wall in our living room. It was a nice reminder that saying yes to things often leads to the greatest inspiration.

Large Aquamarines

In my spare time (lol), I write blogs for an estate jewelry company. I recently wrote one about some of the greatest pieces the red carpet has ever seen and featured the aquamarine pendant worn by Vivien Leigh when she won the Best Actress award for Gone with the Wind. The piece was said to have been gifted to her by her husband Laurence Olivier as she “suffered” through the filming of the movie. In the late 30s, semi precious stones like aquamarine were very in fashion because precious stones and metals were not readily available due to the war. I happen to love an aquamarine any time, and so of course this led me to late night scrolling for large aquamarine pieces. This cocktail ring really stole my attention with it’s detailed metal work and warm tones.

Until next time, which I promise will be more substantial.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,

LCF

Sinners

I left Sinners until late in the game because, to be honest, I was scared that I would be scared. I do not like scary movies, and I still have nightmares about both “Candyman” and “The Sixth Sense,” two movies that I haven’t seen for 25 years. But I had to watch Sinners. And I did, and it was magnificent. My take from the film is this: Is it safer and more comfortable to be a monster than it is to be an unwanted human?

I also didn’t realize I had such a deep knowledge of the rules of Vampirism until I paused the film to explain them to my husband, who, of course, attributed this to my high school education. Adding “Intellectualism and the Supernatural” to a running gag of classes I might have taken at my academically rigorous, but strangely progressive, high school, such as “How to Lobby City Hall” and “The language of Roman Numerals.” Sounds like a good curriculum to me, tbh.

But the truth is, everything I know about Vampires, I learned from The Lost Boys.

J Crew Étienne oversized shirt in lightweight Oxford

I own enough of these to wear them every day of the week, and most days I do. As an oversized button-down connossieur, I have come to the conclusion that pound for pound, this is the best one out there. The quality is really good, the price is right, and the shape is unbeatable. Also, they are on sale right now, which is never a bad thing.

BetterGoods Cauliflower Crust Pizza

Ok, I know we’re not shopping at big box stores, but sometimes we are. And though I think Trader Joe's has the best cauliflower-crust pizza, sometimes I just can’t bring myself to deal with the parking lot and the lack of self-awareness within those tiny aisles. Walmart's newer private label brand, Better Goods, is actually wildly impressive to me. The product portfolio is expansive and provides access, both physical and financial, to items that aren’t usually stocked on their shelves or at that price point.

Adina Reyter Pisces Signet Ring

I love being a pisces and I love a signet ring. I have been considering buying myself a true blue signet ring for my birthday to complement the little guy I wear on my pinky, and this popped up. While it’s a bit novel for everyday wear, I think it’s absolutely perfect.

My Anniversary Flowers

My husband is really good at buying me flowers. Some of you know that buying me flowers, well, buying me anything, is a really tough job. I am extremely picky about flowers. I like a single color, usually a single flower; I am picky about the filler. I know too much. I once called a flower shop to give them an earful for how much they charged my husband for a bouquet that was essentially only made of stock flowers. Here’s the thing: if my husband can give me a bouquet of mixed colors and mixed stems that don’t immediately give me the ick, he is doing something right here. He’s got a good eye (and a florist who knows me on his side). They are exceptional and make me smile every time I look at them.

BONUS: MY FAVORITE SUPER BOWL AD

The Super Bowl is the only day that anyone is interested in what I do for a living. I was much more interested in the halftime show this year than I was in any of the ads. But my favorite? Potato chips. Of course. In a Super Bowl marked by a barrage of AI spots showing what can only be described as our increasingly dystopian future, the only spot that I truly loved was the Lay’s spot about the evolution of a family farm. Am I sentimental? Yes. Do I think that the idea of legacy and the complicated feelings that arise around it are universal? Also yes. Do I think we need to give more credit to our family farmers across the country? You bet. What can I say? It felt real to me. And sometimes reality, in all of its emotional mess, feels really good.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,

LCF

The weeks seem to fly by when you are holding yourself accountable for a weekly roundup!

Naturopathica Gotu Kola Balm
In this dry tundra-like weather, Naturopathica Gotu Kola Balm is the only thing standing between my skin and complete collapse. It’s so thick that you have to rub it in your palms before you smear it on your face. I put it on before bed every night, and the residue finds its way to my poor knuckles and elbows. They say you only need a little, but THEY have obviously never had chapped lips for 2 months running.

Café Bustelo Nespresso Capsules
I love Café Bustelo. I also love Nespresso. It is going to be a real problem for me now that I know these exist in the world - the perfect antidote to the 2 pm winter slump. Fast, strong, no frills.

The New York Times Article About If we Can Ever Love Department Stores Again
I love a department store. Always have. Always will. They are the height of tactility and the height of possibility. Walking through a tunnel of women fanning me with pefumed pieces of paper is my Rushmore.

The Tattoo Removal Subreddit
Yesterday I started the process of removing a few of my tattoos and now I am completely fixated on other people’s journeys. It takes so much patience and comitment. This subreddit is a shockingly tender corner of the internet full of communal encouragement.

Catherine O’Hara
I, like the rest of the thinking world, am extraordinarily saddened by the loss of comedy icon Catherine O’Hara. To say nothing of her comedic timing ever time she delivered a line, she could tell you exactly what she was thinking by her facial expression. For me, this is the height of comedy. It sounds like she was an all around great human, too. May her memory be a blessing.

BONUS - Mandy Patankin on Good Hang with Amy Poehler

A dear friend suggested I take the six minutes to watch Mandy Patankin on Amy Poehler’s podcast. In case you are unfamiliar, Good Hang is Amy Poehler’s (golden globe winning) podcast. Every week she interviews someone, but before the interview, she talks to someone the interviewee has worked with to get a few questions from them. This week the interviewee was Claire Danes and the friend of was Mandy Patankin, due to their time together on Homeland. If you need a smile in this —- trying — times, I strongly encourage you, too, to watch this. From the first bite of his open faced Tuna & Vegetarian chopped liver on Ezekial Cinnamon Raisin bread sandwich to his list of EIGHT questions for Claire Danes, this will warm that shriveled up heart.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,

LCF

“Before the boiling of blood and the searing of skin comes the secret catastrophe: Before Life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.”

Before life on earth becomes finally merely impossibe, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable. Lately, unbearable part feels like the most accurate description of things.

It has become increasingly difficult to feel like you can do anything realistic to help. Not that’s it become harder and harder to understand right from wrong, but understanding how to have enough impact to make society rememeber. For the past year, acutely, it has felt like one fight after another. Every battle overlapping, and insisting on urgency, certainty, and moral clarity. For all of us suckers on the bottom trying to make change, it feels like you are not allowed to make mistakes. Of course, those at the top, creating these systems of deep oppression and damage are not making mistakes, they are guilty on more counts to count but will seemingly never see consequence for any of them.

And us? We will continue to feel consequence, even, and especially if it comes from the inside of the house. Most days, I feel profoundly unequipped. I am reaching out to friends. I am sending money to grassroots organizations (this is a great list of ways to help). I am calling whoever I can to read whatever script I can to express my disgust and despair. But it all feels like a mistake, like there should be something more.

It is exhausting to stay educated and stay active. And there is only so much time and money and despair to go around. The country is cold. And I won’t be the first person to tell you that at a certain point, the only way to keep fighting is to take a moment to find something warm. Something soft. Something that will help you stay intact for the long haul.

—

It snowed in Philadelphia over the weekend. And to be fair, it was a real storm, not the kind that comes on the wave of big claims by meteorologists followed by a light dusting that somehow still shuts the city down. This was a big storm, but not quite big enough for a name. Do they name snowstorms? Or only tropical storms? If I had to name it, I would call it Catherine, perhaps because of my recent tryst with Wuthering Heights, but also because it has been unique in its unending coldness and iciness, and Catherine, for whatever reason to me, is a cold, icy name.

This storm produced the kind of snow that requires multiple turns of shoveling and salting, and shoveling some more. The snow came on Sunday, and on Monday, I forwent my early morning workout for a sunrise shovel, something that I find oddly cathartic. When I came back in, all red and raw, I knew exactly what I wanted. And I immediately felt guilty for wanting it. I wanted a bowl of hot cereal. Cream of rice, to be exact. With a huge knob of butter that would instantly melt into a yellow puddle, only to be mixed with the obscene amount of brown sugar, maple syrup, or maybe both on top.

I am not supposed to eat sweet things in the morning anymore. Not smoothies, not pastries, not anything that could reasonably be described as “joyful.” They spike my blood sugar and ruin me for the rest of the day. I become irritable, foggy, and overall unwell. I have learned this through trial and error and the slow accumulation of information you learn about yourself, whether you want to or not, in middle age. I could imagine the nutritionist I’d once worked with asking me if maybe I’d consider adding a half a plate of green vegetables to counterbalance the glycemic spike I was about to put upon myself.

Cream of Rice has been around for more than a century, with origins in a time when food was meant to be digestible above all else. It was marketed to children, the ill, and people with “delicate constitutions,” which at various points in history appears to have included women, the elderly, and anyone who complained too loudly. I most certainly have a delicate constitution. It was never a glamorous food. It was sustenance pure and simple. There have never been adjectives added to try to glamourize it, nor has it ever been particularly photogenic. I imagine the folks over at B&G Foods aren’t prioritizing it as the next viral lifestyle brand in their portfolio. But the thing is - it’s still here.

It still serves a purpose without requiring a social media presence. We should all be so lucky.

That being said, Cream of Rice is certainly not something you hear about very often these days. But in an age of “maxxing” our protein intake, our fiber intake, our whatever else intake, Cream of Rice feels like a gentle reminder that some things are allowed to be soft and sweet and simple, and that fuel comes in many forms, not just to be used for optimization and productivity.

The house I walked into after my sunrise shovel craving Cream of Rice was my grandparents’ house. In fact, though I have owned this house for six years (!!!), the electricity bill was in my grandfather’s name until last month. When I bought the house, I renovated it from top to bottom. A few things were aesthetically motivated, sure (I mean, the pine floors under the beige wall-to-wall carpet were a very beautiful surprise), but much of it had to do with the fact that the house hadn’t been touched in 75 years, and I guess knob and tube electric isn’t a thing anymore. This house has been ripped apart and put back together in many cases, and as a house built in 1850, it will continue to need to be put back together every single day for the rest of its days. I digress.

It is a strange thing to leave home at 18 and then quite literally come back at 34. The context of the house might change, but there are pieces of life that are impossible to forget. There are things that no matter how much you aesthetically change, never leave you. There are certain smells that I always associate with this house. The smell of toasted challah at its perfectly golden brown pulled out of a toaster by a pair of equally as golden brown bamboo tongs. The acrid smell of vitamins, of which my grandparents had many, overflowing from ceramic containers on the lazy susan in the middle of their kitchen table (they were ahead of the decanting trend). The smell of drying dill, splayed out on the counter. My grandmother used more dill than I do, which is to say, a lot of dill. The smell of Grandma’s Fendi lingering perfume cloud, something I swear I can still smell in some very specific spots in the house.

But there is no scent that brings me closer to being a child in this house more than the smell of butter and sugar on hot cereal. There was no microwave oatmeal here (there was no microwave, full stop, in this house), there were rolled oats in Pyrex pots, made with milk, butter, and brown sugar.

My grandmother was extremely ahead of her time when it came to health, as it was known back then, as opposed to wellness as we have monetized it today. She bought vitamins on the black market before the first health food store popped up in the city. She peeled her grapes, lest any chemicals remain after washing. She was deeply suspicious of seed oils (ESPECIALLY PALM OIL, which I basically thought was poison until I was 20, thanks to her) long before that was a personality type.

But she also ate three gin-soaked raisins every morning. Every morning. No discussion. She sat down for breakfast every day, completely devoid of protein. There she listened to music, read the newspaper and made conversation before her and my grandfather both went to work. She drank a lot of tea and left tea bags and lipstick-stained mugs around the house.

When I think about her now, I like to think that the only thing she was really optimizing for was living, for keeping her mind, body, and spirit intact. She lived until she was three weeks short of 104. Most of those years were good ones. And though many people considered my grandmother a bit abrasive when compared to my grandfather, I loved her for it all the more.

My husband gets nostalgic when it snows and says it reminds him of being a kid. I think that the years of living in New England, in Maine specifically, have made me a bit too cavalier about it. You put your coat on, put your boots on, go shovel, and get on with it. Despite being a lifelong Philadelphian and an artist, my grandmother did have a significant amount of that New England Stoicism you hear about. I think she would have laughed at the TV as the city’s “Snow Emergency” press release roared on, with a tenor as if the city was more concerned about the siege of the snow than about the slow deluge of ICE upon our city, which no one seemed to be discussing at all.

Snow does not make me nostalgic for childhood. But warm cereal does. It makes me nostalgic for the simple understanding I think my grandmother had: that being alive requires tending, and that tending includes pleasure. That tending, not optimization, is the key to life’s quality.

On Monday, I stood in her kitchen with that bowl in front of me. Butter melting. Brown sugar piled on top. Winter light coming in at strange angles because I refuse to put curtains on the kitchen windows. In her kitchen, my grandmother was concerned with living, and on Monday morning, bowl of easily digestable sugar in front of me, so was I.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,

LCF

Another Week, another collection of “it’s the little things” in a world that can’t seem to get the big things right.

Bain de Soleil (RIP)

It’s been hovering around zero degrees this week, which has driven me to an old habit of dabbing my stash of long-discontinued Bain de Soleil behind my ears to mentally transport myself somewhere tropical. Or at least somewhere where my choice in footwear is better than “Bean Boots” or “Combat Boots.” Scent is one of the all-powerful things in life (next week’s long essay is about exactly this), and I highly recommend it for dissociation. I know that Vacation has revived it in their Orange Gelee product, and I love that too, but for the days when the air hurts your cheeks, only the original will do.

Strangers by Belle Burden

Babe Paley’s granddaughter wrote a memoir about a marriage dissolving based on a viral modern love column she wrote a few years ago. I listened to it as an audiobook, as I like to do with memoirs, and realized it's so much more about how quickly and easily facades crumble once you stop having the resources (emotional, financial, whatever) to actively maintain them. If you’re going to read this, you might as well read “La Cote Basque 1965” while you’re at it.

Philadelphia’s Snow Emergency Press Conference

I understand the importance of public safety. Truly. But the tenor of this press conference felt less “weather update” and more “we are at war.” Maybe I’m too cavalier about winter weather after spending so much time in New England, but I was absolutely cackling watching this. I was waiting for someone in the background to look directly into the camera a la Parks & Rec. PS, I think our mayor is doing a great job generally. I just thought that this was a bit overwraught.

My nightly 3:30 am eBay Deep Dives into the 80s Gucci Purses

I have been waking up like clockwork between 3:17 and 3:30 (please save me your breathing exercises, I have tried them all), and have found that ebay’s vast collection of 80s Gucci is the only thing that can even potentially lull me back to sleep. A lot of this seems to stem from a diffusion line sold at airports/Duty Free during a period of financial strife for the company. I don’t love a logo, but I do love this era of excess G’s. The heavy logos, the web stripes, the equestrian details - it’s so CHAOTIC and makes me want a silk sweatsuit to go with it.

The New Netflix Movie with Ben and Matt

I was 12 when they walked the red carpet for Good Will Hunting, which feels like a formative age for that kind of amorous imprint. If forced, I’ll always favor Ben, the rising Phoenix tattoo, the stress cigarettes, the Southie twang (even though, and especially because he was raised in Cambridge), but why should a woman have to choose? The movie itself is a tight, old-school, 90-minute (well, it's closer to 2 hours but feels quick) good time. From a business perspective, this film marks the first time Netflix has agreed to pay bonuses to all cast and crew based on the film's performance. They are notorious for being strict about their payment terms, but pushed by Matt and Ben by way of their production company Artists Equity, Netflix agreed to make an exception. I hope this is indicative of the future.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,

LCF

This week’s roundup of the five things making me happy.

Movie Soundtracks & Scores & LOVE THEMES || A few days ago, the host of one of my favorite podcasts, Bandsplain, started a Substack chat asking for the top three movie soundtracks. Obviously, this sent me spiraling in the best way, because though my top three: Goodfellas, The Big Chill, Romeo + Juliet, have never changed, I feel like I need to explain the five runners up (Magnolia, The Royal Tenenbaums, Marie Antoinette, Empire Records, Cruel Intentions - I’m a mllenial, so sue me) AND my top three scores (Jurassic Park, The Godfather and Challengers) AND explain that I actually think that when it comes to films, we should be talking more about Love Themes (my favorite is the one from St. Elmo’s Fire OBVIOUSLY).

SCHVITZING IS A NAKED ACTIVITY || I’ve said it over and over, but thank you to the New York Times, who published an article that fully validates my aggressive schvitz etiquette stance, thank you very much.

Krusteaz Gluten Free Double Chocolate Brownie Mix || Going gluten-free has been both life-changing in a very positive way and deeply annoying (I’m sorry to every single waiter I’ve come across over the past 15 months), but these brownies are so good, gluten or not.

Burgundy Crinkle Boots || I think I love these boots because they remind me of the ones Rama Duwaji wore in a Cut profile and though hers were pointier and much more editorial, I feel like these capture the vibe in a “I’m not the wife of the new Mayor of New York way, I’m a regular person from Philadelphia who does a lot of walking way.” I am also very well aware that on the cultural spectrum, Tuckernuck and Rama Duwaji may be at odds, but it’s called range, kids.

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT || Gen Z is going back to the movies, and thank goodness for that, because I think that our culture could use more dark rooms and shared gasps. Is it not the greatest feeling in the world when you laugh at something in a theatre and only like 2 other people laugh? THOSE ARE YOUR PEOPLE.

Chic Schmaltz La Vie,

LCF