Christmas Countdown

No, not shopping days (trying hard not to think about that one) but my favorite Christmas songs: 10. "Please Come Home for Christmas," Harry Connick, Jr. You bet I will, Harry. 9. "Santa Baby," Eartha Kitt. Move over, Madonna, cuz this girl got it right the first time. 8. "Christmas Wrapping," The Waitresses. How can you not love this infectious little classic? 7. "Ode to Joy," Beethoven. The title says it all. 6. "River," Joni Mitchell. For those melancholy moments that we wish we had a river to skate away on.                         5. "Merry Christmas, Baby," Bruce Springsteen. Can a Christmas song be sexy? It can if it's sung in a husky rasp by my favorite Jersey guy. 4. "Baby, It's Cold Outside," Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby. Though I'm usually no fan of Bing, he and Rosie kill this one. Hands down, the best version of this chestnut. 3. "The Waltz of the Flowers," Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. This just makes me want to dust off my old pointe shoes and pirouette around the kitchen. 2. "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," Bach. The first few strains of this piece epitomize the joy of the season. 1. "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," Frank Sinatra. Hundreds of singers have recorded this lovely song, but few have conveyed its notes of both regret and hope the way Sinatra has. (Did I mention he was from Jersey?) May you hang a shining star on the highest bough this holiday season. See you in the new year!

♦ ♦ ♦

Sometimes Spaghetti Likes to Be Alone*

Stanley Tucci's love letter to food, family, and the American Dream is Big Night, a small 1996 film about two Italian brothers who own a restaurant at the Jersey shore. Set in the fifties, the movie has terrific period details, from Isabella Rossellini's chic haircut to the giant-finned cars that cruise the main street of the shore town that is home to the guys' restaurant, Paradise. (Parts of the movie were filmed in Keyport, right here in NJ.)

The  brothers Primo (Tony Shalhoub, who plays one of the most convincing Italians I've seen on screen) and Secondo (Tucci) are struggling to make a go of Paradise. Primo is the consummate chef, whose focus is on serving authentic dishes from their native Abruzzi. Secondo is the businessman, who knows that their American clientele are expecting a different kind of fare from the delicate risottos and seafood dishes that Primo lovingly prepares.

As the brothers lose customers to their competition, Pascal (Ian Holm, in a hilarious turn) it looks as though the Paradise will close. When Secondo hears that musician Louis Prima is in town, the brothers risk everything for that one big night, putting every bit of their resources into planning a grand feast for the famous band leader. And here is the real joy of this film--the food. Each course that comes out is more gorgeous than the last, culminating in a timpano, a complicated dish of pasta, eggs, meat and cheese baked in  pastry. I won't tell you if Prima ever does show up, but it sure is fun waiting for him to arrive, as the restaurant's guests eat, drink, dance, and smoke the night away.

To me this movie feels like home--it's got great food, Italian accents, fifties music and the Jersey shore. Paradise, no?

♥ ♥ ♥

*Secondo's answer to a restaurant patron who asks why there aren't meatballs with her spaghetti.

The Fashion Commandments*

Commandment I: Thou shalt dress for thy shape. Smart pears know that a nicely cut Empire waistline falls flatteringly over those womanly hips. Wise apples might choose a wrap dress to emphasize upper curves and create a smaller waistline. Work your assets! Commandment II: Thou shalt not dress mutton as lamb. Ladies of Certain Age should not only act it, but dress it. Let’s step away from that Junior department, and stick to even-numbered sizes, shall we? Commandment III: Thou shalt expose skin in inverse proportion to the number of decades thou has spent on earth. Repeat after me: No one wants to see old décolletage. (Unless you are Helen Mirren, in which case you do not need advice from the likes of me.)

Commandment IV: Thou shalt acquire a few good basics. My great-grandma used to say that only rich people could afford to buy cheap clothes. (Think about it.) One great piece—a well-cut skirt, a black trench coat, or a go-to LBD that goes from office to party—more than pays for itself. Commandment V: Thou shalt have a signature piece. Whether it is your scent, your grandma’s antique watch, or that scuffed pair of Doc Martens, you should have one fashion facet that is all your own. Commandment VI: Thou shalt not don thy exercise clothes in vain.Yoga pants belong on your bod only in the studio. Save the sweats for your daily run or a night on the couch with popcorn and an old movie. And unless you are warming up for the Olympics, never, under any circumstances put on a two-piece track suit. Because I will find you. Commandment VII: Thou shalt not covet thy daughter’s goods, nor raid her closet. See Commandment II.

Commandment VIII: Thou shalt learn how to coordinate thy pieces. A coordinated look is not synonymous with what Michael Kors bitchily refers to as “matchy-matchy.” Even bridesmaids have stopped dying their shoes.

Commandment IX: Thou shalt not display initials that are not thine own. Does any girl really need a crystal-encrusted DG the size of a dinner plate hanging from her purse? I think not. Commandment X: Honor thy body and treat it with love. Now go out and buy yourself something nice!

♥ ♥ ♥

*The format for this post was shamelessly lifted from my son, a regular blogger at the BU Culture Shock blog. I implore you not to link to his post, which is far funnier than my own.

Literate Girls

Recently my sweet and lovely niece Eva sent me a blog post from Thought Catalogue by Charles Warnke with the (hopefully) ironic title, "You Should Date an Illiterate Girl." It reads like a prose poem and it's been making the internet rounds among the young. Here is one of my favorite passages:

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

As a girl who reads, I recognize the woman Warnke describes. The year I turned 19, my then-and-now boyfriend (reader, I married him) bought me a box of poetry books for my birthday. It was a giant gift box filled with Nikki Giovanni, Alan Ginsburg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, e.e. cummings, Anne Sexton--a 70s hipster girl's dream roster--with some good old-fashioned Yeats for good measure. That gift made me the envy of every literate girl in my dorm. In the years since, I have gotten some other boxes of books, usually when I least expect them. One year, in my pre-Kindle days,  it was 38 Penguin pocket books, scaled down to fit in a purse or a back pocket. "So you'll always have something to read," was the inscription on the card. The last such gift was two shopping bags that I could barely lift, as they were filled with a hardcover set of Barnes and Noble classics, from Alcott and Austen right through Wharton and Wilde. It occurs to me that it is a brave man who's willing to date--or marry--a literate girl. Near the end of Warnke's post is this warning:

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. . . .The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold.

So here's to all the literate girls, the storytellers, the crafters of narratives. The girls who read.  (And the men who love them.)

♥ ♥ ♥

Mother Nature's Trick-or-Treat

I love Halloween. I love the spooky feeling on a chilly fall night when there's a big yellow harvest moon outside my window. I love watching the old Universal horror films, or my favorite Halloween chestnut, Arsenic and Old Lace. I love seeing my neighborhood come alive with tiny witches, fairies, robots, and superheroes. But this year, Mother Nature has been up to some tricks of her own, and dropped a load of mischief on us out here in the east. And to that I have to say: Really? Did you really have to snow on my Halloween parade?

Today at least, the sun is shining, and neighbors are outside cleaning up broken tree branches and upending all those overturned Halloween decorations. And there is something beautiful about fall leaves against a backdrop of snow:

But not beautiful enough to justify an early end to my favorite season of the year. My pumpkin is on the porch, my witch stands guard at the door (though she's a bit chilly), and my treat bowl will still be full of candy, weather be damned. Happy Halloween, everyone.  

The First Kiss

My first kiss happened on a swing set; my young swain had dirty fingernails and milk on his breath. Okay, so we were eight years old. And to be quite honest, I had thrown myself at him with an impassioned letter done in maroon crayon I left on his front porch. Moments later, I found the letter torn to shreds, its tiny pieces littering the lawn and mirroring the state of my heart. But in spite of what I thought was a clear message, the boy next door planted a kiss on me the very next day as we sat in that double-seater.  The day after that, he threw a rock at me. Ah, love. Since then, I have learned the importance of the first kiss, whether the first of your life or the first of a new relationship. (In one of my novels, my hero and heroine have their first smooch while they're cooking, and let's just say they end up tasting more than just the food.) The first kiss can seal the deal or send you running in the opposite direction. One way or another, they're usually pretty memorable. A couple of years ago, I got a message on classmates.com that began: "I used to live next door to you when we were growing up, but you probably don't remember me. . ." You'd be surprised, dude.

♥ ♥ ♥

"If She is to Write Fiction"*

It would not be an understatement to say that this little book changed my life. Here are its famous first words:

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction--what has that got to do with a room of one's own?

And the answer is, of course--everything. As I have noted elsewhere in this blog, for a long time I talked the talk of writing without taking the first hard steps of the walk. Instead I found lots of reasons not to write. Some good: "I have three boys under the age of seven." Others pretty lame: "But Project Runway is on tonight." Woolf famously posited that women could produce the same kind of writing that men did, if only they had rooms of their own and five hundred a year. Well, we need more than five hundred nowadays, whether it's pounds or dollars, but one thing hasn't changed. Women who write need a quiet place to work, free of distractions, preferably with a door that closes. Not all of us have that luxury. I marvel at the stories of women who write their novels in the family car during soccer practice, scribble poetry at four in the morning before the baby wakes up to be fed (or while the baby is feeding!), or give up lunches at work in order to write. While I was raising my sons, I was too exhausted, too involved, and yes, too distracted to sit down and write. I didn't start work on my first novel until in was in my late forties. Strangely, it was when I was back working as a teacher, energized by my professional life--and despite all those papers I had to grade--that I carved out time to write. But it wasn't until this year, when my oldest moved out, that I finally got what I had been waiting for: my office. Okay, so there's a beer stein on the dresser and a wooden model airplane sitting on top of the TV that's collecting dust. A sticker for the band M.O.E. still adorns the wall, as does his diploma from Rutgers. And while my beloved son is welcome to sleep here any time he likes, I will slowly be moving his things up to the attic. Because this room is now mine. I sit here at my great-aunt's secretary desk and work by the light of a low lamp. There are two windows on either side, with lots of sun during the day. In the glass case above the desk are books by Austen, Eliot, Wharton, the Brontes, and of course, Virginia Woolf. It's easy to be inspired:

Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days.

♥ ♥ ♥

*"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Virginia Woolf

Back to School

It's a slightly cloudy Last Day of Summer, aka Labor Day, here in New Jersey. And while there's a part of me that longs for summer to be infinite, there's another part that's excited. As a teacher, my job is seasonal and cyclical, divided by semesters and quarters, and marked by holidays and milestones, from First Day to graduation. And though teaching feeds my craving for routine, it also affords daily surprises. And more importantly, each September year gives me and my students something life doesn't always offer: another chance. A new year, shiny as those new school supplies and clean as those new shoes, gives us all a new start. We can erase last year's mistakes, do better, and be better. And that's just one of the reasons I love my day job. The other 99 will be filing into my classroom on Wednesday.

♥ ♥ ♥

Oh, and guys--I know you're out there. See you in home room. ;>

Sunlight and Sea Bright

My go-to beach for a day trip is Sea Bright, in Monmouth County. It's a narrow strip of a beach with lots of parking and a short walk to the ocean. The people are friendly to tourists, and it has a couple of old-timey stores in town that look like they were frozen in 1965. (For some people, like yours truly, this is a draw.) Not only is it pretty:

It has a cute little library that shares a parking lot with the beach. I wandered in one day and got chatting with the librarian, who knew lots about the history of the town. It also has a lovely reading room you can hide out in if the sun gets too hot:

But I think I'll let this sign posted at the beach hut say it all:

Good-bye, Sea Bright. See you in June. . .

♥ ♥ ♥

Like a Hurricane

I'm spending the day securing outdoor furniture, filling the cars with gas, stockpiling non-perishables, and emptying the bookshelves in my finished basement--all in preparation for a category 3 hurricane that's supposed to be heading straight up the Jersey coast. Our governor has declared a state of emergency, and comparisons are already being drawn between Hurricane Irene and the great storms of 1938 and 1944, which devastated much of the northeast seaboard, including the Jersey shore.

The Neil Young song of the title has been running through my head all morning, and like the weather, I'm feeling strangely calm before the storm. My neighborhood is sunny and quiet; people are walking their dogs and kids are bicycling past. But behind it all is an undercurrent that's driving people to the grocery store and gas stations; we're calling family and friends along the coast and encouraging them to come and stay.

In the meantime, I'm planning to do what I always do when I need comfort--read and cook. There's a stack of books next to my bed and the makings for sauce Bolognese in my refrigerator. And if things get really bad, I can always grab the rum and mix up some cocktails--maybe a nice batch of hurricanes?

♥ ♥ ♥