Wednesdays with Carol

A Table for Two
Lunch with Tobi
My second free Wednesday dawned beautiful and bright. A lovely, sunny, cool day. Camille arrived on the dot of 11. After showing her the lunch I had prepared for Richard, I was off on the F train bound uptown. Of course, when the train pulled in to the East Broadway station, it was an A train. Dear MTA: Why is there an A train on the F track? So the conductor kept saying, this is an A train via the F line. Until it got to West 4th Street. Then it was just an A train and would veer over to 8th Avenue. I got off.

Taxi time to 23rd and 6th. I was headed to meet my friend, Tobi, for lunch at Giorgio of Gramercy, not to be confused with Sergio of Soho, on 21st Street between Broadway and Park.

On the way to the restaurant, at the corner of Park and 21st, I spied a fun store from Denmark called Flying Tiger. A quick detour took me through it's aisles filled with bright, inexpensive, fun stuff.

 Easter Bunny Stuff.

 Sheep and Bunnies.

Plastic Chick Thingies.

Better than live ones, which the parents

will have to send to a pretend farm

in the country after Easter.

When I reached the restaurant, Tobi had already arrived and claimed a cosy corner table, so I gleefully joined her, ready to indulge in at least an hour of good conversation, good food and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.

The waiter took our picture.

Over lunch, Tobi told me about her recent honor of being invited to the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts for a three-day residency. Tobi sat in on several classes and gave a gave a speech entitled: "Lies, Hoaxes and Nonsense: Truth on the Battlefield."

Tobi is a writer and teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism. She was formerly National Writer and Arts Editor of the Associated Press.

I would like to quote the final words of her speech in Massachusetts because the message in so important in our Trump world:

We can stop calling this trend fake news and start calling it what it is: Lies.And we can educate ourselves and others.  It's up to all of us because truth is on the battlefield.  And when we lose truth, we lose our humanity.

A gorgeous display of Forsythia

at Giorgio's.

I had the soup du jour, lobster bisque.

It was delicious, as were the olives,

marinated in olive oil, honey and lemon zest.

After lunch, it was time for a bit

of exuberant mugging at the

barbershop next door.

The revelation of the sky

in Manhattan.

Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street.

The Empire State Building

 We stopped at Maille, the

mustard purveyors depuis 1740.

The sales lady sported a mustard-yellow

scarf as she pointed out

the Maille picnic basket

on the back of a spiffy bike.

Yes, I will take it for a spin to

Madison Square.

Final stop: Marimekko.

This outfit reminds me of  the hippie

look from the sixties,

particularly Portobello Road in London.

Love the flying caftans too.

À Bientôt!

À mercredi prochain.

Wednesdays with Carol

A Date with Myself
Wednesdays will always be with Carol

I have been remiss of late in not publishing more frequent posts on Femme et Fleur. To offer a frank explanation, I have not been inspired to write because my world is now circumscribed by a need to stay close to home with my spouse because he needs my help. We no longer travel to my beloved France. Visiting with friends has been curtailed. We still do a lot. We go to museums. We dine out. We will once again go to Orient in August when Lazy Girl will make an appearance. But too often I must beg off seeing friends or hurry home.

So at the urging of my interventionists, my sisters, Susan and Jeanne, and my friends and with the encouragement of my step-daughter, Dianna, and her husband, Michael, I have decided to hire an aide to be with Richard one day a week. This will be my day off. We started this week when a lovely, professional woman named Camille came to be with him.

I will plan wonderful things to do. I will wander and flaneur. I will see friends. I may even sip an elegant cocktail or two. It will always be Wednesdays with Carol.

This week my Wednesday began with a visit to The Morgan Library to see an exhibit about the American poet, Emily Dickinson. When I was in high school I had a slim volume of her poems and brought it to Ms. Sheila Saferstein's English class to read aloud. Ms. Saferstein was a great teacher and quite a looker. She had short, dark hair swept back from her face, wore pencil skirts and heels and was thrilled to have a class full of smart-alecky first-trackers at North Shore High.

For our final exam, Ms. Saferstein gave each student a copy of the hardbound, cultural magazine, Horizon. My issue was devoted to Emily Dickinson so I wrote an essay based on her.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts,

and except for one year which she spent at

Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in

South Hadley, Massachusetts, lived in

Amherst her entire life.

 The glass elevators in the Lorenzo Piano

atrium addition to The Morgan Library.

 The sun-filled cafe in the atrium.

My perfect afternoon tea.

Earl Grey.

Loved the deviled egg and sandwiches.

 Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 and died in 1885.

Particularly in her later life, she was

enigmatic. She dressed only in white and avoided people.
Her poems were enigmatic too.
Short, eccentric and sometimes
difficult to parse.

 She would hide behind doors. She did not visit others,

but sent letters instead.

She would send a bunch of flowers from

her garden.

She said that people might prefer a posy to a poem.

In her later years, Emily Dickinson created hand-sewn books 

of her poems that she had hand written.

These are called fascicles.

Her fascicles contained 800 poems.

 A portrait of Emily (left), her brother, Austin,

and sister, Lavinia.

 Only 12 of Emily's poems were published

during her lifetime.

Her entire oeuvre was 1,800 poems.

 Amherst College, founded by Emily's grandfather.

Her father was a trustee of the college.

 Emily loved flowers.

When she died her coffin was carried through 

a field of buttercups to the graveyard.

She was buried with vanilla-scented heliotrope,

a Lady's Slipper and a knot of blue field Violets.

 Emily had an herbarium of over 400 dried flowers.

This is one of Emily's more accessible poems,

which is perhaps why it was used as a title for the exhibit.

She was an intense poet of mystical proportions.
She was hardly a "Nobody".

When a friend named Thomas Wentworth Higginson

visited her he said,

"Without touching her she drew from me.

I am glad not to have lived near her."


À Bientôt!
Je vous verrai tous les mercredis.

Birthday

A Birthday

Yesterday was my birthday. I am 73. Thanks to some wonderful people -- friends and family, I had a great day.

A delivery man arrived bearing sweet flowers from The Flower Girl, sent by my sister, Jeanne, and her husband, Chris.

My sister, Susan, sent her good wishes. Susan is in Florida where she resides in the winter. We are all grateful that she is recovering from a life-threatening medical incident that she suffered recently.

At The Odeon, celebrating my birthday.

I am wearing my new two-tone beads

which I call Le Boom-Boom.

I planned a dinner at The Odeon, one of my favorite restaurants in New York. I invited my nephew, Jack, who is a student in the film program at NYU, to come along. Jack brought a friend, Jo. She is a student in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design.

Jeanne and Chris sent these flowers.

They are on a shelf with a hat I designed

to wear to a Fashionista New Year's Brunch.

Before leaving for dinner, I found a small package at my door. It was a beautiful resin bracelet from Arts and Artisans in Chicago. It was sent by my stepdaughter, Dianna, and her husband, Michael.

Resin bracelet by Madame Piedran of

Normandy, France.

I got some nice birthday cards. My cousin, Barbara, whose birthday is two days before mine, always sends me one. I owe her a belated card. It's so fun to get cards. When I was young, I used to get a birthday card every year from my Aunt Margaret with a dollar "for a Coke".

Card from old friends, Dyan and Michael.

The manager at The Odeon is named Roya. She is tall and elegant and always dresses in vintage outfits. Last night she was wearing a wonderful dress. She purchased it in Arizona while there for a friend's wedding. "I went shopping for vintage the morning of the wedding," she said. A girl after my own heart. The dress was originally from Iceland!

Roya in her Icelandic dress.

I had never met Jo, Jack's girlfriend. She has a cute haircut and a beautiful smile. She was wearing a light-colored coat adorned with a collection of pins on the shoulder. She had on a black beret and wore large-rimmed glasses. I liked her right away. Jo gave me a book she had made of her etchings.

Jo. I think she had the pasta.

Jo's etching.

Jack is a serious guy. He is serious about his art. Jack was wearing a red and black checked shirt buttoned up at the collar. I like that look. Jack gave me a painting that he had done. He always has so many things on his mind.  Painting, animation, film and video games to name a few. It is challenging to an artist to have so many facets to their creativity. I am in the same boat.

Jack at The Odeon.

The painting that Jack made for me.

Chris came along too. We had some good conversations. I told him how I make my beads and swore him to secrecy. I am pretty sure he will not try to manufacture them and become my competitor. Jeanne could not come because she had her book group.

Richard had a good time. He had a dozen oysters, duck confit and duck breast with pear all washed down with Cote du Rhone.

Richard in a favorite shirt 

purchased in Nice, France.

We finished the evening with deserts. I had the famous Odeon chocolate pudding with a dollop of whipped cream. Someone had overheard it was my birthday, (Roya) and my dish arrived with a candle. Everyone sang happy birthday.  At the next table, a tow-headed boy of nine was also celebrating his birthday. We exchanged birthday greetings. He was born in 2008, 64 years after me.

À Bientôt!

A Rivington Street Memoir

Music All Night, Drug-dealing All Day &
Law and Order All the Time:
Rivington Street Memories 

Susan Chrysler White. She was the catalyst. Richard and I had been living in Philadelphia for over 20 years. Each day I would do my reverse train commute from center city Philly to the Main Line suburb of Radnor. That's where the company I worked for, Fidelity Life, had moved from center city.

Reading my New York Times on the train, the urge to be in New York City would get in my head and make me crazy. One day Richard told me that Susan Chrysler White was moving to Red Hook, Brooklyn. Susan taught painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art where Richard also taught.

That was it. The time bomb went off in my head. If Susan was moving to New York, so would we. Within a week I had the plan in motion. It was 1985, and we were moving to New York City too!

Our building at 159 Rivington Street in New York City.

 Lindemann's Pharmacy was on the first floor. 

Our 1,000 square foot loft was the third floor.

I am standing with Richard. Richard's daughter,

Dianna Cramer, is on the right.

Barry Blinderman, who ran the Semaphore Gallery in the East Village, lived on the second floor. Mr. LaFortune, a Haitian man, lived on the fourth floor. He had divided his apartment into a warren of rooms where other families lived. When we were fixing up our space, Richard had to install drip pans in the kitchen because of leaks coming from Mr. LaFortune's kitchen. Later we learned that when Mr. LaFortune defrosted his refrigerator, he simply pulled the plug, letting the ice melt on the floor and leak through to our ceiling.

MaryAnn, a filmmaker, and David Sipress an artist, occupied the back half of the fourth floor. MaryAnn had installed a huge editing machine in her tiny cubicle of a space, and David made quirky wood sculptures. David now draws ironic cartoons for the New Yorker Magazine.

Richard shopping at the Korean greengrocer

on the corner of Clinton and Rivington.

The first week that we spent in New York, I was astounded that loud music played all night. Drug-dealing was constant on the street, and Law and Order, the television show, was always shooting episodes in our neighborhood. One morning I stepped out of our front door and found a filmmaker, in his director's chair, perched on our doorstep. "Excuse me, sir," I said, as I passed daintily in my Armani suit, "may I continue on to the real world?"

Hanging with Dianna Cramer and Richard

in front of ABC NO RIO, an alternative, and I

mean alternative, art-performance space across the

street from our building. I am wearing a

Streit's Matzos cap. Streits was on the corner of 
Rivington and Suffolk Streets. 

The mural at ABC NO RIO changed every so often.
That kept things interesting.
On weekends, kid from the suburbs dressed up
in kilts and spiky purple hair and drank beer on the sidewalk.

Dianna Cramer, and her husband, Michael
Miller on Rivington.
It was a Dominican neighborhood, and
fruit ices were sold from carts in warm weather.

 Stopping by an abandoned car on Delancey Street
on a summer morning.
Me in my corporate look walking to work.

Me with a fixer-upper.

Me posing for a brochure for
 Guardian Investor Services,
my New York job.

If this post has made you yearn for more,
listen to this interview I did with Tobi Elkin,
for the Lower East Oral History Project of the
New York Public Library.

Listen here:


À Bientôt!

P.S. Susan Chrysler White lives in Iowa now.

Shoe Biz

Margaux:
The Ballet Flat That Fits
A ballet flat can never be a ten. (Wink, wink, get it?)

Recently I purchased the most dreamy ballet flats. I bought the shoes in three colors: black, ultramarine blue and poppy red. They are from a company called Margaux, and they are custom-made to fit my feet, bunions and all.

When I worked in business, I wore only black flats of the Armani brand. These I usually paired with black tights. Very bohemian, Greenwich Village in a corporate world. Really, I had to have flats because I was running around all day -- to the print shop, to meetings and up and down the staircase so I didn't have to wait for an elevator. Besides, I view a shoe with heels as an instrument of torture.

Classic Margaux suede flats

displayed in their West 20th Street showroom.

The color palette will augment

any wardrobe.

 You can order this darling fit kit

from Margaux to measure

your own feet, in case you happen to

live far from New York City,

in a red state, for instance.

The contents of the fit kit.

 Margaux was founded in 2015.

Left: Alexa Buckley, a co-founder,

 right: Gavriella Wolf, production manager.

If you go to the showroom,

Augusta Winthrop will fit you for

your new flats.

 Ballerinas.

Margaux wants to redefine how shoes

 are sized and sold.

Pointy Toes.

The shoes are hand-crafted in family-owned

factories in Spain and New York.

A custom shoe with a satin bow

made for a designer's runway show.

Careful thought and design expertise has gone 

into the packaging and presentation of the shoes.

The shipping box.

The shoe box.

 Each pair comes with a

soft, felt bag.

I use these when I travel.

 My poppy red ballet flats

nestled in their tissue bed.

 The poppy reds and ultramarines.

My new Margaux flats in my

shoe closet.

I put the little red and blue

pieces of felt on the tabs for

quick identification of the shoe color.

À Bientôt!