365 Memories

I am not a makeup maven. I've never worn foundation, except the professional "pancake" kind for those handful of times I have performed on stage (a lifetime ago!). For everyday, it just feels like a slow toxic suffocation of crud in my pores. Ditto the blush. No fuss, no muss. Definitely no mascara; the wand is a serious hazard. The most I could cope with: eyeliner, some shimmery nude color on lids, and lipstick. The lipstick used to be bright red. At some point, I realized that my olive skin tone is hard to match to the right shade, though—all the reds I like when I see them in stick form end up making my skin or my teeth look yellow. Now, I opt for more tawny and brown shades, when I bother. I remember, though, a time when I loved to browse the cosmetics aisles and look at lipsticks and read the exotic, trumped up names of the colors. I would laugh at the outrageousness . Of all the hundreds of names I've read, and the dozens of tubes I've owned, I remember the ...

No, the title does not refer to another fainting episode , despite what you may have read earlier in the week. It refers to the burden—rather, the unburdening—of long, thick tresses. It's summer now, and still a difficult period economically . I have started explaining to people who comment on my growing mane (mostly to say it looks nice, but still) that it is "recession hair." I've used the term in this blog before. It means, basically, that I simply cannot keep paying to cut it short the way I prefer. Every six to eight weeks in a salon—though I never went that frequently, no matter how flush my wallet—is not something I can permit myself. Actually, it's not just the expense of money but of time. Who has time for flipping through magazines as a stylist pumps you up and down in a padded chair? Definitely not I, not this summer. But, I have to say, I am getting very sick of the length, which has grown mightily since the last whack job. My head feels heavy. I am si...

The honeymoon starts unfairly, with my love divided. Moving along the curving Provençal roads, shaded by plane trees, we leave the festivities of the (beautiful but exhausting) wedding behind us—hightail it out of the Southwest region, trading Dumas for Van Gogh , for Cézanne . We arrive on the outskirts of Aix , and there she is: Mont Sainte Victoire in all her rocky glory. I have never been here, but I feel a sense of homecoming and desire, like returning to a lover after a long absence, seeing again the delicate way she peels an orange in a single spiral for your pleasure. I spent years looking at this mountain, through the eyes of the painter Paul Cézanne ; semesters analyzing his obsessive analysis of its geometry: the critical thesis for my MFA compared Cézanne and his modernist literary relation, Lawrence Durrell . But what can you really capture of a lifelong love? Which face presents itself to you, at what moment? A mountain, an Alexandrian woman, two people beginning thei...

We stopped at the side of the road, shocked by yellow. A full field of sunflowers, turning their large, open faces to the sun. Tournesols in French. My friend, D., and I jumped out of the car, went to stand at the edge of the field, and had our pictures taken. Saturated color: gold and cyan behind and above us. Kodachrome tribute. But even in black and white the shots are impressive, the flowers big as our own heads, a field of dark eyes glistening. Before France, I had never seen a vibrant field of growing sunflowers, only their kin, turning up sometimes in a florist's shop or else in the farmer's market. Bringing them home, there was never a vase large enough or heavy enough to hold them; their long, thick stalks had to be cut with knives. The flower heads would bow toward the table, stooped under the weight of their cheerful petal halos and spiky, mane-like leaves. Across the street from the house purchased jointly in name ( post about that here ), there are also fields li...

Today I was honored with a gift: a gorgeous orchid plant in luscious, fertile bloom. The colors are instantly uplifting, especially on as drab a day as today is in New York City, the sky going from black to gray to white and back to gray. In front of me, however, a complex cluster of waxy yellow petals that look as though they've been flecked first with an intense shade of purplish-pink (really, the color you first think of if I say "orchid"), and next with a touch of orange-red, right in the center of each flower. The picture to the left does not do justice to the color saturation; the blossoms are much brighter than they appear here. The orchid is an interesting plant. Its flowers seem fragile; you'd expect them to be like tissue paper. And yet not only are the leaves hearty and thick, the petals (at least on this variety) are sturdy as well. Another seeming contradiction: the blooms are, on the one hand, the epitome of refinement, of elegance . . . and yet, if you ...

Thinking about high school friends. Friends from my second high school, that is. A place I entered under cover of deep Michigan snow, in the middle of my sophomore year. Spring semester, summer vacation, then back for one more term before having to take a medical leave. These events are all detailed in other posts. But what I remember today is this: an unexpected gesture from a friend I didn't even know I had. A handcrafted gift I have kept and cherished since the age of sixteen. With all the moves I've made, it's perhaps a miracle that this gift has not been broken—it is fragile, fired clay—and yet it makes sense: I have taken more than the usual care with it. The object in question is a plate, glazed in dove gray with an abstract crosshatch of lavender, peat, and twilight sky. It was made expertly by a boy in my school, in the ceramics studio, and given to my mother to pass along to me once she'd made the trip up north, alone, to clean out my room toward the end of th...

Edward Steichen's 1924 portrait of Gloria Swanson (cropped detail at left). I would stand in front of this photograph in the Museum of Modern Art for long periods of time. The first time I saw it, I was fifteen years old, and my parents had just moved back East from Los Angeles. We were staying in an apartment that was owned by my father's employer (Pan Am). The small one-bedroom was located in the Museum Towers building on West 53rd Street, next to MoMA . Because the museum was, essentially, my back yard, I went there a lot, often alone. I was with my mother, though, the first time I saw this print. We walked through the galleries, and I was immediately drawn to this photograph. At the time, I didn't know who Gloria Swanson was, but I fell in love with her veiled face, her hypnotic eyes. In them I saw the kind of mystery and sensuality that I longed for—that I hoped to possess one day, when I had come into my womanhood. I also admired the challenging stare, straight into ...

When I was much younger, still a teenager—when danger held an allure, and when I thought my outward appearance was the best defense against a vulnerable heart—I wanted a tattoo of an ornate dagger on my arm, up close to the shoulder. And yet, I knew better than to mistake myself for someone ready to make a permanent commitment; I'd have to grow into that mentality. The urge subsided, then returned years later. Older, I became more discriminating, and less defensive. I became a social pacifist. I was intensely relieved I had not inked the image of a violent blade on my body. But I still wanted a tattoo. I began to do what my adult self has nearly always done when confronting a decision: I started researching. I was living in Chicago at the time, and I remember my quest for finding the best (and cleanest) tattoo parlor, though I don't remember the results of the search. I never even got to the point of meeting any tattoo artists, though (the research was by reputation), because I...

Can you ever really talk candidly about a difference in aesthetic taste, if the difference is between you and your spouse? More precisely, if the difference lies between you, your spouse, and an "object d'art " that you would rather see at the bottom of the ocean than anywhere in your living space? How do you debate taste without sounding like a snob or a dictator, a person with no tolerance for difference at all? Can you really ever convince someone that the item they liked enough to purchase with their own hard-earned money is totally hideous and inappropriate? It's just your opinion, after all. It's your taste against theirs, so who's to say who's "right" (even if you are the one with exposure to fine art, art history, and so forth)? I will admit up front that yes, of course, we should all be able to like what we like without being criticized for our preferences. To each his (or her) own; or, as the French say, " Chaqu'un son gout....

I have just cut my hair—it's what I'll call a "clean up" job. I think it's been almost a year since the last cut (can it be?), and I finally couldn't take my "recession hair" any longer. I went to a new stylist, in a salon about two blocks away from my apartment. Judging only by external appearances (not a reliable indicator, I admit), this salon seemed like a good compromise between my usual high-end stylist and the local Super Cuts type of shop. I've tried the chop shops, and I have to say that unfortunately my very straight, fine hair is not suited to their bargain techniques. Today's experiment paid off; it was the compromise I was hoping for: a lower price and maybe a slightly less sophisticated style, yet nothing that looks in the least bit bad. This blog is about memories, however, and speaking of bad . . . today's brief salon stress (the initial anxiety, when you first trust your head to a complete stranger, not knowing whether th...

There was something "coming of age" about my first spa experience. In fact, the half day I spent at Elizabeth Arden's Red Door Spa in New York City was a gift from my parents for my twenty-first birthday, so it really did mark a milestone. It was the kind of pampered indulgence that I imagined only the most mature, confident, fashionable, and privileged women enjoyed—and that is mostly true. Did walking through the Red Door on Fifth Avenue suddenly make me one of them? Yes and no. I was certainly privileged to be there, and I was pampered and indulged the same as any other client of the spa. I suppose I was fashionable, if in an edgier way than what seemed the usual Elizabeth Arden demographic. I was not mature in years . . . though in some ways I was older than my age (in other ways younger). Finally, I confess that in this environment I was not particularly confident. I was out of my element. I was self-conscious and nervous every bit as much as I was eager to give myse...

Dorothy Hamill, the 1976 Olympic gold medalist in figure skating, and America's Sweetheart for some time after. If you didn't see her on the ice—if you didn't really see her at all—then you saw traces of her image reflected in neighborhood acquaintances who copied her style. In the late 70s and early 80s, everyone knew at least one person with the "Dorothy Hamill 'do," that hairstyle she made incredibly popular: the wedge. Despite the fact that I was dancing, and ballet still mandated long tresses, I made a bold move the summer I was ten and cropped off my hair; it would always grow back. It was the first time I wore my hair that short, and once the shock of being light-headed wore off, I remember thinking that it looked very sophisticated. (Give me a break; as I said, I was only ten!) But since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this was not exactly a universal opinion. Maybe it was the fact that my wedge may have looked a bit more like a bowl cut than is...

By which I do not mean to call her a vain woman, as the title might suggest; she was no more vain than the least of us who give average attention to hygiene. But I remember that my paternal grandmother, whose wish was to be called "Mimi" instead of anything sounding more grannyish (OK, maybe that pushes the envelope a tiny bit), had the most amazing "vanity," as used to refer to a dressing table, or a woman's personal toilet items. She was a large woman—mostly just by natural stature, big bones—and not particularly delicate. She walked with a heavy step; her movements were brusque. She was in her element in a busy kitchen but not overly careful with pots, pans, or utensils, which she'd toss into the sink from across the room. There was, however, one way in which she was the epitome of Southern grace and beauty, and that was the care she took with her appearance, her makeup, and the preservation of a youthful, glowing, Georgia-peaches-and-cream complexion. Mi...