This summer’s greatest guilty pleasure in my happily-cloistered world was John Duff, who started the season off with the glorious ‘Be Your Girl’, kept things hot with follow-up ‘Forgotten How To F@ck‘ and is now coasting through the end of the season with ‘Hoe Is Life’ featuring the legendary Lillias White. He spent the summer traveling and performing, from Pride shows in Chicago and New York to a celebrated residency in Provincetown, and his music has made an ideal soundtrack to the sunny season. Stay tuned for his upcoming ‘Clothes Back On’ to see how he enters the fall.
He perfected it without any practice, producing this delicious dish of fried green tomatoes, augmented by a drizzle of balsamic glaze, some burrata, a sprinkling of green onions and some tomato chutney. It was just as good as the original.
Doesn’t it sound strange? That happens with any word if you say it enough – it starts to sound strange and odd and you wonder how a word came to ever be in the first place – or maybe it’s just my mind reaching its long-predicted breaking point.
Anyway, our pot of papyrus, drainage holes mostly blocked for extra moisture, and which usually does quite well with the regular watering and feeding I give it, failed to astound as it has in previous years. Another disappointing result of this past summer’s waning charm.
Harsh necessity brought me to this gilded cage.
Born to higher things, here I droop my wings,
Singing of a sorrow nothing can assuage…
And yet of course I rather like to revel,
I have no strong objection to champagne,
My wardrobe is expensive as the devil,
Perhaps it is ignoble to complain…
Enough, enough of being basely tearful!
I’ll show my noble stuff by being bright and cheerful!
Pink reigned for the summer – in the face of all sorrow and tumult, we always had pink. Pink dresses, pink shirts, pink pants, pink curtains, pink towels, pink tablecloths, pink straws, pink pastries, pink jewelry, pink shoes, pink hats, pink fascinators, pink ruffles, pink frills, pink glitter…
Pearls and ruby rings…
Ah, how can worldly things take the place of honor lost?
Can they compensate for my fallen state,
Purchased as they were at such an awful cost?
Bracelets…lavalieres
Can they dry my tears?
Can they blind my eyes to shame?
Can the brightest brooch shield me from reproach?
Can the purest diamond purify my name?
Returning to the innocent beginning of our coquette summer makes me realize how much has actually happened over the past three months of the season. A banana tree has unfurled a dozen or so leaves. The cup plant has shot up, out, flowered, and gone to seed. It provides the finches with a current feast. The hydrangeas have had a rightly-renowned banner year after a mild winter. All the flower buds survived, so the show was bodacious and beautiful. And somehow, throughout its entirety, I never quite felt like part of it.
And yet of course these trinkets are endearing,
I’m oh, so glad my sapphire is a star,
I rather like a twenty-karat earring,
If I’m not pure, at least my jewels are!
Now, with summer’s closing act coming next weekend, and fall’s dramatic descent already in motion, I find myself trying to hang onto it a little longer, taking an extra stroll around the yard, sitting in the sunshine. Reconciling and returning to the frivolous finery in which it all began, the coquette theme offers a balmy escape, a way out of the ever-darkening world, even if it was all make-believe, even if it could never last.
Enough! Enough!
I’ll take their diamond necklace
And show my noble stuff
By being gay and reckless!
Let us have one final full weekend of coquette escapism before the official arrival of fall, and for this one I’ll even get up into a dress and Sunday hat and pearls. A boy shouldn’t go anywhere without a pearl necklace. The Sunday hat is really just for Sundays, or Kentucky Derbies, but it fits the finery of our coquette aesthetic for the moment, and in honor of summer magic it stays on. Frilly and fantastical, I’m seeing this summer theme through to the end, though in all honesty I’m rather over it. The sweetness has turned sour, which is the greatest risk to any act of coquetry.
A reprise, then, for this penultimate summer weekend, courtesy of Laufey, who provided much of the soundtrack for our coquette moments. This is ‘Bewitched’ again.
A bit of bewitchery bodes well for the transition into fall, as does a certain feminine energy – and all will be revealed in the months to come. For now, let’s let out a sigh of gratitude for the summer. It’s largely been good to us, even if we haven’t always been good in return. There were sunny and beautiful days where I just didn’t manage to make the most of it, choosing to stay indoors, to stay hidden, to stay in a stasis as much from grief as from healing. There were also new wounds that opened old ones just when I might have thought things were better. The conundrum of a coquette summer… the work of the coming fall.
The sun shines differently in September. It still warms the day, but its staying power has diminished. The earth is priming itself for the bigger chill on the way. I hope it takes its time, slowing advancing into coolness instead of taking some precipitous drop that kills our tender plants in one fell swoop. Maybe that’s the better way though – like jumping right into the deep end of the pool instead of wading slowly in. Rip that ridiculous cherry bandage right off with nary a flinch or flutter.
Our hanging ferns in front of the house have performed poorly this summer, putting on the worst show of any ferns I’ve ever hung there. Of course they happen to be the most prominent plants on view to the street, another one of life’s little fuck-overs. I’ll take them down right after I write this, and drop them into the dumpster. Beneath the veneer of a coquette summer, there is always an underlying ugliness, some bit of bitterness to poison the sweet. Now I’m already veering into fall, and we still have a glittering part two of this madness to post.
Banal fact: I’ve never seen any of the ‘Friday the 13th’ movies.
Seems a stupid thing to start now. Also, I always get confused between the hockey guy and the Mike Meyers guy – or are they the same dude? Was there ever a mash-up? How is Austin Powers tied into all of this? Don’t answer – I don’t care. Happy Friday the 13th.
Fierce as fuck, entrancing and exciting, and causing a glorious commotion all the way into the pop culture firmament, Chappell Roan earns this Dazzler of the Day. From the refreshing charm of debut album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” to the fabulously prickly way she’s been dealing with her insta-fame, Roan is the hottest pop star of the moment – and she’s got the quirky fashion sense to lead the way. Her album is my current soundtrack – and I’m far from alone. Check out her website here for upcoming tour dates.
While everyone else’s tomatoes went gangbusters this summer, our two pots of cherry tomatoes – usually very prolific as seen here – have produced about ten cherry tomatoes until this point. Now that we are on the verge of frost, they are beginning to put out fruit. Too little, too late – and a telling sign of how a summer that started out with such promise has turned to total shit.
There was once a time that people assumed tomatoes were poisonous because of their classification as part of the deadly nightshade family. I do so enjoy a plant that inspires fear in simpletons. Wish we had a bit more.
Fresh off his recent MTV Video Music Awards performance (didn’t even realize that the VMAs were still a thing until I saw some social media posts about it – and who scheduled it on 9/11 anyway?) Benson Boone earns his first Dazzler of the Day thanks to some riveting showmanship and a killer set of vocals. He’s currently touring all over the world, and has a charming website here for all that’s happening. One of his social bios simply proclaims he’s “just a happy guy writing sad songs” and that’s an envious place to be.
How the squirrels and chipmunks chew through the mealy, gritty fruit of the dogwood tree is beyond me, but as long as someone is getting sustenance out of them, I’m happy to see these beauties go to some use. A number of years ago I tried crafting a cocktail out of the dogwood fruit – heating and pulverizing and straining them into a semi-simple syrup (anything that involves an extra step of straining is not purely simple, hence the semi – and if you’re a regular here you probably enjoy a semi).
This is the next to last show of the season for the Chinese dogwood. These fruits will ripen into something that resembles a reddish cross between a strawberry and a cherry, dangling in pretty profusion until the rodents or birds or rainy winds pull them all down. It sets the stage for the final stunning moment – the colorful autumn foliage. It looks especially resplendent when backed by a falling sun.
Yesterday would have been Dad’s 94th birthday. I was up early, before I had to start the work day, so I sat alone at the dining room table and waited for some sign that he was near. The stillness and quiet were strangely overbearing. Nothing moved, nothing made a sound. Outside, the trees were absolutely stoic, and there wasn’t the slightest movement of air. No birds or rustling in the garden. The occasional falling of the seven sons’ flower tree blooms was the only thing in motion, and even their landing in the pool was silent. The fountain grass, the tips of which are usually waving even when there wasn’t a breeze, remained frozen as if in a still photo.
My Dad was often a quiet man. He could yell and scream and get riled up by the horse races he followed in the paper and on television, and he would happily regale dinner guests with stories boisterously punctuated by laughter that brought tears to his eyes, but the bulk of my time with my father was largely spent quietly sharing an observance of all around us, only occasionally partaking in the foolishness. There was a stoic calm in him that seemed both contemplative and cathartic, as if by his age he knew that things were no longer worth fussing about. For the last few years of his life, this was the state which Dad and I happily shared our time together.
On this morning, the second birthday of his that we are commemorating without him, I find solace in the absolute stillness around me. In this quiet, I still feel my father. In this calm, I know he is here.
If I could have my choice of one person’s voice to narrate my life’s story, I would choose Morgan Freeman. One of the most prolific and popular actors of the past half-century, Freeman’s Oscar-winning body of work includes one of my favorite movies of all-time: ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. He’s also played notable roles in works as varied as ‘Se7en’, ‘Bruce Almighty’, ‘Amistad’, ‘The Dark Knight’, and ‘Driving Miss Daisy’. Today he can add Dazzler of the Day to that list of impressive accomplishments.
It was always the goldenrod that signaled the impending end of summer when I was a kid. I’d wait and watch for its unremarkable, some might say weedy, foliage, followed by this late golden bloom. Unfairly maligned thanks to its alignment with the ragweed in the air at this time, goldenrod has a bad rap, even if its pollen isn’t the airborne type that ragweed sends up our noses. The showier blooms get all the blame and only some of the glory. We want things to sparkle and shine only as much as we want to bring them low.
