Known perhaps best for some indelible character parts, Paul Giamatti has recently been racking up the awards for his lead performance in one of best movies of the last year, ‘The Holdovers’. I first remember Giamatti on-screen when he shared a cigarette with Julia Roberts in the guilty-pleasure that was ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’. He made a similar subtle-scene-stealing show as the driver in ‘Saving Mr. Banks‘. After a career of fine work, it’s gratifying to see him earn a few more rewards, including this Dazzler of the Day honor.
Recent years have found me making the most of winter by embracing the concept of hygge – a Danish word and idea that loosely translates into the embrace of coziness and warmth in the simple joys that matter, especially when that involves sharing joy with family and friends. In my mind, it’s that cozy feeling produced when you step out of a hot shower in winter and into a plush robe, then pull on a pair of your fluffiest socks before snuggling into a favored nook on a couch beside a loved one. That’s a ridiculously specific description of a feeling of coziness, but it works for me. You might find hygge in the simple lighting of a candle on these dark winter nights, and a vase of evergreen sprigs seeing us through a snowy spell. Suzie finds it in listening to the Danish String Quartet, and there’s something to that if you’ll give them a listen.
Hygge has found its way into a number of posts here, and is a wonderful way to wind our path along winter. You are invited to explore more of it in the links that follow, and to make your own customs and habits – whatever gets you through the darker seasons.
Whenever I get bogged by the mundane details of life and the annoying minutiae of a troublesome moment, I move to any of the windows on the back-side of our home and look up to this evergreen in the distance. It must stand at around 100 feet tall, and be around 75 years old, give or take a couple of decades (the latter is most definitely a rough guesstimate). Its size and age immediately put things into perspective, and as I examine its snow-laden boughs I think of all the life it has sustained over its existence. You’ve probably seen this view before, as I often post it whenever there’s a need to be grounded.
When you think of everything that has happened in the last 75 years, this tree has stood through it all, unbothered and exceedingly unaffected by any of it. The only thing that may have troubled it is weather or disease, and neither looks to have scarred it in any way. It’s been putting forth pinecones for future trees ever since we’ve been here, and though they are largely raked away or pulled out of the manicured surroundings, its lineage could be easily continued if the neighbors allowed so.
A little over just half a year ago, Madonna was in the hospital and reportedly near the brink of death due to a bacterial infection that left her in the ICU and unconscious for several days. To think that this same woman would have opened such a spectacular show as ‘The Celebration Tour‘ four months after that brush with dying is the sort of commonplace superhuman power and determination that has defined Madonna for four unwavering decades. The journey of how she came to last is told on this tour, which somehow manages to encapsulate all those decades, all those hits, and all that controversy.
Her return to Boston was a long time coming, having had to cancel all the Boston stops of her last ‘Madame X‘ theater tour due to injury and then COVID. We were due for something special, and it came in the spot where she had previously been performing an acoustic version of disco classic ‘I Will Survive’. Boston got the premiere of an acoustic ‘Express Yourself’ which found the entire arena singing along with one of her greatest hits. It was a straight-forward reading in a production otherwise rife with theatrical bombast and effects, and pointed to something that naysayers have always discounted: Madonna comes with a surprising bit of substance, or she simply wouldn’t have lasted. The fortitude of that history is on full display every moment of the Celebration tour.
It opens simply enough, at roughly 9:50 (relatively early for Madonna) with Bob the Drag Queen casually milling about the crowd and asking people to take their seats, which immediately prompts the arena to fill to seeming capacity as Madonna appears on a rising, revolving platform in an elaborate kimono and bejeweled crown, a new interpolation of her ‘Nothing Really Matters‘ video and song from 1998’s ‘Ray of Light’ album – a bold, not-quite-a-proper-hit for the opening, and absolutely perfect for the true fan. This is but a visionary greeting, the lyrics referencing the spiritual over the physical, indicative perhaps of Madonna’s more contemplative view of her past.
She dives headfirst into those early days, and at one point in a surprisingly-emotional show she claims to be in the midst of a mini-nervous breakdown, getting choked up as she spoke with an earlier incarnation of herself from her days living in the Lower East Side. Amid classic performances of ‘Everybody‘, ‘Into the Groove‘, ‘Open Your Heart‘ and ‘Burning Up‘, she introduces the narrative conceit of the evening: previous versions of herself portrayed by her backing dancers in masks and the costume of the respective period. As she meets up with that early Madonna of her 80’s beginning, she hugs the younger version of herself, crying a bit as she offers words no one was there to offer at the time. It thrillingly sets the stage for the emotional heft of the night.
As her early 80’s carefree hey-day hits its climax, with a giddy rendition of ‘Holiday’ (masterfully melded with a snippet of ‘I Want Your Love’), the disco ball slows its spinning, gradually descending as her dancers fall one by one, until only one man is left, ultimately collapsing before Madonna takes off her Keith Haring coat and covers him. The arrival of the AIDS crisis informs a moving ‘Live to Tell’ which locates Madonna rising in a box that flies around the arena as large screens of all the friends she has lost to AIDS appear as so many ghosts. The haunting moment is accentuated as the images shift, evolving into multiple photos of more people lost to AIDS, multiplying to the point where they become an infinite checkerboard of all the lives snuffed out. Madonna knows this history as well as any gay man of a certain age, and it is easily the most powerful, and important, moment of the entire show.
From there, ‘Like A Prayer‘ is about the only thing that could simultaneously sustain the emotion while offering its own sort of healing in the one area which has always rescued Madonna: her music. Navigating a rotating carousel of masked dancers, she makes her way around one of her greatest songs, and the entire audience finds our own salvation in the only temple at which we have all collectively worshipped – the Church of Madonna.
The loose timeline shifts along to the early 90’s and Madonna’s iconic Blonde Ambition period, embodied by the totemic red-velvet bed, where Madonna joins her golden-cone-bra-clad self and indulges in the self-pleasure that caused such a commotion that first time around. Slinking her way through an orgy-fueled ‘Justify My Love‘ and a welcome bit of her ‘Fever‘ cover from the infamous ‘Erotica’ album, she remains as brazenly defiant as ever, gathering her topless female dancers to her side as she whips the group into a rousing version of the dance-floor-shredding ‘Hung Up‘. From the sultry shenanigans of ‘Erotica’ and her ‘Sex’ book period, to all the sexy winking of the ‘Like A Virgin‘ days, and all the sexual provocation which she exuberantly embraced and reflected throughout her career, it’s still telling that her greatest force remains in a simple dance song like ‘Hung Up’. The crowd feeds on it more than the visual feast that came just before – and after the release Madonna proverbially spanks herself with a gem from the ‘Erotica’ album, ‘Bad Girl‘, with piano accompaniment by her daughter Mercy.
Her daughter Esther spins some records for the ballroom portion of the evening, and does some fierce dance moves as a resplendent production of ‘Vogue’ finds Madonna enacting the gay-dance craze that she helped bring to the masses. Such cheeky fun is not without punishment, and for all the early 90’s madness that Madonna reveled in, she gets bound up by several police officers. Throughout the process she sings a bit of ‘Human Nature’ before being rescued by her latex-clad younger self.
That embrace of her former lives (or eras, as Madonna was the original shape-shifting eras girl) finds its most poignant turn as this version of her ‘Human Nature‘ video slowly unbinds her from the ties that the police (standing in for every oppressive entity) have put on her. Madonna sings a verse and chorus of ‘Crazy for You’, dancing with this version of herself in the aftermath of ‘Sex’ and ‘Erotica’, both embracing and forgiving that early 90’s period in one of the most moving moments of the evening. It’s not always easy to accept our past, even if it made us into who we are today; Madonna still proclaims to have absolutely no regrets, but I think she means she has come to a place of acceptance for everything she put herself through.
While I would have been thrilled with a song she has never sung before, say ‘Survival’, the words of ‘Die Another Day‘ might mean more to her, and it ushers in the next section, which features a focus on family and survival. It’s a striking shift and accurate evolution when one looks at how Madonna’s career and family life had progressed. By the mid-90’s, she was starting her own family, and the arrival of her children signaled a change.
In another startlingly confessional moment, she recounts those scary moments near death, and conjures her kids as part of what inspired her to keep going. She launches into a section of defiance that finds her performing with her son David on guitar through ‘Don’t Tell Me‘ and ‘Mother and Father‘ (one of the best cuts from her ‘American Life‘ album). As pictures of their respective parents appear on screen, Madonna and David sing together and seemingly find some sort of joint catharsis.
This particular evening felt even more like a family affair (sadly minus any ‘Keep It Together’ number) with Madonna mentioning that her very own sister Melanie was in the audience for this second Boston show. She referenced her children as a primary source of inspiration when she fought for her life in the hospital last summer. With that seminal event just a few months behind us, it’s amazing to see her dancing and thrilling like she always did, and if the moves are a bit more measured, they are also more meaningful. When she inserts that aforementioned ‘Express Yourself’ in place of what had been ‘I Will Survive’ (my sorry vertical video of that is here), it shows that Madonna is still evolving, still perfecting, still working things out. It what continues to make her so utterly fascinating.
The penultimate section of the show, a 1-2-3 knock-out of ‘Bedtime Story‘, ‘Ray of Light‘ and ‘Rain‘ is an exercise in entertainment show-womanship. It begins with Madonna in a brilliant mirrored catsuit and extra-long pin-straight blonde hair, rising on a box and imploring herself and all of us to get unconscious. With everything that has happened in the last year, it’s a chilling choice, and as the song concludes, and her floating box appears with her son, who gives her a theatrical blue tube of some presumably-life-giving elixir, she rises, literally, over all of us and transfixes with a devastatingly dare-defying ‘Ray of Light’ – proof that music has repeatedly saved her soul. The bonus of one of her best ballads ‘Rain’ from the well-represented ‘Erotica’ era offers a sort of musical resolution that’s been decades in the making.
The finale is a delirious all-too-quick mash-up of ‘Give Me All Your Luvin’ and its cheerleading chants, with ‘Bitch I’m Madonna’, which finally truly hits (after years of not quite connecting) as dancers in iconic Madonna fashion moments swirl and surround her. Some obligatory, but woefully-chopped, bits of ‘Celebration’ are thrown in almost as an after-thought (this was the ‘Celebration’ tour, right?) and the night ends a bit too soon as Madonna disappears behind a white veil that reunites her with her virgin days, now fully integrated into a frenzy of fun and acceptance. It’s almost as if she has reached the pinnacle of her career (again) and is simply reasserting that she knows better than anyone how to put on a show. Forty years into that journey, it’s a gift that she is still with us, and an honor to still be completely crazy for her.
We haven’t had much snow over the last couple of years, and that hasn’t bothered me. (I’m still smarting from a winter of 70-plus inches of snow that kept me from Boston for three months straight a number of years ago.) I don’t ski or snowboard – well, aside from that one time which took me an hour to get down the bunny slope while my brother and Suzie passed me at least three times.
Still, I have a soft spot for a little bit of snow, especially at the start of winter. For those of us who live in the Northeast, this is how life should be at this point in the year. If you don’t like it, move somewhere that better suits your climate preferences.
On the fallen mop-heads of an ‘Endless Summer’ hydrangea, winter dresses up what we thought autumn took away. That magic of snow is what makes it worth all the problematic aspects it presents worth the work. Winter is like that too, and in the last few years I’ve come to slowly appreciate and ultimately embrace its hold.
This is the time of the year when I begin the weekly pilgrimages to the local greenhouse in an effort to get out from beneath the dreary weight of winter. It’s not a fix-all, but it helps, and in early January every little bit of help counts. Such is the cheer that these pretty little kalanchoe blooms bring. It’s a bit early to jump to spring colors, so I’ll keep the thought until later.
I finally got around to seeing ‘Barbie‘ recently and one of my favorite Barbies ended up being President Barbie, as portrayed winningly by Issa Rae, who never met a character role she couldn’t completely command with her innate charm and talents. She is well-known for her YouTube series ‘Awkward Black Girl’ and writing the best-selling book ‘The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl’. She’s currently making the awards show rounds thank to her performance in ‘American Fiction’. With a full plate of projects ahead of her,she is that ultimate triumvirate of producer, writer and director (and let’s not take actor out of it because she absolutely illuminates whatever screen is lucky enough to have her on it). This marks her debut as Dazzler of the Day here – may it only be the start of future appearances.
According to my Mom, my Grandma’s favorite waltz was the ‘Blue Danube’. That makes sense, as she was always one to be thrilled by what thrilled others. For me, though, my grandmother’s waltz will always be the lesser-known and lesser-celebrated ‘Viennese Blood Waltz’, also by Johann Strauss, but not nearly as played as much as its blue cousin.
This was the song that sounded on my Grandmother’s music box clock; as a child I never realized how lovely it would have been to be awakened by a music box. I don’t know if Gram ever used it to wake up – she was always simply up in the morning, and when we were growing up I never, ever saw her sleep. She stayed up reading well beyond our bedtime, and was up early to say her prayers in the morning, often worrying her rosary beads before there was light in the sky, and always before me and my brother were awake.
In this waltz, I hear my grandmother, and am reminded of the happiest moments of my childhood ~ nights spent playing cards in her little room when she would visit our house, and weekends spent in Hoosick Falls when Mom would bring us for a visit.
In this waltz, I hear something else now that I am almost into my fifties, now that I understand a bit more of the world and the way time has its way with all of us. These days, this waltz reminds me that the grandmother I knew and adored was but a small part of the woman who raised my Mom, lost her husband to a heart attack, and then settled into a quiet life that led into the section that I inhabited with her. This waltz goes back years, long before I was born, long before my mother was born, to a time when Gram was a young woman, one of five children, and making her way into the world.
My Mom would often say that Gram always seemed old to her, even when she was young, but I had glimpses and hints of the life that Gram had, and I remember seeing a picture of her and her husband out on the town – Gram glammed up and smiling broadly at a cocktail table, sitting across from my Grandfather whom I would never meet, looking like some starlet that she used to describe to me and my brother as we drifted off to sleep in her care.
We know so little of each other, I think, even of those who matter the most to us. Every human carries such infinite mystery, such unknowable history. It’s a wonder we ever get over ourselves long enough to love someone else – and a marvelous and happy wonder at that.
If ever there was a month ripe and receptive to meditation, it is this one. January arrives and the best way of dealing with the post-holiday blues is to clean house and dive deeply into a meditation practice. Personally, I find it much easier to sit in still and quiet while the outside window reveals the gray and brown dreary landscape of winter as opposed to the vibrant verdant expanse of spring and summer. And so I sit, lotus-style, once a day, for about twenty minutes, slowing my breathing and entering a state of mindfulness.
My meditations most often occur after work, when I’m home, and the day begins to cross into the night. I like being in a meditative state when such darkness descends – it makes it easier to bear. There’s also something calming about it, the way the sky slowly and then quickly drains of its light and any color it might have conjured during the day. As the room dims, the candle becomes the central focus point, flickering its light and enveloping the surroundings with a gentle sense of warmth. It all conspires to further the meditative mode.
All such atmospheric conditions aside, it is not the setting or the scene that matters, as my eyes remain gently closed for most of my meditation. It is, first and foremost, the breathing that counts. Then it is the state of releasing my thoughts and making contact with the mindfulness that clues me into the present moment in heightened form. At the same time, I feel as though I have been taken out of the trappings of the daily grind, transported to a plane of peace and stillness, blessedly relieved of the worldly concerns of a day. It is here where the magic of meditation happens for me.
Accessing this space of blankness, where the mind has allowed all its worrisome thoughts – good and bad and everything in-between – to be recognized and then released, is the key to how meditation helps me beyond that particular moment. Inhabiting that mindful and yet beautifully empty place allows my mind and body to feel a sense of peace that it never gets to feel. It’s like the most exquisite, and healthy, drug trip, without any of the negative effects. Once I began to feel such release, I understood it was possible to access it at almost any time through being mindful. And so my practice extends beyond the twenty minutes, into the days and nights of a January where everything else feels dismal and depressing.
‘The Katie Phang Show’ moves to its new time slot – Saturdays at 12 PM EST on MSNBC starting January 13, and now feels like a fine time to crown Katie Phang as Dazzler of the Day. As a successful trial lawyer, she comes armed with more knowledge than the majority of news hosts these days, and offers a refreshingly honest take on news items, backed by facts and law – something many in the media seem to be dismissing as we teeter on the edge of destroying our democracy. We need voices like hers more than ever.
The rose has come to signify many things throughout history, and in my exceedingly short history here on earth it has been a source of multiple memories and inspirations. My very first rose memory was of our neighbors across the street, and their magnificent rose garden. It sat formally behind a meticulously-manicured hedge of privet, hidden from the distant road, and backed by a tall row of arborvitae. One side was walled by the golden brick of their garage, and the other was more naturally bordered by shrubs and trees. Inside it felt like a little secluded garden room, and it was here where various roses bloomed, centered by a magnificent old-fashioned shrub rose, with single pink blooms that appeared in profuse fashion to make up for their gorgeous simplicity.
From there, the memory shifts to when I was a little older, and I’d convinced my parents to purchase a collection of Jackson & Perkins roses, which arrived in frightening barefoot form, their bulky crowns still caked with a bit of mud, their branches thick and ready to swell with growth. I made the mistake of soaking them in my parents’ bathtub, which quickly lined itself with a thick coating of dirt and muddy water. No one was thrilled with that, but I was sure that the show I was planning for the front and side garden would make up for that.
When only two red bushes deigned to bloom later that season, my heart sank. Having followed all the planting directions, I was dismayed to find them underperforming, a lesson in location as well as the whims of certain summer seasons in upstate New York.
I’d veered away from them after that, until I met Andy, who grew roses in his backyard like some magical prince. His living room, where he would sit in quiet contemplation late at night, usually held a single rose in a bud vase beside his favored chair, brought me back to the magic of roses. His Mom grew them as well, and I watched and learned his tips for dealing with blackspot and less-than-prolific bloomers.
When we moved into out current home, we hastened to put in a few roses where we had the space and sun, but lacking in regular circulation during hot and humid summers, our tea hybrids simply didn’t thrive. Instead, we found a climber and some shrub roses to make up for them. Roses will not grow where they don’t wish to grow, and there’s no coaxing them into it. I learned to appreciate that lesson after years of pretending it wasn’t so.
These days, we mostly enjoy our roses from the florist’s shop, where we can pick and choose and guarantee a bold bouquet of blooms at any time of the year. The last few days I’ve also been favoring my rose-scented frags in an effort to conjure some notion of summer, even if it’s just in my head and through my nose. ‘Rose & Cuir’ by Frederic Malle is a happy reminder of one of the last winters we had with Dad – I wore it to their house while I spent a day with him, and it remains a giddy memory.
Fresh off a Golden Globe win for her transcendent performance in one of my favorite movies of the previous year, ‘The Holdovers’, Da’Vine Joy Randolph earns her first Dazzler of the Day. I still remember her scene-stealing turn in the guilty holiday pleasure that is ‘Office Christmas Party’, but ‘The Holdovers’ shows what she can really do.
