Lifestyle, fitness and wellness aficionado Sam Cushing heats up this frigid weekend kick-off with his first crowning as Dazzler of the Day. With a massive social media following (thanks to everything on display below) he’s also a talented pianist and composer, and an inspiration for everyone boldly following their own dreams and desires. Check out his website here for further illuminating motivation.
Pause for this moment.
Take a deep breath.
Slowly inhale…
and slowly exhale…
Repeat.
One breath at a time.
Winter was always the sad season, and as much as I have tried to learn to embrace it, it remains the season of somber sobriety. I’m not minding that as much this year. Finding the way to an acceptance of it is an important part of looking over the edge of middle age. If one’s life is divided into seasonal sections, mine is about to surrender summer to fall.
That is the only certain precursor to winter.
And so I hunker down, getting busy with the emotional tasks at hand, while outside the snow and wind rages, interspersed with brilliant bits of blue sky and white sun. Shadows elongate, yet so too does the daylight, growing a little longer with each passing week. Without hurry or rush, the days and weeks unfold as they will. With a deep breath, and a patient, measured exhalation, I lean into winter.
“Did you use some stainless steel appliance to gauge how you looked in that outfit this morning?”
File under ‘Things I’m not supposed to say to people at work.’
It is a double file.
The last few years have been difficult ones for my family, and the one person guiding and getting us through them intact has been my Mom. Today is her birthday, so this little post goes to honor her. Celebrating such love is one of the best things about this blog, and sharing it seems to be largely missing on the rest of the wretched internet. And so we offer gratitude and appreciation on this day for the woman who keeps our family together.
She moved into her new home last year, letting go of the house where so many childhood memories took place, and so many adult memories as well. I thought at first that I would miss the old house – it seemed such an indelible part of all those memories. I was thankful when my brother and his family simply switched homes and moved in, keeping it in the family. When we had Christmas Day dinner in the old house, however, I understood that things had changed, and it wasn’t a bad thing. I thought I might be sad, that pangs of our former lives there would come back up in ways that only served to remind us that such a time was over. I thought our connection to that house would only be painful now that so much had changed. My Mom knew better.
She said many months ago that she didn’t miss the old house. She missed the life she had there, and the memories she made during that time, but she didn’t miss the house. I wasn’t so sure until we returned there for Christmas, and I realized she was right. It wasn’t the house that had made those moments and years matter, it was Mom. And Dad. And my brother. And me. Our family is what made those memories mean so much, and it would have happened wherever we happened to be.
I feel that in Mom’s new home. There is a warmth and comfort and love that comes through, not because she has made it her own with key pieces of furniture and objects from our old house, but because she is there.
Home isn’t a place, it’s the people we love.
Happy birthday, Mom. Thanks for still being our home.
Some people get a little sad when taking down the holiday decor they’ve amassed and assembled in the spirit of the season. By this point in the year, I’m grateful and welcoming of the fresh start and clean slate that instantly presents itself upon removing all the Christmas decorations. In our Boston place, that means taking down this wall of curtains that served to make things a little more cozy during our holiday gatherings.
These colorful dividers created a little nook of a space between the living room and bedroom, right near the wooden, gas-lamp-bracketed wet bar and mirror, harkening to some lifetime and era long before my own. It lended an intimacy to the high-ceilings, and provided a little escapade for guests who wanted a quiet moment in semi-privacy. Such secrecy seems ideal for hushed holidays, but my mind is on spring, and as we approach that I want to open things back up again.
Do ignore my random blue sneaker. Real life has a way of sneaking into the most fantastical moments of imagination and whimsy.
There’s always an iced coffee on this emergency call box in Boston’s Back Bay Station. Without fail, no matter the time of year, one is here. Always.
While my favorite concerts by Madonna remain her Drowned World Tour and the Confessions Tour, her current Celebration Tour may rank as a tight number three, and the residual glow and high from that night carried me through the days in Boston that followed. Normally I’d have returned to work and real life the day after such a concert, falling as it did on a Tuesday night, but by some strange auspicious stroke of excessively indulgent planning, I’d taken off three days. Work has been so busy that if I didn’t get a break I might have broken. Sometimes we don’t see such things until we add some distance and then assess what we’re doing. Bottom line: this was a much-needed escapade in the city I know and love.
Boston was busy making its own sort of magic. After a brutal rainstorm event that almost took us out on the night of the Madonna show, only some wind and an occasional shower bothered the city the next day. Between the clouds, there were brilliant peeks of sun and blue sky, and the light painted shifting scenes throughout the afternoon.
Boston isn’t particularly renowned for its architecture but I find many of its buildings beautiful. Maybe that’s because it remains a home for me, and we always have a soft spot for home. On this blustery day, it retained that beauty, even as it tempered it with typical New England bite.
As the afternoon unfurled, dusk fell customarily early for this time of the year. January can be brutal here, however, and since we stayed above freezing it didn’t feel so bad. Still, once the light left the sky, I hurried back to the condo for warmth and coziness and a hot bath.
There’s no telling how precisely accurate this little meme is, but the general idea is good: the duration of daylight is slowly elongating with each passing day, and we are on the right track to spring. In a few short days, we’ll have finished up the first month of winter, meaning about 1/3 of this dismal season will be complete. That’s cause for this tiny thread of a celebration.
Joining our most recent Dazzler of the Day Jonathan Bailey, Noah J. Ricketts earns his first crowning as Dazzler thanks to his own turn on ‘Fellow Travelers’ as well as indelible appearances in ‘Summoning Sylvia’ and ‘American Gods’. He’s also tread the boards of Broadway in ‘Frozen’ and ‘Beautiful: The Carole King Musical’. The world eagerly awaits where his talents will take him next.
Apparently taking three days off from work means hundreds of e-mails and a catch-up period of a full week, as I’m still in the midst of digging out from the avalanche of last week, but it was all worth it for this. Now that most of us are returning to work and school, and the endless doldrums of winter spread out expansively before us, it’s a good time to reconnect with things that bring us calm and clarity. For me, that’s meditation.
The great Betty Buckley introduced me to the writings and teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh several years ago, and since then I’ve been an avid disciple, devouring his books and doing my best to incorporate his meditative methods into my own life. It has helped immensely, and on dour Tuesday mornings in the middle of January, I lean gratefully into being more mindful, less consumed by what may or may not happen, and wholly intent on being as present as possible.
Another way of looking at this is in the words of one of my favorite former retail managers, who often said this to me whenever I started spinning out of control: “Calm the fuck down, shit will get done.”
My previous and perceived pathology was such that I assumed everyone forgot about me the moment I left the room. A lot of atrocious behavior (and questionable outfits) could have been prevented had I realized that I’m one of those people whose absence from certain rooms is felt more keenly than my presence. And that’s a whole other pathology for a whole other post.
A captivating white suit seen around the world would have been enough to capture this coveted title of Dazzler of the Day, but Jonathan Bailey has a body of work culled from the last few years of his career that solidifies this current crowning. From taking on the risque business of charm and seduction at the heart of ‘Bridgerton‘ to the compelling dramatic soul of ‘Fellow Travelers’, Bailey has worked his magic on the screen, and looks poised to continue that enchantment with a turn in the upcoming movie adaptation of ‘Wicked’.
Madonna has been indulging in a bit of nostalgia on her current Celebration Tour (which I finally got the chance to attend, and it was everything I wanted it to be and more). I find myself in the same headspace of looking back, especially with recent reunions with old friends from many, many years ago. The older I get, the more that tends to happen, as the majority of my life begins to fade into the rear-view window of this vehicle called existence. A weighty statement that is best left in that faded view, along with this weekly recap.
It began with this bit of trash talk.
Silent snow, not at all secret snow.
My ass-crack deserves its own #TinyThreads post.
A glowing review of Madonna’s Celebration Tour – her greatest comeback thus far.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson walked so Jeremy Allen White could run.
Oscar Wilde is almost always accurate.
More of Jeremy Allen White in his underwear.
Nostalgia overload: old acquaintance, not forgot.
Dazzlers of the Day included Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Katie Phang, Issa Rae, Paul Giamatti, and Steven Romo.
When my friend LeeMichael proposed seeing Madonna’s Celebration Tour together, I hesitated. First, I wanted to be sure that Andy wasn’t interested in seeing it with me, as he is my husband and we’ve enjoyed seeing her together in the past, though I did get the feeling he was only humoring me much of the time. When he said he didn’t mind if I went with LeeMichael, we got the tickets and planned to attend.
The August dates originally scheduled for Madonna’s Boston shows were soon scrapped as she delayed due to her scary hospital stint, then rescheduled for this month. That allowed for a couple of dinners to plan wardrobe for our attendance. These were the things one did when you were ride-or-die Team Madonna. They were also the flimsy trappings of an excuse to have dinner with an old acquaintance who had somehow grown into an old friend after all our years together. We occupy unique places in each other’s lives; I don’t know anyone else with whom I shared a single date, proceeded to stalk, and then somehow persisted in winning over as a friend. (And I’m pretty sure he has not become as close to any of his former stalkers either.)
Our unique history, after that awkward beginning, in many respects started its friendship phase in 2001 when we saw each other in the sea of people that was exiting Madonna’s ‘Drowned World Tour’ – so our attendance at her Celebration tour decades later felt like a full circle moment (something we’d been rather adept at creating as evidenced by this ‘Sunset Boulevard’ recollection). We reconnected then and have somehow kept in touch with annual and semi-annual dinners and shows through the years – often at pivotal moments, such as just after he met the man who would become his husband, then right around the time of our respective weddings, and every few months to catch up on where our lives were at. We shared one dinner around the time when I had just stopped drinking, and at a time in life when I needed to be around people who were supportive and safe, he fulfilled that role.
My pessimism often gets the better of me, so whenever I send him a text out of the blue, I always expect him to decline and put it off, but he’s usually game for a night out. After knowing him for twenty-seven (eek!) years, some of them very difficult years, there is a new comfort in our friendship, one that wasn’t there before.
As he dropped me off after the show, ‘Crazy For You’ played in the car, and I think he said it was kind of fitting, given the crazy years that came before – and, finally, I could truly laugh at it – laugh, and let it go.
As I went to bed that night, I watched a bit of ‘Old Acquaintance’ – a Bette Davis film about a friendship that somehow survives a lifetime. The universe often winks like that when you need a little reassurance. 
