Category Archives: General

Truth be told, I’m not a big fan of this penstemon plant that I put into the perennial bed last year. I was much more looking forward to the coreopsis that was next to it, but of course that one didn’t make it through the winter, and so we are left with this straggly thing that looks better in photos than it does in real life. If you examine it closely, you can see its messy nature: the faded flowers stick to the same stem on which new blooms are borne, lending it an unkempt feel. I’m a notorious Virgo, and that’s extremely troublesome to me.

Less troublesome, and the reason why I haven’t excised it to the hidden side yard yet, is the coloring. It’s a gorgeous hue somewhere between fuchsia and purple, and it gets set off brilliantly by a backing of lady ferns currently in their early-season chartreuse shading. That combination alone sets off fireworks, and saved this little penstemon for the moment.

(Word of warning: I’m not promising anything when the flowers fade for good, so enjoy this moment while it lasts.)

All I wanted was some peach ice cream. Chasing after a childhood memory that probably never even happened, Suzie and I were with Chris on a hot summer day in Central Park. We’d scoured a nearby Whole Foods Market for a carton of peach ice cream, finding nothing but frozen yogurt which is most definitely NOT an acceptable substitute for ice cream. Chris looked quickly online and said there was talk of peach ice cream in the Chinatown area, but it was too hot to move from our rock.

We sat on a large piece of native stone, something that had been here before the city went up all around it, something that would likely remain after it fell. The day was sweltering, but in the shade of a few plane trees and the company of a couple of close friends it was all bearable. It might have even been beautiful. If only we’d found the peach ice cream.

The original memory, sketchy and problematic as it may be, was of a restaurant in New York City – something like Serendipity. We couldn’t even have been teenagers yet, as Suzie and I were traveling with our Moms. We had been in town for a couple of plays – ‘Lost in Yonkers’ and ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ – and were finding a brief respite from the pounding heat of a New York sidewalk in the middle of the day. We had our lunch while whimsical lamp fixtures fascinated from the ceiling. When it came time for dessert I played it safe and ordered a hot fudge sundae or something similarly plain. Suzie ordered a bowl of peach ice cream. It was the prettiest, most luscious-looking dish. Peaches dotted the creamy mound of ice, wonderfully crunchy in frozen form in the spoonful that Suzie offered me. A perfect treat for a hot day. It was a summer memory made instantly, one that I have held onto and probably morphed into some more than it ever was, especially seeing as how Suzie doesn’t even recall it happening. But I know it did. The details may have been different, but that bowl of peach ice cream was real. To this day, it symbolizes childhood, summer and New York City all at once.

And so we found ourselves, years later, sitting on that Central Park rock and dreamily contemplating an elusive bowl of peach ice cream, making a new summer memory while simply passing a hot, sunny day.

Andy’s Dad passed away one year ago today, and the weather of this afternoon seems to match the mood: ambivalent, cloudy, peaks of sunshine, and dramatic winds. Dark patches of sky threatened to cry down upon us, but for the most part remained peaceful. The pounding thunder of last night has been replaced by something calmer.

In the same way that his Mom’s passing is now a part of the early holiday season, his Dad has become part of our early summer remembrances – not only because of Father’s Day, but because his birthday falls right now as well. It is a bittersweet time of the year, one that completes a poetic full-circle of life.

It’s still too soon for his memory to be much more than sad, but as the years pass I hope we can move to happier reminiscences, and that June will be a time to celebrate and honor everything he did as a father. For now, we mostly mourn, and miss the guy who brought his family such fun and amusement.

When there are rainy summer days, or mosquito-infested summer nights, I retreat to the basement, where there’s a new sofa, a television that always has lots of trash playing, and a pristine desk for prime project development. As we get ready for our summer hiatus, this is where I’ll be working on some new things, and when we return in the fall this site will (hopefully) reap the fruits of that labor. As much as I may love summer, there are always those moments when one needs a respite from all the heat and haze. The cool below-ground calm of the cellar provides just such an oasis.

These little pockets of space are important during the summer months, and I find myself seeking them out when I’m in Boston or New York. It’s not just the place itself either, it’s the frame of mind. Summer, the season that’s supposed to be such an escape, has its confines as well.

Whether it’s a stifling heat-wave or a drought that devours the garden, there are stretches when relief is not at hand. A line of summer storms that hits every weekend is equally mentally debilitating, when the world refuses to grant us a break. Summer cuts both ways.

I’ll put on ‘Gosford Park’ or a black-and-white oldie like ‘The Women’ – each lends comfort to a gray or sickly-hot day in their own way – and I’ll languidly lounge in some ridiculous robe and a pair of underwear. If I had children (God forbid) this would be the state in which they’d be mortified to show their father off to their friends. Thankfully, we remain happily unburdened by children, so there’s no danger posed to anyone other than a wayward Jehovah’s Witness that dares to ring our bell.

Moments of respite and underground escapes – these cool jewels keep my mind mentally collected in a season hellbent on making us all loopy. Not that I’d have it any other way; the shackles of winter leave scars that run deeper than summer’s brief lapses in loveliness.

The high from a glorious weekend in New York City is just starting to wear off, so let’s go back and do this week all over again…

It began with the planning, and trying on a new Kimpton Hotel. 

A summer treat: Prosecco and cherries. 

Pretty in pink.

A new Madonna Timeline: Cry Baby.

Preparing for the brilliance of Betty Buckley.

Underneath the dogwood tree.

Bringing Suzie home: a birthday post. 

The sweetly-scented Korean lilac.

Hunks of the Day included Roger Frampton and Kyle Andrew.

Follow the pink-petaled road!

A summer fragrance. 

My most favorite moment in quite some time: seeing Betty Buckley live at Joe’s Pub. 

And one more time: Fuck Trump. 

Two words.

Two words I am loathe to use.

Two words that hold power and meaning, no matter how awful.

Two words that, when put together, are going to cause a lot of trouble.

Two words that Robert DeNiro said on last night’s Tony Awards:

Fuck Trump.

And I couldn’t agree more.

It’s time.

It’s time to resist everything to do with Donald Trump.

It’s time to stop all that he’s trying to do. There are no more passes to be given. There are no more opportunities to meet him halfway. He has burned all those bridges, and now he’s burning our standing in the world.

He has endangered our citizens, our country, and our earth with his utter ineptitude at being President. It wasn’t enough that he lost the popular vote, that he gleefully welcomed intrusion by Russia in the election, in the e-mails, in all the things we don’t even know about yet, he then had to take the vaunted office of President – an office once respected and honored the entire world over – and burn it to the ground. He’s destroying our economy and bankrupting America like he’s done with all his companies. Our deficit is the largest it has ever been. He’s stoking division and inciting hatred among our people. He is morally corrupt, mean, petty, and abusive.

What’s worse is that we have let it happen.

And we continue to let it happen.

It should have been stopped in the Republican primaries.

It should have been stopped in the general election.

It should have been stopped every day he has occupied that office.

But it hasn’t been.

The only way to do that is to resist everything Trump. The media needs to stop writing him free passes. The GOP needs to stop being silently complicit in what he has done and stop their support. The Democrats need to stop playing the traditional political game and realize he will never play fair. The American people need to stop excusing and normalizing what he has done.

We all must stop him at every turn.

It’s the only way.

This is how you deal with a dictator.

And so I say, “Fuck you, Donald Trump.”

Fuck you for all the evil you have unleashed in our country and in the world.

Fuck you for all the hate you have condoned, promoted and released.

Fuck you for all your lies, your hypocrisy, your racism, your intolerance, and your ignorance.

Fuck you for defiling the office of the President and making posts like this necessary.

Fuck Trump.

A path is the promise of possibility.

A path of pink petals is the promise of possibility draped in prettiness and enchantment.

I will always choose the option of pretty if ever it’s available.

Here, our Kwanzan cherry has shed its flower petals in one fell swoop of a windy day.

What makes it all the more magical is its fleeting nature.

This scene lasted but for a few hours at the most.

After that, it was wrecked by more powerful wind gusts, battered by falling rain pellets, and ultimately shriveled in the return of the sun.

Only the memory, and these photos, remain.

A little bit of inspiration is left too, in the way that the world sometimes leaves things when it takes something away.

Before the summer, and often during, rain is what keeps the gardens and the lawns and the trees alive. We do not mourn it or curse it just yet. Our summer has not yet begun. On with the last week…

A bouquet of lily of the valley. 

Let the pride parties begin.

May departs in a flurry of petals. 

Theater review: a brilliant production of ‘The Boys in the Band’.

The magnificent Betty Buckley.

Following the wisdom of Coco Chanel. 

An enchanting find: Jack-in-the-pulpit.

A little bloom in a hue of blue. 

Your next must-read book: ‘The Summer That Melted Everything’. 

What is the summer movie of 2018?

A quick pasta dinner idea. 

Hunks of the day included Igor Kolomiyets, Zachary Quinto, Sam Hunt and Dan Slater.

What is this summer’s popcorn movie? I’ve been out of the loop and ignoring the pop culture landscape of late. I think ‘Infinity War’ came too soon to be a proper summer movie. I’m looking for the next sleeper hit – like ‘The Others’ or some similar, off-kilter fare. Of course, I’m also willing to make-do with the return of Jurassic World, but the previews look too cheesy to be any good. (A dinosaur at the foot of a child’s bed? There’s just so much belief I can suspend.) 

I’m looking for something new…

I didn’t mean to come upon them. That’s always when you find the best things. They were huddled together in a little clump, rising out of the brown expanse of a leaf-littered forest floor. My eyes picked them out of the forest because back then I could do such things. A single lobelia in a mile-wide meadow was the one thing I would see; a lone lupine on the side of the Thruway as we sped by at 60 miles per hour stuck out like a sore thumb. I’m digressing, moving further away from the memory I want to record here.

It was early June. The end of the school year was upon us, which meant that final exams were at hand too. In those days I didn’t stress much about final exams. If you paid attention and did your work during the year, what more could you do? I usually did well on them. Still, the older I got, the less I seemed to retain, so a look-back was a good idea, even as it pained me. Studying notebooks from the entire year is a big chore, and there’s a point when you can’t do it anymore, when your brain is going to hold all that it’s going to hold, a saturation point that simply won’t allow anything else inside. When I hit that point I stopped and looked out at what remained of the day.

The sun was still slanting through the trees behind our house. It was my favorite time to be out walking in the woods. I hurried down the bank, past the emerging patches of Japanese knotweed, then across a street to another wooded area, up that bank, then down into a slight ravine.

There, in the belly of the forest, in the midst of all the fallen oak leaves, was a nice-sized clump of jack-in-the-pulpit plants. They were part of my childhood lore, when Suzie’s family had them growing happily in front of their house. Each summer I’d study them, fascinated as much by their form as for their endangered status. There were even whispers that they had spread to the point that someone had dug a bunch out and threw them down the bank behind the house.

Now, in the wild, was a tiny collection of them, happily unnoticed by most eyes. I was grateful that I happened upon them. Given their endangered status at the time, I left them alone, content to keep the secret of their location while enjoying the visage they made against the otherwise brown forest floor. It was the perfect study break. Nothing clears the head as well as a brush with the sublime.

The jack-in-the-pulpit plant is a fascinating woodland native. It sends up spikes that unfurl into handsome three-segmented leaves, followed by the ‘flower’ which is a hooded spathe enclosing the ‘jack’ in a cloak of green. If left alone, it will develop a stalk of bright red berries. The specimen shown here was purchased on a whim, in one of those mass-produced plastic bags that contains a sad little dried-up root or rhizome that rarely if ever comes back to life, so I planted it in a shady nook and promptly forgot about it. Other plants took over; a carpet of sweet woodruff, a lacy dicentra, and a hellebore stole the focus, and so the unobtrusive leaves went unnoticed. A couple of years later the spikes emerged and I was pleasantly reminded that it was there. Now it’s a sight to which I eagerly look forward, coming as it does with such pleasant early-summer memories.

The legendary Coco Chanel had a sage pearl of dressing wisdom: take off the last thing you put on. When heading out for a dressy event, I follow this advice faithfully. In my case, most of my last-minute additions are made in a final moment of insecurity, when in the doubt and excitement of that moment I scramble for one extra bit of sparkle. Taking off that final piece has saved me countless embarrassing get-ups.

For instance, the silly necklace seen here, in all its frivolous glory, was a last-minute addition to a floral suit jacket that was, in itself, more than enough. (Some would consider it too much.) I clasped it, felt the heaviness around my neck, and on the way out heard the voice of Ms. Chanel whispering her words of wisdom. I quickly removed it and hung it around a doorknob for another day. And it worked out splendidly. The jacket was enough.

As in so many other aspects of life, sometimes less is more; elegance is a result of discerned and disciplined editing. Knowing when to stop is an art form of its own.

The unofficial start of the summer season is upon us, and with it the pleasures of the pool extend to the blog. As a Korean lilac spreads its sweet perfume poolside, and a single Rosa rugosa bloom draws focus among the fresh green, I paddle peacefully and pause in the day. A look back at the week that came before…

It began with my review of ‘Dear Even Hansen’ – a show you must see. 

Sky, moon and star.

Praying she makes it…

There is beauty in downtown Albany. 

I caught this Lyft driver texting while driving. 

A little bauble can make a big difference.

Who wants a break this summer?

Zac Efron filling out a patriotic Speedo. 

Virtual Ogunquit. 

I had a dream about Cher.

Hunks of the Day included Ben Platt, Josh Brolin, Troy Pes and Lachlan Carter.

Who doesn’t love Cher? At one point or another we have all enjoyed one of her songs, one of her movies, or one of her scathing tweets. Personally, I’ve done all three, multiple times. She’s one of those pop culture constants that has nothing left to prove but still manages to make a splash or marker in each of the last five decades. Pretty impressive body of work.

As much as I adore her, I’ve never dreamt about her until last week. It was a remarkably happy dream (most of mine are not). We were in the audience watching Bette Midler in ‘Hello Dolly!’ – don’t ask how we got tickets, or how I happened to be seated next to Cher, but there we were. Strangely, it was Cher who donned the traditional Dolly Levi garb – big feathered hat, tight bodice, flaming red velvet dress – and I was so star-struck by her and her proximity to me that I babbled some nonsense on how big an inspiration she has always been. She seemed touched by my genuine fandom, and grabbed my arm, pulling me through time and space as can only happen in a dream, and suddenly we were inside her beach-house.

A couple of younger guys, who seemed to be transient son figures with their own rooms and section of the house, looked at me warily, annoyed that I had come. Cher was suddenly missing, so I walked around alone, looking out all the windows at where the house was situated on the beach so I could locate it the next day and tell all my friends I had been in Cher’s house.

Eventually she came back, in more casual garb, her dark hair down in loose waves, running a little longer than shoulder-length. A good look for her. I told her how beautiful her house was and she beamed, joining me in looking out at the beach. It was night, but we knew the ocean was there. All we could see was the sand in the immediate house light. What was beyond extended into darkness. It would be brilliant during the day.

She took me on a quick tour of other rooms, but my eyes stayed on the windows, fixated on the beach. I tried voicing my lifelong adoration for her, which I was certain she’d heard a million times before. Still, we each want to connect to our celebrities, to make it known how much they really meant to us, how long and how hard we have loved them. She was gracious, and seemed genuinely touched. I want to believe that. And I wanted to believe the dream.

A fallen bottle of Tylenol in the kitchen woke me to Andy’s late-night maneuvers, and the dream dissipated into darkness.

In anticipation of summer and patriotism, here is Zac Efron in his Freedom Speedo. Mr. Efron is no stranger to being an American hero, as evidenced by similar Speedo posts here and here. And then there’s the All-American act of getting totally starkers for the pleasure of his fans, as he did here and here.