I'ts So Gorgeous In My Hood~~

...and I thought I wanted to move downtown to be closer to work...but look at that lovely dusting of snow and the ole Humber Bridge...

I've changed my mind. I think I've put down very deep roots.

CAKE BEAUTY PRODUCTS

Well...let it be known I'm a huge fan. I happened to come across the Cake Girls where my office is housed in Toronto and since, we've become great friends. Please don't think that my love of their body products has anything to do with my loving the gals. I was a fan before I really got to know them. They are so enthusiastic that their joy is absolutely contagious. And who could forget their Fab PinkParty in the Distillery District? Along with Foxy jewelry, the Cake gals offered their stuff at an outrageous discount. So much fun to see all the screeching women diving into bins of fab jewels and bubbling over with disbelief over the Calvin Klein gifts that came with every purchase.

The delightful products were developed by Heather Reiser, a definite genius in my estimation, in her kitchen several years ago.
I use their SWEET CHEEKS Better Body Rub and my skin has never been smoother, healthier or happier.

There are some terrific deals for Christmas and I highly recommend you have a gander. They also have a big surprise up their sleeves in the New Year. If you're ever in SEPHORA, do check out the entire Cake line. It is available in SEPHORA world-wide!

For more information: www.cakebeauty.com

The Romance of Montgomery, Alabama

It is where author, F.Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, infamous southern belle, at a Country Club dance in the summer of 1918. Their fantasies were completely matched and a tempestuous marriage followed.

Long before Scott made her a legend, Zelda was already a celebrity in not only Montgomery, but Georgia! Young men paid homage to her and fought battles for her behind the Ole Ship Church on Holcombe Ave. Just being in her social circle gave them status.

Most Zelda biographers do not emphasize her deep southern roots and do not understand her romance with her home town. Youth and close proximity to death (due to the Civil War), and the coziness of the cocoon her family enveloped her in, protected her from life's travails. The effect of geography on love is featured prominently in her short story, Southern Girl and Scott understood her conflict somewhat when he wrote, The Ice Palace.

Apparently, most southerners do not like to be transported. Writer Eudora Welty continued to live in her Jackson, Mississippi childhood home at the height of her fame. She liked her postage stamp-sized world and found something fascinating in it each day of her life.

I believe that Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald did not fare too well leaving her environs for the world stage. She was a natural person, with a love of nature and a fragility that was misunderstood in the North.

I'm heading down south to Dixie, Hurrah! Hurrah! That is, if I can cajole my partner in crime to veer 1,000 kilometres off the beaten path. I'm off to Florida but hope to spend some time in Montgomery, Alabama, which should be in full spring bloom. I want to see the Kiss-Me-At-The Gate and Cape Jasmine, and while I'm there I will take magnolia petals and write love notes to my beau on them with a pin. The petals will wilt somewhat and the messages will turn up in brown. Flowers abound in my flawed southern gothic novel so I 'spose I'll work on that a bit.


I wish I was in Dixie, hooray! hooray!
In Dixie Land I'll take my stand
to live and die in Dixie,
Away, away, away down south in Dixie,
Away, away, away down south in Dixie

And I've been dreaming of:

Baked Chicken Salisbury Steak Barbecue Pork Fried Chicken* Steak & Gravy Chicken & Dumplings Pork Chop Casserole
Fried Chicken* Turkey & Dressing Baked Ham Roast Beef Meat Loaf Fried Pork Steak Barbecue Pork Fried Fish Collards
Steamed Rice Field Peas Mashed Potatoes Yams Fried Corn Green Limas Black Eyed Peas Scalloped Potatoes Collards
Broccoli Casserole Macaroni & Cheese Squash Casserole Smothered Cabbage Scalloped Potatoes Rutabagas Fried Green Tomatoes Macaroni & Cheese Potato Salad Lemon Meringue Pie Coconut Cake Chocolate Pudding Raisin Bread Pudding Pound Cake Banana Pudding Sweet Potato Pie Peach Cobbler German Chocolate CakeApple Cobbler Red Velvet Cake Strawberry Pie
Apple Cobbler Strawberry Short Cake

This is how I went from a size zero to a size six in less than a few months in 2004. I'M NOT KIDDING!

DIXIE COUNTDOWN: 4 days

Gerald & Sara Murphy- Boomers with Zip!

Gerald and Sara Murphy took Paris by storm in the 1920’s, inserting themselves into the avant-garde circles of dance, music, and art. They also tried to make art out of their own lives. They embodied a predominant theme of the 1920’s: life as one would like it to be versus life as it is.


With my obsession of Paris in the 1920’s going full steam ahead, I recently ordered “Making it New: The Art and Style of Sara & Gerald Murphy” from Chapters/Indigo. The book comes on the heels of a Murphy Exhibit that is currently taking place at Yale University.

I’d like to preface that I really wanted to see the exhibit firsthand, but being unable to for several reasons, the book based on it had to suffice. It did not disappoint. It is multi-media and contains a wonderful collection of essays that examine through images and text the artistic life and style of the famous “Murphy’s”. The book delighted me to no end, to the point where I’ve reread it several times in a few weeks. Like eating a box of chocolates, I ate all of them wishing that I’d saved some for later.

The world the couple inhabited as expatriates in France included writers Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, John Dos Passos and Dorothy Parker. They also communed with artists Picasso, Leger, Man Ray and Cole Porter. Both Murphy’s painted sets for the Ballet Russes until Gerald, walking down the rue de la Boetie, saw in the window of a gallery, pictures of Picasso and Braque and Juan Gris. Astounded by their paintings, and never having seen modern paintings, he immediately turned to his wife Sara and said, “If this is painting, then this is what I want to do.” Today, Murphy’s paintings are in the Museum of Modern Art.

It was through Cole Porter that Sara & Gerald Murphy discovered the French Riviera well before the Cote d’Azure became a Mecca for the glitterati. They were also the first to embrace modern architecture with their sparsely decorated Moorish home, Villa America, in Antibes, the first of its kind to feature a rooftop sundeck for sunbathing.

The Murphy’s were so intimately entwined and enchanted with each other that their friends referred to them as “the Murphy’s” rather than just Sara or Gerald. It is interesting to discover that during their heyday in the mid-nineteen twenties they were already well into middle age. I was struck that these artistic pioneers were the first Boomers with zip!

After the tragic deaths of their two sons, Sara & Gerald put all of their efforts into recreating a new life with several beautiful homes they began to renovate. The first, Cheer Hall in Sneden’s Landing and later, Swan Cove in East Hampton, New York. These divine homes, in particular Cheer Hall on the Hudson, were outfitted according to historic research meticulously and diligently uncovered by Gerald. Sara tended to her gardens in order to give her life some beauty and meaning as she coped with her grief. In a letter dated to his wife in 1936, Gerald wrote:

“Outside of a man and a woman, and children, and a house, and a garden—there’s nothing much.”


Inventing a beautiful life in the face of tragedy, is without doubt a current Boomer philosophy, but Gerald Murphy articulated it. He was fond of saying, “As we grow older we must guard against a feeling of lowered consequence.” How many of us are facing this, with personal losses and a need to bring beauty and gentleness into our lives. Reading the Murphy story is a reminder of how to live well and elegantly with diminished circumstances.

In an essay from “The Making of Style”, Linda Patterson Miller brilliantly points out that at first, Fitzgerald’s portrait of Dick Diver in his novel Tender Is the Night” irked Murphy. He felt Fitzgerald didn’t get it right. However, in its anticipation of life’s complications smothering a dream, Gerald fully realized how Fitzgerald discovered, with awful clarity, the prominent theme of his and Sara’s real-life story. He told Fitzgerald in 1935:

“You are the only person to whom I can ever tell the bleak truth of what I feel…I know now that what you said in Tender is the Night is true. Only the invented part of our life- the unreal part- has had any scheme any beauty.”

The Murphy’s are the precursors of the Boomer concept of living well in the face of adversity. I highly recommend this book as a shining example to those of us who are aging and are feeling of “lowered consequence”. The Murphy life story points out that the boat can sail again, albeit in a different direction and can carry us to a different and perhaps, serene Port.

Upon Reading M.F.K. Fisher

From: The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher

"The prettifiers of human passion choose to think that a man who has just watched his true love die is lifted above such ugly things as food, that he is exalted by his grief, that his mind dwells exclusively on thoughts of eternity and the hereafter...the truth is that most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers; they want a steak. Preferably they need it rare, grilled, heavily salted, for that way it is most easily digested, and most quickly turned into the glandular whip their tired adrenals cry for...

Underneath the anguish of death and pain and ugliness are the facts of hunger and unquenchable life, shining, peaceful. It is as if our bodies, wiser than we who wear them, call out for encouragement, strength and, in spite of us and of the patterns of proper behaviour we have learned, compel us to answer, and to eat."



So..I have finished reading all of M.F.K. Fisher's works and have never read anything more lucent. However, in trying to find anything personal about her I've come to the conclusion that she was in fact evasive if not vague about what she has written. It ocurred to me that this is because it is in the past. She never read reviews, she rarely rewrote, and never reread finished work.

In my obsessive research I learned that when a psychoanalyst friend suggested that she look at her past work, Fisher felt sick. Why?

Judith Jones, Mrs. Fisher's editor at Knopf, who coped with her idiosyncrasies said, "she simply sets very high standards. She is a perfectionist, with great modesty and an old-fashioned sense of propriety."

M.F.K. said, "Well, I get so self-critical, I get sick. I think, I have to pull this thing back, but I can't; it is over. Writing is the only thing I know how to do, the only thing that makes me very happy. I write all the time--my house is bulging with things that will never be printed If we survive another fifty years, these pieces might have some value--they might not. I don't care. I really don't care."

There was something about reading this quote this weekend that completely freed me up to the point of feeling absolutely reckless. Isn't that great?

Then there's this:

"I have known a lot of writers," she wrote, "and have always been basically amused by their frantic insistence on being WRITERS."

The simplicity of that sentence. The artfulness of its construction. Great art comes from indirection.

Read "How to Cook a Wolf" or my absolute favorite, "The Gastronomical Me". What porn is to some people, Fisher's work is to me.

A Forgotten Stetl

My latest project has been to recreate the town Antos, (Antosia), Poland, where my mother, Rose, was taken by the Russians to Siberia in 1939. It has been all but forgotten, along with its townfolk.

My mother's maiden name was Czyzyk (Sparrow). When she was fifteen years old she married Stanislas Pienonzek. I recently found out that a Piotr Pienonzek is one of the last of that family line to still live in Antosia, which is now considered part of the Ukraine in the Brodsky Oblast.

I have been visiting my mother on many nights to ask her about the town--dilligently working on a street map of it. I have had my mother recall all the townspeople's names and where they lived. Sometimes the conversations of lost neighbors and childhood memories have made us laugh and at other times It's been quite painful. I believe that my hard-copy of the street map is sodden with my mother's tears. I'm posting it for the benefit of other people of my generation who have family from Antosia. Some may be looking for Kolonia Antos, the name the Poles gave it.

In its heyday, Antos was a verdant and fecund place agriculturally with the land given to men who had fought during World War I. It was the way the Polish government thanked its returning soldiers. Unfortunately my grandfather came back with a bullet lodged in his skull and my grandmother worked the land on her own. How hard it must have been seeing as she was pregnant with my mother...


My grandfather died before my mother was born and is buried in Leszniow on the grounds of a Polish chapel that is being reconsecrated this June 2008. I'd like to put flowers on his grave and feel a huge desire to see and know where my people come from. It's not really desire but a yearning. In Polish we have a word for it. It describes a bittersweet feeling of sorrow. It is called "Zal".