Everyone likes shapes. That’s Grandma Moses, by the way.
I’m in Cleveland at the Original Sewing and Quilt Expo show. I’ll be teaching today; tomorrow, I’ll teach again and then give a lecture. If you’re in the state of Ohio, you should do the following immediately:
1. Eat a buckeye
The candy, I mean! Not the sports fan, tree, chicken, or passenger train that also use the term “buckeye.” Eating a passenger train… What’s wrong with you??
2. Drive to the OSQE show.
It’s at the I-X Center. I don’t know what I-X is for, but is there any better place for us all to find out than in the actual I-X Center? Clearly, there is not.
3. Come find me!
I’m wearing pants, shoes, and a top. And earrings. And a necklace. And bra and underwear, naturally, and I’m deodorized and flossed. Can’t miss me. Shouldn’t miss me, really. We can rap about the tip sheet up there. It’s full of good information for beginner quilters of all ages and stages.
4. Gimme one of those buckeyes.
I smell peanut butter on you. You’re holding out. C’mon, man, hurry up… No, just do it quick! Just be cool! Aright, aright. Now we’re talkin’… Mmmm…
In the most recent Neiman Marcus catalog, a Scalamandre bonanza.
See that Scalamandre red wallpaper with the zebras?? Yeah, I see it too! Every day! In my bathroom!
Looks like I was a touch ahead of the crowd on the Scalamandre zebra wallpaper, friends. Neiman Marcus has licensed the print. Now, a person can get pillows and dishes with the motif and be black, white, and red all over. Just like me! The wallpaper was the highest-ticket item I purchased in my renovation, relatively speaking, and I love every crimson inch of it. Those zebras move, sistuh.
I’ve taken lots of pictures of both my bathroom and my kitchen with the intention of sharing them, but when I get to the “insert photo” moment here on the PG, I balk. I get letters from guys in prison, you know. That gives a girl pause when she’s about to post photos of her bathroom mirror, especially because she’s fully aware 99% of all nutcases and stalkers are not currently behind bars.
Plus, as stunning as my Scalamandre bathroom is and as drop-dead gorgeous as the navy blue subway tile and floating shelves are in my kitchen (it all turned out perfectly, almost gross in its awesomeness to me) isn’t it better to imagine these things than be even slightly let down when you see (for example) a bag of Stay-Puft Jumbo Marshmallows on my counter instead of leftover osso buco? What if you think I have a huge, ginormous house? I like that! Keep thinking that! When you see my galley kitchen, you may have to go find another fantasy and no one has time for these things.
You see, I cannot possibly post the pictures of my home on this blog.
Yuri says that to make me laugh. He speaks in this funny accent and sounds out every syllable very slow: “Beeee-yoooooo-teeee-foooooool.”
“Do it again!” I’ll say, laughing and clapping my hands.
Then he will pointedly not do it and I will beg, beg him to do it again. I will pout and stare at him.
“Please do it again?”
He’ll wait for a moment, thinking about this, considering things. Then, with a very forceful “b” sound, very plosive:
“B-eeeee-yoooooooou-teeee-fuullllll!”
And I will dissolve into giggles and Yuri will smile and we continue with the day.
Do you ever stare at someone and wonder deeply what it’s like to be them? The first time I remember this happening was when I was in Washington, D.C. I was touring with the Neo-Futurists. We were all out to dinner. My brilliant, talented, achingly pretty friend Chloe was sitting next to me at the restaurant we had chosen, somewhere in Chinatown. My day had been spent in despair, dread, sadness: my marriage was in crisis and I was sick. I spoke very little that day, ate nothing.
And I will never forget looking over at Chloe and just desperately wanting to be her. “Just be Chloe,” I thought, and actually tried to will it to be true as I watched her. It seemed so easy, so possible; we were sitting right next to each other. She was laughing at something Bilal said; she was dipping into her sweet-and-sour sauce. Someone asked her a question. Couldn’t I be Chloe, instead? Couldn’t I just have her calm, happy, crab rangoon-dipping life instead of my ostomy-bagged, confusing, strife-stricken one? Time and space seemed utterly surmountable in that moment, like I could smush myself next to her and pop! be Chloe instead of me. She didn’t notice that I was staring at her, I don’t think. Sorry, Chloe. That was a bad day that you likely remember well. I hope you didn’t think I was going to stab you in the neck with a chopstick or anything. It wasn’t like that.
When Yuri speaks sometimes, I look at his mouth and his teeth. What is is like to have those teeth? To have that mouth? And while we’re at it: what’s it like to be a dude? Though I have wanted to be Yuri with less desperation than that time I wanted to be Chloe, I have wondered about how it is to be Yuri so strongly a few times that it counts. It happened when he got the job in New York. Sometimes it happens right when he wakes up in the morning, sleepyheaded and warm. It happens when he comes home after meeting up with various brothers. It definitely happens when he speaks Russian.
What does it taste like to be Yuri? How would he solve Problem X? What would he say? I want to know from the inside out.
There’s a Nietzsche quote in my book: “What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do?”
Most days, I have on a gold necklace. It’s the same one all the time; I hardly ever take it off.
This is necklace, in my view, is gorgeous and conspicuous. A woman is allowed one, maybe two conspicuously gorgeous accessories on any given day. She can switch out the conspicuously gorgeous accessories as she wishes, but more than two at once (e.g., nice earrings and a handbag) and you’re breaking a cardinal rule made by Big Mama Chanel. Chanel — who we can all agree was a real pain in the ass — said that before you leave the house, you should take off the last thing you put on. (I’m pretty sure she was taking about accessories, not shoes or pants.) And she’s right. If you find yourself wearing a necklace, earrings, a couple bracelets, a handbag of consequence, and a selection of rings, you end up looking rather…accessible, if you catch my drift. Can’t have that.
My necklace is my secret wardrobe weapon. It ensures that I am never over-accessorized. This is because my ensemble on any given day starts at the necklace; not the other way around. Because I never take it off, the piece anchors my look. (Verily, it anchors my very soul.)
The medallion is a solid gold coin from Canada. My grandfather on my dad’s side did some business up there many years ago. The company he worked for screwed him over (this is what grampa told the adults in my life, who then vaguely explained it to me and this is how family lore is created) and grampa is dead now, but before all that depressing stuff happened, the man bought a few of these gold coins.
My mom and my now-deceased grandfather had a complex relationship while my parents were married; the relationship remains complex to this day, even though it now only exists in the abstract. It’s like that with most people who knew my grampa; he was not a kind man. I’ve been assured from several well-intentioned sources that he mellowed considerably toward the end of his life, but to me, being mean your whole life and then being nice toward the end is like apologizing immediately after slicing someone’s throat: you feel terrible and you help with the paper towels, but someone is dying and it’s a little late, darling. Carnage wreaked.
But Grampa, feeling expansive one day, decided to have one of his Canadian coins set by a jeweler. And so he did, and he gave this piece to my mother. She did not wear it then; she did not wear it ever. It sat in her jewelry box for decades, sleeping the days away in the box’s velvet lining.
Mom and I were looking in her jewelry box several years ago she came across the coin. I gasped. I had never seen it before. I thought it was beautiful.
“Zounds!” I exclaimed. “What’s that?!”
Mom helped me unclasp the gold chain I was already wearing and we slid off the little seashell I had hanging from it. We replaced it with the medallion. As soon as I felt that coin around my neck, I felt like I had discovered America. The weight of it on my breast was thrilling; actual gold is heavy, it turns out! The shine, the yellowness of the disc communicated a first-prize win, a blue-ribbon. I felt like I had received a gold medal for simply being alive. I think we should all get a medal for that very reason; life is too hard to not get an award just for surviving more than a few birthdays. Mom saw how much I loved it and it is on permanent loan.
It’s only a piece of metal. But my necklace is the closest thing I get to a talismanic object. I wear my necklace around my neck and my heart on my sleeve and that’s all the adornment I need. Well, then there are my diamond earrings, but that’s another jewelry story for another day.
Note: Chanel also said, “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.” This declaration was made in 1930, presumably from a chaise lounge inside La Pausa, Chanel’s home on the French Riviera. A person has to admire Chanel the businessperson, but no one has to like the woman herself. I mean, ew.
It’s mesmerizing, looking through stock photos of chocolate chip cookys. Hundreds and hundreds of cookys and still, their power remains undiluted.
There’s been a lot of cooky baking in the past few months. New York, Chicago, busy or less so, I am a woman with a wooden spoon.
I prefer the “cooky” spelling, yes. There’s something L’il Abner about spelling cooky with a “y,” which is to say spelling cooky with a “y” evokes newsprint, the 1950s, and little kids with southern accents.* I’m not so sure that even with the “y” I shouldn’t change the plural to “cookies.” I probably should, but if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for language rules you didn’t make and don’t like. Also, Cooky Monster eschews the “ie” and that’s good enough for me.
Yuri likes cookys. Chocolate chip wins by a wide, wide margin. It’s funny how you can not listen to someone, even when they’re telling you exactly what they want, to your face. When I learned that Yuri was a cooky fan, I set about making him the best cookys of his entire life thus far. I listened only partly when he said that chocolate chip cookys were his very very very favorite. I made a batch of chocolate chip first, of course, maybe even two batches. But then it was time for my cooky experience to grow. It was suddenly more about me, this cooky.
I did some maple glazed. That was in New York. Lemon buttermilk, because I had to use up some buttermilk. I did some pecan sandies.** But one day, after I saw a cooky unfinished on Yuri’s snack plate, I inquired.
“Hey, did you like the cookys I made?” I asked.
“Yeah, they were really good.”
“Lemon buttermilk, right? So good. You really did like them?”
“Yeah, they were awesome.”
I gave him a pout. “You didn’t eat all your cooky, though.”
There was a pause, then Yuri, with great diplomacy and tact, said, “You know what, baby? I love everything you make, but I really just love a chocolate chip cooky. Like, straight up chocolate chip.”
Oh, men!
It’s a fantastic thing to listen, and it’s also fantastic to focus one’s cooky-making adventure on a single cooky. There’s a zen calm in thinking that for the rest of the foreseeable future (we can’t see much of it, but I’m forever trying to peek) I will be exploring but one cooky. Without deviating from the goal — a great chocolate chipper — I can experiment with infinite variations until I achieve what this man believes is The Best Yet. A little baking powder? a lot? no nuts? hazelnuts? hazelnuts pounded within an inch of their life so you have a fine meal of hazelnut going on in the bite? It’s exciting.
*L’il Abner ran for 43 years. Forty-three years! **Alt. spelling, “sandys”
