Along Those Lines

HAPPY ENDING?

There are no happy endings.

Endings are the saddest part,

So just give me a happy middle

And a very happy start.

-Shel Silverstein

A food inventory from Greece

Greek salad, fruit salad, mixed fruit smoothie, Syrah red wine, fried calamri with french fries, grilled feta with peppers and tomato sauce hot off the grill in tin foil, grilled black sea beam, fried red mullet, steamed zucchini, beetroot salad, steamed kale (or something in the kale family), a liter of house white wine, big jello mold with cherries inside and whipped cream and chocolate sauce on top, watermelon, cheese pie, mini-bananas, greek salad with fresh parsley, mussels saganki, grilled octopus in tomato sauce, stuffed cabbage with lamb, Greek salad, small bottle of homemade Raki, walnut cafe with Cinnamon, Greek salad with julienne cucumbers, chocolate square with marzipan, chocolate square with cornflakes, Amstel light, broccoli salad, eggplan emam, moossaka, shrimp sagnaki, grilled garlic toast, fried tomato balls, grilled feta with tomato and epper, honey/orange cake, hard boiled egg, honeydew melon, apricot, plum, tomato/sausage quiche, yogurt with honey, fresh quince, homemade orange marmalade, cherry marmalade, local raised goat soaked in lemon/oil, crispy french fries with oregano, sweet iced tea, sweet white wine from a barrel, mythos, delmades stuffed with lamb, Greek salad, fried chick pea balls, homemade meatballs with feta, Metaxa, watermelon, strawberries, yogurt gelato, Greek salad, grilled squid with spinach and mashed roe, cappacino, fresh fruit mix, anchovies with olive oil, pink pepper corn and capers, lemon gelato, Tzatziki, lule kebab, grilled sea beam, fennel sausage, grilled tomatoes, yogurt with fruit and honey, cheese (goat, manchego), fresh squeezed orange juice, Greek salad, chicken kebab with spiced onions, french fries, frozen strawberry daqueri, mythos, cannibis beer, metaxa, chocolate chunks with crunchy grains/raisins, house white wine from a barrel, fried tomatoes, Greek salad, grilled scorpion fish (caught that morning), honey/syrup/pistachio turnover (galactaburekos), lemon custard, red wine, metaxa, sweet dessert wine, coca cola light, a mouthful of saltwater, grilled pork chop, grilled prawns, multigrain bread, Greek salad, tzatziki, eggplant puree with spiced red peppers, green apples with cinnamon and honey, iced frappe, mint and honey, caprina, steamed mussels, grilled zucchini, lobster pasta, pistachio ice cream, grilled chicken salad, grilled octopus with grain salad, kalamta olives marinated with rosemary, pink peppercorn, honey, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, big glass of sangria with pear, fried calamari, Greek salad, grilled red snapper, grilled black sea bream, vanilla gelato, orange cake, zucchini salad, grilled octopus, tzatziki spread, grilled pork chop with fries, shrimp/rice stuffed tomatoes, strawberries in brandy, frappe, large mythos beer, mixed nuts, red wine, bacon, Greek meze platter, grape/greens salad, octopus carpaccio with pureed eggplant, grilled sea break with grilled veggies, ice cream mousse, yogurt with mixed fruit and honey and wheatabix, raisins, mixed greens, goat cheese, Swiss cheese, honey cake with raisins, almond/pistachio cookie, spinach turnover, Greek salad, sweet olives, grilled squid with eggplant puree and spiced potato chips, fried shrimp with Greek spices, scoops of pureed fennell with sweet onion, slow cooked octopus on a bed of potatoes and crab, sea bass spiced with jalapeno-soy broth and grilled vegetables, baklava, milk pie, Cretan salad (tomato, feta, cracked wheat), garlic bread with tomato bruschetta, pasta with grilled salmon, “Greek pizza,” flat bread with onion and peppers, eggplant eman, Amstel light, marble spongecake, iced frappes, fresh watermelon, lettuce cherry tomato grilled zucchini and smoked salmon salad with mint and honey, liter of house wine, fried feta with honey and black sesame seeds, seafood pasta (including a giant grilled oyster, clams, mussels, shrimp), grilled fresh shrimp in a lemon/oil sauce on a bed of greens, yogurt/candied fruit, pistachio gelato cone, cappuccino gelato cone, spinach pie, and a Greek sandwich (tomato, green peppers, feta, olive tampenade on wheat).

What you remember and how you remember it

In Babylon 4,000 years ago, it was accepted practice that for a month after the wedding, the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because this calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month, which we know today as the honeymoon. 

You would have to try very hard to have a bad honeymoon.  No matter where you go for your trip, your sole responsibility is to dote on the person you have chosen to spend the rest of your life with; every day, you wake up and say, “I love you SO much.” To which your partner replies, “No, I love YOU so much.” And so on and so forth; this is all you have to do.

We chose Greece.

 I. Athens

Athens is a pretty cruddy city  —it’s nearly impossible to take a single step without walking into cigarette smoke.  But  Athens should not be avoided for the pure history of the place. Seeing the Parthenon is like pushing your way in for a spot at the Mona Lisa. Fellow tourists need to be cropped out of romantic photos, but the experience is worth it.

The city has a leisure culture as well. There are lots of old men sitting on benches, drinking iced frappes (sugary under-caffeinated coffee) in a typical European café fashion. The greatest part about walking around Athens is having the usual city experience of pollution and frantic crosswalks interrupted by 2,000-year-old (fact check?) ruins that run spontaneously through the city.

 II. Santorini

The key component to a honeymoon is a beautiful backdrop, and almost every direction you look in Santorini looks like it’s lifted off a postcard.  These kinds of moments will be used for all of those deathbed memories we stock up.  An integral part of our daily life in Santorini was watching the sunset, along with our established ritual of Metaxa and cribbage.

We spent most of our days by the pool, reading for our “Honeymoon book club” (we read Love in the Time of Cholera together), venturing into town at night to walk down a thousand feet of stairs to the very bottom of the island to eat fresh fish dinners before hiking allll the way back up the stairs for dessert.

It’s uncertain whether the people of Santorini are worried about the Greek economy. If there’s any concern at all, it’s for the discretionary pleasures of tourists. And most of the island people have figured out the perfect work schedule: work very hard every single day for six months then take the rest of the year off. Not bad eh? We actually met real people named Aphrodite and Athena. 

All doors and window frames on Santorini have to be blue or green and all church domes are blue. The water is as clear as the Caribbean, but more of a crystal blue than a green. Which brought us to a serious debate: Was the color of the Greek flag created to match the ocean or the church?  

III. Milos

With 58 beaches and a population of 5,000, the island of Milos is about the size of Burbank.  We discovered 12 beaches in our time there and each beach had a different feel to it, with distinctive sand and rocks, people, and swimming options at each stop.

Milos is how Hawaii must have been many, many years ago before the tourist onslaught.  It’s unused and pastoral, not to mention inexpensive. We had a ball.

It took 20 minutes to say “goodbye” to Demitra, the woman running our hotel, every morning because she showered us with so many kisses after feeding us a gigantic Greek breakfast. It was exciting to be so integrated with local life and meeting people who had been having the same patterns of conversation for a lifetime now. We could see these emotive conversations at our favorite restaurant in all of Greece, in the little town square where the entire village would come out and talk, and talk, and talk, all night long.

Henry was able to navigate the windy country roads with our little Fiat, through very few signs, most of which only consisted of arrows. And goat crossings.  We took a boat ride to see the hidden caves of Kleptico, where pirates would hide before capturing boats headed to Crete. Compared to Santorini, everyone on Milos was much more low key and relaxed. A lot of the people we met loved the fact that we were from Los Angeles.  Some of them even wanted to know, “What are you doing here??”

On our second to last night there, we were extremely fortunate to witness a lunar eclipse. After the near full moon turned bright orange, it completely disappeared for a fraction of the evening. The sky was devoid of the moon but full of bright stars. It left us awestruck — it was definitely an experience we never would’ve been able to have in Los Angeles.  And, on our very last night, we had a full moon honeymoon.

Hurry up, we’re dreaming

The irony of working in social media is that all of your own social media falls to the wayside. But I promise to update this tumblr more often, starting with two long, outdated and self indulgent posts!

Every Night

My new barometer for judging women is by how they approach their wedding. It’s  very easy to become consumed by the “big day,” but that doesn’t mean you should be given a hall pass to be a total betch for a year. 

That said, there’s a reason all of those screwball wedding movies do so well: it really does hit the fan before a wedding.  Take ours, for instance. A low key, Jewish wedding in Nashville, Tennessee, with about 100 attendees, that took about a year of planning and up to 700 mother-daughter email exchanges.

We planned it according to Miss Manners’ Guide to Having a Dignified Wedding and managed to cut out a lot of the extraneous drama that goes along with weddings today. When it came down to it, I only cared about four things: handwriting out individual invitations, serving pie, dancing with my friends and family, and actually getting married. Yet somehow, stuff came up.

A month before the wedding, Henry broke his big toe and had to have surgery. So we fast forwarded 50 years into our relationship and I took care of my little invalid, cooking, cleaning,  driving, orchestrating SPONGE BATHS.  That was hard, but we got through it. 

Then, a week before the wedding, we learned that it was time for the infamous cicadas. Cicadas come out of the ground once every 13 years in Nashville and they are all of my fears coinciding at once: disgustingly large insects descending on the town in Biblical proportions, in loud, flying droves.  But it ended up raining on our wedding day, keeping the cicadas hidden away underground and causing us to move a year’s worth of planning inside.

 A few of my favorite memories from the big day:

-The “oh no” moment that hit me when I was getting my hair done. I was so caught up in the party planning that I forgot what I was actually signing up to do. That hit me about two hours before the actual ceremony like a ton of bricks. A happy ton of bricks.

-Getting a pedicure with my mom.  My mother doesn’t do this kind of stuff. I had to talk her into the pedicure, which she definitely ended up enjoying. And makeup, too.

-Getting drunk on details with my mother. We were running around a few days before the wedding, doing who knows what, and just looked at each other and started cracking up at the ridiculousness of it all. The only other time we had that kind of faux hallucinatory experience together was when we were staring at a Jackson Pollack piece in MOMA for half an hour, like we had just downed a cup of mushroom tea.

-Driving to the ceremony with my parents. It was just the three of us and I was in the back seat, which made me feel like a little kid.  It was misty outside and it felt like the car was floating down the street. This floating sensation continued for about five hours. 

-Getting dressed with my girlfriends.  I skipped the whole bridesmaids ordeal but a handful of my favorite girls were on hand to help me get into my dress. Mary surprised us with a bottle of champagne, which we all took swigs out of and passed around.

-Walking down the aisle with my parents to the flute-guitar-violin trio playing the Beatles “In My Life.”

-Seeing Henry for the first time.  We decided to do it old school and wait to see each other until the actual ceremony and I think we were both shocked by the magic of being under the chuppah —my great grandmother’s lace tablecloth— and the sheer emotion of the crowd.

-Telling Eli, the groom’s witness, to shut up while we were signing the Katubah because he started preparing his elevator pitch for a reality show about Jewish weddings.

-Keeping our pact. On the Rabbi’s recommendation, we made sure to hold hands throughout the entire reception.

-The speeches. My dad worked really hard on his, which I thought was the most adorable thing ever. My best friend, Maggie, gave a positively touching speech. And Henry’s brother’s was comical. Also, my oldest brother Ben stepped it up a notch and surprised everybody with his own speech.

-I don’t remember what I ate for dinner. And I skipped the hors d’oeuvres altogether. Henry tells me that the horseradish sauce complimented the steak quite nicely.

-The dancing, of course.  The father-daughter dance, my first dance with Henry, dancing like mad with my brother, Max, who only really dances about once every 13 years (he’s on the same cycle as the cicadas), and getting lifted up on chairs during the hora, which was kinda like a Semitic crowd-surfing.

-We spent months perfecting the setlist for the DJ and it was great to see it come to fruition. Mrs. Dalton, a woman who has known Henry since he was five, absolutely rocked out to ODB. I’d told the DJ that I wanted the party to be like the “Love Shack” video and I think we got there.

-The pie. I hit that pie pretty hard.  And yes, we had pie, not cake. There was brandy soaked blueberry, pecan, white chocolate strawberry, and rum apple. 

-Karaoke after the party. This was a last minute call that I’m so glad we did. I warned all of the out-of-towners that karaoke in Nashville is pretty intense, but nobody listened to me and everyone drunkenly humiliated themselves. 

-Seeing our families and friends mix together. Henry has pretty well defined groups of friends from high school, college, and grad school.  And most of my friends are totally random people I’ve collected over the years who don’t belong to any group at all. So it was incredibly fun to see the surprising connections between our disparate friends.

-The brunch the next day. This was the longest brunch of my life…guests didn’t leave my parents’ condo until 7pm but we loved every minute of it.

-The presents! Mostly at my mom’s insistence, we didn’t register.  She’s a Republican hippie, so her theory was, “You don’t need any more stuff. And if you do need something, work hard and buy it yourself!” So we were pleasantly surprised by our friends’ creativity and thoughtfulness and only ended up with a couple of duds (his and her matching blinged out license plate covers).

-The stuff you find out about later. Even with just 100 guests, it’s hard to stay on top of all the action. So we didn’t find out until later who hooked up with who, who cried at the bar, who was arrested, etc.

Trouble Weighs A Ton

The greatest advantage to waking up early on weekdays is the chance that KTLA will air a commercial-free high speed pursuit. It only happens about once every couple of months, but it’s worth sitting through Cali-centric news programming and busty weather women on the off chance that some outlaw will decide to risk his life for your viewing pleasure.

The outcome of these races usually ends in one of three ways:

1) the criminal runs out of gas and attempts to lose the police on foot (never a wise move)

2) the fugitive drives his car straight into the highway median (explosion!)

3) or, and this is the best, there’s a pit maneuver — when a handful of police cars come barreling in at all angles, surounding the goon in a starfish formation, trapping him once and for all.

“Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.” 

“Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”

“Yes. I want to ruin you.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too.”

— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

What better place for a bunch of girly tomboys to get together than Hicksville, a trailer park desert oasis?

It Don’t Worry Me

While hosting book club at my house last month, I noticed that I have adapted both of my parent’s styles of entertaining. For the first half of the evening, I was like my mother: sitting at the edge of the table, eagerly attending to guests, engaging in conversation, and defending the book. For the latter half of the evening, I took on my father’s traits: body turned to the side, legs crossed, quietly waiting for the party to end.