Our Anniversary celebration was wonderful! Dinner at Fraiche was really delicious. I had a lovely piece of monkfish with mashed potatoes to die for, and my husband had some oysters on the half shell and a plate of freshly-made pasta with a super-rich sauce I thought was terrific.
No photos of the food because we were so hungry I couldn’t stop long enough to snap!
It was — and always is — nice to get away for an evening with my husband.
And for an added bonus, we had major sightings — right in the restaurant, just 2 tables away: Ed Begley, Jr. and his wife, and joining them was David Mamet! It was awesome: they actually fought over the bill!
Mr. Mamet has a play running right in downtown Culver City at the Kirk Douglas theater — and he was probably on his way there after dinner. I wished I’d had the nerve to stop by the table. I wanted to tell him that I had worked on a movie version of his play American Buffalo about 12 years ago in Providence. It starred Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Franz and is the topic for another post.
Although I will say this: That movie is the reason I was in People Magazine.
Today is
my 9th wedding anniversary. Congrats to me and my spouse!
We are
heading out on a dinner date tonight to Fraiche, in Culver City – aka The
Restaurant Capital of Los Angeles. Perhaps I will sneak a photo or two of the meal…
I checked
the interweb to find out what would be a traditional anniversary gift for 9
years of marriage, and guess what it said? Leather.
I’m
telling you, these people are geniuses. Forget the leather couch idea, you and I both know what they intended
when they picked leather.Am I
right?And what better way to put
a little spark into a 9-year-old marriage!
I live in Los Angeles, so I have year-round outdoor work
out capabilities, which is both a blessing and a curse, if you know what I
mean.But hey, I need to do it and
so I’m very lucky to be able to get a great workout without needing to join a
gym.
In fact, there’s a great hill just blocks from my house I
can walk up and down and all around for some good cardio.There is even a set of steps – talk
about your stairmaster.
However, I have lived here (in Los Angeles) for 18 years,
and have become quite acclimated to the weather, meaning I don’t have a very
high tolerance for cold.Or
really, any tolerance whatsoever.
So when it gets to be the dead of winter around here, like
about 58 degrees (any Steve Martinfans out there?), my hands are cold when I
go outdoors in the morning to take the kids to school and for my workout
walk.I have suffered in silence
and in loudness my cold hands, and then I decided to stop “suffering” and wear
gloves.
Yes, I wear gloves in Los Angeles.In our “winter”.And even sometimes as late in the year
as April or May.Go ahead,
laugh.You know you want to.It’s OK.I understand.
But I’ll have the last laugh, because my hands are toasty
warm.Ahhhh.
So, I in addition to the gloves, I wear a hat, since I’m a
woman of ADVANCING years, and so I don’t need any more help achieving wrinkles,
thank you very much.And because I
grew up on Maui, in the 70’s, and we just didn’t really read the fine print on
the sun block memo.Hence, we
spent most of our time in the sun NOT wearing any.(Actually, we went in for suntan OILS at the time.Hinano Tahiti oil, Hawaiian Tropic, and
good old Johnson’s baby oil.Can
you sense it?Feel the wrinkles
forming even in memory?Yup.)
I tried a baseball hat*
at first, but it didn’t cover the
back of the neck, or any on the side of my face, so I wanted more.More coverage.And I found this:in the gardening section at
Target.
I love it.Perfect for weeding, except for the
fact that I don’t weed.(Please
see previous post.)So I wear it
for walking.
And this being LA, one doesn’t go ANYWHERE without one’s
sunglasses on, so I don’t.
Now, I’d like to lose a little weight while I’m walking,
so logic would dictate that in order to lose weight, you need to put on
additional weight, right?Well,
you might think I’m crazy, but check out the WALKVEST.You stick the little weights in the
little slot/pockets and viola! You’re 8 pounds heavier! Which means you’ve got resistance training going on, and you’re working
harder to work off the weight.
Which is great. Except, you look ridiculous. That is, I look ridiculous. Patently ridiculous.See?
But here’s the cool part:I don’t care anymore. I have realized that I am really a grownup now because I can go out in
public looking like this and not feel embarrassed.Because I’m working out!
* When I did wear the baseball hat with the WalkVest, I
looked like an FBI agent, or maybe DEA, so I had to stop.Talk about ridiculous!
This is
something a colleague once uttered, years ago.It’s such a PRONOUNCEMENT.
And at
the time, I felt ambivalent about it. I mean, for one thing, he’s a man, and me being a woman, I felt it was
kind of, well, easy for HIM to say. He had a wife to do the housework so he could do the “art”.I had no such arrangement at the time.
And I wanted to believe in a world where a woman could do as she pleased: have a lovely home AND be an artist (or a career woman) at the same time. I didn’t want to believe it was a case or either/or.
But I
have come to realize how true the statement is, especially now that I’m a
mom.There is LITERALLY no end to
housework when you have kids. Sometimes it takes the form of homework, or tying shoes, or attending
PTA meetings – but it’s all basically Housework.It’s Daily Life. And it absolutely kills art and creative expression.No question.
They
cannot both exist simultaneously. You have to make a choice.
So this
weekend I made the choice: I did not blog.But I do have a really clean house!
Typepad has a new set up APPARENTLY, and I don’t know how to fix things yet. It isn’t doing what I want it to, gosh darn it. Sorry for the weird appearance of my last post — I’ll work on the html and get back to ya…
This
phrase has been a rallying cry in the world of mothers of elementary school
children for years now.It’s as if
they’re trying to convince those former lawyers who took a detour in their
career paths to have children that they won’t be bored out of their minds while
stopping by in this land of classroom volunteering and bake sales.Come on, we promise we won’t make you
come to luncheon wearing gloves and lift your pinkie as you sip tea.Just come to a meeting, please???
Well,
it’s true that we aren’t doing things these days that our Grandmothers probably
had to do back in the day when it came to supporting their children’s
education.I mean, when my
Grandmothers were raising elementary school children, this country VALUED
education.As opposed to now, when
we underfund our public schools and then cut the budget even more in a lean
year.Callifornia, here I come!
In
fact, I’m pretty sure my Grandmothers – or my Mother, for that matter — were never asked to rally to protest budget cuts, or to sit on committees
designed to evaluate why our schools are failing at teaching kids to read, or
asked to draft comprehensive discipline plans for elementary schools.
But
I’ll tell you something:I WISH I
were a member of my Grandmother’s PTA. I wish FOR ONCE all I had to do was make banana bread and bring it to my
nice neighbor’s house, who’s just made a pot of coffee, and we all sat around
and discussed what color roses we wanted to plant out front of the school at
gardening day next month.I WISH!
Instead,
I’ll be at all those committee meetings I mentioned above, plus making a bunch
of banana bread.Wanna cup of
coffee?
PS – Please consider attending the march on Sacramento!
That’s what I have to say about this year’s Mother’s Day experience. It was just lovely.
It actually lasted even longer than a day! I started out on Saturday getting my roots and nails done. Pampering! YAY! (Well, actually, the roots were more of a necessity than pampering.) But the nails were fun. Just the toes. I don’t have the patience to get my fingernails done. Hmmm… wonder what THAT’s about? Oh well, fodder for another post…
Anyway, then on Mother’s Day itself we drove out to Alhambra for dim sum. (And if you’re asking “where???”, you probably live in Los Angeles — on the west side.) Suffice it to say it’s east of downtown LA and took us 20 minutes driving time.
Anyhoo, it was delicious food, not a very long wait for a Mother’s Day Sunday crowd, and we all enjoyed ourselves.
Here’s a look at the highlights:
Char Shiu Bao — or BBQ pork buns, as they are also known. Charlie’s #2 fave.
Some delicious wonton soup.
OOOO! Salted Shrimp!
A seaweed salad Jim chose that I have to say was really tasty, even though I would never have chosen it.
My personal #2 fave — a shrimp dumpling that had water chestnuts in it. So good.
And both Charlie’s and my ultimate #1 fave: Har gao, or the basic shrimp dumpling with rice noodle skin. SO delicious, in fact, that I couldn’t stop long enough to photograph it before they were all gone! (We usually order 2 containers for the table!)
And Oscar, my “choosy” eater had… wait for it… rice:
A Happy Mother’s Day indeed.
Hiatus. It’s the MOST wonderful time of the year! Even better than Christmas. It’s when my husband is home.
See, many stay-at-home moms I know have a spouse whose job is structured in such a way as to allow him to do co-parenting duties in the morning before going to work, like getting the kids dressed, fed and off to school. And then in the evenings, those lucky women have husbands who come home in time to eat dinner with the family, help with homework, bath & bedtime routines, or even find time to take a class or coach a Little League team, just for instance.
My husband, however, works on a TV series.
Oh, the glamour, you say, the klieg lights, the starlets, the dreams fulfilled. HA! I say. Sure, it is part of the Dream Factory – Hollywood. But the day-to-day reality of living a dream like this is very much less then dreamy.
(And I know of which I speak, since I, too, once worked — dunh, dunh, dunh – on a TV series!)
My husband usually leaves for work at 5:30am, and not because he has to drive 3 hours to get there. Work on set starts at 6:30am, that means leaving the house at 5:30am. (And, just to be fair, some of the actors, especially those in character makeup, or some of the big glamour-pusses, have to be at work even earlier to get all the makeup and hair work done – which means the hair and makeup people have to be there that early, too…)
Anyway, then, if you’re lucky and get on a good show, the hours will be reasonable, like 12. Per Day.
Which means, subtracting out the hour lunch break that’s union-regulated, thank god, the crew will finish work at 7:30pm, having started at 6:30am, don’t forget. So add in drive time and evening traffic, and my husband gets home at about 8:30pm, after having left the house at 5:30am.
On a good day. There are days, in fact Tuesday was one of them, when the crew works 15 hours, and there are shows that are notorious for doing so. Can you tell what time he gets home after one of those days? (10:30pm.)
So that’s something that makes the movie and television industry different from the rest of the world’s (or at least middle America’s) jobs.
Here’s another: we have extra seasons. Everyone gets the standard Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, but in our business we also get Pilot season and Hiatus.
Hiatus is when the TV series takes basically a school summer vacation, except that it’s usually in May and June. It shuts down between seasons, to give everyone a break from the hours they do on a regular basis. And everyone on the crew is free to vacation (VA-CAY-SHUN! Also sung to the tune of “The Love Boat”) or to take other jobs, if they so choose. Lots of TV actors do movies during hiatus time.
But I get a husband back during hiatus, even if it’s only for a short time.
Can you feel the AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH……. Emanating from Mar Vista right now? That’s hiatus for ya, baby.
