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Style Icon Prepares for Next Year's Oscars 

It's been a week and a half since my last post as a newly-minted Style Icon:  not a particularly auspicious start to my 15-year sprint to the cover of Vogue!  I know that all 15 members of my faithful following have been waiting patiently for me to answer two critical questions:

First things first. It has indeed been more than…

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"S" is for.... 

My first full week as a style icon finds me on a four-day work trip to San Francisco, staying and working in a hotel near Union Square.   

Here is what I see every time I turn on my phone, at all hours of the day and night:

 

In my life, I try to be guided always by that still, small voice.   I just never thought it would come from Sephora.   

It is Friday afternoon, at the end of the work week, before I finally have a little free time to walk around the city (still gorgeous, by the way, despite its obvious…

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Day Two as a Style Icon, in which I explain how to look great while traveling 

My second day as a style icon sees me hitting the road, on a work trip for the day job (the one I plan to keep only until I land that Vogue cover).

I arrive at the airport ready to share my travel look with the world.   Yet I am immediately confronted with a problem:   my arms are apparently too short to take a selfie that captures anything more than my head.   

I am, however, in an airport:  where better to shop for accessories for my small electronics?   I set off in search of an item I have long avowed…

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My style icon launch! 

The time has come for me to launch my new identity as a style icon.

This decision seems inevitable after a wave of articles in the past few weeks about how women of a certain age are finding a place in the fashion world.   First, this headline in the Wall Street Journal  declared that “Older Women Ruled New York Fashion Week,” with "modeling’s silver wave” (that is, women between 40 and 70) prominently featured in several shows.   

The article featured photos of very elegant, astonishingly thin older women…

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Lessons from the Subway 

Last week, I turned 59. 

This week, I got on a moderately crowded Orange Line car, and a young man near the door promptly offered me his seat.   A few hours later, when I boarded a slightly-less-crowded Orange Line car for the return trip, another young man did exactly the same thing. 

Astonishing.   In a lifetime of riding public transit, I can recall only one other instance of being offered a seat, when I was struggling with several heavy grocery bags.   More memorable are the times when I really needed a…

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The Bear Facts 

I am pleased to report that during my 10 days in Montana, I was not mauled by a bear.

This happy outcome is not what I was led to expect.  Bear warnings are everywhere in western Montana. This sign greeted us as we drove to Missoula:

There is a bear warning at every trail head:

This second one, to be fair, focuses not on bear avoidance, but on which kinds of bears one is allowed to shoot.

And then there is this throwaway line, in the instructions pinned to the fridge at our VRBO.   The hosts explain that it is…

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Why can't a Jewish girl from Queens write a C&W song? 

Midway through our Montana vacation, after a lovely day of hiking, Steve and I thought it would be fun to go out and hear some music.  We searched online and found a brewery about 10 miles outside of Missoula which featured a singer-songwriter from 5:30 – 8:00.  So off we went.

The beer was excellent. The music was awful.   The food was revelatory.   We ordered a “pickle flight:”

All I can say is: if you haven’t tried Pop Rocks on a  pickle, you haven’t really lived.

Steve, whose repartee is usually as…

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Mother of the Bride, Part 3 

The central signifiers of a traditional Jewish wedding are the canopy and the glass broken under the heel of the groom.  You probably know this even if you’ve never been to a Jewish wedding because of the wedding scene in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, a revival of which is currently taking Japan by storm (many thanks to my brother, Howie, for bringing this to my attention).   

Here is the wedding scene from the very first Japanese production, featuring the great Hisaya Morishige, who apparently played the…

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