The other evening our usually dependable Wifi sputtered during a meeting. I was able to get back on it, but yesterday we woke to the realization that we didn’t have Wifi. After two calls to our provider, RCN, our “box” was declared dead (well, dying, it has a few meager lights blinking) and a technician requested for later today. It was also, as it would happen, Kim’s birthday and so thoughtful wishes are piled up, as I write, in the world online, an internet connection away.
Kim, who is immersed in the latter stages of his next book spent yesterday tracing off pages which will then be tightened and eventually inked. (A post with the specifics of Kim’s process can be found here. It is a great favorite!) I still had online access, via my phone (and my ipad which decided it could operate off my phone) which meant I could do some work including attending meetings with my little Italian Felix toy avatar in my stead.
I have my own policy of trying to be on camera for most Zoom meetings, at least at the beginning of each, and I try to stay on for all meetings with staff. I think it is more humanizing even if I am just in from my run and admitting that I only make it to even nominal make-up about once a week these days.
Nonetheless, the lack of Wifi slowed me down mightily – if you are reading this it means either I posted it via my phone (a skill set that may well be beyond me), or the technician has come and restored us to full function. It makes me realize how much I depend on the internet for casually adding things to these posts as well. My fingers twitch to check references and add links and photos.
In case the day needed more complications, I had an appointment to get a new phone. Like many people, I beat the heck out of this thing over the past 18 months. The screen is cracked from dropping it from the elliptical at the gym, years ago now. (There was a time when I didn’t take my phone into the gym, preferring to listen to a tiny and somewhat finicky ipod instead, but when my dad was began his decline and was hospitalized I started bringing it with me to workouts. It bounced off the moving machine hard and it is lucky it didn’t hurt someone.)
It has been giving me warning signs that it is breathing its last (screens turning into strange shadow screens, no longer holds a charge) and so while making another change to my account recently (prophetically changing my date plan), I committed to a new phone. Suffice it to say, given the day that yesterday was, after more than an hour at the Verizon store, I left sans phone transfer complete – alas, I must return later today.
Evermore than even a year and a half ago however, I am tethered to the internet like it is a favorite child!
Simultaneously, this week I was encouraging my office to help inform a return to work plan and being met with recalcitrance, fear and assorted resistance which evinced an insurmountable level of exhaustion in me. Like many managers, the decision about a return to the office is an institutional one and Wynton Marsalis has made his feelings very clear throughout this period – we will not be an organization that operates remotely. We need to be together and to see each other as humans again as soon as is safely and reasonably possible.
My first work-out at the gym. Man, I swear the weights are heavier here than at home!
Like a good manager, I have been trying to gently exercise the muscle of in-person meetings and discussing our return. Our policy is to return to the office in person two days a week over the summer and then moving to full time mid-September. Having to decide on dates was like ripping the band-aide off for many folks though. It is hard to balance their variety of concerns, an institutional mandate while keeping any of my own feelings to myself. I am impatient with my own impatience.
The day finally concluded with Kim and I eating some excellent Vietnamese food which greatly restored me. Then, with the premiere of a concert for our virtual season, our full Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, with the founder and head of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson. It was a great marriage of spoken language and jazz and spoke very directly to the topics of freedom and inequality and history. (Freedom, Justice and Hope is available on-demand until May 26 and you can purchase tickets to watch it here). It is in my opinion by far the best concert we have produced for online viewing and I am so proud of my colleagues who created it and how far we have come. It left me with the very real hope that we will come out of this period with a new way of continuing to reach audiences far beyond those in our hall and on our tour destinations.
Afterward, I watched the first part of a PBS documentary on the Metropolitan Museum. Long-time Pictorama readers know that I spent most of my career, thirty years, there before leaving for my current gig. (I wrote about my departure in a post called Leaving the Met which can be found here.) I gather that the documentary was originally meant to follow the museum through its 150th Anniversary Year. Instead it is half about that and half about how 2020 played out with the pandemic and the closure of the museum, the ultimate re-opening and then grappling with the new re-emerging world.
It was moving for me to see many former colleagues as well as some objects I know like they had spent years in my own living room, so they too are like old friends. But overwhelmingly for me it was so touching to see the conservators, curators and other colleagues I had worked with for so many years. I was graphically reminded that yes, despite our discomfort, Wynton is right. In the end it comes down to the people. People make organizations like these great and that will suffer if we do not make the effort to come back together again to work with each other in person. When I interview people I always ask them, what will you miss most about where you work now and almost to a one they say it is the people.
Me and Eileen Travell, Met buddies and long-standing friends, having our first post-pandemic in-person meal earlier this week! Sheer bliss to see her again. It helps to do some of the nice aspects of getting back into the world as well.
In her remarks, Carolyn Riccardelli, one of the conservators, kept coming back to the metaphor of the conservation work that had been done on the Tullio Lombardi statue of Adam. Many years ago, it famously fell spontaneously from its base and smashed into an almost infinite number of pieces, fragments, and some reduced to dust. Like a crime scene, the pieces were photographed in situ and logged where they fell to aide reconstruction. That reconstruction took ten painstaking years (it has been documented in a video called After the Fall and can be found on their website here) and is back on display. It looks flawless, but of course as part of the team who restored it, Carolyn must see her years of handiwork beneath the surface every time she looks at it. She talked about how sometimes you just need to move forward, even if you have no idea how you are going to do it, making progress and claiming small victories until finally, you are there.
Shown at top: Tullio Lombardo (Italian, ca. 1455–1532). Adam, ca. 1490–95. Italian, Venice. Marble. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1936 (36.163)
Pam’s Pictorama Post: My hair went gray when I was thirty. It started with an interesting streak in front which grew in rapidly over time. My maternal grandfather, Frank Wheeling (aka Poppy), went gray in his twenties so I suspect it is his genes at work – most of the rest of that generation in my family never had more than a few strands even as they reached very advanced ages, my father’s mother not withstanding as I believe she did dye her hair as part of her weekly visits to a salon where she had her 1940’s updo style managed weekly.
I have never dyed my hair. Despite hitting my twenties during the height of the punk era I have never done anything except shave it down to a crewcut periodically and that usually reflecting more function than form – such as anticipating a lack of showering facilities while camping in Tibet. Not only have I never dyed my hair a radical color, I have never highlighted it or dyed it at all. I don’t have anything against it, I just never did it and so when I started to go gray the question of dying it was a bit bigger, dye never having been a go to, nor something I had ever played around with. I always figured that it would be easy enough to try if I changed my mind, but acknowledge it would be a huge pain to grow out and as it became more and more gray the fact that it would be a significant commitment of time and money (not to mention the reality of heavier, more chemical dyes) to maintain became clear.
Me in London at age 21. This was taken by a friend for a photography class.Not shaved short but soon after the very first time I ever cut it short at all.
Also, as I can be about such things, I was curious to see how it would grow in and what it would look like. I always figured that dying was something I could decide to do (although certainly it would have been pretty radical after a point) so there was no compelling reason to rush to do it. So, I just didn’t. My hair guy, David Smith (he opened his own salon pre-pandemic, Smith and Morgan on West 80th Street) always liked my gray and never encouraged me to dye it – despite the fact he would have made a ton of money over time if I had, which always made me love David a little more. I met David just before my wedding, a good friend recommended him when the person I had been seeing shutdown abruptly and until he opened his own place I followed him across a variety of locales on the westside of Manhattan.
David Smith’s current domain, Smith and Morgan at 205 West 80th Street.
To be frank, there is a very real prejudice against being young and having naturally gray hair (yes, some folks are dying their hair gray now which is a bit different) and I am only just getting old enough now where it is less of an issue. People immediately assume you are older than you are and sometimes express outright confusion over a younger face and gray hair. At its worst I have on occasion been met with a certain kind of aggression, as if my deciding not to dye my hair was a statement about other people’s choices. It seems to annoy some people. I am a bit confounded sometimes when people talk about it – after all I think my choice of hair color is a bit personal and I have trouble imagining the same person asking someone why they dye theirs brown or blond for instance. And, I will admit that there was a time when I thought if I were to look for a new job that I might consider dying it. In the end, it has become very much a part of who I am and in my case it would seem false to change it. As Popeye would famously say, I yam what I yam!
My sister Loren hated that I was letting my hair go gray. She would bully and rage about it in the way only she as my older sister could. Frankly I considered dying it when she was in treatment for cancer and bored, sick. I was looking for ways to entertain her – I know, it sounds crazy, but I thought about it. She would tell me that when her hair grew back it was going to be dark brown again (during a pause in treatment it had grown in completely gray) and only she and Lady Clairol would know the truth about the color. If she had lived I don’t know if I could have held out against her indefinitely. (I have written about Loren a few times and two of those posts can be found here and here.)
A high school photo of my sister I took a picture of recently.
By the same token I have enjoyed many random compliments from strangers – literally sometimes getting stopped on the street – about my hair. Love your hair! Great hair! Occasionally it was another woman with naturally gray hair and we would give a sly smile between us and pass a compliment. Other times women would opine that they didn’t think theirs would grow out as nicely and I always admit that if I hadn’t liked the way it grew in I probably would have dyed it. My hair had the good grace to come in with streaks of gray against the dark brown. In addition, the texture changed for the better once it was mostly gray. It had always been thick, but slippery, heavy and difficult to keep up or back. I enjoyed manageable hair for the first time as the gray grew in.
Enter Covid however and suddenly many women have let their dyed hair grow out and are reemerging into the world as gray. It was of course a great time to let your hair grow out – or have a baby I guess. (Newborn down the hall this week! Evelyn Grace Deitch – yep, we have a Deitch down the hall! Pronounced Deetch however.) While some of the gray-goers are friends and colleagues, I see many women making the transition to gray on the elevator or in the street. I get the feeling they are checking out my hair, taking notes as such.
Pandemic Pam recently. As you can see, my hair isn’t getting a lot of attention.
While I have no advice about growing out dyed hair I do have some about living with gray hair. Until Covid I was very careful about trims and keeping my hair tidy figuring that it was such a standout feature that I needed to pay extra attention to it. Early on David showed me how to mix a bit of baking soda in clearing shampoo (for example Bumble & bumble makes what they call a clarifying shampoo, theirs is called Sunday Clarifying Shampoo, which is designed to clear out old product from your hair, Neutrogena makes one too) and leave it in for about twenty minutes before washing out. This is drying so I would do this once or so a month to keep the gray white. (I have started using a sea salt scrub instead which is a bit less trouble. The one I currently use is by Christophe Robin. Although during these Covid days I use very little hair product so it is less of an issue.) Oribe makes Silverati (disclosure – it is crazy expensive) which is in a class of colored shampoos to bring out highlights, specifically of gray in this case and goes alongside a group of purple shampoos which are designed to counterbalance the yellow in gray hair. All of these work to a greater or lesser degree, but in my opinion, nothing like the scrubs to brighten the color.
Kim and I at a wedding a few years ago.
I am also a bit maniacal about products and styling and pre-pandemic I would joke that there wasn’t a styling product that I couldn’t be induced to try and had settled into a routine of potions as part of my hair care. Meanwhile, although gray wasn’t an issue for me I have let my hair grow crazy long during the months at home. I have only had it cut once since the onset of lockdown and that is now getting to be close to a year ago. I wear it up each day and it is easy to forget about although I do feel like an aging Rapunzel when I take it down. I will also confess that in a sheer contradictory way, I thought about dying my hair during the lockdown out of sheer boredom. I thought it would be fun to emerge as a totally different person. Maybe that’s what women growing their gray in is all about. We are all deciding what our post-pandemic reset is going to be and what it will look like.
Featured photo by my good friend photographer @EileenTravell!
Pam’s Pictorama Post: Time marches forward and it was brought to my attention today that I have published more than 760 of these posts. (That seems impossible actually, but I will take the word of the fine folks here at WordPress since they seem to be keeping count.) Topics have sprawled over time and the nature of it has morphed a bit. As a general rule they have gotten longer and increasingly personal, although cats, photographs, toys and Felix remain the banner headline for the majority of weekends.
You all, my readers, have increased in number over time too – more in recent years than at first. And inevitably some very interesting things have come in over the transom from you all. A wonderful cache of Felix photos came to me that way – I remember I was in a hotel room in Florida having a miserable trip for work when it found me and cheered me immensely. (That post can be found here.)
Pams-Pictorama.com Collection
One man in India was very interested in a rare book I had acquired (and cannot find in the miasma of our apartment post renovation to scan for him but will eventually) and I have heard from the descendants of folks I have uncovered, such as the grandchild of Alfred Latell, who have had occasion to write about more than once. (Among my most popular, those posts about his career as an animal impersonator can be found here and here.) Usually I let the stuff I have acquired lead me down the rabbit hole of memory or joyfully research or speculate on its past a bit, although occasionally I have taken you on trips across the country and world for work, recipes I have created, or whatever else is on my mind on a given day.
Alfred Latell, Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.
My original dream of organizing my Felix photo postcards into a book seems as far away as ever – folks start muttering about copyright when I mention it – but nevertheless, it remains of interest to me. Alas, I will find a way I hope and of course I continue to add to it.
Pams-Pictorama.com collection
Earlier this week, a reader reached out to me to ask about a post I did where I mentioned a lost cousin of hers, Bruce Rogerson, someone I knew in Britain when I was living in London in my earlier twenties. It arrived in the midst of a work week which can only be described as our annual budget hell which has been escalated in intensity by the pandemic – such is fundraising for a performing arts organization that hasn’t been able to perform in public for more than a year! However, I did take some time to answer her and dredged up memories of Bruce the best I could on short notice.
Annoyingly, at the time I could not find my post she referred to and it was only this morning that I realized that it was the briefest of mentions in a super long post I wrote while returning from a work trip to South Africa in 2019. (It can be found here.) That post was primarily about African Highlife music and musings on my early relationship to it while living in London in the mid-1980’s. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra had played with local musicians as part of the Joy of Jazz Festival and the strands of the more indigenous African music woke the sound memory in my mind.
This morning I received an email from her and thanking me for writing along with the information that she had about her cousin. The combined gathering of my memories of Bruce for her and then reading her notes have him very much on my mind today.
*****************
Bruce Rogerson owned a coffee house in Britain called The Troubadour (still in existence at 263-267 Old Brompton Road, London). It would have had recognized bona fides and probably something of a cult following when he acquired it in 1970 from its original owners, Michael and Sheila van Bloemen who established it in 1954. The Troubadour made its name in the heyday of the coffee house live performance culture on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1950’s and ’60’s. It is said that it is the first venue in London where Bob Dylan performed has have Paul Simon and more recently Adele.
At the time I knew it the basement was used only infrequently for music or performance and I can only remember being in it once. Subsequent owners have expanded it and it is a live music venue once again – or presumably was pre-Covid. However, living down the street in a series of rented flats in Earl’s Court – which was rundown and affordable at the time although even then you had to know it was on the edge of gentrification.
The Troubadour was to me a rare place for a good cup of coffee – at a time when that wasn’t easy to find in London and I was already coffee addicted. It was also warm in winter (my abodes were anything but) and light food was available – a good soup comes to mind and quiche. The pastries were dubious and occasionally we joked about those. I was chronically a bit broke at the time so eating out was a matter of budget, although I was willing to pay for coffee. It was a sort of a cappuccino served in thick white ceramic mugs. (Liquor, wine and beer were not sold there during my time although I believe a license was acquired later.)
A coffee or two could buy you a lot of time at the Troubadour and soon I was doing my school assignments and writing letters from there, and my few recently acquired friends joined me there occasionally, making it our clubhouse of sorts. However, I was the most constant resident and as a result I got to know Bruce and also a number of the other regulars.
The Troubador more or less as I remember the interior in the late 1980’s.
I now know that Bruce was born the same year as Kim which made him twenty years older than my 21 years at the time. Over time I was to learn that he had a degree in mathematics, an advanced one I believe, although I only remember touching on it once. He was a tall, lanky man, always dressed in a uniform of neat denim jeans and an open-necked, button down Oxford cloth shirt, light blue or blue and white stripe for the most part. Bruce wore his hair a bit long, disheveled and was balding when I knew him.
He stood behind the low, ancient wood bar counter at The Troubadour, stairway that went up to the apartment where he lived above just in back of him. The kitchen, painted a really bright, surprising sunshine yellow, was at the end of the long narrow space and beyond the counter. One usually ordered from the counter although occasionally a waitress might stop at a table and ask if you needed anything – or not. The seats were hard wood, all of them. Former church pews lined the walls, at least in retrospect that is what I think they were, and wooden chairs made up other table seating throughout. Music played ongoing and the Blue Danube Waltz was played nightly at closing to usher us out the door.
I believe most of the interior decoration which defines The Troubadour dates back to Michael van Bloeman, the founder and scrapper extraordinaire.
Michael van Bloemen, the founder, was known for his ability to find trash and turn it into treasure. (After selling The Troubadour he and Sheila moved to Sarajevo and my father was ultimately introduced to them while traveling there and they struck up a friendship.) So The Troubadour was chock-a-block full of odd ancient and interesting bits and pieces that spoke volumes even to a young Butler blogger and future collector of detritus even at the time. In retrospect it seems odd that Bruce would be so devoted to the place when his own taste actually ran to the modern and his apartment reflected this and was a bit of a shock in contrast. Michael stayed friendly with Bruce and was a close friend of Don’s and would stay with one or the other on trips to London, where he turned up periodically to pick up his money from the dole.
The shop, which I believe is no longer there, as it looked when I lived in London.
I met and became good friends Don Bay there, it was Don who introduced me to High Life music as he owned an African music company, Sterns. (Ironically Don tried to pick me up by taking me to a classical music concert I had been reading a review for when we met. It was the only time I would associate Don and classical music.) Don and Bruce were close friends and over time I tagged along and was enmeshed in their lives for the time I lived there.
Let it be said, these guys drank a lot. At 21 I was capable of drinking a fair amount myself so I didn’t think much about it at the time, but now I know it was a lot of drinking. Bruce consumed endless bottles of white wine while tending to the counter evenings, always in a short water glass. Meanwhile, Don and I had a love of cooking in common and he had a large kitchen at his house in Putney so we would spend whole weekends making exotic fare and inviting friends to eat it. Those cooking weekends including consuming bottles of scotch while we cooked (my mind reels thinking about it now), not to mention while we ate, and those parties generally went all night long sometimes with leftovers being finished in the morning.
Bruce and Don both knew about food and enjoyed eating out and would sometimes take me along to the various restaurants they knew, some where they were regulars themselves. With Bruce it was always a late meal, after The Troubadour closed, which I want to say was 10:00? Seems so late now, but there was a French restaurant across the street where he went on a regular basis and there was also an African restaurant in a basement up the street where you could get a late night meal. Again, I was very broke and a good meal was always memorable and appreciated. (I was acquiring my own cooking chops as well and this was the time I really started to figure out cooking.) I was just starting to leave off eating meat, but still did. Bruce’s cooking achievement was a traditional cassoulet.
Generally Bruce, who was a very reserved man, made much of looking askance at my young (probably somewhat outrageous and loud) American ways and would often use a certain look of horror, eyebrows raised when I shocked, which was frequent – sometimes just looking at what I was wearing; I had a fondness for very bright colors at the time and at one point shaved my very long hair into a boy’s bob in response to my less than efficient shower at the flat. However, he generally also had a bit of a twinkle in his eye as well. In retrospect, he was fairly rigid in his ways and was very set in a routine; he needed the structure he created and wasn’t comfortable out of it. He stuttered a bit, something that is just coming back to me now in an effort to really remember him.
Bruce generally surrounded himself with a series of stunningly attractive waitresses whose skills had to include making the coffee (a large and somewhat erratic machine was involved) and at least assembly as well as serving of food. I still remember one woman named Emma who remains one of the most attractive women I have ever known and once told me a wild tale about having been a nanny for a famous German film director, who in addition to hitting on her, one day took her to a major film premiere without telling her where they were going. The Troubadour provided Bruce with both a social life and an endless line of attractive women, both customers and staff.
No tables outside when I frequented it as in this undated photo – also door painting is new to me.
He was a kind person and to his cousin I related a story about a mutual friend, my age, Hedwig Dumangier, who suffered terribly from epilepsy – she would have “tremblies” as she called them, several times a day and throughout the night. Specialists were unable to control it, although she tried a variety of medications and I believe had seen doctors across Europe. She was unerringly cheerful about it and took it in stride, however, when Hedwig failed to find employment due to her disability, Bruce gave her a job waitressing at the Troub for as long as she needed it. (This was very hard on dishes and occasionally food ended up in the lap of customers, but Bruce never really cared that much about the comfort of his customers!) On another occasion he invited my friend Sue to spend Christmas Eve with him and Don when she was alone in London. She was Jewish so the midnight mass they attended (sharing a flask in the back of the church) was I believe, memorable indeed.
Bruce was the one who was interested in classical music and I remember him trying to impress upon the young me that the sound quality of CD’s was inferior to LP’s. He had an elaborate turntable and a record collection which seemed substantial at the time, although I now know that a large record collection is generally in the thousands. If I could go back in time I would ask him if he didn’t also collect 78’s, maybe he did. Of course, even better sound quality there – but I knew none of this at the time and it was my first introduction to the concept. He played me the same recordings on both to make his point, but my untrained ear failed to really catch on at the time.
The very beautiful Old Brompton Cemetery was down the road and I used to take long walks there as well. This was less unusual in Britain and many folks walked there.
Although I knew Bruce had died back in 2014 (at age 69) I did not realize that he had been in nursing care for dementia in the last years of his life. He had sold The Troubadour in 1998 and retired in the Chelsea area. His cousin tells me that growing up his parents ran an inn where his father would have held forth behind a bar much as Bruce would later in life at the coffee house, although his family’s preoccupation with running the inn meant that he was sent away to school early on as well. Bruce lost his mother to cancer when in was just 17 or 18 and purchased The Troubadour when he was only 25. Knowing his background, growing up with parents running an inn, that makes more sense now – he grew up in the business. He was estranged from his mother’s side of the family after she died. My favorite bit of information is that he was nabbed for smuggling Swiss watches into the country. Bruce would have been attracted to Swiss watches and their fine mechanisms!
For those of you who made it through this very long post, thank you for staying the course. I hope this gives a bit more color to my description of him to his cousin Sara, who made the inquiry. It made me think hard about that time in my life which I haven’t really in a long time and so it was very much on my mind. I hope you enjoyed the trip, but hope to return to Felix and finds next week.
Pam’s Pictorama Post: Let the cat post begin! It has been awhile since a new cat item wandered into Deitch Studio, but this one was worth waiting for. It came to my via one of my favorite Instagram vendors, Mia @ The Ruby Foxes, or you can find her wares at therubyfoxes.com, but then you wouldn’t be treated to her frequent posts which not only have great stuff, but showcase her two cats (Enid and Astrid) and take the viewer on glorious, daily five mile runs through the British countryside. Her account says she resides in Arundel, Sussex and let me tell you, it is stunningly beautiful.
Photo from Carl Schurz Park earlier this week.
This pandemic year has given me a vast, new appreciation for glimpses of other folks lush landscapes as an armchair traveler of sorts – and for what it is worth I try to treat my Instagram followers to my East River views, park foliage and wildlife in my IG stories as a reminder of our urban pleasures. Some of you know that I recently made the acquaintance of a young hawk who insistently swoops in front of me as I entered the park each morning. (Look at me!) Just yesterday he was hunting about a block from the park and I saw him as I headed over, soaring high above me, being chased by wary, angry crows and sparrows. (An interesting example of warring bird factions who wouldn’t typically otherwise unite for a specific cause.)
Immature hawk (red tail?) posing on a lamppost after flying past me repeatedly one morning while warming up for my run.
Mia, on the other hand, has hedgehogs in her garden and she has rigged up a camera to film the pudgy little fellows at night! They are delightful! The other day she gave some instructions for encouraging them back to British gardens as they no longer thrive there the way they once did. We all do love the hedgehog footage.
A glance at the Ruby Foxes IG page. Just out of sight is a rhinestone horsehoe pin I might need if it hasn’t sold. The lower right is a hedgehog night cam video!Enid is the pretty long-hair and Astrid the large ear-ed youngster of the kits shown.
Mia is an accomplished runner and shared views of her muddy track shoes through spring – extra muscle building, those muddy paths I would imagine. She ticks off five miles daily and is very diligent. While I suspect she is younger than yours truly it does inspire and impress me mightily, as my sort of sloppy, very slow and approximately three miles has taken a long time to achieve. Mia sent encouragement early on when I told her I was trying to start running which was also very kind, and she and her five miles in the English countryside are a sort of vision board for me and my nascent, slow and urban, efforts.
However, this is all to say that I found The Ruby Foxes because she sells antique jewelry and other antique bits and pieces on Instagram and I like to see those too. I have written some about my fascination with early 20th century British jewelry and vintage clothing as it is a sort of a parallel universe to the same period in the US. I am enjoying the baubles and bits of their bygone age and as it is slightly different than our own, it has renewed my interest in this sort of thing. (My other posts about this can be found here and here.) I considered it a sign of good mental health when I got interested in jewelry again – proof that some part of my brain was thinking about a future where I would again be out in the world someday. I am developing a fascination with lucky horseshoe pins and insect pins.
Not doing this little beauty justice, but moonstones are like opals in that they are hard to photograph!
Recently I purchased a tiny moonstone ring from her. I have long been a fan of moonstones and have had my eye out for a simple, early ring like this one. It is a tad small, even for my littlest finger, but after some to and fro we decided that it could be made a bit bigger if needed. However, best of all, Mia reminded me that ages ago I said I wanted a cat door knocker which she had subsequently tucked away for me until such time as we added something to the order which I guess didn’t happen. I don’t know how I let this little fellow slip my mind because he is wonderful!
Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.
He is quite small, the size of the palm of my hand so what, about five inches? As a door knocker he is small, although solidly made of brass and I would imagine he would emit a suitable knocking on your door. (In size he reminds me more of a mezuzah than a door knocker.) Still, I can’t help but feel he is somewhat apartment sized and really would be ideal for a door like ours here where you are never more than half a room away from the front door.
Living in a large apartment building which has restricted front door access (in our case a rotation of doormen) means that not a lot of knocking goes on here. Oddly though, we have a new, shy porter who has instituted the practice of leaving some of our packages at our front door and he quietly knocks when he does it. It made Cookie hiss the first time, which seemed like an extreme reaction. Still, we were all a bit surprised and of course now when you go to open your door you have to find your mask first and chances are you are on a Zoom call for work at the same time and carrying the ipad or phone around with you. It doesn’t happen often and so it is a bit of a big deal.
Our broken bell, misnamed home and a bit of peeling door paint. I gather these will all be repainted shortly.
Our NYS regulation fire safe metal doors also seem a tad knocker unfriendly. We technically have a doorbell built into the door although it broke within weeks of my moving in here decades ago and I wouldn’t begin to imagine how to have it replaced or repaired. There is also a bit of press tape with the prior owner’s name stuck in (J. Radigan, whoever and wherever you are) where the broken bell is. We have lived here incognito for several decades. (Yes, I have always been a bit casual about some aspects of home maintenance.)
Meanwhile, I don’t foresee putting this great little fellow out in the hall. For one thing, I like to look at him. He has tiny holes for thin nails and I cannot imagine somehow drilling him into our fire-approved metal door. Since we live in one room, doors are in short supply here, so I think he will grace a wall or shelf instead.
Cat Knocker, I would guess by the same maker, for sale on eBay.
I have found some of his feline grinning brethren online – a few identical and a few kissing cousins, likely of the same origin. The general consensus is that he is British and Victorian. The variation that is perhaps more available seems to be just his head, with the bow the actual knocking part, shown above, and identified as the Cheshire Cat. I wouldn’t mind assembling a few more cat knocker variations if the opportunity arises and am a bit tempted by the eBay offer although that one does look like he has been poorly polished at some point.
Yet another variation on the theme available on eBay.
I like my guy best I think, with his full cat body, smile and big bow tie. Hard to see but his grin is a bit toothy and there is an almost worn away whisker or two. The smile is a slightly enigmatic one, his toes tucked together and somehow the knocker gives a sense of a tail which does not exist. He will do a nice job of guarding our house, even if it is from the inside and not out.
Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: As I write this it is developing into a soft spring day here in New York City and if it doesn’t cloud up too much I hope to get out for a run in a bit and enjoy it. There is something about this photo of women playing softball or baseball, which makes me yearn toward summer. On the back of the photo, in pencil script, it says only, Backyard NH Aug 1945. The stately farmhouse in the background and all these trees, it is a regular idyll. It fed directly into my desire for the outdoors this spring as I observe every new sign of growth and progress toward summer daily. (I snatched it up via a sale by @_wherethewillowsgrow_ a favorite photo friend.)
I am very fond of the suspender style shorts worn by the pitcher and the short skirt of the catcher is pretty cute too. There is a protective fence between them and that lovely house so this is a well-used baseball diamond. The photo has a haziness, as if some how the humidity of that August afternoon and the visual incarnation could reach out and frizz my hair a bit, all these years later. The trees seem to fade right into the whited out sky. It is trimmed with those wonderful scalloped edges, the way photos often were at that time.
By August of 1945, I guess WWII was just about to be declared over officially. Of course people would have had a pretty good sense that it was ending, but I wonder if after all those long years they really believed it. Were things already hopeful in August of 1945 or were they just beyond exhausted by it all? Probably both by turns and that six years and the devastation of millions dead is among the world events that greatly overshadows even our current world-wide woes.
Yesterday I made a trip to the East Village for the first time since fall, to see about getting my eyeglasses repaired – they broke just as I was leaving for New Jersey a few weeks ago and I have been living in my spare pair. It was a riotously beautiful day, sunny but windy and still jacket weather. There is a wonderful glut of tulips this spring – speculation in the paper about if New Yorkers are just enjoying them more or if there are more. As a tulip lover I would vote for there are more of them – but we are definitely loving them all.
Masses of tulips in front of a building on 85th and Second Avenue.
Meanwhile, East Village residents were out in force on the streets and packing every outdoor hut and cafe. Manhattan has changed I believe for the long-term, in this way, and New Yorkers have claimed the sidewalks and streets. I think it has given birth to a new sort of cafe society outdoors. Temporary huts gradually giving way to more permanent structures and perhaps like Paris, our restaurants will largely open onto the streets.
Veselka’s has established this substantial outdoor space which now dominates the block.
Looking more carefully however it is easy to gloss over the vast number of empty retails spots, like a growing gap-tooth smile. Some old friends are among the missing. A favorite toy store has disappeared after 38 years, heart breaking, but not unexpected. I wrote about them in a prior post which can be found here.
Dinosaur Hill Toys is sadly gone! They had elegant, new toys and I always stopped in to pick up some small token.
I stopped in at a clothing store on the same block on 9th Street, DL Cerney (@dlcerny, their site can be found here and I have written a little about them before) which I am very fond of. Their men’s trousers have been the only “hard” trousers I have worn since March of 2020 and it is them I will look them to dress me in some sort of return to the world clothing. Their designs, fabrics and tailoring is exquisite. I found them in a little storefront tucked between McSorley’s and a friend’s apartment on 7th Street many years ago. At the time I could only afford the occasional item and they were selling a mix of vintage and their own designs. (I had a pair of heavy, men’s black Cuban heels I wore, resoled and wore through again in my 20’s. Maybe best shoes ever.) Eventually, sadly they disappeared and it was literally decades later that I rediscovered them in a storefront on 9th, further east by a block, having taken over a storefront from another shop I frequented.
Since then, over the past several years, I have been happily clad in their lovely button down shirts and men’s trousers which make me feel a little like Katherine Hepburn, or sometimes just a well-dressed man. My feeling is that I am always perfectly attired (if also very comfortable) in their clothes. I have taken the trousers to London and Johannesburg and worn them endlessly. Having said that the trousers are fairly indestructible and my elderly tailor admires them each time I bring a new pair in to be hemmed with cuffs. For me they are a reasonable starting point for a transition out of daily workout clothes, thinly veiled with sweaters and the occasional necklace or earrings for a shoulders up appearance on Zoom.
As I tried on a few things I talked to Linda St. John, who along with Duane Cerney, are the principals of the business, and a bit of shopping there is also a nice visit with whoever is in the shop that day. We talked a bit about where New York seems to be in the recovery process, and for them it is still a bit discouraging I think. Like those of us in the performing arts (trying to re-open our hall and our club Dizzy’s at Jazz at Lincoln Center), retail continues to lag and in their case the loss of tourism and students (not to mention the subtle migration out of small city apartments to bigger digs for those who could afford it) continues to erode business. They have challenges with suppliers. We are all trying to stay afloat until we reach the shores of better times.
We discussed, as I have with Wynton and my colleagues, whether we are poised at the beginning of the end of this long pandemic haul or not. We may be or is it just the next bend in the road? The end of the beginning rather than the end – I hope not! However, none of us knows what our corner of the world will look like in six months, let alone another year and I think we’ve learned the hard lesson that we only thought we knew before anyway.
It wasn’t too difficult for Linda to talk me into a spring dress, although I had arrived hunting a linen version of the trousers I love, but in a slightly larger (post-pandemic) size than I am in possession of currently. Nonetheless, a dress, even a casual one, is like a stake in the ground, hopeful that there will be summer meals and drinks outdoors and maybe even days at the office as we inch our way forward.
Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Today I get to combine my love of early photos with family. While I was visiting mom in New Jersey last week, my cousin Patti took out a huge basket of photos we went through together. Some folks remained unidentified, but a core group appeared throughout. (I wrote about this side of my family back in a post around a photo of a very early family wedding celebration. It can be found here.)
These are entirely my mother’s side of the family, the Italian immigrants who settled on the Jersey shore and ran a series of restaurants and food stands in what was a popular beach community. I apologize for the reproduction quality – I was just taking pictures of these photos on my phone.
As far as I can tell the genesis of these food enterprises was my great, great grandfather – last name Cittadino, first name not known to me. He is shown below in two photos, with car and bike.
Pams-Pictorama.comPams-Pictorama.com
I especially like the one of him with a bike. Regretfully no one knew who the two hotsy totsy looking, well dressed young women were. They showed up in some other photos. None of these photos were marked and had largely at one point been in an album, but we realized what everyone does when looking at family photos which is there are a lot of people who were friends or folks they worked with who were like family, but sadly no one remembers now.
The Deli, shown below, seems to have been the first restaurant incarnation of the family. I only recently learned of this earlier version of the family food establishments. As per an email from my mom below, I gather it was a place to eat as well as the take out sale of food. Sorry to say, these two fellows in the photo remain unidentified.
My grandfather had a deli and related food sale place in Long Branch on the Main Street Broadway. Every morning he walked to the bank for day cash on the way passed the owner of the bar getting to the bank. They struck up a conversation the fellow told him he was tired and wanted out. My grandfather then struck a deal walked on to the bank and got the loan went back and gave him the cash and that was it. He walked back to the deli told my grandmother and the customers eating there at the time and agreed all would help move down the street and that is how he moved down to the building with friends and customers helping shortly after when they did.
Pams-Pictorama.com collection.
Norwood was the name of a street in Long Branch, in fact the street where my grandmother and the extended family had a home. (I wrote about that house in a post that can be found here). As per my mother’s email, the deli and the bar that followed, were actually on Broadway, the long main drag of what was once the thriving downtown which I believe ends at the ocean where the Boardwalk once thrived. The family home was within walking distance of the Deli and Bar, I think probably 15 or twenty minute walk, of it.
The family also seems to have two food concessions on the Long Branch Boardwalk as well, one I had always heard about, owned by my Aunt Ro. However, another turned up in these photos and I am not sure who owned this stand, but the general consensus was that this was not Ro’s but another. Not sure who is pictured here either, although he resembles my great uncle Frankie, but is too long ago to be him. Perhaps the Al mentioned on the awning boasting a Quick Lunch.
Pams-Pictorama.com collection.
The family’s bar is what is remembered best by my mom, run by her grandparents, her mom and aunts. Mom would go to their apartment above the bar after school as a small child. Although much of the family worked there – not Mom’s father, Frank, who was an engineer for Bendix. While it is always referred to by family as The Bar, it served a lot of food as well. In addition to the daily fare special Sunday dinners were offered to steady customers, all prepared by the women of the extended family. Mom remembers them cooking non-stop between the restaurant and family.
The photo below is the aforementioned Frankie, father of my cousin Patti who stays with my mom these days and found these photos cleaning out her house. I believe this shot was at the bar although I would have voted for it being one of the beach concessions. (I wrote about my sectioned blue Willoware plates which were the Blue Plate Special plates at the bar and are our everyday dishes. You can find that post here.) My mom and uncle were too young to work there, although my mother used her restaurant background to waitress her way through college later in life.
Hot dog concession with Frankie manning the flatop and Great Grandpa Cittadino behind him. Pams-Pictorama.com collection.
The establishment remains today, at 591 Broadway in Long Branch – currently Johnny Piancone’s, ironically also an Italian bar restaurant. I have never been – although once my father and I had pizza in the place next door which I gathered from him had been there as long as he has known my mother.
My uncle ate at the restaurant several years back and they allowed him to visit the apartment upstairs which he also remembered vividly from afternoons there as a child. I have shown the bar today below which I found on the FB page. The bar pictured may be the originally one, although I believe my uncle said it had been cut down. The restaurant appears to have survived the pandemic with outdoor dining in a backyard and I would think doing take out. It’s nice to know that it is still there, still going in its own way.
Pam’s Pictorama Post: Last weekend for the first time since October I headed out to see my mom in New Jersey. As I had in the fall, I hopped on the ferry at 34th Street and the East River. I say hopped on, but there is a lot of queuing up, appropriately distanced, and waiting to get on the numerous boats to go up and down the river and coast. The same ferry line that takes me to Highlands goes significantly further north, up to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. (Although perhaps the more substantial model boat that I took home at the end of the trip, more on that later.)
Like many people I have been hesitant to see my elderly mother and possibly inadvertently infect her. She has not been well and I have wanted very much to go, so I took a Covid test and hopped on the ferry last week. I sat on the upper deck outside and it was cold, but a gorgeous day. Like the trip in the fall, it felt strangely heady and almost decadent to be traveling. (I wrote about that first trip out of town in an October post here.)
For my fellow workaholics I will confide, it was the closest I have come to unplugging in more than a year. I only attended one meeting in two days and colleagues were very thoughtful and there were less emails than usual. I’m pleased to report that no major meltdowns occurred.
Leaving the dock at 34th Street.
I thought I had dressed warmly enough, but was wrong again. I always forget how much colder it is on the water and on a boat zipping along that way. I layered on all of shirts I had with me, put Beethoven on my earphones and watched the scenery while perched outside reading the Camp Fire Girls Behind the Lines which I have downloaded to my phone. (If you are curious about my Camp Fire Girls reading, I have written about those early juveniles from the teens here and here.) The trip is only about 50 minutes (an hour and a half on the train) – twice as expensive, but half the time. Since I don’t go that often it is well worth it.
As we enter the Sandy Hook Bay I start to get nostalgic for my childhood. I remember being in my grandfather’s small fishing boat, the Imp, or later sailing with my dad in that Bay. Not that often, but often enough that the sense memory kicks in when I see it. As we get closer to Highlands memories of walking on the Hook come back too. I have walked it in all seasons, the fall there being especially pretty and quiet.
Grabbed this photo off of Pinterest, the boat view from a mile or so away from where the ferry docks.
Highlands and Atlantic Highlands are built into hills right on the water, making for some dramatic, virtually vertical roads leading up to wealthier inhabitants at the top, with commanding views of the water, river and ocean. Perched at the very top are the Twin Lights, important lighthouses in their day, now non-functioning and a museum. Erected in 1828 the existing structure is from 1862. It was a landmark I always looked for from car and boat growing up in the area.
At sea level there are tiny houses, mostly raised with garages on the ground level to address constant flooding. I have always had a yen to own one of these little houses. For some reason, although I grew up along another part of the river, this area always had the pull on my heart. If I had bought a house there it would have been in this area or in Sea Bright on the other side of the Bay.
Mom’s house.
Mom currently lives in a small town next to the town where I grew up, about 15 minutes from the ferry. After spending most of this year cooped up in our tiny studio apartment, her little house seems expansive – stairs! The surrounding neighborhood is in a glory of spring blooming and flowering trees, tulips and other flowers are just bursting all over.
I got up early for a run and took the route to a friend’s house, figuring I was least likely to get lost that way. It was Edenic. Just running without a mask was blissful. The cherry trees and magnolias were so beautiful (some shown above) I ordered one of each for Mom’s yard for Mother’s Day.
Another morning gave me a chance to walk on a virtually empty beach, a few miles from where the ferry dropped me, in the town of Sea Bright. It was a very warm day and the sand was hard packed for easy walking, the ocean lapping. It too was heavenly.
Beach in Sea Bright.Sea Bright and the main drag there, Ocean Avenue, taken from the boardwalk on the beach. Rory’s is the current incarnation of a restaurant I waitressed at in college, Harry’s Lobster House.
Meanwhile, in the past year my mother has acquired two stray kittens who are in the middle and latter stages of adolescence now. I seem to terrify and fascinate them both, Peaches and Gus. I missed my friend Red who died in the past year as well. (I wrote about him in my post Red Buttons, here.) However, these two keep things lively in the house, racing around constantly. (Gus on the left, Peaches – very worried – on the right.)
On the third morning it was time to head back to Manhattan. I stayed an extra night and took the 6:00 AM ferry back to the City. There were many more passengers than I would have expected and a larger, more no-nonsense ferry in use. The upper outside deck was closed off so I stayed warm inside and watched the sunrise over the river.
Pam’s Pictorama Post: It seems safe to say spring is finally on the rise here in NYC and this month marks six months in my experiment with running so I thought I might give a bit of an update today. February threw down some serious snow which brought me to a complete halt for awhile, however after several weeks in captivity I forced myself to head back out (with some trepidation) to see how much ground I had lost. Much to my amazement I pretty much picked back up where I left off.
For those of you who missed my earlier post (it can be found here) I started jogging because otherwise during our long pandemic period, I found myself not moving from my home desk (Deitch Studio is also a studio apartment and our single room leaves little room even for pacing), and watching as many hours melted rapidly into days. I don’t have much time and I wasn’t able to get much walking done in the hour or so I can devote to it so in a bid for efficiency I began running.
I came to exercise late in life, but pre-pandemic was a happy gym rat, cramming it into early mornings, evenings and weekends. (I have written generally about my workout and that post can be found here.) However, I have always been a reluctant runner. I dislike treadmills (I don’t really imagine that will have changed when I get back to them) and running was sort of a final frontier of exercise I had not embraced.
Dramatic signs that spring is unfurling earlier this week.
My mother ran and was in fact a high school track and field star whose records there were only broken decades later. (I believe it was the long jump she excelled at.) She ran for a brief period when I was a kid, but she had largely given it up as an adult. My sister, Loren, ran. Loren was a bundle of hyper energy that needed to be released daily in large dollops or she was impossible to live with. Therefore it wasn’t unusual for her to run and bike, swim or play tennis together in combinations daily. She ran cross country, was on the track team in high school and generally distinguished herself as she did in most things. (Loren’s college rugby career in is mentioned in a post here.)
It can only be said that I did not inherit my mother’s genes in this area and it must be my more sedentary father I take after. I frankly cannot imagine my father running – it isn’t an image I can conjure if I did indeed ever witnessed it. He was a tall man, 6’5″ and skinny in his youth, but he filled out as an adult, muscled from his work carrying camera equipment for his job daily. Still, other than a daily work out of reluctant stretches for a bad back, executed on the floor of the bedroom, there are no memories of dad and exercise.
Frankly, I run badly and I am relieved that it is very unlikely I will actually ever see myself run. I run slowly – there may be people who walk faster than I jog. My strides are short and plodding. I seem to be a different animal than many of the folks around me, boasting their shirts from the marathons they have run, bouncing, gliding and zooming along. Young, old, women and men of all ages generally make a better job of it. It is only thanks to my long time trainer, Harris Cowan (@livestrongernyc) that I have managed to ease my unwilling body into running.
Area I start my warm up in each time. Often there are others working out, walking dogs or on their phones. These trees have been late breaking into bloom.
However, doing something with determination even if badly, is a good foil for the narrowness of our current cooped up state I think. I remind myself to be grateful to my body for what does achieve, not critical for its failure to do it better. It’s been good to put myself up against something hard that is concrete and which can be chipped away at. Running makes me use another part of my brain and gives a rest to the thorny problems of work and what needs to be done, or what has risen to the top of my agenda for fretting. Releasing the problems for a time allows me to better work through them later I think.
Strangely and unexpectedly I have started listening to classical music, largely orchestral, while running. I run along the east side esplanade, along the water (my brother Edward reminded me in my prior post that our East River is actually an estuary) which tends to be glorious with the sun rising over it in the early mornings. I will never tire of the various moods of the water – choppy with current one day and still the next. It reminds me of the river which was always in our backyard growing up.
View of Roosevelt Island with water sparkling during a run earlier this week.
However, not to be too romantic about it, on the other side of me each day is the FDR drive and a noisy endless bevy of cars, fighting their way to their early morning destinations. Therefore, it is not the glorious sounds of nature I would enjoy if I wasn’t plugged into my phone. Audio books were always my go to when exercising and I have listened to some wonderful things. Yet I was finding increasingly that they weren’t right for running, distracting but not in a good way.
The park during a more wintery run.
I switched to a music mix I had used occasionally for workouts which ran I admit with some embarrassment heavily to Bruce Springsteen (can’t take the Jersey out of the girl I guess) which did the job but was a bit repetitive. However, one day it started with a curiosity about Beethoven’s 7th symphony and the feeling I had never really listened to it. I downloaded it and decided I would listen to it while running – which I did many times over several weeks. After that I wandered over to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony which has long been a favorite, but I hadn’t heard in a long time. I welcomed spring with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. (Admittedly, I have pretty routine taste and I suppose if I want another challenge I could actually start learning about classical music.)
A fairly calm morning on the FDR.
I listened to a Beethoven violin concerto and realized that after years of it making me sad after my sister died, more than a decade later now I love listening to the violin. Staying with Beethoven I was listening to a piano concerto yesterday and realized I have rarely listened to much piano at all and what an amazing instrument – one-stop shopping for a full orchestra in a single instrument. The education of my ear which I had been receiving with live music via jazz on the job in recent years, has taken a turn with classical music.
The long incline at about 80th Street on a cold morning.
My experiment with running began with a combination of walking and running. Running as long as I could, followed by periods of walking which became shorter over time. I achieved a milestone the other day and did virtually the full run without a break. (There is a steep incline at a land bridge which I have yet to tackle at even a slow run.) I had dragged myself out that day which it turned out was a gentle spring morning not to be missed and was rewarded. For those who have followed my running via my IG stories, I am taking fewer photos now that I am walking less!
Little guy found a cache of nuts and was happily porking down the other morning while I stretched at the end of my workout the other day.
Frankly most mornings it is still sheer will that gets me into my sweats and out the door. (I wrote last time that I was doing the post simply to keep me from quitting the whole venture.) It is hard and drinking coffee at my desk or even lifting weights in the comfort of the apartment is more appealing. However, once I am out it is good for me and I am seeing spring unfold in the park where I start and end my jaunts. Earlier this week a hawk swooped right past me at eye level while I warmed up with a few moving stretches pre-run. (He was a big fella and I was glad not to be a small mammal or bird. Yikes!) Plants are beginning their persistent and riotous emergence and squirrels and birds are suddenly everywhere, feasting and frolicking. When I look back on this time I think it will be these mornings I remember best.
Pam’s Pictorama Post: I purchased this little guy a couple of weeks ago. I saw him on Instagram one afternoon and grabbed him (sold by @marsh.and.meadow antiques), and I was just delighted when he showed up. Continuing with yesterday’s jewelry theme I also purchased the lovely Czech glass necklace below from Heather @marsh.and.meadow antiques. It was new old stock and she had a fistful of them! When I wore mine, to a rare in person lunch earlier this week, it was the first it had ever been worn despite being decades old.
Photos snatched off of Instagram and from Marsh and Meadows Antiques.
I first met the proprietor, Heather, under the guise of her account, @_wherethewillowsgrow_, for the purchase of vintage photos and then I realized she sells other interesting stuff from her other account. She included this nice little photo of a family, shown below, in the package with the Czech glass necklace. I consider these folks as part of my Easter celebration in their spring hats and dapper clothes. (Also to say, she recently sold a necklace made of operculum which vaguely fascinated me, but I didn’t see it in time to pull the trigger. How is a necklace made of those somewhat ephemeral things? Find a post devoted to a pile of operculum here!)
Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.
Meanwhile, this great little Easter fellow presents this enormous spotted egg, tied with a big bow – and he sports a jolly big bow around his neck as well. I like this sort of frame he is in and I love that the back continues the design, bow, egg and bunny back. I realize that if you look carefully he does have a cotton tail which extrudes from the frame. He has a sweet face and expression and this is a very big egg he has. Although the pink in his ears is mostly missing, the tiny daubs of green and blue and gold in the flowers around the edge show a level of care in his making. He’s enjoyed a place of pride on my desk since he arrived and frankly I just like to have him there, pick him up and look at him.
There is a bale and he is meant to be a necklace. I would definitely wear the little fellow, although he is somewhat season specific, perhaps a thin bit of ribbon instead of a chain. No matter, I just like having his cheerful self around.
Admittedly I come at Easter from a largely non-ecumenical perspective. Easter for me will always be the launch of spring despite what the calendar or weather has to say about it. With a Catholic grandmother and Jewish grandparents, it has a mixed smattering of Passover thrown in and my childhood memories of this time of year are filled with Easter bread, matzoh brie, matzoh ball soup and of course chocolate. Easter and Passover are about food and family.
I am one of those kids who somehow subconsciously thought that bunnies laid eggs and that’s why the Easter Bunny brings eggs. At some point I realized that wasn’t the case and I admit it has always confused me. Yes, I understand the whole eggs and Christianity thing and the prolific bunnies of spring, but it was always remained a strange marriage in my mind. How did we end up with bunnies that deliver eggs? Chocolate eggs at that? And it seems to be a male bunny on top of it. Screwy.
I think I have touched on the big family Easter gatherings of my childhood in previous posts. (I wrote about the magic of my grandmother’s kitchen back in the 2015 post Ann’s Glass which can be found here.) I can remember Easter egg hunts in her generous yard – me in an Easter suit, white tights with baggy knees; I remember one in particular that was light blue and even had a little hat. (My mother was not prone to dressing us up as kids so perhaps that is why I remember the occasion, although I believe it is also documented in a photo somewhere. I think mom felt just keeping us clean and clothed and getting us to where we were going was generally sufficient when managing three kids.)
I always liked the stuff of Easter, the celluloid grass, small silky toy chicks, sugared eggs with Easter scenes unfolding within them. I liked the smell of Easter egg dye and vividly remember the messy joys of making those. (There was the year that our German Shepard, left unattended one afternoon, ate the better part of a dozen of our finished dyed Easter eggs. She didn’t get sick; she never did. Just took it in stride. However, I was very angry at her for robbing me of this ephemeral pleasure of the season.) Fluffy baby chicks, tiny soft bunnies, strange plastic eggs filled with toys and candy – what’s not to like?
Strangely Peeps creep me out and I have never eaten one. I know they have some intense fans.
I was thinking this morning that I have no memory of how we ultimately consumed all those hard boiled eggs each year, although we must have since mom didn’t waste food. My mother was not a maker of egg salad nor deviled eggs though and I do remember that the Paas dye seeped into through the shell and colored the inner eggs in places. I have specific memories of discovering egg salad and deviled eggs in adulthood. Maybe the dog got more of them each year than I knew. I will have to ask mom on the phone later.
My father, although Jewish, faithfully supplied us kids with baskets of Russell Stover baskets of candy every year, on into young adulthood, with amazing consistency. (My father was very good with the delivery of candy and there were equally consistent Valentine’s Day, heart shaped boxes each year. Those started with Russell Stover, but in adulthood morphed into Godiva and others as we got older.) The Russell Stover company still makes very similar chocolate eggs and baskets – they remained strangely constant over the years and I see them in the drugstore in the weeks leading up to Easter.
Most years I breakdown and purchase one of the chocolate eggs, filled with either strawberry or maple cream – the taste of childhood! Of course there were always the chocolate bunnies. I was a tad sad about consuming their cute selves – always ears first, eyes of hard sugar. Mom helping when they were solid chocolate and harder to break apart. It was always a somewhat inferior chocolate, but rapidly and joyfully consumed nevertheless.
For my father, non-observant though he was, this time of the year my mother would always make matzoh brie which we called fried matzoh. She had learned this from his mother, early in their married life I gather. Matzoh ball soup was a constant throughout the year, but would always be made too. In young adulthood I mastered both – my matzoh brie is a scrambled one like my mother’s; it tends to come more like an omelet when I purchase it in diners, usually on the Lower Eastside, and I like my matzoh balls a bit firmer than some people. (There is always a discussion of fluffiness.) Lots of salt and some pepper in the fried matzoh – I know exactly how my father liked it.
In retrospect it is a bit strange to think that we would have an Easter ham with my grandmother on Sunday, when we probably had matzoh brie for breakfast the day before. My diet (which promises to be a feature of my life well into summer at the rate I am going) and Kim’s aversion to eggs (he is probably turning green just reading about all this egg consumption) means alas, we will not celebrate the advent of Easter and Passover related food this year. Perhaps next year will be a different story and I will find the recipe for the glorious fat loaves of Easter bread my grandmother used to make and treat you to the story of baking them.
Pam’s Pictorama Post: One of the strangest byproducts of the past year was a developing penchant for pins. Backing up a bit, allow me to assure you that I have long been a joyful purchaser of jewelry. However, pre-pandemic, I was decidedly more of a ring gal and my preference was almost exclusively gold. My taste did not especially run to gem stones, although with occasional exception. It wasn’t unusual for me to wear four rings on a typical day, including my simple gold wedding band which I wore every day, along with a few gold bangle bracelets. Really, fingers were for decorating.
Coinciding with staying at home my fingers began to swell. I have mentioned that I have psoriatic arthritis, (related posts can be found here and here), but it has typically not been fully resident in my hands and my fingers remain fairly straight. I assume the swelling is in some way tied to less cardio exercise – the lack of the daily walking around town of the sort that used to be normal. Anyway, that combined with rarely leaving the house to do more than shop for groceries or hit the drugstore, meant that for the most part I took my rings off last March and have rarely worn them since.
This one also from Wassail_Antiques contained a Felix mug as well! Future post there!
And yet some time around last fall my photo buying interest on Instragram (the purchasing of photos and other ephemera has been documented in posts here and here) lead me to a few select, vintage jewelry dealers. These are folks, mostly women from Great Britain, deal largely in turn of the century items. At first it just fascinated me that these items were not things I typically have seen in looking at vintage jewelry in this country since I was a teenager or younger. While it wasn’t wildly different, it was different enough to capture my imagination – sort of a parallel universe to the vintage jewelry I have been looking at and purchasing for years in the US. Almost entirely silver, this is strangely like a mid-life, British version of the early vintage jewelry I boasted in my twenties and early thirties.
Early purchase, incoming package!
As an aside and bonus, these folks all seem to live with access to the most stunning British countryside and an additional benefit has been the gorgeous photos of their surroundings which feed a craving for some non-urban views in this narrow New York City life. Folks like Mia – aka @therubyfoxes treat me to almost daily photos of her ambitious (if often muddy) morning runs through the farms and woods there. She also has two adorable cats and recently posted a great series of nighttime hedgehog videos from her garden. (In addition she makes a darn good looking Friday night pizza for her husband and son and was kind with encouragement about my nascent running career.) Marco, of @fiorisfinds, and the purveyor of the heart pin (shown further down) and more recently a pretty faux aquamarine ring, has a pair of mighty fine looking bunnies, Basil and Dinky, who have their own account, @abunnycalledbasil.
Photo credit to Rachel from Wassail_Antiques. I wore this to a rare in-person lunch yesterday.
Because many of these sellers also deal in early photos, a photo or two often shows up with the package. Rachel in particular wraps her packages in a layered and luxurious way and it is a bit like Christmas or your birthday when one of her packages shows as shown below. (The recent purchase of a necklace from @marsh.and.meadow came with a tiny early photo worthy of its own post – watch for it and a related Easter post tomorrow.)
My most recent package from Rachel at Wassail_Antiques. She and most of the other dealers mentioned can also be found on Etsy.Am especially loving the Rinty card here!
Slowly I began to purchase an item here and there. Given the swelling in my hands and that rings are generally best tried on, my interest wandered to pins. I have never worn many pins and consider getting them attached attractively to clothing a challenge and a talent, like tying a scarf, I do not readily possess. Nevertheless, I have acquired quite a few. Among them a jolly horseshoe to be placed upward to hold the luck in, congratulatory messages on hearts, and most recently two beaded butterflies.
I definitely have not done these butterfly pins justice. Hard to describe but they are very lovely indeed in person.
The butterflies are more beautiful in person than they photograph. I purchased them from a favorite seller, @Wassail_Antiques who is also a talented photographer and I have treated you to a few of her photos here. Therefore it is rare that an item arrives and Rachel has not fully captured its beauty, yet these fellows pleased me even more in person than they had online. These butterflies languished in her shop long enough to gnaw at my brain which was looking for a fix of spring, just waiting for me I guess. They have done the job and the gorgeous pics of her dog and the sheep and meadows around her house as spring blooms help too. (In pulling together photos for this I realize that rings are not entirely absent from my purchases and several necklaces, very short for good Zoom viewing, bright and cheerful glass “stones” have also been acquired and gone into rotation. Zoom jewelry is, oddly kept on a shelf near my computer rather than with my other jewelry.)
This double heart feels like it is shouting encouragement at me.This style of silver pin is very available and I have to resist the temptation to just keep buying them.
The butterfly pins were evidently made by prisoners of war, I believe during WWII, but perhaps in the first World War as well? I was unable to find any real history about the practice. Butterflies were also a symbol used in mourning jewelry in Victorian Britain, but I will mostly ignore that fact and focus on spring I think. For that matter insect pins in general have begun to interest me – Art Deco fat insects with paste or gem stones. I had to control myself over a large cicada pin which of course would be a nice way to celebrate the little fellows on their once every seven year appearance coming this spring. I do not know where the vision of me sporting many insects crawling up my shoulder has come from or why exactly it now appeals.
Cropped photo from Wassail_Antiques on Etsy.
Like most of us, the shoulder and neck view of Zoom has meant that my colleagues and associates have largely seen a long line of dark scoop necked tops with the occasional cardigan (or frankly sweatshirt) thrown over them. I don’t have pierced ears, but a tiny pair of bright blue glass earrings that were among my early purchases from Rachel make an occasional appearance. Meetings with Board or non-staff might encourage me to pull out one of two soft sweater jackets that I acquired for that purpose as well. For some reason though it seems weird to sit in my apartment in a fitted jacket with lapels of the kind I used to wear almost daily. Yet somehow in the back of my mind I have been formulating a vision of a time when I will sport lapels again, boasting multiple pins on them. Hearts will gather together, horseshoes will provide good luck, and butterflies and perhaps other insects will flit across my shoulder.
Pam's Pictorama 