More Than Nerds: Sharks Mate for Life

Book people are the best people (yes, even better than fashion people).  So, when I started reading Emily Henry's latest, Book Lovers, I knew I was in for the kind of banter that burgeons between people who make their living in letters.

New York City publishing powerhouses Nora-named-for-Nora-Ephron Stephens and Charlie Lastra are an odd couple.  No, she's not a loveable kook whereas he's an acquired-taste curmudgeon, nor is she the straitlaced sophisticate to his irresistible man child.  Instead, both can be kindly described as stick-in-the-mud corporate sharks.  Although to be fair, only Nora is actually nicknamed The Shark.  So yeah, no Oscar, two Felixes.  In other words, these two are made for each other.

Not that they see it that way.  Or are even a couple.  Nora thinks that she's finally escaped her cold-hearted colleague when she and her sister land in rural North Carolina for some summer R&R.  But then Charlie rears his oh-so-handsome head just as Nora is hate-texting him, throwing her lazy vacay -- and her plans to snag a Hallmark hometown hottie -- for a loop.  Still, both Nora and Charlie are too prickly for most people to understand let alone tolerate, so it isn't long before they realize that they're cut from the same page proofs.  Not since Gone with the Wind has a story made such a strong case for "like goes with like."  So fine, they like each other.  But why should we like them?  (The last time I checked, people want to swim with dolphins, not sharks.)  Because they're book people.  And behind every book person is someone who's been hurt and found what she needed in fiction.  Nora puts it best:

"Daily life was unpredictable, but the bookstore was a constant.  In winter, when our apartment was too cold, or in summer, when the window unit couldn't keep up, we'd go downstairs and read in the shop's coveted window seat.  Sometimes Mom would take us to the Museum of Natural History or the Met to cool down, and I'd bring my shredded copy of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler with me and think, If we had to, we could live here like the Kincaid siblings." (225)

It's the rare book that can drop inconvenient trope truths and retain its lighthearted status, but Book Lovers does it with style.  Because although it isn't easy for everyone to accept that opposites don't always attract, not all career women are heartless, and sometimes small towns are more depressing than darling, Henry shows us the world as it is but also as we'd like it to be, through the spell of her snarky-sweet prose.

Oh Henry, you've done it again.

Leaf Brief: Treeing Red

Dress: Arizona Jeans, JCPenny; Shoes: Chase & Chloe, Zulily; Bag: Apt. 9, Kohl's  Red and yellow bangles: B Fabulous; Orange bangle: Mixit, JCPenney; Maroon bangle: Iris Apfel for INC, Macy's

Maple Mix Barrette Brooch

Autumn Ornament Barrette

Top: Nine West, Kohl's; Skirt: Candie's, Kohl's; Shoes: Nine West, Amazon; Bag: Nine West, ROSS; Belt: Belt is Cool, Amazon

Fancy Foliage Barrette Brooch

Fall may seem like an odd time to review a show that takes place during summer.  Then again, Red Oaks is an awfully autumny name for a comedy cured in warm weather.  So as with most of life's contradictions, I'll accept that the truth lies somewhere in the middle and get the heck on with it.

The Amazon Prime original Red Oaks (2014-2017), not to be confused with Twelve Oaks (although both have some Scarlett, ha ha), is about a Jewish North Jersey country club in the '80s.  Our hero is David Meyers (Craig Roberts), the club's twenty-year-old assistant tennis pro.  In the first scene of the first episode, David's dad (Richard Kind) has a heart attack on the tennis court during a discussion about David's future.  But Oaks isn't always as serious as an ER trip -- even if pompous club president Doug Getty (Paul Reiser) does tangle with Johnny Law.  It's summer, it's fun.  And David is at least sometimes carefree as he navigates the do's and don'ts of country club life along with his stoner-slash-secret-genius bud Wheeler (Oliver Cooper) and cartoon character of a womanizing tennis pro Nash (Ennis Esmer) one entitled member -- and love interest -- at a time.  

Because true to form of the age of angst, David has girl problems.  And parent problems.  And what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life problems.  All of which he battles from his bicycle.  That's right.  What we have on our hands here is a classic manchild.  Not only does David lack wheels, he lives with his parents instead of at NYU.  Still, despite his failure to launch, he wants more from life than a wife and a desk job.  Even if his high school girlfriend Karen (Gage Golightly) is content to remain in their hometown forever.  

As an emissary from the '80s, Red Oaks offers music somewhere between New Wave and the background track on an after-school-special.  And then, of course, there's the fashion.  Although more realistic than the Day-Glo sweat bands and leopard leggings that come prepackaged as Halloween costumes, it's nonetheless iconic, with bowler hats, striped leotards, and Laura Ashley-esque florals swathing the artist, aerobics instructor, and costumer that they respectively represent.  What's more, Jennifer Grey, Gina Gershon, and Josh Meyers (yes, Seth's brother) round out the "adult" cast.  Although the maturity level of Meyers's cheesy photographer is debatable.    

Red Oaks brims with life's big and not-so-big questions but leaves plenty of room for funny.  Introspective and bittersweet, it's a character-driven joy ride that takes a nostalgic look at coming of age in the '80s.     

So, fall.  Get out there and jump in a pile of leaves.  Just look before you leap.  

There are worms in there.

Green Queen: Mistress Marilla

I've always been suspicious of prequels, sequels, and alternate versions of classic books written by people other than the original authors.  It's why I passed on the not-Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett and the not-Daphne du Maurier's Mrs. de Winter.  Although I do recall watching the Scarlett miniseries on TV as a kid with my mom and sister.  Remember network miniseries?  And Sunday night movies?  If not, then picture a Lifetime movie airing on CBS every Sunday after "Murder, She Wrote."  Oh, '80s and '90s, you made cheesy melodrama worth staying up for.  Even if that cheese, much like its lactose-laden inspiration, gave us nightmares.  (If my mother is reading this, then I feel honor-bound to say that not one of those soaps stirred up bad dreams.  That was just a bit of hyperbole.  It takes more than a wedge of Gouda and Judith Light whaling on her husband to mess with my sleep.)

Yet despite -- or because of, I'm not quite sure which -- my eternal love for Anne of Green Gables, I gave Marilla of Green Gables a chance (which you probably saw coming a mile away, given the wide berth I gave Meg and Jo).  Written by Sarah McCoy instead of L. M. Montgomery, this prequel is Marilla Cuthbert's origin story.  Known to grown-up little girls and book lovers the world over, Marilla is the iconic, no-nonsense closet softie who gives Anne Shirley a home.  She's middle-aged when we meet her, a gray-haired spinster living with her bachelor brother on the family farm in Avonlea.  She's proper, she's stern, she's set in her ways, and she's downright disgruntled when the orphanage sends her a wisp of a girl instead of a strapping boy to work her farm.  At first.  But her kind heart lets the endearingly eccentric Anne stay, forging a bond that will change them forever.

Still, one can't help but wonder: Just how did Marilla end up alone in the first place?  Sarah McCoy explores this question, using it for the foundation for her irresistible novel.  She shows us Avonlea as it was forty years before Anne ever set foot there.  It's a more austere, pioneery sort of place than the fairy tale land we see through Anne's eyes.  But it honors the spirit of Montgomery's magic, its seemingly simple descriptions of small town life seeping into the soul.

Marilla of Green Gables starts in 1837 and ends in 1860.  At the start, thirteen-year-old Marilla is the daughter of modest, hardworking people.  Her older brother Matthew is painfully shy, and none of the Cuthberts are demonstrative.  But they love each other deeply even if they seldom say so.  Still, Marilla feels her reserve melt away when she starts spending time with handsome John Blythe.

"They sat together under a canopy of meadow grasses and a sky of spun sugar.  Marilla's heart still beat fast from the dance.  John's did too.  She felt the pulse in his fingertips.  From the magazines she'd read, she thought she'd feel embarrassed or ashamed to be holding a boy's hand.  The same way she felt holding the pages of the romance quarterlies.  But she didn't.  She only felt John: simple, solid, and true." (110)

Wait.  Hold up.  Blythe, do you say?  As in Gilbert Blythe, Anne Shirley's one true love and husband?  Yes!  Apparently, in Anne of Green Gables, Marilla tells Anne that people used to call John her beau.  But I'd forgotten that.  Not so for McCoy.  This brief but telling revelation sparked her need to write this book and get to the bottom of what happened between John and Marilla to cause Marilla to end up -- to use the term of the time --an old maid.  McCoy draws upon the themes of pride, duty, and the passage of time that influence the plots in so many of Montgomery's novels.  At times, McCoy's writing is so like Lucy Maude's it's as if the late author herself is writing through her.  One marked difference, though, is the prominence of historical events and -- but, of course -- feminism.  McCoy takes us on a sometimes somber journey that encompasses Canada's fight to split from Mother Britain as well as the American Civil War.  At one point, Marilla witnesses the public hanging of some "radicals" and is horrified by the way the onlookers laugh:

"They were too young to understand that life is ephemeral while death is permanent.  These weren't her children or children of Avonlea, and yet they pained her.  Like a tendon tethered to splintered bone." (198)

Marilla's own Aunt Izzy, a dressmaker in Charlottetown, offers her home as a safe house for runaway slaves.  Marilla is proud, reflecting that her aunt couldn't have made such a difference if she'd stayed in Avonlea and married a local boy as planned.  Instead, she uses her talent with needle and thread to offer refuge:

"Their costumes were their salvation, transformative as Cinderella on the night of the ball, and Izzy was their fairy godmother."  (238)

McCoy also examines what it means to be a wife and mother, and it isn't always as idyllic as the Avonlea of old would have us believe.  Poverty, farm chores, and mouths to feed conspire to create a life that is oftentimes drudgery.  Women are discouraged from speaking their minds, and many succumb to sickness and even death as a result of childbirth.  Still, Marilla of Green Gables needs to be told because it speaks its own truth and sets the stage for everything that comes after it.  If Marilla and John had married, then there would never have been an Anne or a Gilbert.  It's because they didn't that Anne and Gilbert come into the world, cross paths in Avonlea, and fall in love.  Which is the way it's supposed to be.  Like Marilla and John 2.0.  But not.  And that's the bittersweet part, I guess.

So, you see, I had no choice but to read Marilla of Green Gables.  Even if I eschewed Scarlett and Mrs. de Winter.  Because I'm a fool for an origin story.

And because I never loved Gone with the Wind or Rebecca the way that I've always I loved Anne.

The Ties That Blind: Birds of a Tether

Dress: Modcloth
Shoes: Chase & Chloe, Zulily
Bag: Gifted
Belt: Marshalls
Bangle: Mixit, J. C. Penney's
Green bracelet: Amrita Singh, Zulily
Purple bracelet: Etsy
Other bracelets: So, Kohl's
Sunglasses: Michaels
Barrette: The Tote Trove

Top: Pink Republic, Kohl's
Skirt: Wild Fable, Target
Shoes: Katy Perry, Macy's
Bag: Circus by Sam Edelman, Kohl's
Belt: Izod, Marshalls
Bracelets: So, Kohl's

Filled with beads! 

Bird is the Word Bag Necklace

Sometimes, things don't go according to plan.  Like when I photographed this first outfit and found that the lovely-in-my-mind lemon print dress camouflaged my Bird is the Word Bag Necklace into a chaos of color, and not in a good way.  But I subbed in a plain black top as the new backdrop.  And the necklace popped the way I wanted it to -- even if the sacrifice was the obliteration of the green and black details of my watermelon flip flops.  

But that was okay.  I learned to love my little ghost watermelons, reminding myself that perfection is boring.  

Which is just one of the things that spoke to me in Kelly Corrigan's memoir Glitter and Glue.  In it, journalist Corrigan reminisces about when she was twenty-four and quit her desk job to see the world and have great adventures.  She never imagined that she'd end up as a nanny for an Australian widow and his two children.  Or that the experience would make her see her relationship with her own mother in a new light and give her a glimpse of the mother she herself would become.  

I knew I would like this book.  How could any crafter not, with a title like Glitter and Glue?  But I didn't know that I'd love it, that its bittersweet edges would remind me of life's relentless yet precious surprises.  I like memoirs because they get right down to the core of things.  They're character-driven as opposed to plot-driven (although I suppose they have to be, what with the characters being real people and all), and their end game is self discovery instead of shocking endings or eleventh-hour rescues.  Unlike in a novel, nothing is tidy -- and somehow seems richer for it.  And that's the case with Glitter and Glue.  Corrigan describes her adopted Australian family in as much detail as her family back in Philadelphia, complete with all the alliances and dynamics that construct the invisible framework of people who sometimes have nothing in common but genes.  

Five-year-old Martin is immediately smitten with Kelly (it seems incongruous to refer to her as Corrigan at this point), but seven-year-old Milly remains reserved to the point of rudeness.  Both adorably call her "Keely" in Australian accents.  Helping out in a motherless household gives Kelly a new perspective on her own childhood.  She has always been closer with her father, a light-hearted Irishman nicknamed Greenie, whereas she sees her mother as strict and unsympathetic.  Yet when she was a teenager, her mother told her, "Your father's the glitter but I'm the glue."  (Better than the old rubber and glue saying, I guess, where glue is the villain.)  Now, years later, this makes Kelly wonder, and it makes me wonder, too.  Is the no-nonsense parent the one who loves harder?  And do men always get to be the fun ones while women do the less glamorous work of holding things together?

On a more superficial note, I could not for the life of me imagine traveling anywhere with only ten pieces of clothing!  But that's just what Kelly did.  Toward the end of her nanny tenure, she tie dyes a top and a pair of pants purple in an attempt to impress a special someone.  (Because yes, there is a touch of romance here.  And for me, it -- and its tortured trajectory -- is the book's most poignant part.)  I admire Kelly's move in all of its Scarlett-O'Hara-tearing-down-the-curtains ingenuity.  But for me, most of the fun of going anywhere is getting to trot out new looks.  Still, this personality impasse makes Glitter and Glue's message even more powerful.  As in, we may not all be the same or even like the same things, but at heart, human beings need the same things: to understand the world around them and to be appreciated and loved. 

I think that's what Corrigan (because yes, at this dramatic juncture we're back to using her last name) is saying.  That, and appreciate your mom no matter how much she annoys you, because she's amazing.    

They say that healthy birds leave the nest.  And I agree.  But the healthiest birds always come home.  Even if only to unpack an overnight bag -- be it a designer tote or old, beat-up backpack -- and say thank you.

The Drawbacks of Tiebacks: (Not So) Fast Food and Matters of Art

Yellow Rainbow Glow Necklace 

Yellow Rainbow Glow Earrings

Yellow Rainbow Glow Purse Charm

Top: Candie's, Kohl's

Shorts: Merona, Target

Shoes: Betseyville, Macy's

Bag: Marshalls, embellished by The Tote Trove

Belt: Izod, Marshalls

Bow: The Tote Trove

Non-tassel purse charm: The Tote Trove

Ah, tassels.  First made popular, not by hippies, but by Scarlett O'Hara when she, in the ultimate necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention moment, tore down those curtains to make that green dress.  Fortunately, I didn't need to venture any further than the nearest craft store to get the ingredients for my latest passel of tassels and pompoms (a phrase, by the way, that I say far too much on this blog).  Not that my shopping trip wasn't without its own challenges.  Oh, big-box-craft-store-that-shall-remain-nameless, you tried to deny me my discount.  But I wouldn't let a little thing like a barcode-less coupon stop me.  Anyway, in a nod to Gone with the Wind's groundbreaking green dress, I paired my Yellow Rainbow Glow trio (that's what I named my passel; nice, no?) with an emerald ensemble.

Speaking of which, it's funny that a character named Scarlett is best known for wearing green, first for the aforementioned drape dress, second for the green-print white one at the Twelve Oaks picnic.  (Yes, there's the red dress too.  The one that gets her into all the trouble.  Still, it's a sad second fiddle-dee-dee to its less va-va-voom verdant sisters.)   Then again, maybe this color conundrum makes sense.  Because Scarlett is a woman of contradictions.  For instance, she stuffs her face before said picnic in the privacy of her own home (okay, plantation) so that no one will think her unladylike for stuffing her face in front of others.  She doesn't want to do this and in fact fights it, but it's an unwritten rule of the antebellum South, and, like the South itself, she surrenders.  Yet Rhett, if given the opportunity, would have seen past such subterfuge.  I think that if he'd said, right from the get-go, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a ham (about your weird secret eating), then a lot of heartache -- and perhaps heartburn -- could have been avoided.

The same could be said for Mr. Darcy and Bridget Jones and lots of other iconic couples.  Which just goes to show that being a woman who likes food and falling in love (so a woman who, in other words, breathes), living in any time or place is in a real sisterhood of the traveling pantaloons situation.

Kind of makes you rethink sloppy seconds.