Rind Finds and a Sweet and Tart Read: Summer, Start Your Engine

 Rainbow Confetti Necklace

Top: POPSUGAR, Kohl's

Skirt: Arizona Jeans, JCPenney

Shoes: Worthington, JCPenney

Bag: Circus by Sam Edelman, Kohl's

Sunglasses: Michaels

 Fabulous Felt Lemons Barrette

Top: Arizona Jeans, JCPenney

Skirt: Arizona Jeans, JCPenney

Shoes: Payless

Bag: Sleepyville Critters, Zulily

Sunglasses: Michaels

 Cherry Ice Cream Necklace

Top: Fifth Sun, JCPenney

Skirt: Amazon

Shoes: Worthington, JCPenney

Bag: Gifted

Sunglasses: Brigantine beach shop

Memorial Day.  The sun on your face, something hot off the grill, and a tall glass of cold lemonade.  Does it get any better than this?  

It does if you score some new citrus-themed clothes and/or lose yourself in a good book.  Full disclosure: I bought these tangy togs more than a month ago and finished reading When Life Gives You Lululemons on Friday.  Which means that today I'm not doing any of that and am headed to a BBQ.  But the promise of this post is what kicked off my weekend.  Not unlike this pair of Katy Perry flip flops that I'm currently, ahem, rocking. :)

But I digress.  

Time for the book club portion of our program.

No one wants workout gear.  Especially the designer, Stepford wife kind that takes the place of bona fide clothes.  So it was mighty clever of Lauren Weisberger to use it in the tile of her third Devil Wears Prada novel.  Remember Emily (also Emily, Blunt that is, in the movie version), Miranda Priestly's (Meryl Streep's) other assistant?  The mean queen bee fashionista to leading lady Andy's (Anne Hathaway's) fish-out-of-Figi ingenue?  Well, Lululemons is all about her.  She relocated to Los Angeles to start a fabulous life as a stylist to the stars and is now a PR goddess fixer.  But lately no one is in need of her signature brand of spin doctor sorcery.  Because she's in her mid-thirties and doesn't know how to use Snapchat.  Which seems silly to anyone outside of Tinseltown's rarefied and fragile bubble.  But it's enough to make Young Hollywood shun Emily in favor of a fellow millennial.         

Now, Emily is not at all the kind of character I identify with or even usually admire.  Slick and savvy, she's a master manipulator who gets whatever she wants.  But I think that's what makes her so interesting, even if only as a lesson on how to deal with -- and perhaps even understand -- people like her IRL.  Right or wrong, her moxie serves her in righting her career as well as in saving two friends from personal ruin.  Old camp pal Miriam is a high-powered lawyer-turned stay-at-home-mom who feels overwhelmed.  And Karolina is an ex-supermodel married to a senator with an agenda.  Yet despite their accomplishments, these women lack Emily's nerve.  Emerging as more than a wardrobe warrior princess, it's Emily who reminds them to put themselves first.  Rudely and in an in-your-face way, yes, but that's what they need.  Then, as always in fiction land, just as Emily puts their lives back together, her own does a wild 180.      

When Life Gives You Lululemons is a page-turner for sure, zinging with all of Weisberger's wit, humor, and glimpses into the glitterati.  Funny and fierce, it -- wait for it -- puts the devil in diva.  I know, I know.  Simply awful.  And not something that Miranda Priestly would find the least bit amusing.   

Now for something that no one in this book (except for maybe Miriam, bless her heart) would find amusing or ever hang on her mansion door: my new lemon wreath!  I love that it's kind of unruly, as if at any moment the lemons might launch a revolt.  Also, I dig the red and yellow combo.  Because, Ronald McDonald forever.

So, this Memorial Day (and every day), when life gives you lemons, just spit out the seeds.  And grill your own cheeseburger and avoid Ronald McDonald.

He may be stylish, but he seems like a creep.   

Mama Drama: Going Postal

 Whimsical Waters Necklace

Dress: Zulily

Shoes: Worthington, JCPenney

Bag: JCPenney

So last week, I received an email from a customer informing me that she still hadn't received a necklace that she'd purchased in March.  Needless to say, I was gobsmacked.  As always, I'd shipped the package within three days of purchase and emailed the customer the USPS.com tracking number to let her know that it was on its way.  True, I didn't receive a response or get Etsy feedback, but that happens more often than not, so I thought that no news was good news.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Not knowing what else to do, I logged onto USPS.com and plugged in the tracking number.  The red No Record Found that flashed on the screen made my heart sink.  There was only one explanation: the package had gotten lost in the mail.  In my nearly ten years of selling on Etsy, this had never happened.  I couldn't make the customer a new necklace.  The one in question was one of a kind, made from eclectic fabric flowers that I wouldn't be able to find again.  Instead, I issued a full refund along with my heartfelt apologies and the offer of a free item from my shop.  Thankfully, the customer accepted all of the above with grace and good humor.  Better yet, she loved the necklace she chose as her consolation prize, right down to the packaging.  Which meant everything to me.  When I send something across the country (or, once a in a while, across the world), I feel like I'm putting good out into the universe, and I want to keep those vibes going.

Still, I can't help but wonder what happened to that package.  Is it lying in an alley somewhere, pigeons pecking away at the illustrated envelope?  Or is some postal worker wearing the necklace to a summer shindig, margarita in hand, even as I type this?  In the future, I'll always track the package myself to find out if it reaches its destination, if only so I can contact the customer instead of her (or him) contacting me.  But the fate of this one will just have to remain one of life's mysteries.

In happier news, I saw Mama Mia: Here We Go Again last weekend, and it was fabulous.  So fanciful and colorful!  Plus, I always love a story with flashbacks, which is pretty much the whole deal with this one.  As you probably know, in the first Mama Mia, Donna's (Meryl Streep) daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), wants her father to walk her down the aisle.  The only hitch is, she doesn't know who he is.  He can be one of three guys (Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, or Pierce Brosnan) that Donna wrote about in her diary.  So, Sophie invites them all to her wedding, they show up, and chaos ensues.  In the sequel, which is partially set in 1979, we return to the idyllic Greek island of Kalokairi to see a young Donna (Lily James) fall for her three handsome suitors and sing her (broken) heart out about it.  (As a bonus, we also get to see her buy her signature overalls at an outdoor market).  The air crackles with the delicious angst of young love in an exotic setting, and the songs play in your head long after you've scarfed down your popcorn.  Yet even more intoxicating is the sense of freedom and adventure.  Donna is an unapologetic risk taker, exploring the world fresh out of college without a plan or a safety net, bewildered by those who follow more well-worn and traditional paths.  And she's absolutely ecstatic doing it, even when her world seems to crumble.  It makes me wish that I would've done something like that at twenty-two instead of combing Monster for a "normal" job.  But then again, I guess it all worked out.  This strange little public diary of a blog is more my type of adventure.

Anyway, I stumbled upon a treasure trove of ocean-themed jewelry-making supplies not long after I saw the movie.  When I spotted these dolphin-shaped beads and the groovy druzy rock pendant, I thought, ooh those would make a cool necklace.  Beachy and boho and blingy and blue.  Just like Mama Mia!  

Speaking of beaches, here's a shot of the faux surfboard attached to the Conex box that is the Sol Berrie smoothie stand on the less glamorous but beloved island of Brigantine.

Bold and inviting, it's the kind of picture you want to dive into -- one dutiful hour, of course, after downing your smoothie.  Or, you know, thirty seconds after downing your smoothie, pineapple-mango froth still dribbling down your chin.

How's that for unapologetic?

Cafe au Yay and Fostering Play: Old New York and New New Jersey

 Blossom Rainbow Rampage Necklace

Top: Delia's

Skirt: Material Girl, Macy's

Shoes: Not Rated, Journeys

Bag: Fred Flare

Belt: Wet Seal

Sunglasses: Michaels

 Medallion Rainbow Rampage Necklace

Top: So, Kohl's

Jeans: Candie's, Kohl's

Shoes: Bamboo, DSW

Bag: Apt. 9, Kohl's

Sunglasses: Rampage, Boscov's

Butterfly Blue Rampage Necklace

Top: So, Kohl's

Jeans: Mudd, Kohl's

Shoes: Chinese Laundry, DSW

Bag: Uniquely Different, Etsy

Belt: Candie's, Kohl's

Sunglasses: Rampage, Boscov's

Heart Rainbow Rampage Necklace

Dress: Rampage, Amazon

Shoes: Worthington, JCPenney

Bag: B&B

Belt: Wet Seal

Sunglasses: The Tote Trove

It's no secret that I adore the ornate.  If it's (jewel) encrusted, embroidered, or embellished, then I'm plotting a way to make it myself or at least make it my own.  That said, when I see an old-school movie, one of my favorite things to do is check out the costumes.  It's such fun to slip into a time when people really dressed.  Gowns!  Jewels!  Hats!  Nothing was ever too fancy, and no heroine ever worried that she looked like she was trying too hard.  So, when I saw Café Society and Florence Foster Jenkins, I wasn't disappointed (well, not in the clothes, but more on that later).

First, Café Society.  It's a typical Woody Allen flick about a misunderstood, wet-behind-the-ears New Yorker yearning to make his mark.  This time the young man in question is Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), and the time is the late 1930s.  Bobby leaves his parents' cramped Bronx apartment for Los Angeles to ask his bigwig agent Uncle Phil (Steve Carell) for a big break in the movies.  Uncle Phil is an unlikable sort, a far cry from the teddy bear in grizzly clothing version we all know and love from "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air."  But ambition seldom comes without romance, and through the course of the movie, Bobby finds himself involved with two women, Vonnie #1 and Vonnie #2.  Sure, I could go with Vonnie and Veronica, as Bobby does for most of the film, but this way is funnier, plus has the added benefit of symbolism.  Vonnie #1 (Kristen Stewart) is Uncle Phil's secretary, a wise-beyond-her-twenty-five-years goddess who's not what she seems.  On the wardrobe front, she favors chic yet girlish skirts and blouses in creamy neutrals topped off by the occasional frilly headband.  By contrast, Bobby is awkward and sweet, and as Vonnie #1 herself says, naïve.  (Also, he wears a lot of high-waisted pants.)  After spending what seems like forever in the friend zone, Bobby finally wins Vonnie #1's heart.  The two enjoy a California sunshine-drenched idyll in which they frolic on the beach, a spectacle that manages to be more moving than cheesy.  For Eisenberg and Stewart, it's Adventureland all over again (minus the carnies), as they morph into every nerd boy-cool girl pairing you've ever seen, only better -- and more ironic.  Some people don't like Stewart, but I think she has a kind of soulful depth that matches Eisenberg's earnestness.  (As a side note, Café has a six degrees of separation thing going on, what with Blake Lively as Vonnie #2 and husband Ryan Reynolds as Adventureland's villain).  But this is Woody Allen's world, which means that heartbreak is on the horizon.  A difference of opinion tears the young couple apart, sending Bobby packing for Gotham.  There he sheds his Hollywood dreams to manage his shady older brother's (Corey Stoll) nightclub.  It's a role that molds his naivete into near cockiness, a persona that fits the endearingly diffident Eisenberg about as well as Bobby's too-slick suit.  Nevertheless, this is where Cafe's style unfurls in full flower.  Enchanted ensembles float across the dance floor in decadent splendor, more modish and mysterious than those on display in LA.  In keeping with his new playboy image, Bobby tries to bed Vonnie #2 during their first meeting, his shy, romantic younger self long since snuffed out by disappointment and living.  Glamorous and sophisticated, Vonnie #2 is a winsome divorcee who's been hurt.  But even her charms are no match for the chemistry between Bobby and Vonnie #1, which is a pure thing in a sea of pretense.  Their relationship reminds me of Tom and Summer's in 500 Days of Summer.  Timid office drone Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) falls for charismatic, nonconformist secretary Summer (Zooey Deschanel) who turns out to be - spoiler alert - a conformist after all.  When Summer tells Tom she's done, she means it, and Tom ends up meeting a girl who makes him truly happy, whereas Bobby . . .  Well, never mind.  (Hey, sometimes I can keep a secret.) Suffice it to say that Café Society is melancholy, introspective, and spiked with Allen's signature wit, a cocktail as bittersweet and sparkling as the elixirs mixed behind its bar.

As for Florence Foster Jenkins, I just don't know.  It's the 1940s biopic of Jenkins (Meryl Streep), a New York patron of the arts who desperately wants to sing but is terrible at it.  To add to Florence's misfortune, she contracted syphilis decades ago on her wedding night (a condition that forces her to wear a hideous, if era-appropriate, wig) and so is in a second marriage (of convenience) with actor St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), a not unkind guy who juggles a girlfriend and the full-time job of shielding Florence from the painful truth about her pipes.  Yet talented but greener-than-clover accompanist Cosme McMoon (Simon Helberg) finds it more difficult to keep up the subterfuge, revealing his frustration in a series of hilarious facial expressions each time his benefactress unleashes her banshee wail.  As Florence continued to screech her way through a whole hope chest's worth of mother-of-the-bride-like beaded outfits, I couldn't help but hope that something would break for her (and I don't mean glass).  When she's at the height of her humiliation, giving an earsplitting recital at Carnegie Hall for a horde of rowdy servicemen, I thought that maybe she would shift to a comic-on-purpose performance, dramatizing her already bird-like outfit and strangled-crow's voice until she sprouted literal and metaphorical wings in a rom-com-style extravaganza of unlikely and uplifting triumph.  But this is no rom com, and that never happens.  Instead (and you may want to avert your eyes if you still plan to see this) she finds the one newspaper that St. Clair hasn't destroyed, reads a scathing review, and . . . dies.  Hmm.  So much for sticks and stones.

But upward and onward.                 

High points:

A bathtub full of potato salad (who says you can't picnic where you pee?).

The aforementioned comedic stylings of Simon Helberg, who turns out to be a nerd for all seasons.

The reminder that Ms. Streep can play any role, no matter how ridiculous, flawlessly.

That brings us to the end of this post's New York portion.  So long, Empire State, hello Garden (State).  (Not adding that second "State," I feel, would have been disrespectful to Zach Braff.)  No story here, I'm afraid, just the blue skies of Brigantine and the mirage-like (marsh-like?) skyline of  Atlantic City.  Bet there are more than a few suspect songstresses belting it out beneath those chandeliers.

That, and a buffet's-worth of potato salad.

Book Report: (A Blogger's Take on) Julie & Julia by Julie Powell

I had been wanting to read Julie & Julia for a long time. Partly because I saw the movie when it came out last year, partly because I'm a fellow blogger. Last Friday I finally got around to finishing it. There were things about it that I really liked, and things about it that I really didn't. Although the movie was very similar to the book, the book had an undeniable dark streak running through it (as books often do) that was much diluted in the movie.

So, things that I liked. As a writer and blogger, I could relate to Julie. Right from the get-go. I particularly liked this excerpt on page 11:

"When I was a kid, my dad used to love to tell the story about finding five-year-old Julie curled up in the back of his copper-colored Datsun ZX immersed in a crumpled back issue of the Atlantic Monthly. He told that one to all the guys at his office, and to the friends he and my mom went out to dinner with, and to all of the family who weren't born again and likely to disapprove. (Of the Atlantic, not Z-cars.)"

Here Julie establishes herself as a reader. It sort of sets the tone for the rest of the book, because it lets us know that she wants to do something with that, and that that something, of course, is to become a writer. But finding ways to do that prove kind difficult because of, well, life, and all its mundane daily trials. Enter the Julie/Julia Project, in which Julie will spend 365 days cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, chronicling every misstep and triumph in a daily blog. As a springboard for a writing career, it's an odd choice. Julie spends a small fortune on unappetizing ingredients such as beef marrow, kidneys, and cow brains, spends hours preparing them, and then sits down with her husband, Eric, to actually eat them, often at the mind-boggling hour of midnight. I found it very, very hard to understand why she forced herself to eat cow brains. But then, this is supposed to be the part about the stuff I liked . . .

Fast forward to the whole blogging thing. At the start of the project, Julie doesn't know what a blog is. Her husband tells her, and it's with a certain tentative technical unsavviness that she ventures to write her first post, an excerpt of which is, "Too old for theater, too young for children, and too bitter for anything else, Julie Powell was looking for a challenge. And in the Julie/Julia Project she found it. Risking her marriage, her job, and her cats' well-being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment. 365 days. 524 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer-borough kitchen. How far it will go, no one can say . . . " (26). And she's off. The blog becomes popular relatively quickly, garnering Julie the kind of readers who comment daily and write near-tearful missives if she disappears for too long. She begins to depend on hearing from them, telling her husband that she can't stop the project because her "bleaders" (as she begins to call them) are expecting to hear from her. Julie becomes so immersed in blogging that she questions the point of blogging itself by analyzing the seventeenth century diarist Samuel Pepys (you may remember this character from high school English class). Here was a guy who jotted down every detail of his life, both the shocking and the run-of-the-mill, solely for his own enjoyment. Julie ponders this, writing, "What I think is that Sam Pepys wrote down all the details of his life for nine years because the very act of writing them down made them important, or at least singular. Overseeing the painters doing his upstairs rooms was rather dull, but writing about it made overseeing the painters doing his upstairs rooms at least seem interesting. . . . " (110). It's true, what Julie says. Writing stuff down does make it seem more interesting. That's why we read, after all. Sitting on your porch and slipping into someone else's world is almost always preferable to whatever you've got going on in your own. I guess that was what Julie herself was doing when she blogged: adding interest to an otherwise (by her own confession) uninteresting life. I chose to view this as a positive move, a way for her to reclaim her own destiny.

Now, on to the things I didn't like. Or rather, the things that troubled or confused me. Julie has a very nice husband. He helped her with all aspects of the project and hardly ever complained. He was her high school sweetheart, and they'd married at the age of 24, together moving to New York seeking intellectual and artistic adventures. To me, this seemed romantic. But Julie seems kind of ashamed of it, a state of mind she reveals in various parts of the book. Consider this (graphic - I warn you) section from page 21: "Please understand - I love my husband like a pig loves shit. Maybe even more. But in the circles I run in, being married for more than five years before reaching the age of thirty ranks real high on the list of most socially damaging traits, right below watching NASCAR and listening to Shania Twain." It seems like maybe Julie doesn't want to be married. (I got a little of this from the movie, but the overall message was that they were happy despite Julie's neuroses. A Hollywood spin, I suppose). And I'm not really sure why. It's not as if her husband is some Neanderthal, you know? A Google search revealed even more upsetting news. After publishing Julie & Julia, Julie wrote another book called Cleaving, which is about her adventures as an apprentice butcher away from home and all the affairs she has. (Part of me wants to read it but knows I can't. The butchering descriptions would be the end of me. I'm very squeamish about blood and had to skim several of the more graphic cooking scenes involving organ meat and butchery in Julie & Julia.)

At the end of Julie & Julia, you sort of hope that Julie is finally fulfilled. (At least I did.) That writing a blog that turned into a book that turned into a movie was what she was looking for. But once I heard that she'd run off and cheated on her husband I began to question her capacity for any kind of happiness. Maybe she wasn't just another frustrated writer. Maybe she was a woman with issues with a capital I. And I think this was what bothered me the most. Because for all its wittiness and David vs. Goliath sensibilities, Julie & Julia lacked that essential ingredient of the kind of book that you want to reread and remember -- heart.

All of this having been said, I couldn't help but ask myself, "Why do I blog?" The easy answer would be that I love to write. I've always loved to write. Even during the few times in my life when I told myself I was done with writing, I found myself creeping back to it, almost unconsciously, jotting down snippets of things on scrap paper. I like to weigh the rhythms of sentences, adding and subtracting words until they sound perfect. I like to describe things: people's expressions, clothes, meals, houses. I like to make up characters (which applies to writing fiction, not blogging, but still). So, blogging is a fun, easy way to write about stuff that interests me. Why not just keep a private journal, then? The best answer I have is that blogging provides a way for me to join the conversation of the world, which is important to me because I feel like I have something to say. True, it's a mostly one-sided conversation, but to be honest, I prefer it that way. If I had a ton of commenters, then I think that would make me feel nervous and accountable and would take the fun out of it.

Movie Moment: Julie and Julia

I saw Julie and Julia about a week and a half ago. I really enjoyed it, probably in part because of my recent blogging obsession. It's fascinating how you can type something up, and then with one click of the post button, release it out into the world. You never know if anyone will read it, or if they do, what they'll think. But either way, you've created this little mini world that's all your own. If you're a writer at heart, blogging is probably the most instantly gratifying way to get yourself out there. But I'm running off at the mouth (keyboard?) again. Back to the movie. Meryl Streep is amazing as Julia Child. She is just so charming and optimistic and determined that you can't help but pull for her. And Amy Adams does a great job playing a frustrated but plucky writer-slash-cubicle dweller. One thing I particularly liked about this movie was that both characters had very supportive husbands. So many plots seem to feed off of petty romantic drama; with the exception of one incident in Julie's story (which was believable and completely relevant, by the way), this movie doesn't go there. Instead, the focus is on two real women pursuing - no, make that hog-tying - their dreams. Very refreshing! Be warned, though. This flick is a long one. I saw a 7:00 show and didn't leave the theater until 9:20. The length is understandable given that this movie tells two separate stories, but it does drag a little bit toward the end. Overall, though, it's very entertaining.