Edith Laughs. Andrew McCarthy Probably Has Mixed Feelings, As Usual...

I've returned to my computer, lo this sunny afternoon, freshly haircutted, looking absolutely divine, if a tad sweaty (my ensemble, which was so appropriate for a cool summer morning, turned out to be a bit much for an almost-sultry afternoon), to find that two different people named Kate have posted comments relating to Andrew McCarthy. One of them has landed, confusingly, with my entry on Rebecca Mead's book about weddings -- so poke around until you find it. Miss Edith cannot help but smile that there are so many Kates with so many opinions -- that is, of course, as it should be...

Mannequin. Probably not really about what you think.

Miss Edith will cheerfully admit to having a little thing for Andrew McCarthy, star of one of the most under-rated movies of the 1980s (Heaven Help Us, which also starred Mary Stuart Masterson, John Heard, and Donald Sutherland, if memory serves; it also features very nice turns by Jennifer Dundas and Wallace Shawn – why don’t people talk about Jennifer Dundas’ film work more? She always played genuinely interesting kids – I admire her from afar, though I don’t follow her stage work much). Andrew McCarthy was the guy I liked best in St. Elmo’s Fire; he was the obvious choice if you were, like Miss Edith, one of those punk-goth-pretentious teenage girls who found Rob Lowe just boring, too pretty to take seriously.

One of the things I liked best about Andrew McCarthy was that he starred in a movie of a book I loved. The movie was called The Beniker Gang, and I’ve never seen it, actually – unfortunately for me – but the book it’s based on, Dear Lola, was one of my favorite YA books when I was a kid. I still re-read it fairly regularly. Its author, Judie Angell, was hands-down one of my favorite YA writers, and I have kept copies of her books all these years. I know it’s silly but I always thought Andrew McCarthy earned points for being in a movie based on one of her books. Had they ever made a movie of Ronnie and Rosey, he’d’ve made a good Rosey, too.

For all my affection for Andrew McCarthy, though, I’ve never been able to sit through one of his most popular movies, Mannequin. I just have never cared for this bit of fluff.

The reason I’m bringing up all this nostalgia is that I recently stumbled on a website that made me crow with joy – it made me wish I owned a clothing boutique and were a rich woman so that I could justify spending lots of money with these people. There’s a company called DecoEyes that makes replicas of early-to-mid-20th century mannequins, mostly busts. (As Auntie Mame says to a befuddled Patrick, “That’s the head, you know.”) If you go to their website, you’ll see something that may bore you or it may creep you out, I don’t know, but if you’re like me, you’ll just sort of sigh and sink into your chair and fall into a kind of daze… As I say, I wish I had a reason to do business with these people, but since I don’t, I just wanted to thank them for their work and their website, which has made me, for no good reason, very happy.

Wedding Bells Are Ringing...

…and according to Rebecca Mead, those bell sounds are really coming from cash registers.

Miss Edith scored nicely at the Public Library this week (thank you, Acquisitions Department) and plucked a number of choice tidbits from the new releases shelves. The first item to be plowed through was Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day, which is about the business of weddings in America.

This is, as you’d imagine, a fairly fluffy read, but Mead’s a good writer and it is what it is. Miss Edith got legal a few years back and remembers it vividly, so it was interesting to compare my memories with what Mead sees going on today. I imagine that anyone who is getting married now-ish (say, calendar years 2006-2008) will find the book of particular interest.

The wedding industry does play on people’s psyches to an astounding degree; I remember this from my experience reading bridal magazines, of which I believe I bought maybe three when first engaged. I was completely depressed by them, and they got recycled pretty quickly. “I hate Jordan almonds!” I said. “No fucking Jordan almonds!” Notarius, of course, had no idea what Jordan almonds were, so he was fine with my hatred of them. We enjoy, to this day, dazzling ourselves by considering weddings we’ve gone to, and how many aspects of normal weddings we totally ditched. This is not to say we got married on the cheap, but, as these things go, we were pretty restrained. There were no, and I mean, no, flowers purchased for our wedding. There was no heirloom cake server, for the excellent reason that there was no wedding cake. Things like that. We just said, “Screw it,” and that was that. People had a good time anyhow, and the marriage is secure, thanks for asking.

Mead’s book is a kind of travelogue through different aspects of the wedding industry – the dress, the site, the clergy/random people who legally perform weddings – and it’s all interestingly presented. But every now and then, Miss Edith just snorted with (admittedly unkind) laughter. Last night, sipping a Manhattan while finishing the book, I devoured the chapter on videography. (This is an aspect of wedding planning that, I have to say, eludes me entirely: do people really not have better things to do than sit on the couch and watch movies of themselves? The vanity! Worse: the crashing boredom! I understand watching movies over and over again – how many times have we watched The Big Lebowski, Bull Durham, Auntie Mame; but those things had scriptwriters, dear. These things have crafted dialogue. Wedding videos are a pox on mankind, I’m convinced, showing us at our worst for as long as the medium lasts. Thank god we can be confident that the media won’t last. But I digress.) There was a line in this videography chapter that just knocked my socks off. Apparently – this is something Miss Edith would never have thought of – there are professional wedding videographers who cannot grasp the religious range of This Great Land of Ours. Mead describes attending a convention of wedding videographers, and mentions a class for non-Jewish (that’s goyische, darling) videographers on how to capture Jewish weddings. She quotes a presenter: “Never ever, never ever, never ever refer to the synagogue as a church.”

Well, that would be wise, I think.

I give this book a white-opera-length-glove-with-mother-of-pearl-buttons-and-lace-trim thumb up.

The President of the local chapter of the They Might Be Giants fan club?

Miss Edith, as you might imagine, every now and then finds herself in the heart of her beloved city, and she takes pleasure in checking out her fellow carbon based life forms, most of the time. Some of the time they’re just appalling, to be honest, and it’s all she can do to not go home and weep into her Martini pitcher. (You don’t need olives if you’ve got tears – isn’t that right, Mr. Lecter?)But often someone just makes my heart sing -- a charming hat; a particularly well-trimmed sideburn. It's the little things, you know.
Today I found myself waiting for a street light to change in my favor on Whitney Avenue. Whitney Avenue is one of those streets – like, say, Broadway in Manhattan – where, basically, if you spend any time around here, you will spend time being spotted there. (Chapel Street and Broadway are also excellent “see and be seen” streets in this fair Elm City. The stories Miss Edith could tell…)
So I’m standing there in my snappy Mary Janes, waiting for the light, when I notice a young man schlumping along in my direction – not toward me specifically, just in my general direction. He had the mien of one of those sad, sad characters who don’t have nearly enough friends. The kind of person who, when I was in college, would have taken Mystery Science Theatre 3000 waaaaaay too seriously. (And I say that as someone who genuinely enjoyed MST3K.) The kind of person who games – I mean, plays role playing games, and uses “game” as a verb. The kind of person to whom the letters "SCA" mean something really cool. This is the sort of person I should be paid to make fun of, not because that’s a nice way to spend time, but because I’m just so gosh-darn good at it.
The young man was wearing ill-fitting jeans (natch) which went with his unkempt, ill-cut hair; his t-shirt was neatly tucked into his jeans, and over this ensemble he wore a loose flannel shirt. (I know we’re in New England, but it is mid-June; no one needs flannel shirts right now.) He was smoking a cigarette. I thought, “Huh, that’s not what I’d expect.” Most of the kind of geeks I associate with this physical type are too… too… nice to be smokers. Not that smokers are unkind people (though often they are, and professionally so), but… well, let’s just say I was surprised, and leave it at that.
The young man walked past me, and I was able to see that his t-shirt bore an emblem that read They Might Be Giants. Now, at this point, I began to feel bad: Notarius and I count ourselves as fans of They Might Be Giants (spit if you will), and I was saddened to think that I’d been entertaining myself by being snarky about someone who, to be fair, I might easily chat with happily at a They Might Be Giants show. For all I know, this guy’s got a sharp wit, and unguessed-at gifts along the lines of, oh, cabinetry or something. Maybe he writes brilliantly funny essays and I ought to be nice to him because someday he and I will find ourselves at a cocktail party and rely on each other for conversational comfort because everyone else is such a patent asshole. You never know.
So I revised my estimation. I thought, “All right, bad jeans, bad haircut, but probably a nice enough guy.”
And then I sniffed the air. The cigarette the young man was smoking had emitted just enough smoke to hit Edith’s twitchy little nose. And my little nose, my schnozzette, was shocked to realize what I was smelling. That young man’s cigarette?

Cloves.

I returned to my original snotty position, and I stand by it.

No, We Did Not Attend Our College Reunion, But...

Recently, Miss Edith polished off the final chapters of Morningside Heights by Cheryl Mendelson (a re-reading; a pleasure) while The Most Ethical Man in the World, Notarius, polished his shoes. It was a placid moment. Notarius methodically applied the polish and rubbed it in and then buffed and buffed and buffed. “Shiny, shiny,” I said, glancing over at the finished product.
We were both reminded suddenly of a story from Notarius’s college years.
The chef at our alma mater was a wiry little man who had worked in very fancy New York restaurants and done well for himself; in his late middle age, he had basically retired to the country and taken this job at a small liberal arts college to keep a hand in and earn some money in a place where the cost of living was cheap.
The food at our alma mater was excellent; we had smoked salmon every Sunday morning. Dinners occasionally featured the best aioli sauce I’ve ever eaten. (Oh, yes.) The wiry chef also made the finest poppy seed cake I’ve had, the recipe for which I’ve been hunting down ever since, and never found. (It was a lemon-less poppy seed cake; these are apparently unusual, which is too bad.) The wiry chef was a genius.
He was also something of a queen, and an imperious queen at that. If you were on his staff, or crossed his path, and he didn’t like you, that was that; but if he liked you, for whatever reason, he could do some very nice things for you. One friend has a story about the time the wiry chef made some pierogies, from scratch, just for him, one night when he’d missed dinner because he’d been on a trip. Imagine that! From a college cafeteria!
Notarius remembers an afternoon when he was in the dining hall and the chef was polishing the milk machine. Notarius was on cleaning crew, sweeping up the place, and another member of the kitchen crew, an aspiring punk rock musician, with the requisite lunatic hair, multiple inkings, and so on, was wiping down toasters. The wiry chef, was methodically massaging the huge stainless steel front panel of the milk machine, and mused in his raspy voice, “You know, this reminds me of that song: ‘Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather’. “ All present knew what he was talking about: the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs”. The punk kitchen assistant looked over with wide, faux-innocent blue eyes, and said, “No, I don’t know that one.” “It’s by Lou Reed,” the chef said placidly.
“Who’s he?” the assistant asked gamely.
The wiry chef rubbed the milk machine. “Lou Reed?” he said. “He was a famous botanist. He invented plants.”

Bright College Years.