Rozita Made Me Do It

Rozita snares customer

Last weekend I did something I never do. I had a makeover at the Lancome counter.

I have been wearing my makeup the same way since my mother marched me into the Fosi Modeling and Talent Agency in Tucson, Arizona.. I don’t know how old I was—10, 11, 12? But I must have been pretty young because I didn't know what the word “features” meant. On first evaluation, Miss Fosi told my mother I had some nice features to work with. I had to ask my mother what she meant. Miss Fosi  had enough makeup on for both of us. She told me that the most fattening thing I could put in my mouth was a grape. By this she meant wine, and I am still not sure why she was saying this to a 10/11/12 year old.

So I learned the drill: a couple of layers of mascara, eyeliner, foundation, blush and lipstick. These were the basics and still are and I don’t leave home without them. No eye shadow because my mother said it the invention of Satan.

When I was able to climb up from the Ponds and Neutrogena level, I chose the Lancome line, sleek and black and French and glam. But in recent years they betrayed me twice. They discontinued my favorite mascara and foundation. So, acting out like a girl who had been dumped by her boyfriend, I took up with someone else immediately—Christian Dior got both the mascara and foundation business. I wouldn't even look at the Lancome ladies as I passed. I would show them. Dior had a Diorshow Mascara (“a big show mascara inspired by models behind the scenes runway trick.”)

Mascara is very important to me...

Lancome pulled me back in me with a rival to Diorshow, the introduction of a big fat stick of Hypnose Drama mascara.  And in truth I had been monogamous with Lancome for so long that it did seem silly to have to go to TWO counters just for some foundation. 

I like my mascara like my humor, dark and black

Then I met Rozita at the Lancome counter. I was charmed by Rosita and she convinced me I should book a makeover. To my surprise I said yes, giving up part of my precious Saturday because Rozita is someone you can’t say no to.

I got to sit in the high chair as I had seen so many women do over the years, but then again, they probably had not enjoyed the childhood benefit of Miss Flossie. It was a bit of a bait and switch because Rozita turned me over to the make-up pro of the day, Odetta from Lithuania.

Odetta: "Questions?"

When I told Odetta I was in the market for white skinny jeans and didn't have much time left, it being mid-July and all, we talked about the ridiculous convention of not wearing white until Memorial Day and after Labor Day. The Lithuanians are not burdened by this tradition. Odetta took about a half hour to make me over, I learned that I must exfoliate, put on the Energy before the base, use a pencil instead of a liquid liner and use eye cream morning and night. At the end Odetta stood back in a very business-like fashion, looked at me and said: “Questions?”

The stuff I am supposed to use

I had fun at the makeover, and it pumped me up to do more shopping...a couple of skinny jeans and a Christina Maldonado dress that I got to model for all of my new Lancôme BFFs.

Rozita took my phone number and I will undoubtedly respond to her siren’s call, the next promotion, the next deal. She indeed has me hypnosed.

Wearing my new jeggings at the Nats game. Don't want to get the white ones dirty.

The Year in Review (2013)

Okay, let’s do the year in review. I know it is a little early, but I am having dinner guests on New Year’s Eve, so I will be too busy for the next couple of days, getting a manicure, going to The Dry Bar, shopping and cooking.

Thanks to the old-school pocket calendar which I fill in throughout the year, I have been able to recreate the highlights of 2013.

 Movies: Anna Karenina, Django Unchained, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Salmon Fishing on the Yemen, Zero Dark Thirty, To Rome with Love, The Master, The Queen of Versailles, Searching for Sugarman, Quartet, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Central Park Five, All the President’s Men, The New World, Frances Ha, Before Midnight, One Eyed Jack, Cloud Atlas, The Seekers, Lawrence of Arabia, The Usual Suspects, The Prestige, The Graduate, Adaptation, Bernie, The Science of Sleep, Blue Jasmine, Rush, Captain Phillips, Giant, Nashville, Notorious

Cultural Outings:  Three plays: Good People, the Book of Mormon, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I went to the Phillips Gallery twice, once with Peter and another time with Kathleen to see the preview of the Van Gogh show; I took Peter to the Holocaust Museum and I attended the National Book Festival to see Linda Ronstadt.

 

 

A Sound Reason to Visit Martha's Vineyard

Trips:  I went to Honolulu on business in February; spent spring break traipsing around the dreary NJ, CT, NY, PA area looking at colleges (only to learn that Franky wanted to go south); spent a week in Martha’s Vineyard, thanks to Peter’s best-ever summer job as a member of the Vineyard Sound a cappella group;  back to Cape Cod with Jane for a visit to Susan in East Falmouth, and then one more time to Martha’s Vineyard for Peter retrieval; and went to Saratoga Springs, NY for Parents’ Weekend at Skidmore. Conspicuous by their absence: New York City, Tucson, California and Maine. Gotta fix that next year.

Books: I now belong to two book clubs, so I am always reading for one or the other; sometimes they overlap so I have to skip one, but overall it has upped my reading and steered me toward books I would otherwise never pick up.  Here are a few we have covered in the two clubs: The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B., Sandra Gulland (Part One of a Trilogy); The Burgess Boys, Elizabeth Strout; War and Peace, Tolstoy (ongoing, four-part book club); American Pastoral (in progress)  and Operation Shylock by Phillip Roth; Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe; Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf; Age  of Innocence, Elizabeth Wharton; O Pioneers, Willa Cather; Madame Bovary, Flaubert; Therese Raquin, Zola; Excellent Women, Barbara Pym;  Cannery Row, Steinbeck; The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene; What’s Bred in the Bone, Robertson Davies; The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles; the Road from Coorain, Jill Ker Conway…okay I am going back more than one year...so kill me. I didn’t do this exercise last year.

Who Can Forget the Nose Cast?

Accidents: I broke my toe; I broke my nose (tennis); and in an “unfortunate spinning accident” my foot came out of the pedal going at top speed into my shin and I required 11 stitches. First and last spinning class.

 

You Say Goodbye

And I Say Hello

Fitness and Glamour: I ran, played tennis and took yoga classes. I quit Equinox, an expensive health club, which I was under-utilizing at $140 a month; and became obsessed with The Dry Bar, and for $200 a month may never have to wash or dry my hair again. Ooops, $140 a month habit dropped, $200 a month habit taken up. Even I can do the math on that one.

 www.healthylivingmag.com

Money/Miscellany/Mini: So as they used to say: “Mother is going to take in a little sewing.” I started freelance proofreading last summer and am very happily employed by HealthyLivinG, a monthly magazine based in Beverly Hills, which keeps me busy in my increasing spare time; and sends me checks which I am banking for our trip to Madrid to see Peter next spring; but after that, may apply to my new major purchase.

Who Says Mini Can't Buy Happiness?

 

College Bound...Somewhere

College bound and determined: Franky took over the search, found seven schools in the south and two in California; has been admitted to two early action, is waiting to hear from the rest.

 

 For a variety of reasons, I am much happier this year. Let’s hope the good times roll into 2014.

 

 

 

 

'Been a long time since I rock and rolled. Been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely time..."

Zeppelin's first

If you don’t love early Zeppelin, then I guess you didn’t grow up in the 70’s. When Jason Werth chose Dazed and Confused as his walk-up music, my respect for him soared. I am pretty sure I was at a Led Zeppelin concert in Phoenix. Almost positive.


Tools of the trade-good thing I'm not a photographer

Basically I’ve been too busy proofing and editing the work of others to have time for my own writing. Proofreading teaches you a lot about writing. I’m beginning to agree with Mark Twain’s opinion of adverbs: 'I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me.' I have delighted in deleting a ton of adverbs and throwing them in the dead word pile. Really.

 

Birthday week

In November a lot happened.  First it was my birthday for about 10 days.

Together again after two years

Then Peter came home from college and had a spontaneous reunion with his Beatles cover band at a pre-Thanksgiving party. "Ringo" arrived with his hair dyed blond. I guess this is what happens when you go to Brown.

The day before Thanksgiving I got this:

Mini Me-If I were a car this is what I would look like



 

On Thanksgiving I did this:

... cooked the turkey upside down.  Not on purpose. I am finally able to share this shame. I meant to, yeah, that’s the yarn we are spinning. Cooking it upside down allows the juices to flow to the breast and make it moister. But once my husband started to carve the back he noticed a paucity of meat. Flipped it and there was, well, the turkey as we expect to see it. All that malt barley glaze for naught.

Guy Poms



Smells like teen spirit

Senior year at high school has come to this: guy poms. It is also a time of uncharacteristic interest in the snail mail. Franky has applied early action to four schools, so any day now, or week, or month, we could hear something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm still reading War and Peace, but I have made it to the half way point (600 pages), and now am very interested in what will happen to Boris, Natasha, Moose and Squirrel.

And now we slip into the stress-packed month of December. No I haven’t done the shopping,  shipped the presents, gotten the tree, written the cards or decorated the house yet. Could be a long time again, long time, a long lonely, lonely time until I return to the blogosphere.

 

It's the "happiest day of the year"



Let your pedicure be the only blue thing about you

“Feeling good today? You are not alone. It’s August 11, which is, except Christmastime, the happiest day of the year in this country. Or at least the day with the lowest rate of depression, according to Google searches,” New York Times, Sunday August 11, 2013  

I woke up a bit melancholic wondering where the hell this summer has gone. I have only been to my pool and tennis club three times this summer, and none of them to linger by the pool. Two weeks from tomorrow my younger son starts his senior year of high school. Two weeks from tomorrow I have to retrieve my older son from his-best-summer-job-ever on Martha’s Vineyard. Five days later he goes back to college. My summer pedicure is receding.

But then I read in the New York Times, so it must be true, that today is the happiest day of the year. It’s never too late to start your day over, as they say, so I got right on it.

I got my hair done at the Dry Bar and I had a manicure, deeply engaged in The New Yorker during each pampering service.  The Rogers Cup men’s finals starts at 3 p.m.; the Nationals at 5 p.m.; and rejoice, oh rejoice, Mr. Walter White returns to our living rooms at 9:00 p.m.  Could Google have known that our happiness would coincide with the “final episodes” of Breaking Bad? No. Coincidence, I think not.

Summer’s not over. Technically there are six weeks left. Freshen up your pedicure and go lie by the pool and read War and Peace, for one of my more demanding book clubs. Really, I’d hire you to read it for me.

Check back with me February 27^th, the day with the highest depression rate. Start planning now.