indulgences

The old French saying is all too true: After a certain age, a woman must choose between her face and her figure. The added flesh that diabolically accretes to one’s middle with the passing years will keep the face attractively plumped out. Cut calories to preserve the figure and the face grows pinched and wrinkled. […]

No elegance is possible without perfume. — Gabrielle (“Coco”) Chanel When I arrive at my friend Renée’s house in Paris, she is knitting a small fleecy white garment. She embraces me, holds it up, and says, “It’s for your grandchild-to-be.” I’d written her that my first grand was on its way. “You will be a […]

I am in Paris with my husband. I have convinced him that he wants to accompany me to one of the city’s legendary flea markets. It is way, way out on the edge of town, a lengthy pilgrimage on the Métro, past stops with names like La Fourche (the fork, as in a road, which […]

The dress on my back, the cloth on my dining table–unique, beautiful, old, and absurdly cheap. “Where’dja get it?” the appreciative and envious exclaimed. Gerry’s, of course. I came across Gerry and his goods plowing my way home through a street fair devoted, as these events are nowadays, to the peddling of tube socks, junky […]

I’ve always thought of myself as an addictive personality, but life is forever proving me wrong. Take alcohol, for instance. My father–himself only a social drinker, and not much of one at that–introduced me to an occasional dab on the tongue of very good scotch when I was a mere child, so that, as he […]

It happened in Copenhagen. Hans Christian Andersen tells us that magic and imagination flourish on Danish soil, and the tourism industry builds on that proposal at every turn. My own frequent visits to Wonderful Copenhagen and its environs–for work and play–make me suspect there’s some truth in the idea. One Friday, many summers ago, the […]

Bookwormish-ness runs in our family. Over the generations it has seized the soul of my mother, me, my daughter, and my daughter’s elder daughter, to name just the female victims. For example, whenever I take the subway with my young granddaughters–which is often, and often from one end of Manhattan to the other–I read aloud […]

When I was growing up, my mother pointed out to me that, among my aunts, uncles, and myriad cousins (along with any spouses and offspring that had accreted to them), the ones that I liked best invariably had the “worst” personalities, moral characters, and behavioral track records. At least according to the standards of our […]

Have you considered how rare it is to encounter an ugly baby? Post-six months, that is. But apart from C-section arrivals, the newborn, still supine in its crib or pram, entirely exposed to the gaze of the curious, usually bears for at least several weeks the marks of its struggle out of the womb, a […]

People ask where your passion for something started. As if a passion were an unreasonable thing to have and needed to be justified by a specific root cause. For me, the devotion to dance began when I was a child and saw a picture in Life magazine. It was a small black and white photograph […]