Is it over yet?

Los Angeles, the The Awards Season.  

It starts in early January with The Palm Springs Film Festival and rolls into The Critics Awards, the Golden Globes, The Sag Awards, The Spirit Awards, The Oscars, and ends with The Grammys.

You can't hold a function on any weekend from January thru March. All the caterers, valet parking, party planners, hair and makeup techs, and top venues are booked. The town becomes a seizure of self importance and hype.

Apparently in December you get all your botox and "pull backs" done; do your rehab time; finish your house make-over, and complete all your adoptions of babies in time to make your appearance at one of these award ceremonies or at any of the endless pre or post parties.

Beverly Hills and Hollywood can handle the influx and insanity. They have been doing it for years. But this year there is an unsettling quiet in the streets.  A weird level of lackluster has seeped over the town.

The new Bel Air Hotel has opened to less than glowing reviews (I wonder what the swans are thinking?) more people are talking about the NFL playoff games than the movies.

It is a sea of lookalikes. An impressive lineup of hairdressers, makeups artist, and manicurists all working feverishly and laser focused. This is Hollywood at its most exalted – the land of makeovers. 

During Awards Season every place from the airport to the delis to personal driveways sport red carpets.

Fashion Police Joan Rivers will hit every show.  I believe she single-handedly put all red carpets on the map.  My issue with the Red Carpet hype ... what does Charlize Theron's "fairy" dress or Angelina's "alien look" has to do with fashion?  Even women I know wearing formal attire don't care about Red Carpet couture.  Face it we only love looking at  them at home with friends so we can mock the whole production! It has never been about trend-setting but rather it’s about wise-cracking.

Frankly, I miss the big gaffs of years gone by; singer Bjork in her swan goose costume, Barbra Streisand in her glitter shorts, Demi Moore in anything of insanity. Today's stylists have homogenized every star to look alike. It's an assembly line.

I have been told that L.A. is now a fashion epicenter, no longer a fashion joke. Ha!  Spoken to someone who wears old cashmere sweaters and glorious jewelry. I look at the fashion magazines and I recognize I am very out-of-date.

ALAS-

I try to stay open minded

I live for mystery only there is no mystery

I live to be fascinated only there is nothing original

NEITHER on the red carpet NOR on the screen 

A Jam Session

We here at this blog love a good trope almost as much as we love not being sick—but we’re only going to get one of those today, and it’s not the second one.

From an old letter column (December 1973) of the London Times (where else) who published a keen controversy the end of which, as of its writing, had still not jelled.

It seems that Sir Dingle Foot wrote an article praising, extolling, and glorifying the English breakfast. Alas, Sir Dingle Foot made a most serious error of omission. He went on and on without so much as a mention of English marmalade. One Reverend Edmund Haviland of Tonbridge caught him out at once and fired off a letter to The Times saying how could Sir Dingle Foot, or anyone, talk about the marvels of the English breakfast without a mention of English marmalade. With the letter from Reverend Haviland a really sticky situation developed, and the fact that it was Sir Dingle Foot who got himself in a jam has since been totally forgotten.

Reverend Haviland was immediately challenged by Peter Macdonald of Edinburgh who wrote: "Marmalade, like many other inventions which other nations have sought to appropriate, is of Scottish origin, since it took a canny Scot to see value in the peel that others threw away."

This caused Colin S. Dence of King's Lynn, Norfolk, to rise to the defence of dear old England: "...by what right does Peter Macdonald claim English marmalade to be Scottish? These are vital matters of national prestige and I put forward as my authority a certain Gervais Markham (1568-1637) who published a recipe for Marmalade of Oranges in, please note, his English Huswife. Scottish indeed!" Then John Orr of Marden, Kent, added pectin to the plot with this explanation: "... I have heard that it was derived from a confection prepared by the chef for Mary Queen of Scots when she was married to the Dauphin of France and was indisposed. The word marmalade is a corruption of the phrase Marie est malade."

Lady Antonia Fraser found Mr. Orr's legend appealing, but she felt the Oxford English Dictionary must surely be right in saying that marmalade is a derivation from the Portuguese marmelo in 1480. Mrs. Joan Richards went on to explain that the Portuguese claim came about because of a language problem during the Peninsular Wars when the Duke of Wellington wanted some Portuguese quince preserve (marmalada) but instead got Portuguese orange jam "which was henceforth known in England as marmalade."

This incited G.E. Trease of Devon to inform readers that "The Duke of Wellington was by no means the first Englishman to use marmalade. It is mentioned as 'marmaled' in the English translation of Renodaeus' Dispensatory, published in 1657 by the London apothecary Richard Tomlinson. An earlier reference is in the inventory of Thomas Baskerville, apothecary of Exeter, who died in 1596. This lists 'marmalade 11Ibs, 10 shillings.'"

It is, as the London Sunday Times summed up, "A marmalade cat fight." 

The demise of the old-fashioned love letter…

…no matter what format, is a loss romantics the world over - however few of us are left - will always mourn. And with summer romances fading faster than August's tan, what would be more pleasantly surprising than an epistle from a beloved?

It costs not much, it takes some effort and a little time, but the result is everlasting. No one, not even the philistines who rule our culture nowadays, despise a love letter. My father, a connoisseur of the fairer sex, used to turn them out effortlessly. He once admitted to a friend of his that the best love note he ever received simply stated, "I do love you." Alas, love letters do not have to be long.

Not surprisingly, people today prefer the world's most annoying instrument, the cell phone. The intrusive contraption demands less concentration and therefore less commitment.  Mind you, in certain cases it's understandable, now that selling personal memorabilia to the press has become big business. And divorce lawyers counsel, "Don't text it!"

What is truly sad about the death of the love letter is that an entire aspect of romantic expression known to our grandparents has now vanished. Back in the good old days, people got to know each other through words rather than through deeds. Or, translation: syntax rather than sex. Relationships were more stable as a result. Just imagine if young people would correspond with each other for one year before taking the plunge. Would they take it?  Probably not, but then I am assuming they both know how to write.

Of course, some people are better at writing love letters than others. I have a personal favorite that went as follows:

"Dear X, There's a marvelous line in Romeo and Juliet when Romeo, having avenged Mercutio's death, is banished from Verona. ‘Heaven is here, where Juliet lives’, he proclaimed. However sudden this may sound, or corny, this is how I've felt about you since the first moment I met you. Love, Max."

My brother Max first wrote that letter over fifty years ago, and to his great delight it worked, so he tried it again and again. Now before any of you scream foul, I don't think there's anything wrong with repeating a love epistle. It's the message that counts, not the wording. And the message is that he loved her. Some might say repetition dilutes the meaning. But not for him. The reason I can go public with it is that he got caught and became the laughingstock of, well, I will keep that under wraps.

Two girls were discussing Max, and both said how they thought very little of him. Then Angela said, "But he does write wonderful love letters."  Emma agreed and read one out. When she had finished, Angela had a wicked grin on her face. She had received the same letter. They both started to laugh. Word got out, and people never stopped laughing. One wit said that the original one, the one that Mona received, could be worth a lot by now. I hope so.

Women, far more than men, are the victims of the love letter's demise. They like to be wooed, and nothing is better for a courtship battle than a letter. Being pounced on is not a woman's idea of romance, or so I believe, but then again I'm awfully old-fashioned. And it is far harder to win a woman's heart than to win her body. Robert Browning won Elizabeth Barrett's heart through the written word, not the spoken one. Furthermore, shyness does not inhibit when writing, at least not nearly as much as it does when speaking.  This is why today's lack of love letters is a paradox. We are a far more prurient society, exposing ourselves in the most ludicrous manner, yet we will not write from the heart.

Now some of you will see this post as yet one more manifestation of Ms. Edna's leanings and tendencies, traits passed down from my father.  As far as I'm concerned, women have suffered more from the lack of romance than men. Now I admit my mother may have suffered from my father's cavalier behavior, but she loved him until the very end because he always flirted and romanced her as well. And he meant it. To my mind, my father's pursuit of other women never diminished his love for my mother.  After their death, I found their letters, but I can't pass them on because it would be too painful.  Still, when his mistress came to see me and showed me some of his letters, I refused to read them out of respect for my mother.  My father's mistress only wished for me to know what a romantic man he had been. But I already knew.

Although I'm getting a bit too long in the tooth, my heart still skips a beat whenever I hear from or see a man I like, and it will until it stops ticking altogether. But until that time, I will continue to love romance and write love notes -although no Romeo and Juliet ones.

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