I’ve been absent from this blog since 2011 because I’ve been writing a novel, “The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street,” which follows the spectacular rise and fall of a complicated, drunken American ice cream maker over the course of 70 years. To write it, I had to live, breath, and research ice cream nonstop. […]
Recently, an interviewer for JAM magazine asked me, “Which phrases do you over-use the most?” My answer: “Cry me a fucking river” and “The world should have my problems.” Indeed. The reason I haven’t posted a blog since the New Year has been that I’ve been consumed writing my latest book, which, I’m happy to […]
Ah, ‘tis the season for holiday travel. And I, for one, am greatly looking forward to the new, full-body pat-downs at airport security. You want to run a metal-detector over my nether parts? Please, be my guest. While you’re at it, feel free to rifle through my toiletry bag and dismantle my laptop. A strip-search? […]
This month, Frank McCourt would’ve turned 80. This blog is in his honor. Recently, I went to Ireland to honor my late, great mentor and high school English teacher, Frank McCourt. As you may know, Frank McCourt taught in the New York City public school system for 30 thankless years, then wrote a little international […]
Confession: until this week, whenever I visited Germany, I felt a little queasy. Even as I laughed with German friends, raised a beer, and feasted on strudel, part of me was on red-alert, one eye on the door, my heart thumping nervously. The first time I ever set foot in Deutschland was 1987. I went […]
So I’m back in the USA again, prostituting myself again for the brand-new, gorgeous, shiny, highly-affordable paperback version of Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven (please buy it, please buy it! –there, required shameless subliminal plug done) and what do I find myself doing all day? Math. To my great horror, I have been […]
Ah, once again, it seems, I’ve pissed off the Brits. Recently, my husband, the Amazing Bob, and I went to London. From Geneva, it’s an hour-long flight, followed by an eternity stuck in rush-hour traffic. Yet as our voluptuous British taxi jerked and crawled through the streets, we were dazzled. Before us stood Buckingham Palace. […]
A few weeks ago, the Amazing Bob and I had the great, good fortune to go to Marrakech with some American loved ones. We spent a week in a family-run guest house in the medina. Each day, we toured Morocco like the tourists we were. The souks. The Islamic palaces. The red clay countryside: All […]
I just paid $17 to look at a bunch of ho-hum dildos in Prague. Serves me right. Like a gazillion other tourists, I got suckered in by the “Sex Machines Museum” here just beyond the Old Town Square. Well, I thought, who can resist that? I’d been to Prague before and seen the Top Ten […]
Given all the hot-under-the-collar hullabaloo over health care reform in America, I feel compelled to offer my fellow Yankees a drink. Let’s all peruse a wine list and chill out for a moment, shall we? How about a premier cru Chablis? Or a wonderful 15-year-old Bordeaux? Or, if you’re a Bubblehead like me, champagne? Veuve […]