Getting Off the Couch

I cried and cried in therapy. My therapist of over 8 years is leaving. She can't afford to work in private practice, taking the crumbs that the HMO's, (my insurance) tosses and has to leave the life's work and calling that she loves, to get a job with benefits...
There is no way to adequately thank Liz for her friendship and support over the years. It's almost impossible to describe how this inconspicuous woman, with this rare and powerful gift to listen, remember and suggest, has helped me carve a wonderful life for myself by helping me see the world and my place in it with fresh eyes, every week.
Liz is a woman, not much older than me, who has been sister, mother, friend and teacher. I am so grateful to count her among the women I have been blessed with and have been forever bettered by. Living my life with her as a constant has been life-changing. Saying goodbye to that will be difficult.

Fo moments like this, I choose hooch over wine and I suggest, Dahwhinnie, Single Malt Scotch, nicknamed, "The Gentle Spirit"!


Excerpted from an interview with "Women and Whiskey" guru, Heather Greene
Can we talk a little bit about women and whisky? Women sort of get the short end of the whisky stick; it’s not really marketed towards us. Why should women drink whisky? Well actually it wasn’t traditionally marketed to men. It was something that women were very comfortable drinking in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, and around the world there are women who drink whisky. Bourbon drinkers are women; women don’t have any problem drinking bourbon in the south. I mean, mint juleps are made with bourbon. If you look at classic cocktails like old-fashioneds and Manhattans, those are whisky-based cocktails. So this sort of question of how and why the single malt scotch becomes a male thing, I don’t really know. It was most likely advertising in the '60s and '70s that implicated whisky with power and that’s why men ended up drinking more of it.

My Husband's Girlfriends

It's Robert's birthday on Tuesday and I decided to plan a little last minute brunch for him.  Inviting all his favorite people. A half dozen women. Mostly my friends, but women he has lovely chats, martinis and stolen moments with both behind and right in front of my back! And I love him for it.  Not that he doesn't have male friends, he does....well not really...he just really prefers the company of women.  And I think it's sweet and genuine and a testament to what kind of man he is.

There was a time, 10 years ago, after 9/11, when so many of my friends and neighbors were instant widows, that I felt guilty about having Robert, and it almost ruined our marriage. Now, I notice the guest-list of some of his favorite girls are those widows, Robert somehow representing for them,  the good guys their husbands were as well as enjoying the manly company of a funny, caring, intelligent man that is my husband.

I love these women and have admired their strength and resilience and would have liked to have had reciprocal friendships and martinis with their husbands and partners, but life, at least this life, has given us very few guarantees, so you really take what you can get. You don't always end up dancing with the one who brought you but you take your partner where you can and just dance a bit!

I'm in love with these girls and so glad to know them,  Cheryl, Marian, Cheri and Jane, our coven of widows and my husband's girlfriends.

If Kermit could drink he'd sing...."it's getting easier to drink green"

I know it's a bit of a cheat..but this week's post is my article in Organic Wine Journal on drinking Green at the Staten Island Greenbelt Gala!

Home » Features » NYC’s Greenest Borough Drinks Green Wines

Posted by Lorie Honor on Nov 15, 2011 in Features

  

In addition to birding, hiking, kayaking and camping, the Staten Island Greenbelt Conservancy can add their wine list to the things they do to support their reputation as New York’s “greenest borough.” The SIGC, steward of over 2,800 acres of private and pubic lands, served only organic wines at this fall's fundraising gala. Executive Director Steve Cain was very enthused to serve his hundred guests environmentally friendly wines, saying “there’s tremendous synergy behind the choice.”

Staking out the bar, I found that while this crowd was committed to sustainability and preservation, few guests were familiar with organic wine and most were sampling them for the first time. Many guests did not even realize they were drinking organic wines, but once they found out were all very interested to talk about classifications, policies and politics.

I invited NYC Parks Commissioner Adrian Benape to join me at the bar and we sampled a flight consisting of Yealands Estate Pinot Noir from Marlborough, New Zealand, Di Majo Norante Sangiovese from Molise Italy and Yalumba Organic Riverland Shiraz from Australia. He was quite happy with the Pinot whileI asked for a healthier pour of the Sangiovese, but I also quite enjoyed the Shiraz. Commissioner Benape said he is a strong advocate for “all things organic, including drinking organic wine,” yet demurred when I asked if he would propose to Mayor Bloomberg that only organic wines be served at Gracie Mansion.

Of the whites, Bodega Santa Julia Chardonnay from Mendoza, Argentina seemed to be a crowd favorite, though I preferred the Weingut Loimer Reisling from Kamptal, Austria, (Biodynamic). 


I was happy to spend the night leaning on the bar talking and slurfing with my fellow Staten Islanders  and just as happy that the Staten Island Greenbelt Conservancy sent a very green-forward message by initiating a hundred or more organic wine drinkers. 


And now Mayor Bloomberg, about Gracie Mansion’s wine cellar…

WHEN I WAS AN INDIAN...

As a kid I lied…a lot. And this is a recollection of things false, in tribute of that lie that invented the 3-day weekend, Columbus Day.

I don’t recall being particularly fanciful as a child, but it seems I was a natural born liar. 

On my dead-end block in Staten Island, along with my best friend, Avis Cardella I pretended alot. I conceived, costumed and judged the “Little Miss Locust Ave Beauty Pageant" and performed on the uneven parallel bars as Olga Corbit on the broken swing set turned Munich Olympics Gymnastic Arena in the Rice’s backyard and for several summers wrote, directed, performed and sold tickets to a weekly variety show in my backyard based on the previous weeks’ Carol Burnett Show. 

 I went on to choreograph a spot-on West Side Story number in Jill Perpetua’s  backyard using her mother's low-hanging laundry line to designate the territory of the Sharks and the Jets.  But that was just my Staten Island version of Summer Stock. Just what we did  to amuse ourselves back then. Making stuff up with the endless kids on our block was my daily diversion and everything was fine until Avis Cardella found out that she was beautiful and a year older than me and didn’t want to be my friend anymore cause I wasn’t. So I  looked for ways to be someone other than me for real.

My first reinvention-of –my-life-lie happened after a talk with my backyard neighbor, Mr. Quick the summer when I was 10.  Mr. Quick used to hang his laundry on this metal contraption that looked like a giant umbrella but with just the metal parts. He’d hang his wife’s giant dresses and look at me in a way that made me glad there was a chain link fence between our yards.  Mrs. Quick looked like Aunt Bea on the Andy Griffith Show, except mean and even though I only saw her a few times she’d look at me like I’d done something wrong.  I’d see her sometimes looking out her window when I was sitting on the back of the roof of the Tancredi’s garage taking a break from climbing the big pine tree in my backyard that when I got to the top made me feel like I could catapult myself clear over the Quick’s house and land in Wolf Langford’s pool three houses over and on the next block.  But Mrs. Quick never smiled or waved.

Mr. Quick was the only man I ever saw hang laundry and the Quick’s were the only ones that had that giant daddy long legs-on-a-pole laundry hanger upper...everyone else just had a clothesline.

One day Mr. Quick was hanging the laundry and he leaned over the fence and started talking to me.  I always thought that Mr. Quick was nice and until then we had a “Hi/Bye” neighborly wave sort of relationship and I sort of felt sorry for him on account of his sourpuss old wife making him do the laundry.  Plus I think he was sort of a snappy dresser, not like the Monkey’s snappy but chinos and a buttoned down shirt like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island.  Mr. Quick had white hair and a white mustache and sort of talked like a cross between Vincent Price and Roddy Mc Dowell.  So even though he was old, he sort of made me curious to talk to him.

Mr. Quick told me I looked like that girl that sang that was on tv, the one with the comedy show, with the short husband, Sonny. “She’s part American Indian, you know.” 

“Cher?”

“Yes, Cher. That’s who you look like, you look like Cher.”

Mr. Quick seemed to really like Cher.

And I really liked that a grown-up said I could practically pass for  an American Indian like Cher….so exotic and conflicted…so proud…so other-worldly... I told everyone that didn't know me that I was part American Indian, a half-breed. I told it so many times I half-believed it myself. Pretending I was like Cher made me feel better about not being good enough to be Avis Cardella's friend.  

So when I think of Cher or fresh laundry, I think of Mr. Quick and American Indians and my old secret identity.   

Yep, when I was 10,  I became a Native American. 

GRACE NOTES

I was waiting tables, had a deadbeat boyfriend, was thoroughly miserable and completely adrift. I was 22 and was half-heartedly preparing auditions for graduate drama programs at Yale and NYU while wholeheartedly in denial about having no idea what to make of my life.  I was aimless and clueless and given that I was living in the city in the 80's, a little reckless.

          Even though I'd LOVED musicals all my life I had never performed in any. I always felt more comfortable pouring myself into damaged, fragile, eccentric characters or taking on smart-talking comedic roles.  It was much more natural for me to burst into tears than burst into song, so Blanche Du Bois was a cakewalk for me compared to Ado Annie!  When it came to musicals, I learned I was a girl who COULD say “no” so I needed some help in finding and refining my voice for the singing part of my auditions. 16 bars. How hard could it be?  

         A musician friend of mine gave me the card of a voice teacher. Julia Speratore, vocal coach, the Ansonia Hotel.  Being firmly entrenched in the downtown scene in those days I rarely ventured north of 14th street much less the Upper West Side, and my aesthetic was much more the grungy, post-punk debauched Chelsea Hotel than the ornate grand Dame that was the Ansonia. I had my doubts about whether Ms. Speratore and I would be a good match.

          I remember meeting Julie for the first time in her apartment on the 6th floor.  Julie was tiny and energetic. She spoke in a clipped staccato with an accent and tone that was like Katherine Hepburn played on a scratched record. She wore black slacks and a tailored shirt, her dark hair in a tight bun, her eyes intent and direct. We had a cup of tea and then she sat at the piano. I knew the words to every musical I'd ever heard as well as the complete Ramones songbook and a lot in between but I had never sung for anyone. As I croaked through, "You've got a Friend", Julie, head cocked, stared at me.

          Since Julie was staring at me, as well as managing to play piano while poking, correcting, adjusting my posture, my breath.... I was taking a good look around, too.  Her eyes were dark, intense and old, yet ageless.  Her skin was flawless and smooth, not a wrinkle. Her hands gave some clue to her age.  Large-stoned rings that may have fit decades earlier were now several sizes too large and twisted easily around the slender fingers that poked me in the belly throughout surprisingly strenuous vocal exercises and later emphatically marked the time in the air through Vaccai and Marchese. In front of me, on the grand piano, there was a multi-colored stuffed spider with a card attached that read, "Happy Birthday to my favorite octogenarian."  This little spitfire could NOT be 80.  I walked out of my first singing lesson physically aching and doubting my understanding of the word,” octogenarian" but sure that Julie and I were indeed a good match.

          It turned out that while my speaking voice was vintage Debra Winger my singing voice was more suited for Cavallaria Rusticana than Carole King and Julie initiated me into the mystery and rigors of classical voice training.  While I never made it to New Haven, I began an independent life study with Julie, a lesson a week over more than  15 years that primed me for my life and prepared me for who I would come to be in hers.

          Our relationship developed over hundreds of cups of tea and the piano.  Some weeks I was late, in bad voice or broke. Sometime all three. Julie never judged.  Sometimes I would forget to show up or cancel at the last minute.  Julie was always there when I was ready to come around. She never berated or tried to tough-love me.  She never tried to guilt me into being more than who I was on any particular day. When I was broke, she taught me for free.  When I was flush I bought her cashmere sweaters.  She never disparaged my indulgent lifestyle; late nights and partying resulting in chronic laryngitis. The only advice she ever gave me was, "Don't sing in the street, its bad for the voice."  If she only knew. When I was in really bad voice we'd stop the lesson and just have tea and talk. She'd talk about her childhood.  Of picking strawberries and making ice cream on her farm near New Haven. Of leaving her family for New York in the early 1920's.  Of making a living during the depression while studying voice.  Of knowing that music was her calling and, believing that she couldn't have both a career and a family, and chose music. Julie was fearless and confident and everything I wasn’t.

         I was afraid of being alone. So much of my party-girl act was just that. I didn't know where I belonged or what I should do.  At 20-something, I thought I had already missed my chance to make my mark on the world. I longed for Julie's clarity of purpose.  I was still searching and not sure if I was looking in any of the right places. At my age I should...at my age... at my age...wait a minute...look at Julie. She’s in her 80's. She's never achieved "fame" but her life, is an enviable success story. She's not famous, but of course she's remarkable! She's giving lessons. She's vital. She's in the world. She's going to the opera. She works out. She's volunteering at the Y, she's taking care of a sick friend, (in her words, "the old lady up the block.") She’s living her remarkable, wonderful life.

         My experience with old people was pretty much limited to them dying so for the first few years, I dreaded getting to her apartment door. Afraid, every week, that Julie wouldn't be there.  She was hard of hearing and a bit too vain to wear her hearing aid when she wasn't at the opera. And while she could tell immediately if I was flat or too wobbly on a high C she sometimes couldn't hear the doorbell, leaving me to pace the cavernous hallway outside her apartment playing worse case scenario in my head.  She fell in the tub. She had an aneurism/stroke/heart attack. She was burgled and conked on the head, unable to reach the door.  I'd start ringing the bell again. She'd answer impatiently, "Get in. Get in. Where you been? You're late." I'd go in and make tea with shaky hands.

         I went from thinking Julie would die every week to believing she would never live to see me grow up.  I was afraid I wouldn't have enough time with her to put together a life for myself. To make her proud. To accomplish something. But she was there to fall in love with my husband, be an honored guest at our wedding, delight in both of my children. Julie saw me go on to eventually make it through grad school. Buy houses. Grow up.

           Well into her nineties, she was still giving lessons to a dozen or so regular students. Over the years we'd all gotten to know one another meeting at the beginning or end of our lessons, listening to each other's progress from the hall, and singing together around the piano at Julie's annual soirees. We became Julie's family. The one she thought she couldn't have because she chose a career in music. I was no longer catastrophizing Julie's end. Her life force was so strong, I never even thought about it anymore.

          But there were signs that she was faltering. While Julie could remember exactly how much rent she paid in 1935, she'd forget to turn off the stove or close the front door or why I was there. 

There were medical issues and hospital visits.  I was afraid that Julie wouldn't be able to stay in her home/studio of 35 years unless she got help. It was a painful talk to have with her, she was so private and independent, explaining that strangers would have to come in to help her, she was angry and accusatory. "Who are you to come in here and tell me this?!!! You're not family!!" "Yes I am Julie.  I'm family."  We never said another word about it. Homecare was arranged and the round-the-clock ladies soon became part of the family as Julie continued with her life un-interrupted.

         One freezing December night, I got the call.  I reflected on how knowing Julie shaped my life and helped define my beliefs on aging, beauty, friendship, womanhood, success and family. I wrote her eulogy and drove to New Haven.  Julie’s death was a heartbreaking loss and it was my honor to speak on that bone-chilling morning, in that beautiful church in the small city she had left the better part of a century ago,  not only about Julie’s life in music but about lessons she taught me. The grace notes. To give and accept love, gifts, talents, time. To open up my heart and home.  To create family and define it in its most lovely and varied forms.

          As an opera singer I was an inconsistent dilettante, but  I can teach a master class in crying.   When I stood up for Julie to say the words, the poems, the missives I wanted to send up about and for her, I thought my grief would stifle me. But the love I felt and the honor I wanted to show her allowed me to sing her praises in my own strong, clear voice.

More than 10 years have gone by and she is still with me; poking, encouraging, chiding, accepting, loving, challenging. And we sing. We’re always singing.

Crying Room

I  listen to the classical music station in my office and so it is playing on the morning of 9/11, which is how I find out about the towers and tell my colleagues, the other teachers at my school.  My room is on the fourth floor facing the city. When I look out of the window I see a thick black ribbon in the sky billowing sideways, blowing east from the city toward Brooklyn.

 I tell someone I have to get my sons. My five year-old just started kindergarten and my toddler was at daycare.  But I walk in the opposite direction from my car,  towards the ferry, where there is a clear view of the city across the harbor. The iconic view of lower Manhattan that's on postcards.  I grew up with that view, taking the Staten Island Ferry toward it my whole life.

My pace and gait  up the steep hill and down the block toward the water is jerky and stilted, like a zombie.  On the way to the ferry is the Brighton Heights Reformed Church.  I have never been in there, but I have admired its tall white spire every day from my office window and I am pulled in toward the sanctuary by my need to sit quietly in the last moments of the old world.

The church is locked but the door isn't closed shut all the way and I walk in, sounding the security alarm.  The alarm is blaring but I don't have any reaction to it. Except  that maybe I'm grateful that I can't hear my own thoughts. I am completely alone.  I  see a door to a small room and know it is where I need to be so I walk toward it.  It is a little room in the back of the church, a room for parents to take their children during church when they get upset so they won't disturb service. The sign on the door says, "Crying Room."

I open the door and fold myself into a tiny chair.  I hug my knees to my chest in that little room built to comfort little ones who are inconsolable and with the sounds of deafening alarms going on all around me I sob and sob as the souls of my friends and neighbors are released into that black ribbon.

Surf Lessons

My friend, Jim Hill picked me up Sunday morning at 5:30 to go surfing.  Let me back up. I wasn't originally going surfing. I was going to watch Jim surf.  I knew that we were in between two storm fronts, last week's Hurricane Irene and some other storm that was getting ideas and Jim said the waves were tremendous and there were tons of surfers. The Quicksilver Surf Championship was in town and there would be some pros around but I was most curious to see the surf culture that exists a 40 minute subway ride from Manhattan and a half an hour from my house, at the beach The Ramones immortalized in a song I had chanted since I was 15 years old,  Rockaway Beach.


At 6 a.m. we're the first one's there and Jim's disappointed at the waves, I think, in part, because he wanted to share his sport with me and to show me a good time.  Jim's a really good guy and he was there to surf so despite the absence of sizable waves, he suited up and got in the water.  I, on the other hand, took a nap.


I had drank the better part of a tasty bottle of Raisins gaulois the night before, which combined not so well with a night of insomnia due to my anxiety that I would oversleep so I got out of bed with an RWH,  (red wine hangover) the size of the great outdoors. Pounding surf was not going to do anything for my pounding head so I was secretly glad the waves were small because they were quieter.   I  pitched my tent and and fell out on the beach immediately.

Hanging out at Rockaway Beach.

When I woke up the beach was abuzz with surfer regulars and boadwalk on-lookers. I had a neighbor now, who had hung a hammock under the boardwalk and was chatting with another surfer. I walked out on the jetty, parallel to the half-dozen surfers, straddling boards, bobbing  in the water, waiting for something that looked and felt right. Once in a while one of the waves would ask one of the surfers for a date, and the three of them, wave, board and surfer would dance toward the shoreline. It was a friendly and mellow operation. And quiet. Really quiet.  Even though the surfers were floating pretty close to each other, each seemed to be in their own aquatic, meditative reverie.

I noticed a lone female surfer, for no other reason that, unlike the other surfers, she bent her legs when she was paddling and it was a interesting, style-wise, like the surfer who bounced on his board as he started to slow down, to get every last drop of acceleration out of the ride. A style thing.  When Jim took a break, he told me that she'd told him she was retiring her board today. (Apparently surfers DO talk a bit out there!)  

When she got to shore I walked out to her and we started to talk.....turns out this was the the board she had learned on 10 years ago, when she began surfing at 40.  Suzanne waxed poetic about the board, which was duct-taped with love,  with dinks and scratches all over it. She was the only surfer out there whose board didn't have a strap, it having snapped off a while back. She was worried that if she kept surfing on it, it would fall apart before she could hang it as art in her apartment on 103rd street on the Upper West Side.  She asked me if I wanted to have a go at surfing.  


Earlier, Jim had asked me to surf.  I gave him multiple, rapid-fire reasons why I  was happy to watch. I had my glasses on and I'm blind without them and afraid I'd get disoriented.  I'm a swimmer not a surfer.  I didn't have a wet suit bottom.  

But when Suzanne asked me, I said, yes, automatically.  

The last waves for Suzanne and her fist surfboard.

 Who knew that my last weekend of summer would finish with such a kick. I left my thick, black-rimmed glasses on the shore, handed Jim my camera,  directing him to take my picture with the un-apologetic boldness of a reality star and gamboled, yes gamboled gamely into the surf. I am an extremely good swimmer,  swimming over 39 miles and taking a 3 place finish this summer in a 6-week lap swim at my local pool, but truth be told, I am terrified of swimming in the ocean.  But in I went and pretty deep, without fear or apprehension.  So genuinely excited to try something that was clearly way out of my skill-set and, frankly, my interest.  With Suzanne, I was all-in, without  feeling self-doubt, judgement, competitive or a need to perform.   It was gratitude that I mostly felt. 

"Don't think, just do it," advice from a surfer/sage.

I was grateful for this beautiful day.  For an unexpected experience. Grateful  for the friendship of Jim and  the generosity of Suzanne as  I was initiated into their athletic meditation.

Grateful that Suzanne, reflecting on the milestone of the 10 years of her life as a surfer that her board represented, brought me in to her world with an openness and an enthusiasm that made it easy for me to join her, ultimately inviting me to share in her board's last dance. What a soulful gift.

Me and my surf guru.