Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

• Day 99: The Sweetness of the Swing Set

  Date: 2010.06.06 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 2

  I almost titled this post GRATITUDE except that word’s been so Oprah-ized that I decided against it.   But if you can get past the earnest New-Age jargon, you’ll find that being grateful packs quite a pragmatic punch. It’s like a trick in life that works.

  Even though I’m almost at 100 days of no sweets, I haven’t spent much time being grateful for eliminating sugar from my life.  I wrote yesterday that I’m going back to basics which today means taking some pride in that.

  I can easily go the other way and look at what’s lacking in my life or what I missed.  My cousin Kathleen reminded me of this in a small way when she emailed me yesterday that she reads my blog once a week, really fast, to avoid the “tantalizing” pictures of candy.  ”You see I NEVER had such a sensual relationship with candy,” she wrote. ” Your blog just makes me feel as if I missed out!”

  Right now I’m reading two books at the same time, Girls Like Us, my friend Sheila Weller’s amazing story of the lives of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon, and  The Place at the End of the World, a memoir by Janine Di Giovanni, one of the pre-eminent war correspondents of our time, with whom I worked years ago at the AP in Boston.

  Frankly, it’s a little hard to read about the incredible careers and storied love affairs of Carole, Carly and Joni – set against backdrops like the 1960s-era hitmaking Brill Building in New York, the Summer of Love in Laurel Canyon and Martha’s Vineyard with James Taylor.

  I think: Why wasn’t I born a wildly talented, iconic singer-songwriter who came of age in the 1960s? For one thing, I have hair a lot like Carole King’s – think of the time I’d have saved over the years had I skipped the blow-drying.

  When reading Janine’s book about her ultra-courageous adventures reporting everywhere from Baghdad and Afghanistan to East Timor, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Bosnia, I think, oh no, I forgot to be a war correspondent!

  But I also know envy is a trap – and I’m never impressed with people who are envious of me.  Invariably it seems like the most jealous people are the least successful. It’s like a bad version of The Circle Game.

  I met my friend, Broadway actress Karyn Quackenbush when I was writing an article about Broadway understudies for The New York Times. Karyn’s now performing in Nora Ephron’s off-Broadway play, Love, Loss and What I Wore, and is opening in a musical called The Bikinis this August.

  Karyn’s had career high and lows but she hews to a cool philosophy to keep her from envy and bitterness when she sees another actress (probably less talented!) getting a part she wanted.  ”It’s her path,” Karyn always says. “There’s no point in being jealous. You just realize you have your path and everyone else has their path. Be glad for your path.”

  I vividly remember the day in the early 90s in New York when I deliberately stopped focusing on where I wasn’t and what I didn’t have and instead focused on what I had.   The very next day, no exaggeration,  my entire career literally took off.

  Which gets me to the swing set.

  My LA-based cousin Michaele is at this very moment vacationing at my father’s old property on Cape Cod where I spent every summer.  She took a picture of my swing set, which was put up even before the Summer of Love and still stands after all these years, and sent it to me on her iPhone yesterday.

  Seeing my old swing set unleashed a flood of childhood memories as if I were Proust dipping madeleines in his tea in Remembrance of Things Past.

  That swing set  helped launch me on my path and it’s the kind of memory that makes me realize I didn’t miss out on much.

  “It is still here and waiting for you,” Michaele wrote. “Wish you were here.”

  Me too.

  

• Day 98: Back to Basics.

  Date: 2010.06.05 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 1

  

  I got up this morning and clicked on my friend Julian Michael’s June newsletter.  (That’s him on the left on ABC News.) You can find his newsletter by going to his site.

  Julian is a fantastic numerologist and writer and seer. We have tons of fun in New York but he also throws great parties in Los Angeles at fabulous estates above Hollywood and at the beach and always has a Kennedy cousin on line one.

  I love his June newsletter because it includes a meditation for tomorrow, June 6th. The meditation involves visualizing a golden door with your third eye and listening to the messages you hear once you have permission to open it.  Oh, yes.

  The messages I got were: go back to basics. I’ve been working a lot and traveling a lot for work. I haven’t been doing all the biking, hiking and kayaking that I usually do all the time all year long. I’ve only been swimming a few times this summer!  Usually I swim every day in the summer.

  I’ve given up sweets but can’t rest on my sugar-free laurels. Literally.  I lost a little weight when I gave up sweets on Feb. 28  - but then I gained some!  I thought no desserts meant the weight would fall off no matter what. Um, no!

  So my plan for June is to eat better, get back to the sports I love – and be happy I’m not treating myself with sugary stuff that is wicked and causes inflammation, among many other bad things.

  Here’s a back to basics video:

  
  

• Day 95: London Calling!

  Date: 2010.06.02 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 3

  

  London is a short hop from the south of France but arriving here is such a sweet, yes, jolly, occurrence that I want to kiss the first Cockney-accented cab driver I meet. And some cab drivers in London still have Cockney accents and call you “love” and in the case of the first one I got yesterday, did grow up in the East End.

  Perfect! I quizzed him about the old days in the East End for the entire length of the cab ride. And who doesn’t love the stately cabs?  Always make me wish I was an international assassin/spy arriving for an overnight briefing at 10 Downing Street or MI6 headquarters before being sent on a highly-classified mission to Moscow…

  I am fascinated by the East End (and even spent a week at British military boot camp for women in Devon with actress Brooke Kinsella – great person and wonderful at commando raids! – who starred on the long-running British soap East Enders.) Even better, Brooke’s father is a true East Ender who drives a cab!   Sadly, the East End, once home to, roughly, ten trillion pubs, is now Bangladesh West and there are now, like, two pubs.  No Jack the Ripper, no docks. Sigh.

  But the real reason I love coming to London  is the English sense of humor, so different from the sensibility in the Latin countries like France, Italy and Spain.  And by humor I mean they’re funny – and in good humor as well!   It’s so refreshing after months on the fractious Mediterranean.

  If you head one island over, to my ancestral homeland, the people are really funny, but I don’t get to Ireland more than once every two years.  No one is funnier than the Irish, even though my real Irish friends bristle at any Irish-American attempt of mine to idealize Ireland.    One Irish acquaintance calls people like me “plastic Paddys” and is quick to tell me that Ireland is a “floating madhouse” full of drunks and dysfunctional families.  To which I say, who cares, they are so funny!

  Time was, I’d be considered a traitor to love England and the English.  They didn’t crush the spirit of Ireland but they did wipe out my ancestors’ language. One of my friends still lives in the cottage in Ballyforan outside Galway where he was born across from the river Suck. On the other side of the river is the old abandoned, stone manor from which the English tyrant rode over from every morning to whip the Irish into going to work. We always walk over there and examine it.  He’s still bitter – and he’s only 49 and all that happened a century ago. I love it!

  But how can you hate England these days?  Today, the place is filled with home-grown, dark-skinned foreigners speaking English with a perfect plummy British accent; payback is a bitch, baby.

  But I digress from the entire point of what is actually a bittersweet trip to London.

  

  I normally love coming here because the U.K. is chockablock with the most fantastic candy. It’s everywhere the minute you land here.   Seemingly dozens of different Cadbury chocolate products alone – the basic bar, the Flake, the Cadbury egg – and that’s just one of a million candy bars for sale. The British teeth aren’t famously bad for no reason, you know.  Even Madonna talked about her obsession with British candy when she lived in London:

  “One of the worst things about Britain is that it has such fabulous candy,” she says and lets slip that when she has worked particularly hard at something, like the rest of us she rewards herself with a treat.

  “I love Cadbury Fruit and Nut, Crunchies and Maltesers. But my absolute favourite is a Cadbury Creme Egg. I bite straight in to it and suck all that good stuff right out!”

  Suck it, sister!

  For comparison, how many candy bars does France have?

  Try a paltry four or five brands of candy bars – Mars (Zzzz…,) Snickers (ho hum,) Kit Kat (snore), Bounty (double-snore), Smarties (ugh.)  Then they have the big supermarket chocolate tablets.  OK in a pinch but not that exciting. Lindt? Toblerone?  Not even French and not that dynamique.

  England has roughly one million different brands of candy bars in a typical newsstand kiosk.   Ireland, as it happens, has about ten million candy bars.  All you need to know about me and my sweet tooth is that I am of 100 percent Irish descent.

  But this trip to London is my first to the U.K. during My Year Without Candy. What a tragedy and struggle. I walked the aisles of the candy-stuffed stores, looking, gazing, fantasizing… but never touching!

  In between two business meetings I ignored all my actual London-based friends and met up with my wonderful friend B. from New York whose husband was there on business the same day!  We hit two different coffee bars, the fabu 202 restaurant in Notting Hill for lunch and went shopping on Portobello Road.

  Most fun? We both love the movie Notting Hill and we ran right into the actual “Travel Bookshop” where Hugh Grant met Julia Roberts!  Of course we went in and I asked shamelessly about the movie – as if the shopkeeper (who was not Hugh Grant, I might add) had never gotten THAT question before.  ”It was filmed in a studio,” she said, barely concealing her boredom and scorn at my Jethro Clampett question. (Wait, is this France?)

  Then it was teatime and that’s when this story gets most tragic.  After all the succulent candy, what’s better than high tea and if not a crumpet, then one of the to-die-for enormous chocolate chip cookies or banoffee pie or cakes dotting the windows of every other cafe, tearoom and restaurant in London?

  Such a waste.  I sat disconsolately with B. and drank cappucino without sugar.

  However, there is a silver lining to being in London while eschewing sweets:

  

  Three words: salt and vinegar potato chips.  I mean crisps!

  Love them.  And bags of them are everywhere. I ate two in one day. Could have had a third.

  So now I’m wondering – does this water make me look fat?

  Cheers!

  

• Day 93: Feeling Lucky

  Date: 2010.05.31 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 2

  Hard to believe I am on Day 93.  Just very glad I had the idea to do this blog because I’d be having a candy bar right about now without it.  Grateful for many things today.

  

• Day 90! – “Let Me Hear You Scream!”

  Date: 2010.05.28 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 5

  Three months without candy.  I’m 1/4 of the way there.

  The below video, filmed two days ago at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in New York expresses how I feel better than I can put in words today.

  Love Ozzy and Sharon and their genius for a great PR stunt!

• Day 88: Are You as “Unique” As I Am?

  Date: 2010.05.26 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 4

  Today I was pronounced unique.

  How does that relate to being a candy addict?  Well Sheila said, “You are unique!” in reference to a choice I made that she thought was strange.  It was just a throwaway comment on Facebook.  (Not to be confused with a very early boyfriend who once called me an “iconoclast.”  The term somehow seemed very elderly Somerset Maugham for someone who was 23, and female, at the time.)

  Anyway, this brought to mind something another friend who’s an alcoholic and who is in his fourth month of not drinking once said.

  He said he drank because of the way the world is. The way sometimes you feel so alienated from other people, or they just bore you to death, or you just feel so so different. Or because you’re… unique?

  Is that why I’ve always needed something sweet to get through life?  Because when you’re unique maybe everyone else isn’t unique enough?

  The backstory:  Sheila made her Facebook status update a query asking everyone to say what their favorite song was: “the sentimental grand-experience-marker, from an earlier time in (your) life, when emotional and bohemian Romance were everything.”

  Sheila chose Laura Nyro’s Timer. For whatever reason, I read the question as being about a song that was your earliest favorite song, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have made the same choice as I did.

  I chose a song from 1970 called Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes.) Because I remember that song corresponding to one of my earliest crushes, like in second grade in Massachusetts. His name was Joey Frontiera.

  To me, elementary school was unbelievably romantic.

  Imagine choosing Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) for a favorite romantic song in response to a Facebook query by a sophisticated media friend in New York?

  Wait, does she know that Sugar, Sugar by the Archies is my idea of a perfect pop song?  What a coincidence, given my lifelong vice!

  In any event, when my friend responded to all of the comments – cool choices like Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row and Joni Mitchell’s River – she wrote that she couldn’t imagine my choice ever making such a list. You are unique! she wrote.

  So I looked into the band behind my unique song, Edison Lighthouse

  Below from the esteemed research center, Wikipedia:

  Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” was written by Tony Macaulay Barry Mason and  Sylvan Whittingham. Essentially they were a studio group with prolific session singer Tony Burrows providing the vocals. When the song became number one a group needed to be put together rapidly to feature on the popular TV show Top of the Pops.  Sylvan Whittingham found a group called Greenfields and brought them to the auditions a week before Top of the Pops. Once chosen and rehearsed non stop they appeared on the show as ‘Edison Lighthouse’ to mime to the fastest climbing no 1 hit record in history. Burrows sang the song on the program, which happened to be his third appearance on the same show with three different groups. It reached number 5 on US pop chart, number 3 in Canada, and number 1 on the UK singles chart for five weeks in January and February 1970.

  I was more intrigued when I checked out the lead singer, Tony Burrows, and found this interview entitled “The Greatest Singer Whose Name You Never Heard.” Burrows, it turned out, was the anti-Bob Dylan.  No huge talent coupled with peerless ambition and savvy careerism here:  Burrows was just the one singer in history to have four top 40 singles with four groups in a space of four months.

  His favorite of all his hit singles?  Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) of course.

  If you must know, my very favorite song of all time is Into the Mystic, by Van Morrison.

  But as much as I love that song, it doesn’t evoke the same “sentimental grand-experience-marker, from an earlier time in (your) life, when emotional and bohemian Romance were everything.”

  Not the way Love Grows (Where my Rosemary Goes) does.

  Am I also the only person who remembers the intensity of feeling you can have as a girl for another boy?

  Am I that unique? Is my freak flag flying that high?

  Can I say how much I love the people who totally get you and don’t think you’re unique? I can think of one right now.

  By the way, I came thisclose to buying a can of whipped cream tonight.

  C’est pas facile, cette vie.

  Pour a little sugar on it baby.

  And together we will float,

  into the mystic.

  Ta,

  

  
  

  
  

• Day 85: The Sun Also Sets

  Date: 2010.05.23 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 1

  

  I left the dying embers of the Cannes Film Festival and bought some groceries and new plants for the terrace on the way home.  I feel badly for people who live the high life all the time.  How can they get any perspective?

  You can’t make sense of Shelley Hack and her strange connection to Alain Delon and my jealousy of Mick Jagger’s girlfriend L’Wren Scott without a little set of rooms with a view in Middle Earth.

  The last big bash of the Cannes Film Festival is always the amFAR AIDS charity throwdown at the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc in Antibes, just five miles down the old coast road from Cannes.  It’s one of the most beautiful places on earth – even if you know Villa America and the artists and writers are are all long gone and that’s Roman Abramovich’s vulgar yacht out in the harbor.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, above with Zelda in Antibes in 1926, was so inspired by the hotel that he opened Tender is the Night with it:

  On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose- colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.

  The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.

  So it was that I arrrived Thursday night at the Hotel du Cap’s 2010 version of a bright tan prayer rug: the red carpet.

  And then, of all the red carpets in the world, he had to be there.  Before me, of course, and first in position in line.  Let’s call him… Pemingway.

  Pemingway rules the Parisian roost as king of entertainment reporters. We have a rocky history.  No, we don’t spar over pastis at Les Deux Magots or kick around iambic pentameter at lesbian literary salons.

  

  Let’s just say Angelina Jolie got between us a few times. Then there was that night when Madonna’s stage set collapsed in Marseilles.  Pemingway was on the horn from Paris, ready to tell me what to do per usual like he was Darrin and I was Samantha.  ”Don’t give me your journalism tutorials,” I barked.  Pemingway backed off.

  Until now.  The truth is, Pemingway and I had never met in person. Now we’d be side-by-side in the harsh afternoon sunlight as the first C and D-listers came down the red carpet. And we’d be together two hours later for the last of the A-listers as the sun slid slowly over the horizon.

  Tonight Pemingway and I were working for different media outlets. We’re free agents and tonight Pemingway was working for a television show. It was a new Pemingway, quick with a quip and chivalrous. He gave me an extra bottle of water and even offered to fetch me a shawl.

  We soldiered through Rachel Bilson, Karolina Kurkova, Chris Tucker, Michelle Rodriguez, Mischa Barton, Emily Blunt, Elizabeth Banks, Paris Hilton (and her mother,) and gaped at graying Patti “Horses” Smith, who walked the red carpet in jeans, motorcycle boots.

  Our bond deepened as Jennifer Lopez, Gerard Butler, Naomi Campbell and Michelle Williams swept by refusing to speak to anyone.  Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling and Lindsay Lohan (again!) snuck in some side door.  Kate Beckinsale, Mary J. Blige, Harvey Weinstein, Kenneth Cole, however, paid us a certain kind of tribute.

  Oddly enough, I was struck by a vaguely familiar face.

  

  “It’s Shelley Hack,” I whispered to Pemingway, who squinted expertly in her direction and nodded.

  Shelley Hack is 62 and she’s no longer famous but she stood out on the red carpet.  She looks 20 years younger but as if she hasn’t had any work done.  She also looked as if she knows things other people don’t.

  Pemingway was more focused on Alain Delon, former huge French bad-boy star who now just looks permanently hung over.

  A PR person had asked me and Pemingway to ask us to interview Delon because he wanted to get some American press – but he didn’t want to speak English.  So we’re primed to speak to him in French.   Then Delon shows up, and appears to diss us.

  Pemingway worries that it’s him – that Delon has remembered him from some past encounter and doesn’t want to talk to him.

  Me, I don’t care because Mick Jagger and his 6’4″ girlfriend L’Wren Scott have just arrived.  I just saw Mick the other night before the screening of  Stones in Exile and he looked as youthful as… Shelley Hack!

  I’m irritated that if Mick is going to wind up with a tall woman with long hair in her 40s, why didn’t he just stay with Jerry Hall who’s not that much older and prettier than L’Wren Scott.   Then I wish I had gotten in there before L’Wren Scott.  I figure you could make it work with Mick just by letting him do what he wants.

  

  Mick can’t answer any questions because the stern, unsmiling L’Wren yanks him down the red carpet as if he’s six – and Mick seems to revel in it.

  Then, as quickly as Mick disappears up the stairs into the hotel, the “arrivals” have ended and the red carpet is going to be rolled up.

  Pemingway and I don’t say goodbye – but that’s because we’re both going in for the dinner and auction, in the big tent on the back lawn of the Hotel du Cap.

  I don’t see him during dinner, which stretches until midnight, with just a tiny appetizer, small entree (both good, though) and fabulous dessert that I can’t eat. I’m starving.  We move onto the big party across the lawn at midnight, inside the Eden Roc restaurant next to the pool and overlooking the Mediterranean.

  I bump into all the usual suspects – Paris, Lindsay, Benicio de Toro, Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams – as I circulate the party with various other reporter friends or alone (you can never get a Plus One to these events so no invitations for Mr. Year Without Candy.)

  Then I see her:  Shelley Hack again, looking all-knowing while standing at a railing above the sea.

  I say hi and she is friendly, though wary. Her husband and another friend of theirs are chattier.  Her husband is a director named Harry Winer. He’s at Cannes with a movie and somehow Alain Delon is involved.  It turns out he and Shelley are friends with Delon and just had dinner with him and Harry tells me how hard he worked to arrange American press for Delon on the red carpet.

  “Oh,” I said. “I was there. What happened?”

  Winer said Delon panicked after he arrived and was faced with so many English-speaking reporters.  Somehow he didn’t realize that some of us could have spoken to him in French.  So very French of him to feel intimidated but act arrogant to hide it.

  

  I sighed.  So it wasn’t Pemingway after all.

  I had to tell him.

  A few of us stayed until 3:30 a.m. and the party was still rocking.  I tried every now and then to walk away to the edge of the sea and imagine the place, 90 years ago, when Fitzgerald and Picasso and Leger and the Murphys all had picnics on the beaches here and drank too much and chased their children and wrote and painted masterpieces.

  I tried, but it was hard.

  We drove back to Cannes in the dark.   Sometime the next day I sent Pemingway an email explaining the Delon mystery.

  I haven’t heard back.

  I’ve been… Pemingway-ed.

  We won’t always have Antibes.

  Tant pis.

  Ta,

  

• Day 82: Lindsay & Grace: The Importance of Not Being Sweet

  Date: 2010.05.20 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 0

  

  Time got away from me the other  night at the Carlton Hotel because I was having dinner with an old friend, Entertainment Weekly movie critic Owen Gleiberman.  Owen is one of those people with whom you start having a profound debate less than 30 seconds after meeting and in a sea of Croisette-inspired small talk, that’s a good thing. Keeps me alert.

  We both said no dessert but the waiter had to bring a plate of pastries.  Owen ate some but fortunately kept arguing with me and saying he wasn’t sure I was right, which I enjoy and keeps me awake.  Boredom is the worst for causing sugar cravings.

  Then I saw my watch -1 a.m. – fuck, I’m supposed to be out scouting Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling and Lindsay Lohan at a couple of parties: the Weinstein after-party for Blue Valentine at the Palais Stephanie – and Grace Jones at Le Baron.

  I’m about to meet some mean girls!

  I downed a coffee and headed over to the rooftop Palais Stephanie where I’m supposed to eyeball Williams and Gosling and figure out if they’re a couple.  I accidentally walk past three chunky producer types having their picture taken on a faux-red carpet and one calls me “cheeky” as I am still in earshot.

  Ah, an annoying British-ism just when my blood sugar is dipping precipitously. But it’s gorgeous up there; the pool is shimmering from the sliver of moonlight above and you can see the lights twinkling on the yachts in the harbor.  Away from the crowd, a couple makes out next to the railing overlooking the Croisette.

  The party at Le Baron where Grace Jones will perform is hotter.  In a festival short of superstars and trainwrecks, Lindsay Lohan is in the house.  Deep inside the VIP area where she holds court, I buy a sorely-needed 12 euro Diet Coke and the bartender gets mad when I ask for a receipt.

  I have the same reaction every time I am in one of these dens – be they in New York, Los Angeles, Cannes or St. Tropez.  It’s dark, it’s hot, it’s noisy and everyone seems poised for something to happen that never does.  If we’re all in denial what is truly in store for us (death), then being at a crowded nightclub late at night just reminds me of it more.

  All I can think of is, I can’t wait until I can go home and read a book.  I’m sure getting drunk to get through it would be the smart thing, but alcohol makes me sleepy and I’m already enervated enough just being here.

  I think of the soldiers in Evan Wright’s wonderful book about being embedded in Iraq, Generation Kill, and how they sometimes doze off right as they go into battle.

  

  I’m brushing up actor Dominic Cooper (had no idea who he was until someone told me) who is standing next to Lohan.  I watch her as she flirts with Cooper even though the word on her is that she is with some older lesbian cougar.

  Lindsay’s wearing a black hat, white wifebeater T, short white shorts. She gets her bodyguard to eject a very pretty blonde from her little circle who’s flirting with Cooper.  The blonde, exiled to a corner across the room, protests loudly for the next five minutes.  Can’t blame her.

  Everyone’s forgotten that Lohan is a fairly good actress but she seems so into her deliberate downward spiral that she’s more unlikeable by the moment. A judge is probably going to put a warrant out for her arrest when she doesn’t show up for a court date Thursday in L.A.  She’s supposedly in Cannes to promote a new movie in which she will star as Linda Lovelace but there’s no deal even in place yet.

  But I also get why Lohan sometimes gets into fights at these places. (She threw a drink at somebody in a New York club last week.)  Nightclubs really lack a sense of humor.  Her scary, scowling bodyguard looks as if he’s ready to punch anyone who looks at him.  I leave briefly to go look for the ladies room and unfortunately march straight into the path of fearsome Grace Jones who is flanked, African queen style, by three big, fierce bodyguards, one of whom pushes me so hard out of the way I am shocked.

  I glare at him; he glares back at me and to my amazement, Grace Jones glares back at me.  Did I imagine this? I don’t think so. Grace is quite the fucking diva. Fantastic. Now I’m awake again, got my second wind.

  Grace Jones, she of the fabulous posture, gets onstage and and I stand on a chair to watch her as Lindsay stands on a chair one over from me.  As Grace’s killer set wafts through the club, we’re lifted up into something briefly meaningful.

  Life is sweet.

  Ta,

  

• Day 81: Weakening

  Date: 2010.05.19 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 2

  A bit tired with low blood sugar – was thinking how much I wanted a Snickers tonight and then got to my hotel room and there was a packet on the pillow with four little squares of chocolate.

  I need the chocolate; I need the energy.  I was thinking what if I just had one of the four: the milk chocolate one.  Nobody would know or else I could be honest and say I ate just one.  Minor relapses are supposed to be actually quite effective.

  I probably won’t eat it.    Of course it’s no big deal but the person I am afraid of is me.  If all of a sudden I say, OK, I’ll just have this one, I know me.  Tomorrow I’ll say, it’s OK, I’ll just have one scoop of the white chocolate gelato on the Croisette.

  And by Friday I’ll be chowing down on Snickers and Mars bars.

  It’s just a little bit of chocolate would help so much now

  Damn these chocolates on hotel pillows.

  Why not just put lines of cocaine on the bathroom vanity?

  Je suis faible et fatiguée,

  

• Day 79: Temptations Lurk Around Every Cannes Corner

  Date: 2010.05.17 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 3

  

  Bonjour de Cannes!

  I’m only 11 days away from three months without sweets.  A bit strange to me that friends and readers of the blog wonder if I am actually not eating sweets, as if maybe  it’s just a blogging concept.  Like I’m chowing down on French macarons (yes they are spelled like that) while typing posts about how much I miss desserts? Um, no.

  I went to rent a car the other day from Nice’s best car rental agency, Elite,  and my friend Stephane who runs it, saw me eating from a bag while he was writing up my reservation.  ”I thought you were not eating candy?” he said. (When you’re on Facebook, spies are everywhere.)

  I showed Stephane that there were only almonds and raisins in the bag.  Raisins actually seems like cheating but only for some crazy-ass purist who doesn’t want a drop of natural sugar or processed sugar in her body.  I’m still just avoiding candy and all desserts.  That’s hard enough, bitches.

  So the point is – I am doing what I set out to do on Feb. 28, 2010.  Sometimes it seems almost easy, meaning I don’t crave sweets a lot or feel too deprived.  But just when I start to smug up and think I have this beating-candy thing down — I turn a corner, as I did yesterday in Cannes, and first see two girls eating ice cream cones.  Then I walk by the above boulangerie and see the macarons.

  I get hit hard and immediately feel – I want some of that and I want it now and how can I continue not to have the stuff I want?

  But the secret for me seems to be… about five minutes after I turn away from looking at the macarons and the girls with the ice cream cones are long gone, I forget about my jonesing and it passes.

  Sounds too easy, true.  And I don’t know about you, but the minute I get complacent and think I have everything under control, boom comes the big sledgehammer in the sky to take me down a peg.

  But… it keeps me on my hooves.

  Ta,