Mystery Solved

Earlier in the week I read Time magazine's spread on Elizabeth Taylor. On page 62 of the article, there's a photo of Taylor and an unidentified, damn fine-looking man leaning up against what looks to be a sound stage at some or other studio. Earlier today I tweeted: "Who is unidentified male on page 62 of new @TIME with Elizabeth Taylor? Inquiring minds want to know!" Within an hour (ain't Twitter grand?), @Allie_Townsend, who works for Time (and asked the photo department), provided the answer. The unidentified smoldering yet nonetheless nonchalant hunk is Montgomery Clift, whom we now know was deeply tortured by his bisexuality during a time when nobody came out of the closet. (According to Patricia Bosworth's biography of Clift, he once said, "I love men in bed, but I really love women!")

Regardless of that bit of gossip, here's the photo (I cropped it for maximum hunk-gazing), taken by Peter Stackpole, Time & Life Pictures back in the day. Enjoy!

Mystery Solved

Top Chef Finale

To be honest, Richard Blais sometimes came off like a dick during this season of Top Chef, not giving any of the credit to Stephanie Izard for his loss to her during season four. But more often, Mike Isabella wore the mantle of asshole chef. During the last couple of episodes, though, he appeared to be more likable, while Blais' neurotic lack of confidence sometimes seemed to be a front to gain sympathy from the judges and other "cheftestants." (How ridiculous is that name, and is it worse than "celebreality?")

Last night, though, I think we saw the real thing from both chefs. Blais willingly delegated to his sous chefs (I worried that Spike wasn't at the same level as Antonia or Angelo, but wasn't he the one who suggested changing the foie gras ice cream?), while Isabella, no doubt immensely talented, wasn't interested in taking any suggestions from Carla, Tiffani, or Jamie. Was that some of the same sexism he exhibited throughout much of the competition (and poor Antonia suffered the most for it when three got cut down to two)? Actually, I don't think so. I think Isabella followed his vision, and for the most part, he succeeded admirably.

Still, I think Blais as winner was the correct call, and I hope this will give him the confidence he needs to give his nasty little "you're not good enough" inner voice a rest. I'm familiar with that voice. So is my daughter. She called Monday to say she'd gotten an A on her philosophy midterm, which surprised her because she thought she'd earned a C+. Poor thing. She's experiencing precisely what I went through after each round of tests in college. I finally stopped fucking with myself in grad school. Hopefully it won't take her four years to figure it out.

I think this was one of the best seasons of Top Chef, even though I wish Angelo had made it into the finals. He against Blais...now that would have been something to see.

Top Chef Finale

Writing for H&H Is Fun!

I adore writing for Heroes and Heartbreakers! My Rhynannon Byrd "Fresh Meat" piece, which went online yesterday, was incredibly fun to write; the site, thanks to Megan Frampton, has a sensibility I find refreshing. It's modern and pop-culturey. I needed to entirely rewrite each of the first four pieces published so far, but that's because it's tough to go from PW "staff-writing" mode to "let's have fun with it" mode.

I actually don't mind the rewrites because the first draft is "just the facts, ma'am," and totally necessary. The second draft is when I get to morph the piece from impersonal to personal, from old media to new media. If I wanna write "fuck," I write "fuck." If I wanna write "wanna" instead of "want to," I write "wanna." I still limit dashes because I'll never get the "too many dashes are lazy" refrain out of my head, but I might even...gasp...allow myself to use more than one type of special punctuation in a sentence (like a colon and ellipses), something that I decreed verboten at AAR.

Writing for difference sources that require different sorts of writing challenges me. To be honest, I still don't think I've come up with a single "style" for this blog, but I'm going to try to do that in the future. I'm going to aim more for the H&H sensibility, but because some of my posts are more serious, that may be a tall order. We'll see.

Writing for H&H Is Fun!

New "Fresh Meat" at H&H, and the Art of the Review

Fresh Meat: Rhyannon Byrd's Rush of Darkness

My newest blogging at Heroes and Heartbreakers just went online (5:00 p.m. eastern time). My sub-title for the piece is Dysfunction junction...come on, gimme a little smile. Drop by and give it a read, then post a comment over there.

I thought I'd share with you why I don't seem to be blogging much these days. It's simple. I'm spending all my time reading and writing, either reviews for PW, or pieces for H&H. I've got another spec piece in draft status, with another just written yet not submitted, and in the last week, in addition to reading and writing about Byrd's book, I read and reviewed two books for the magazine (not including the review I turned in this morning). Never has it felt so good to be under such a time crunch, although having to write ten drafts (yes, you heard right, ten drafts) between last evening and my eleven o'clock deadline this morning for my most recent PW review was not exactly a barrel full of monkeys.

Why were ten drafts necessary for this particular review? Well, the book was nearly 500 pages long and had four sub-plots, three of which melded together. It's part of a long-running series that I've not read in its entirety, with a tremendous number of fans who are as unhappy with review errors as I am. If the facts in a review aren't right, the entire thing—analysis and all—lacks credibility. Because these are short reviews, there's no margin whatsoever for error, and with a book readers are ready to devour, the pressure is more keen than usual.

I write for two PW editors; my mass market editor requires reviews to be no more than 170 words, including page cites. My fiction editor allots up to 300 words (with page cites). This was a review for my mass market editor and the first draft was too long by half. By the time I'd cut it down enough, I'd not only gone through nine more drafts, I'd very nearly rewritten the entire review several times.

For me, the hardest part of self-editing to meet a word count is giving up ownership of my writing. In this review, for instance, I'd written a particularly brilliant sentence fragment. It lasted from draft five through draft nine. Ultimately I cut it because the sentence directly following it subsumed my point. I should have been able to let it go a couple of drafts sooner, but it took further editing to determine how I could cut the fragment and replace it with an entire sentence. Other writers, who are more skilled than I am, no doubt find this easier to do, but even after sixteen years of reviewing, I struggle.

I've got six books to review for PW between now and early May, and I've committed to writing at least two more Fresh Meat pieces for H&H. In addition to the spec pieces I've submitted or finished writing, I plan to write more. And, I'd like to fit in a little reading simply for the pleasure of reading. Not that I'm complaining; I'm glad to be busy and hope everything I write that's published pleases readers and my editors. While you can't update me on my success at PW (I can tell you that I had one review among the 86 published today, but can't be more specific than that), I hope you'll give me feedback on my H&H articles.

New "Fresh Meat" at H&H, and the Art of the Review

My Hour of Crazy

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary and after my daughter finished doing my makeup (she's home for spring break from college and asked if she could), I took out the jewelry I planned to wear out to dinner at Stephan Pyles (yum!) last night. I could not find my earrings and went into an hour-long bout of crazy looking for them.

The ring and bracelet I'd planned to wear were right where they should be...in a small yellow jewelry bag that sits on the crystal plate in my bathroom which houses all my nice non-safe deposit box jewelry. The earrings should have been in the same small yellow bag, but were not. My daughter and I frantically started looking in drawers, in my closet, my bedside table—anywhere they might be. Eventually I got so upset I told her to stop. Continuing to look would spoil my evening. And so I decided that my next "project" would be to reorganize my bathroom drawers and closet space, all in the service of finding the damn earrings.

I got dressed, put on a different set of earrings, then went into the den to relax until it was time to leave. About five minutes before we left, I asked, "Do either of you actually remember my wearing them after I bought the other jewelry on our cruise this past summer?" Neither had any recollection. Suddenly I remembered blogging about the jewelry I'd bought, and posting pictures of each piece, last August, and ran into my study to take a look.

Guess what? There were no earrings. I'd actually invented them in my mind, but of course, after thinking about it, realized I'd never be so matchy-matchy. This hour of insanity will undoubtedly and undeniably go down on my "most crazy" list that I mentally keep. See, I never lose things. In the past five years there have only been two instances in which I could not find something, and in both cases, they were actually where I thought they were. Problem is, the inside of my backpack is black, and the neoprene cover for my iPod is also black, as is the zipper bag in which I store my laptop plug and chargers for my phone and Kindle. Both times I went more than a little nuts trying to find one or the other, but in both instances, they were actually there...I just need to root around to find them.

Anyway, we all had a good laugh about it, and I kept thinking about the earrings that weren't lost because they didn't exist during our delicious dinner. So much that I actually designed a pair from looking at my bracelet. This is what they'd look like. If only they weren't so matchy-matchy

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Btw, dinner last night was one of the best meals I ever ate. I mention it specifically to write about the sous vide stuffed chicken. Until last night I'd never actually eaten any food prepared in this manner. If you ever have the chance—and since more and more chefs are incorporating this style of cooking into their menus, you well may—try it. It was the most moist and tender chicken I've ever eaten. Now, I like chicken well enough, and adore my husband's pan-roasted chicken, but I'd never imagined it could taste this good. Of course, my appetizer was phenomenal (really, how could seared foie gras be anything but amazing?), as was the amuse-bouche (a small bite of lobster and asparagus in a delicate sauce), but the dessert also blew me away: Mexican chocolate fondant with fleur de sel caramel and Kahlúa crema. For a few years now I've loved salted caramel and salted chocolate, so this was a real treat. My husband's dinner was equally wonderful, and after 28 years of marriage, I'm still wildly in love.

If you're ever in Dallas, have dinner at Stephan Pyles. He's among those few chefs who invented Southwestern cuisine, and I can remember in our younger days waiting six weeks for a reservation at his first restaurant, Routh Street Cafe. Not only was it the place to see and be seen, the food was brilliant. What can I say? It was the late 1980s and we were yuppies with a disposable income.

My Hour of Crazy