Posts Tagged ‘The Ivy Restaurant’

What’s Real

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

My husband and I waited all day for the arrival of our imaginary grandchild.  It’s a boy.  His name is Jackson.  He’s quite real.  What’s imaginary is the idea that we are his grandparents.  Jackson was already nine months old and we had yet to meet him.  That’s because our surrogate child lives in Northern California and we haven’t been up there since the birth, and she hasn’t been here.  A brief explanation of Jackson’s mom, Tory.  When my daughter Augie started second grade, I spotted this tiny, adorable student in her class.  She looked dazed and confused, kind of lost.  I asked Augie about her and she told me that Tory was new at school.  I said, “Let’s bring her home.”  So, we did.  And she stayed, occasionally for months at a time.  The chaos in her own home made it appear that our family was functional.  Everything’s relative.  Secretly, I liked that she thought we were “normal.”  We got so much more out of the deal.  Tory was a real find.

Now, many years later, I texted Tory, though I was concerned she was on the road and might glance at her phone while driving.  But it’s Tory, more adult than any of us, even at thirteen.  She had to be.  I get texted right back.  Oh, did you think it was today I was coming down?  It’s tomorrow, and then I have to leave the following day.  I walked into my husband’s home office.  “I got the day wrong.  There’s a movie in Santa Monica, want to see it?” (more…)

Queen of Tarts

Monday, August 20th, 2012
 

I saw a beautiful fruit tart today, but I didn’t buy it. Though one brief glimpse of its light crust, glistening white cream & assorted seasonal berries and our whole intense love affair came rushing back.

It’s the mid 1970’s. The place: Patrick Terrail’s West Hollywood restaurant Ma Maison. An old house on Melrose converted into the most innovative, modern French restaurant of its day. It was so very French and so very Hollywood, and when those two worlds collided on that patio of Astroturf and umbrellas, it was magic.

Big Hollywood deals were made, infamous fights broke out, and occasionally I was lucky enough – if someone with more money was paying—to be there, enjoying the food. That’s where it began – an infatuation that would turn into a stalker’s obsession. They had me at crème anglaise.

I was there a lot with Jackie Mason, which sounds so random, sort of like my celebrity dreams, but he was a friend of my dad’s and we went as his guest, or vice versa. Often, when we were at a meal with Jackie, he would do his bit:

Gentiles never finish drinking, Jews never finish eating. What do you think Jews talk about for breakfast? Where to eat lunch. At lunch: “Where should we have dinner?” (more…)

To Die for Mandel Bread

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

okay, in person it was quite the sight, 1983, pregnant with Oliver

I’m not exaggerating when I say I gained a person during my first pregnancy. Not an eight-pound person, a fifty-pound person. And fifty looks more like a hundred on my tiny frame. I’ll try to track down a picture to prove it.
At the time, I was often seen in the nicest restaurants sporting a leopard print Fiorucci number, a one-piece that was meant to have a big belt cinching it to show off your hot early-eighties bod. But I was dressing “for two” and looked more like a giant spotted pumpkin than the sexy dame I thought I was. Strangers laughed at me when they took in the sight. A real ego booster.
Cedars, where I gave birth, became a huge party where all my friends visited at all hours. I was one of the first of us to have a kid. Okay, Kimme, Sherry and Barbara started a bit before me, but it really seemed like I was hosting a big premiere. Think “The Wizard of Oz” and the moment she wakes from the dream, looks around the room and says to each person “…and you were there, and you were there…. “ Well, all of YOU reading this were probably there — only it wasn’t a dream.
Periodically, everyone would leave my room en masse to visit the nursery to look at my new, perfect, ten-days-late, stunning child with the Mick Jagger lips. And no, I didn’t fuck Mick — though I met him a few months after Oliver was born and told him it WAS his baby. Should I totally digress to that story? Sure, why not. (more…)