Love

Sure it's a cliche, but Paris really is a tremendously romantic city. The grand brasseries like the art nouveau Bofinger or the art deco La Coupole don't just transport you to another place, but another time. They are joyful places where you want to be extravagant and order bottles of wine and big platters of seafood. When I think about my time in Paris with my husband-to-be at the time, I remember the feeling of indulgence and even decadence as if nothing beyond those gilded dining rooms mattered at all. And I remember the seafood, those big multi-tiered platters brimming with oysters, clams and lobster.

Anyone who has been through it will tell you, getting married is not nearly as stressful as the wedding itself. The relatives, the seating charts, the guest list, the cost. Oh I could go on and on. But I won't. Instead I'll tell you about the night before I got married. After weeks of handling last minute details, celebrating a birthday, entertaining and seeing to the needs of out-of-town guests and relatives, it felt like the night before our wedding was the first moment we had alone in ages.

To be perfectly honest, the only food recipe I have is one for disaster. My husband and I found that out the hard way. We hadn’t been married very long, and I wanted to make a delicious home-cooked meal of steak and potatoes. I put the steak under the broiler, waited a reasonable amount of time and then opened my oven door to 12-inch flames. I screamed, what else could I do, but my husband simply strolled over to the fire and blew it out. In his sweet way he told me it would be fine, we could eat the potatoes. He also said, don’t worry about cooking anymore, we could eat out.

So over time our recipes for dinner came from the restaurants. When we dine out, we relax into our table and, as everyone knows to do, we look to mind our own business. But sometimes the tables are very close together, and being that my husband and I are both therapists, listening to what people have to say is what we do. In fact, our business really is minding other people’s business, so inevitably we may find ourselves paying attention as it becomes clear that the conversation at the next table is about to go up in flames, just like my steak. The other night we were at one of our favorite Italian restaurants. As soon as the waiter took our order we could hear it starting just a few feet away. The woman began.

My husband Mike points out that the room goes silent as I watch a quivering gooey strand of icing bridge a hunk of pastry being pried apart by delicate hands in an Entenman's commercial. And when a pool of thick, rich Dove chocolate swirls around and folds itself magically over a brick of vanilla ice cream, my eyes glaze over. Then, when the caramel and chocolate of a Milky Way is fully exposed in delectable close up, my jaw goes slack. He tells me to face it: these commercials are, for me, like watching porn. Yes, I embarrassedly admit that I have fallen prey to the sexualized enticements of sugary things. 

Candy has been a bond between me and my pal Joy since we first became best friends in sixth grade at Beverly Vista Elementary School in Beverly Hills, California.   Sure, there’s been humor, loyalty, shared heart-throbs, and tears…but from the get-go, there were shared Nestle Crunch candy bars filled with crinkly chocolate that we bought every day as we walked home from school together.  It became a ritual, peeling off the blue and white wrapper, then the foil, and eating the crunchy bar while hysterically laughing over some inside joke that was funny only to ourselves.  But it was better that way.