I spend a great deal of my life working functions that exceptionally wealthy people go to. My official jobs have ranged from handing out escort cards to rangling opera singers, to making emergency Staples runs, to standing and looking pretty. I’m especially good at that last one.
But my unofficial job is where I really excel: soothing the savage rich lady.
Actually, I’m pretty great with rich old men as well, but soothing the savage rich man sounds like the subject for a whole other blog, by a writer who isn’t me, and you need to buy a subscription to read it.
If any of you are considering entering into the exciting field of nonprofit fundraising, you need to learn one thing: rich ladies like it when you like their blouse. Ok, or their jewelry or their hair or their bag, but blouse is a funnier word, and relates specifically to one unfortunate such occurrence I experienced recently.
A friend who is a good cook complains, "I'm too busy to cook. I get home from work and tell my family let's go out or order in."
I watched Mark Bittman’s video Pasta With Anchovies and Arugula.
There’s a certain sort of woman for whom Tina Fey is their spirit animal. In the words of Jack Donaghy of “30 Rock,”: “New York. Third wave feminist. College educated. Single and pretending to be happy about it. Over-scheduled, under-sexed. You buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover. And… Every two years you take up knitting for… a week.” Of course this is Alec Baldwin describing Liz Lemon, Tina Fey’s television alter-ego, but it could describe any number of women (that I know).
We thought it would be really fun to do a summer reading piece and asked some of our contributors what they’ve read this summer and what they recommend.
). It’s an extraordinary, textured look at an American family, multi-generations of women and how they influenced their children and generations to come. Written in pitch-perfect prose, it’s just great!
by Willliam Makepeace Thackery but don’t take this very seriously because I read “Vanity Fair” every summer and never manage to get through it... Except that Becky Sharp is one of the great characters ever written – it always loses me (or I lose the book) somewhere along the way... I know my friends at the 
I’m also riveted by Stuart Firestein’s new book 
The rhythm of everyday life enters in: George chops tomatoes at their country house in Weston, and roasted chicken and dessert orange jelly are served to guests. Tanny, in the novel, mentions the kitchen as “the site of continual commotion…it looked forlorn to me tidy.”In The Ballet Cookbook, published in 1966, she collected the recipes of almost every famous dancer or choreographer of the time, including Jerry Robbins, Suzanne Farrell, Margot Fonteyn, and Rudy Nureyev, whose winter borscht is one of the crowd-pleasers. The cookbook has a cult following and, a la Julie and Julia, “Dinner with Mr. B.” events and the like have sprung up, with participants fording the shrimp bisque, blinis, banana sweets, and fish dinners that melted off the frames of the supremely lithe. The Master’s Muse comforts the reader with the assurance that a love of life can fortify a love affair that refuses to perish.
My favorite book this summer is Maria Semple's 
The book that stole my heart and soul this summer was 
(Amy's too shy to mention this but the paperback version of her latest book 
by Patti Smith. Loved. - Christina Wayne
which is stunning. Now reading, 
, a real eye opener. And finished 
, on which I am ambivalent. - Linda Deutsch
, a first novel by G. Willow Willows. Really interesting mix of modern Cairo and mystical jinns. I couldn't put it down. - Allison Thomas
by Marilynne Robinson. I wept at the end just for extraordinary ordinariness of it all. - Pam Felcher
- short stories by Peter Stamm - an internationally-acclaimed Swiss author - stories of people who are lonely and unhappy in their everyday lives (characters with whom we can identify). - Christina Zawadiwsky
and both other Gillian Flynn books - 
and 
. - Kate Guinzburg
by Coburn Hawk. And yes, Maria Semple's Where'd You Go Bernadette is next on my list. - Roni Keller