Stories

The weeks of soaking rain we had recently in LA were wonderful for people’s gardens, with the depressing drawback of the continued, surreal-seeming announcements, on radio and in the newspapers, that the rain was having no effect whatsoever on the drought.

In those circumstances, there was nothing more cheering to gaze upon indoors than parrot tulips. Even after they’ve been cut and put in an arrangement, these flowers continue to stretch and grow and open, with their vivid, striated colorations continuing to develop and intensify. Here, “Salmon Parrot,” “Orange Favorite” and “Libretto” tulips share space with “Climbing Joseph’s Coat”, a rose that has more than enough wattage to stand up to them, along with another rose, “Climbing Herbert Hoover,” which, although not widely grown (it dates from 1937), has the appearance and the scent of a peach, and a single specimen of the rose “Oklahoma”, which picks up the very darkest tones in all the other flowers.

We went for a cocktail-hour potluck last week at Paule and Flavia’s place. They’re both architects and they live in a house of their own design in the medieval village of Poreta.

We had been to visit them once before and I pretty much sort of knew where it was. It was up this steep little street, I remembered. Well, it’s not a street; it’s more like steps that you walk up but cars use it, too. It’s a medieval thing. I have driven up a number of stairways in my time, in quaint European villages, but never intentionally.

So, we parked at the bottom and trudged up the steps in the direction of the twelfth century castle that crowns the hill. I figured I’d recognize Paule and Flavia’s place when I saw it. By the time we got to the top of the hill, I thought I had seen three possible candidates but no clear winner.

We walked back down the steps, which was a lot easier than going up but Jill was tiring of carrying the bowl of hummus and the plate of raw vegetables that we were adding to the lucky pot. I carried the wine, which is a husbandly duty.

What I Wore: A silk beige diagonally checkered shirt that my mother bought when she was 16 from the Beverly Hills General Store [if my mother and I were both 16 at the same time we would have been best friends] and a brown Armani tweed skirt that I have never worn because it is high-waisted and way too big for the only part of my body that is truly tiny, but luckily I was in New York where there are three tailors on every block, one of which was able to pin it for me so that it added two creases that looked as if they were meant to be, and brown Ralph Lauren heels that make me feel confident because the struggle to find the second shoe amongst the insane amount of boxes at the Union Square DSW to this day still makes me feel triumphant.

The Occasion: Opening Night of the second of a rotating cast of “Love, Loss and What I Wore,” an off-Broadway play my two aunts, Nora and Delia Ephron, wrote together. Since the play is all about clothes, I knew I had to dress the part, despite getting off an airplane two hours before the curtain. I packed my best Mad Men inspired outfit freshly pressed so the suitcase could do minimal harm.

A few weeks ago a friend of a friend invited me to a pig roast.  Having never attended one, I looked forward to what seemed like the perfect California outing: meeting new people and trying new food, all at a BBQ in February.  Eating a pig that had been selected from a local, organic farm also sounded rather virtuous as far as meat-eating goes, and maybe in my heart of hearts I was thinking of the party as a kind of Omnivore’s Dilemma, Live.  Besides, I like to say that I’ll try anything once, especially when it comes to food and I think that I might get an article out of it.  I even started to string together a few premature sentences about The Pig Roast on the way over, dreamily trying out lines like “fork-tender localness”.  (Michael Pollan I obviously ain’t.)  Mental notebook at the ready, I pulled up to a trendy house in Los Feliz and quickly found myself among a crowd of strangers, each of us staring down at a charred animal the size of an eight-year old.  The pig, laid out on its grill of cross hatched re-bar, turned a party of stoned hipsters into Lord of the Flies characters with edgier haircuts, everyone vaguely competitive and wondering what to do now.