Getting to know Nora Ephron + Lillian Hellman

I absolutely love Nora Ephron, her clarity of voice, and her "cashmere clad" wing spreading over me.

Right. If I were to have something named for me it would be cashmere. The Kathleen scarf, throw, socks?

I love the chapters "Addicted to LUV" I relate. I am just as addicted to Bejeweled Blitz as she was to Scrabble Blitz. It takes your mind off things, helps you see where you are not lined up, just one more game, just one more minute and focus!

Oh, have you tried Temple Run? That's crazy, the sound effects alone make it compelling to do another game and another. I switch back and forth when I have a little minute to focus, which turns into 5 or 10 then just one more, just one more game, something I can focus on, like Nora Ephron's wisdom, maybe follow her through a doorway into a more relaxed place, as if I were in the kitchen with her, sitting at the table, watching her cook while she talked to me.

Food is a very big part of life. Food is life. Isn't it amazing how much you can eat, how full you can get, and suddenly you aren't full anymore and begin to think of the next thing you will eat. I like how Nora says she goes into her kitchen a hundred times a day just to think about the next thing She will eat, and the next.

I love her chapters about the egg white omelette, teflon, chicken soup, Lillian Hellman, a real original and wild card. This is not in Nora's book, but I read somewhere one summer when Sinatra's yacht was anchored off Martha's Vineyard and a wild party was going on to which she was not invited, she went to a phone booth and called in a bomb threat and stopped the party cold. I imagine her standing on shore, cigarette in hand, fur coat around her shoulders, Blackgama of course, remember the advertisements she was featured in?, infuriated with the music and laughter floating back her way, and she chose to shut it down. True? Who knows.

I love Nora's final chapters, What I Won't Miss,  - EMAILS!
What I Will Miss  - her husband, children, friends, twinkle lights, pie.

Thank you Nora Ephron for clear soothing words. 

Nora Ephron keeps right on giving. She speaks to me.

I have 179 emails in my inbox, but I ignore them and go back to reading Nora Ephron. With all this heat it's the only thing I can focus on. Los Angeles has been about 95 degrees for weeks in a row.

I am reading the chapter called "My Life as a Meat Loaf," when Graydon Carter opened a restaurant in New York and put Nora's Meat Loaf on the menu. It had it's ups and downs, patrons tried to adjust it and everybody put their hand in until it was no good and flopped on the plate. Eventually they took it off the menu, but in the mean time, it wasn't exactly what Nora thought of when she used to play a game called "if you could have something named after you, what would it be?"

That got me to thinking, wow, if if I could have something named after me, what would it be?

I would name the ___________________ Kathleen.  Child? Ship? Chair? Car? Dog? Peony? Souffle? KKKKKKKathleen?

Reading Nora Ephron posts "Everything is Copy"

Yes, I'm reading the posts, watching the movies, picking up cookbooks, and I've even put a google alert on to Nora so I can read what everybody else is saying about her. From Martha Stewart, to FASHIONISTA BLOG for standout style in Nora's movies, I have to read it all. She is gone and I want more of her charm and wit and humor.

I can't quite let her go. I miss her and I never knew her. I love her wisdom, and her common sense. I love that she was a foodie, but insisted, as John Horn's piece in the LA Times points out, that homemade pastry dough is a waste of time: "Don't ever make piecrust, just buy it."

Meghan Daum's column in the LA Times, one of the first, tells us "Nora was not only an influence but a sort of literary mother hen with a cashmere-clad wing outstretched."

The New York Film Society paid tribute with free screenings of YOU'VE GOT MAIL at Lincoln Center.

Tom Hanks: "journalists-artist who knew what was important to know, how things really worked, what was worthwhile, who was fascinating and why. At a dinner table and on a film set she lifted us all with wisdom and wit mixed with love for us and love for life. Rita and I are so very sad to lose our friend who brought so much joy to all who were lucky enough to know her."

Meg Ryan: "Nora was an era. We pictured outselves inside her dreams and they became ours. All wisdom, wit and sparkle lights, what a treat she was, what a blessing. I marvel again and again, what a life...To have created simple happiness in people, to have added to the sum of delight in the world."

Mike Nichols: "What kind of a place is this? I feel like someone reached in and grabbed my compass from around my neck and threw it from a moving train. How will I navigate? I think a lot of friends and readers will feel like that. Nora was so funny and interesting that we didn't notice that she was necessary. She is absolutely irreplaceable."

The 1996 Wellesley commencement address was riveting, and inspirational. "Above all, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim." When she graduated in 1962 they threw six young women out for lesbianism. There were curfews. If there were guys in the room, one had to leave the door open. And she reminded these young women how much antagonism there is toward women, still. She told them to rejoice in the complications and the mess, and for a woman over 50, reading that, I'm telling myself to rejoice, even when "I feel bad about my neck."

Her movies are stellar. I've watched HEARTBURN, twice, love those 80's, when you met someone and bam - went right to bed with them, so cavalier, so luscious, so much fun. What happened in that picture between the lovely scene with the new baby in the hospital and the jump to him, Jack Nicholson exercising with a demonic-angry-rageful look on his face? Why so angry? Pissed she was paying too much attention to the newborn? I guess we can't explain everything. Stuff happens, dreams broken. The Carly Simon soundtrack filled in nicely: "out came the sun and dried up all the rain and the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again."




Rejoice in Nora:

5 things that describe me:
writer
fun lover
art hound
foodie
good friend

Now tell me,
My Favorite Nora Ephron movie is ____________________.


To be continued.

Girls. The rise of LENA DUNHAM

 OK, I love Lena Dunham. I'm a little late to GIRLS, but have watched all the episodes now, AND TINY FURNITURE, her first feature film, and I'm intrigued, not because Hannah and her friends are off having weird/fun sex (which I think of with fondness) but because the show, makes me remember that I forget that life is simply random - nothing is safe - nothing is secure - nothing lasts forever - and everyone is just trying to figure life out while weird stuff continues to happen; HELLO! taking pills, screwing in cast off construction pipes, smoking dope, getting fired from their jobs, power drinking, and being financially severed by their parents,
photo by Christian Oth                        

our Hannah, now forced to "make it" on her own, which I never was because I was so thrilled to get away from them (parents) that I took the bus out of Main Street, USA, got to California, and started to make my fortune one, two, three.

What I wonder now is why I never tried to make it in Hollywood, I mean I've been here 35 years - but I got involved in commerce instead, and it was very seductive...big FAT commission checks.

I'm not 25, not even 35, but interchange sex, drugs & rock & roll with retirement, menopause and healthcare and there is the next GIRLS......Girls like us,
remembering what it was like to be 25, wearing platform heels, fringed ponchos and low riding leather pants from the front row of a Rolling Stones concert.  I saw stars!

This show is intriguing. Miss Dunham dares to be herself; tattooed, overweight, sometimes without makeup, centered, present, and wickedly talented.

She's my kind of daughter, if I had one.

Thank you writer, director, star,  Miss Lena Dunham.

Writers - Listen to Radiolab - HELP!

Me, Myself & Muse
http://www.radiolab.org/2011/mar/08/

Radiolab - Help!

www.radiolab.org

What do you do when your own worst enemy is...you? This hour, Radiolab looks for ways to gain the upper hand over those forces inside us--from unhealthy urges, to creative insights--that seem to have a mind of their own.

Writing: "I had a farm in Africa...." one of the most glorious first lines in literature.

Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, is my guide & constant inspiration.

From the 1956 Paris Review, after she was asked: most of your tales are laid in the last century, aren't they? You never write about modern times.

"I do, if you consider that the time of our grandparents, that just-out-of-reach time, is so much a part of us. We absorb so much without being aware. Also, I write about characters, and they take over. They make the design, I simply permit them their liberty. Now, in modern life and in modern fiction there is a kind of atmosphere and above all an interior movement inside the characters - which is something else again. I feel that in life and in art people have drawn a little apart in this century. Solitude is now the universal theme. But I write about characters within a design, how they act upon one another. Relation with others is important to me, you see, friendship is precious to me, and I have been blessed with heroic friendships. But time in my tales is flexible. I may begin in the eighteenth century and come right up to World War I. Those times have been sorted out, they are clearly visible. Besides, so many novels that we think are contemporary in subject with their date of publication - think of Dickens or Faulkner or Tolstoy or Turgenev, are really set in an earlier period, a generation or so back. The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquility...I was a painter before I was a writer....and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes."

photo by Peter Beard.