2011: A Helluva Year
Perhaps it is because I’m a January baby, but as I wrote in 2010, along with Halloween, New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday. Everyone is determined to have fun on New Year’s Eve, and I love that commonality of spirit. New Year’s Eve is humanity’s common party, and what kind of lifestyle writer would I be if I didn’t love a party? New Year’s has it all: food and drink, noise, fun, and most importantly, camaraderie. We are bound and determined to be sentimental and silly on New Year’s Eve, and how dear the quality of the human spirit that brings us in concert to that agreement. New Year’s Eve is the night of indulgences from nightclub grandeur to homestead stillness, but whether you’re a reveler downing champagne or a hospital worker raising a much needed cup of coffee, the music that plays at the stroke of midnight is an affirmation, and a shared one at that. Another year has passed, and another year is starting. And that is the joy as well as the weight of January. January is the month of beginnings but it is also the month of review. Whatever year just passed, it was the setting for highs and lows. Whatever the experiences, each warrants appraisal for reasons that range from learning to appreciation to closure. Collectively, they add up to something. They were a year in your life and in the lives you touch and are touched by.
I’m just gonna say (well, write) it: in our urban home, 2011 was a helluva year. Within a couple of weeks, I will celebrate a birthday that, in turn, will place me within shouting distance of a milestone one. That does give one pause, but I have to say that, as 2011 replays in the film of my life, that it really does seem as if a year has passed.
In a year of milestones, the most important one for me was marking one year out from being diagnosed with and cured of cancer. As I wrote last summer, cancer slams us with the fact of our own mortality, a theme that is an appropriate setting for the month of birthday and new year. I didn’t share it at the time (though I suspect that those close to me perceived it), but attending this anniversary was a period of sadness that, while never serious enough to be dangerous, necessitated my reconnecting with the brotherhood of survivors of this cancer. I’m normally resistant to the platitude of the curse that is a blessing, but I do believe that sometimes we can manage misfortune so that its effects are minimized or even neutralized, and sometimes we can even transform those effects for the better. That is the lesson I learned from the cancer survivors community, and the gift I try to repay in my own acts of daily living. I volunteer funds and effort to surivivor’s communities – two I especially support are Livestrong and Balls to Cancer. I will carry this commitment into 2012, perhaps even to participating in a group run to mark two years out.
Another milestone was the New York State legislature legalizing same sex marriage. I can still remember the live broadcast of the vote on the Friday evening of Pride Weekend. There were moments so tense that we forgot to breathe. When the legislation passed, Greenwich Village erupted into an impromptu celebration as dense and inarguable as the riots that inaugurated Pride in 1969 (speaking of birthdays, John was born during the Stonewall riots). It made for a helluva Pride weekend. Drag queens in bridesmaid dresses got into street fights with drag queens in bridal gowns during the march, and not a seat was available at any bar or restaurant below 14th Street. It was especially poignant for John and me both because, after over twenty years together and counting, we were able to finally ask each other to get married and answer yes, and because my dearest friend from childhood was visiting for Pride Week. In 2012, we expect to have our ceremony and reception. It will also give me the chance to write about a topic that as a lifestyle writer I’ve stayed away from until it applied equally to me: weddings.
No matter where we live, when we’ve been there a while, every street, every corner, every cobblestone becomes dense with memory. Sometimes we forget to look at our own environment. When we’re entertaining visitors, we see our home town through their eyes, as if seeing it anew. We spent many golden afternoons during New York City Pride Week sightseeing. An afternoon begun among the carny clamor of Chinatown concluded among the architectural accomplishments of the High Line. Over tapas and wine at a Basque restaurant in the East Village, I pointed out the wall paintings I had helped make as part of a herd of art students whom the owners wisely hired to work for food and drink ages ago. The week’s activities and news merged into celebration as our family of friends gathered at our favorite New York City steakhouse to recognize John’s and my engagement.
In many ways, summer was the apex of activity in our urban home. John and I indulged in an unfortunately rare treat for us: a Broadway show. This revival of Larry Kramer’s landmark play The Normal Heart was one of the best theatrical events I’ve ever experienced, and was both timely and touching as we saw it so soon after our own good news. That month we also undertook a massive redecoration project in our urban home. It meant sleeping on the living room floor for a couple of weeks but that was a small price to pay for a project in which not one but two rooms turned out well. It also helped me as a designer, as live-tweeting the project led to an outside decorating project; and as a writer, as the project supplied me with material for one of Urban Home Blog’s most popular columns of the year.
Summer reached another landmark as family from all over the country traveled to Pennsylvania to surprise my brother for his milestone birthday. I have to admit that, as a rule, I don’t exactly trust surprise parties, but my sister in law, working alongside her accomplished mother, executed a perfect event. It was held on a soft Saturday evening in their gorgeous home in the Pennsylvania hills. Inquisitive neighbors from foxes to frogs surveyed the proceedings from a distance while fireflies investigated up close. The food was amazing – especially award-winning hot wings from the local watering hole and the region’s signature sausage and peppers in red sauce. Flawless execution led to relaxed togetherness and these made this party one that was, as they say in Dutch country, “fertha.” And that togetherness came full circle this winter as we were able to spend a special December day together, sharing some of the pleasures of a New York City Christmas.
That arrived after an autumn that was equally as busy as summer had been. October was a high point at Urban Home Blog as readership spiked. How grateful I am to all of Urban Home’s readers (Urban Homies?). As readers, you have let me know that it was a good year for content at Urban Home. I got a lot of positive feedback by email and through other social media. In case you’re interested, here is 2011 by the numbers. The most popular column by clicks were March’s recipe for Iceberg Lettuce Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing and November's column about greens;, by mentions it was May’s write-up of wines to serve with steak, and by forwards it was September’s decorating column on switching the bedroom and the home office. By feedback, it was last July’s column on cancer, which I am especially touched by. I thank each and every one of you for each and every read.
In October I published two of my favorite columns of the year: an Urban Bar column about the Corpse Reviver, and a homekeeping column about mold and mildew. I was proud of both my cleverness for placing those subjects during the month of death and decay, and, I’ll admit, proud of the writing itself. The mold and mildew column required significant research, and I don’t mind admitting that for the entire period I was working on that column, I imagined myself a mycologist – also appropriate to October, as that would be a helluva Halloween costume!
Autumn also heralded our usual Thanksgiving celebration, to which we welcomed new friends as well as established. It was a lovely day touched with the gentle sadness which is as much a part of autumn as the quietude of falling leaves, for in early November I gathered with friends and colleagues from grad school as we celebrated the passage of our mentor Dr. Nancy Foell Swortzell. Along with her other accomplishments, Nancy was known as a standout hostess. I always remember Nancy’s leadership in this area of living that is also an area of scholarship as I write Urban Home. Nancy’s memorial was lovely, respectful and bit ribald, three qualities which reflect the spirit of this remarkable lady and that comprised the kind of party that she would have approved of wholeheartedly and vocally. Remembering Nancy was the order of the morning, but reconnecting with those days and, most importantly, the people from them was the result. I am confident that Nancy would be as proud of that aspect of her considerable legacy as any of the more formal laurels she earned.
Nancy and her husband Lowell believed strongly in the importance of travel to a well-rounded life. Unfortunately, for the past twenty years as John and I have worked hard and sometimes struggled, it has followed that travel has been sacrificed. Readers will remember that in spring of 2010, we took our first vacation in (embarrassed whisper) over fifteen years. In 2011, we honored our commitment to ourselves and took a second trip -- back to Los Angeles! This time, we intended to see a deeper level of City of Angels than on our first trip. As training for the realities of the travels that we had promised ourselves, we made base camp at a hotel. I wrote and published two columns in that hotel, and from it, we deployed in widening arcs throughout la-la land.
We went to Santa Monica on a crystalline winter day when the wind rolling off of the mighty Pacific was as chill as any gust from a noreaster. We clutched paper containers of coffee and marveled at surfers to whom the waves were more enticing than the frost in the air was discouraging. In Hollywood, we howled over an AOR cover band playing a set of seventies treacle at a retro bar, and treated ourselves to an evening of tinseltown glamour for Valentine’s Day. On two separate occasions we sat next to tv actors at dinner, but connecting with old friends – themselves transplants from the east – was much nicer. We spent a sleepy midweek afternoon with a dear friend on the Sunset Strip. We got lost in the stacks at Book Soup before watching the afternoon sun dissolve over wine glasses at the Sunset Trocadero.
As the week progressed, it became evident that we were bonding with this unique, seductive city. Yes, I buried the lead: we have become bicoastal. As family, friends and followers have surmised, the biggest event of the year was the official decision to set up a second urban home in Los Angeles. In a couple of weeks, we will return to Los Angeles to do just that.
I am excited and fretful in equal measure by this decision. As someone to whom New York City is endemic as a person, a writer and a homekeeper, I confess I am eager to learn about a new kind of urbanity by living it. I never intended to be bicoastal, but people often maintain double or even multiple households, and New York/Los Angeles is a popular dual citizenship. Every plane ride affirms it: whether the trip is westbound or east-, at least half of the passengers are traveling from one home to another just as matter-of-factly as Los Angeles residents travel to homes in wine country or New York City residents travel to them in the Hamptons. Some of us just do it between the two cities.
That is the essence of living that is the foundation of Urban Home Blog: the sacred details of daily living as those are experienced seasonally by locale. The same impulse that draws us indoors during the harsh beauty of a northeast winter sends us outside during a sunny southwestern one. How exciting to learn the new ways of a new place, from the realities of how driving alters the perceptions of someone who’s used to walking to the difference between a breakfast plate at a New England diner versus a L.A. coffee shop. I often state that if I write it, I live it. And in 2012, that is my new year’s resolution: to try this new way of urban living in our country’s two biggest metropolises, and to share those experiences as both practice and theory through the Urban Home Blog.
I’m just gonna say (well, write) it: in our urban home, 2011 was a helluva year. Within a couple of weeks, I will celebrate a birthday that, in turn, will place me within shouting distance of a milestone one. That does give one pause, but I have to say that, as 2011 replays in the film of my life, that it really does seem as if a year has passed.
In a year of milestones, the most important one for me was marking one year out from being diagnosed with and cured of cancer. As I wrote last summer, cancer slams us with the fact of our own mortality, a theme that is an appropriate setting for the month of birthday and new year. I didn’t share it at the time (though I suspect that those close to me perceived it), but attending this anniversary was a period of sadness that, while never serious enough to be dangerous, necessitated my reconnecting with the brotherhood of survivors of this cancer. I’m normally resistant to the platitude of the curse that is a blessing, but I do believe that sometimes we can manage misfortune so that its effects are minimized or even neutralized, and sometimes we can even transform those effects for the better. That is the lesson I learned from the cancer survivors community, and the gift I try to repay in my own acts of daily living. I volunteer funds and effort to surivivor’s communities – two I especially support are Livestrong and Balls to Cancer. I will carry this commitment into 2012, perhaps even to participating in a group run to mark two years out.
Another milestone was the New York State legislature legalizing same sex marriage. I can still remember the live broadcast of the vote on the Friday evening of Pride Weekend. There were moments so tense that we forgot to breathe. When the legislation passed, Greenwich Village erupted into an impromptu celebration as dense and inarguable as the riots that inaugurated Pride in 1969 (speaking of birthdays, John was born during the Stonewall riots). It made for a helluva Pride weekend. Drag queens in bridesmaid dresses got into street fights with drag queens in bridal gowns during the march, and not a seat was available at any bar or restaurant below 14th Street. It was especially poignant for John and me both because, after over twenty years together and counting, we were able to finally ask each other to get married and answer yes, and because my dearest friend from childhood was visiting for Pride Week. In 2012, we expect to have our ceremony and reception. It will also give me the chance to write about a topic that as a lifestyle writer I’ve stayed away from until it applied equally to me: weddings.
No matter where we live, when we’ve been there a while, every street, every corner, every cobblestone becomes dense with memory. Sometimes we forget to look at our own environment. When we’re entertaining visitors, we see our home town through their eyes, as if seeing it anew. We spent many golden afternoons during New York City Pride Week sightseeing. An afternoon begun among the carny clamor of Chinatown concluded among the architectural accomplishments of the High Line. Over tapas and wine at a Basque restaurant in the East Village, I pointed out the wall paintings I had helped make as part of a herd of art students whom the owners wisely hired to work for food and drink ages ago. The week’s activities and news merged into celebration as our family of friends gathered at our favorite New York City steakhouse to recognize John’s and my engagement.
In many ways, summer was the apex of activity in our urban home. John and I indulged in an unfortunately rare treat for us: a Broadway show. This revival of Larry Kramer’s landmark play The Normal Heart was one of the best theatrical events I’ve ever experienced, and was both timely and touching as we saw it so soon after our own good news. That month we also undertook a massive redecoration project in our urban home. It meant sleeping on the living room floor for a couple of weeks but that was a small price to pay for a project in which not one but two rooms turned out well. It also helped me as a designer, as live-tweeting the project led to an outside decorating project; and as a writer, as the project supplied me with material for one of Urban Home Blog’s most popular columns of the year.
Summer reached another landmark as family from all over the country traveled to Pennsylvania to surprise my brother for his milestone birthday. I have to admit that, as a rule, I don’t exactly trust surprise parties, but my sister in law, working alongside her accomplished mother, executed a perfect event. It was held on a soft Saturday evening in their gorgeous home in the Pennsylvania hills. Inquisitive neighbors from foxes to frogs surveyed the proceedings from a distance while fireflies investigated up close. The food was amazing – especially award-winning hot wings from the local watering hole and the region’s signature sausage and peppers in red sauce. Flawless execution led to relaxed togetherness and these made this party one that was, as they say in Dutch country, “fertha.” And that togetherness came full circle this winter as we were able to spend a special December day together, sharing some of the pleasures of a New York City Christmas.
That arrived after an autumn that was equally as busy as summer had been. October was a high point at Urban Home Blog as readership spiked. How grateful I am to all of Urban Home’s readers (Urban Homies?). As readers, you have let me know that it was a good year for content at Urban Home. I got a lot of positive feedback by email and through other social media. In case you’re interested, here is 2011 by the numbers. The most popular column by clicks were March’s recipe for Iceberg Lettuce Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing and November's column about greens;, by mentions it was May’s write-up of wines to serve with steak, and by forwards it was September’s decorating column on switching the bedroom and the home office. By feedback, it was last July’s column on cancer, which I am especially touched by. I thank each and every one of you for each and every read.
In October I published two of my favorite columns of the year: an Urban Bar column about the Corpse Reviver, and a homekeeping column about mold and mildew. I was proud of both my cleverness for placing those subjects during the month of death and decay, and, I’ll admit, proud of the writing itself. The mold and mildew column required significant research, and I don’t mind admitting that for the entire period I was working on that column, I imagined myself a mycologist – also appropriate to October, as that would be a helluva Halloween costume!
Autumn also heralded our usual Thanksgiving celebration, to which we welcomed new friends as well as established. It was a lovely day touched with the gentle sadness which is as much a part of autumn as the quietude of falling leaves, for in early November I gathered with friends and colleagues from grad school as we celebrated the passage of our mentor Dr. Nancy Foell Swortzell. Along with her other accomplishments, Nancy was known as a standout hostess. I always remember Nancy’s leadership in this area of living that is also an area of scholarship as I write Urban Home. Nancy’s memorial was lovely, respectful and bit ribald, three qualities which reflect the spirit of this remarkable lady and that comprised the kind of party that she would have approved of wholeheartedly and vocally. Remembering Nancy was the order of the morning, but reconnecting with those days and, most importantly, the people from them was the result. I am confident that Nancy would be as proud of that aspect of her considerable legacy as any of the more formal laurels she earned.
Nancy and her husband Lowell believed strongly in the importance of travel to a well-rounded life. Unfortunately, for the past twenty years as John and I have worked hard and sometimes struggled, it has followed that travel has been sacrificed. Readers will remember that in spring of 2010, we took our first vacation in (embarrassed whisper) over fifteen years. In 2011, we honored our commitment to ourselves and took a second trip -- back to Los Angeles! This time, we intended to see a deeper level of City of Angels than on our first trip. As training for the realities of the travels that we had promised ourselves, we made base camp at a hotel. I wrote and published two columns in that hotel, and from it, we deployed in widening arcs throughout la-la land.
We went to Santa Monica on a crystalline winter day when the wind rolling off of the mighty Pacific was as chill as any gust from a noreaster. We clutched paper containers of coffee and marveled at surfers to whom the waves were more enticing than the frost in the air was discouraging. In Hollywood, we howled over an AOR cover band playing a set of seventies treacle at a retro bar, and treated ourselves to an evening of tinseltown glamour for Valentine’s Day. On two separate occasions we sat next to tv actors at dinner, but connecting with old friends – themselves transplants from the east – was much nicer. We spent a sleepy midweek afternoon with a dear friend on the Sunset Strip. We got lost in the stacks at Book Soup before watching the afternoon sun dissolve over wine glasses at the Sunset Trocadero.
As the week progressed, it became evident that we were bonding with this unique, seductive city. Yes, I buried the lead: we have become bicoastal. As family, friends and followers have surmised, the biggest event of the year was the official decision to set up a second urban home in Los Angeles. In a couple of weeks, we will return to Los Angeles to do just that.
I am excited and fretful in equal measure by this decision. As someone to whom New York City is endemic as a person, a writer and a homekeeper, I confess I am eager to learn about a new kind of urbanity by living it. I never intended to be bicoastal, but people often maintain double or even multiple households, and New York/Los Angeles is a popular dual citizenship. Every plane ride affirms it: whether the trip is westbound or east-, at least half of the passengers are traveling from one home to another just as matter-of-factly as Los Angeles residents travel to homes in wine country or New York City residents travel to them in the Hamptons. Some of us just do it between the two cities.
That is the essence of living that is the foundation of Urban Home Blog: the sacred details of daily living as those are experienced seasonally by locale. The same impulse that draws us indoors during the harsh beauty of a northeast winter sends us outside during a sunny southwestern one. How exciting to learn the new ways of a new place, from the realities of how driving alters the perceptions of someone who’s used to walking to the difference between a breakfast plate at a New England diner versus a L.A. coffee shop. I often state that if I write it, I live it. And in 2012, that is my new year’s resolution: to try this new way of urban living in our country’s two biggest metropolises, and to share those experiences as both practice and theory through the Urban Home Blog.
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