June 15, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Back to Chicago By Sadie Stein From a travel-poster advertising Chicago ca. 1910. Last night, I discovered a portal to another time and place—specifically, Hyde Park, Chicago, in June 2000. I hadn’t meant to, but when I opened a new tube of peppermint foot cream, there I was. The smell had transported me. Like all sense memory, smell is evocative for many people—for some of us more so than music or even taste. The Stanislavski method often involves conjuring smell to infect the audience with theater’s noble ecstasy. But until last night, I had not known its true power. Read More
June 12, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Gracious Lie By Sadie Stein From the paperback cover of The Party. Readers of this space know that I’ve recently devoted an unprofitable amount of time to puzzling over the underlined passages of a secondhand copy of Sally Quinn’s guide to entertaining, The Party, notorious when it was first published in 1997. My quest to discern the logic in the underlining became, as Douglas Sirk would have it, a magnificent obsession. Was the reader mad? Did she have an ax to grind? Was she a reviewer? None of these theories really held up. But then one person came up with an approach far more innovative than my own. Like the perennially underestimated amateur sleuth who’s able to crack a case that’s stumped the authorities, this person took one look at the examples I had isolated and was able to see with a clarity that, in my obsession, had escaped me. “I was inspired to string all the underlined bits into a poem,” the reader wrote: Read More
June 11, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Party of One By Sadie Stein Not long ago, I picked up a fifty-cent copy of Sally Quinn’s The Party: A Guide to Adventurous Entertaining from a street vendor. I was interested enough by the beltway gossip and tales of DC hostesses and the faint whiff of notoriety that still emanates from its pages almost twenty years later. I learned the term Philadelphia Rat Fuck, thereafter referred to by the author as “a P.R.F.” And I do love an entertaining guide: say the words pink lightbulbs and I’m there. (I’ve been slavishly conjuring their flattering glow since I first read the tip in a 1980s copy of Sunset.) But ultimately, what intrigued me most about the book were the previous owner’s underlines. Any scholar will tell you marginalia are the true window of the soul—or brain, at any rate. (Even if it’s just a window into your own immaturity via passionate collegiate commentary on bell hooks.) Jottings, doodles, highlights: there’s a reason between the lines is a cliché. It’s revealing. Read More
June 10, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Playmobil Fun Club By Sadie Stein Photo: Merete Sanderhoff, from Vermeer and Dürer Raise a tiny plastic goblet, please, to Playmobil’s founder Horst Brandstaetter, who has died at eighty-one. Brandstaetter, who was apparently known as “Herr Playmobil,” joined the family company in 1952, but it wasn’t until the seventies—and the oil crisis—that he was moved to come up with the cost-effective and efficient three-inch plastic figurines we know today. The first three—a knight, a construction worker, and a Native American—made their appearance in 1974, and the rest is toy history. Read More
June 9, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Copious Free Time By Sadie Stein A postcard, ca. 1910. “Why are narcissists always talking about how busy they are?” my friend wondered as we left the party. At this party, a certain narcissist had been droning on about how much she had to do; how she really shouldn’t be there; that she would be leaving any moment. The implication had been, I suppose, that she was far busier than anyone else—or at least that her docket of tasks was more important. Or that she was more conscientious, maybe. I’m not sure. But it did seem to signify a failure to live in the moment, as it were. This is a type most of us have encountered at one point or another. Two stand out in my mind—a college professor and the manager of a restaurant where I worked one summer. Both liked to talk, constantly, about how frantically busy they were. But more than this, both of these people were fond of a certain phrase: in my copious free time. As in, “Yes, yet another thing for me to do in my copious free time,” or, “Thanks, Bob! We all know how much I need to fill my copious free time!” or, “I think we all know who’s going to end up doing that—with all my copious free time.” Read More
June 8, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Role Play By Sadie Stein A still from Holiday in the Protectorate. Readers of the New York Times may have noticed a recent story about a new Czech reality show. In the tradition of Victorian House and other total-immersion programs, this one sticks modern people in another time—specifically a 1939 “remote mountain farm” in what was then the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Hilarity does not ensue. As the article explains, There, they must not only survive the rigors of rustic life with dated appliances and outdoor plumbing, but navigate the moral and physical dangers of life under Nazi rule. German troops (played by actors) kick down their doors in the middle of the night. Local villagers betray them to the Gestapo. Food is scarce. Conditions are crude. Everything about this show sounds distasteful, certainly. Besides the obvious objections, the basic flaw in these time-travel shows—the assumption that you can switch off modern mores along with central AC—seems doubly true here. Reading about it, I was reminded of when my father and I had gone to an exhibit featuring artifacts from the Titanic. To enter, we’d had to show a “boarding pass,” and they’d made us pose for an obligatory picture together at the top of the stairs they’d re-created, just like Rose and Jack in the movie. Read More