January 14, 2014 On Food, Our Daily Correspondent Sin-Eaters By Sadie Stein Photo: woodenmask, via Flickr “Please don’t confront me with my failures,” sang Nico. “I have not forgotten them.” I can sympathize. Said failures are particularly difficult to forget when they sit glowering at you from your refrigerator. I have often pitied noncooks who will never know the gratification of perfecting a recipe or the sense of achievement that comes from transforming disparate ingredients into something nourishing and pleasurable. But by the same token, these people will never know the heartbreak of a recipe gone wrong. In her classic essay collection More Home Cooking, Laurie Colwin writes of attempting to make a custard in an inadequately equipped rental-house kitchen. When the mixture curdled, “I remember flinging the pot into the sink and flouncing out of the house in tears, which I wept bitterly in a pine wood surrounded by clavaria and Indian pipes.” My mother recalls a similar incident from her childhood in Palo Alto. Her own mother, never the most confident of cooks, somehow screwed up a lemon-meringue pie (there are many components to screw up) and, most uncharacteristically, hurled the misshapen pie out the window in a fit of tearful frustration. To this day, says my mother, the memory of rushing out into the yard and gobbling down the offending pastry off the grass with her father and brother remains one of the most thrilling of her early life. To the noncook, these reactions probably seem excessive. But anyone who has gone through the process of inspiration, planning, shopping, and cooking understands the sense of total emptiness that accompanies such disappointments. After all, if cooking and feeding are the ultimate in social bonding and expressions of love—and we’re constantly being told such things—then these failures strike at something deep. Read More
January 13, 2014 First Person, Our Daily Correspondent Only Connect By Sadie Stein Photo: David, Bergin, Emmett, and Elliot, via Flickr Many years ago, when Missed Connections, the creepy/romantic online personal ads, still felt like a big deal, one friend of mine claimed he had received not one, not two, but three such Craigslist missives from enamored young ladies. The guy in question was attractive enough, but even by the notoriously unequal standards of New York City mating culture, this did seem excessive. What’s more, as I pointed out, he was obviously poring over “New York City/W4M” every day in hopes of said ego boosts. “Not at all,” he said. “Every time, I’d had a hunch.” He went on a date with one of them—a girl with whom he’d made intense eye contact on the F train following a Cyclones game—and it didn’t really go anywhere. But that’s okay because now he’s happily married to a lovely woman, and they have two adorable children. Read More
January 10, 2014 On Food, Our Daily Correspondent Big Trouble in Little Poland By Sadie Stein Conspiracy lurks in every bite. Photo: Edsel L., via Flickr. It is pierogi weather. Here in New York, that means going to Greenpoint, or one of the Polish or Ukrainian coffee shops in the East Village, or maybe one of the two warring dairy luncheonettes nearby. Fried or boiled is a matter of heritage and personal inclination; ditto sour cream and fried onions. I will not tell another person how to live his or her life. This is America. But here is what I will tell you: I was walking down First Avenue, hell-bent on pierogis, when my way was blocked by a very short lady in a very voluminous house dress and a fur coat. Her manner was urgent, her gaze intense. “There is something you need to know,” she said, with the air of a fellow undercover operative making contact. We moved toward the curb so as not to block foot traffic, and she delivered her message. She had, she told me, been eating stuffed cabbage at the Little Poland restaurant “for almost thirty years.” And yet, on this day, they had refused to serve her! “They said they didn’t have any,” she said, furious. “I know they were lying. I saw people eating it.” And that is not all. Following this outrage, she had made her way three blocks south, to Veselka, because sometimes you need stuffed cabbage, and no one will argue with that. “But,” she continued ominously, “do you know what?” I did not. She leaned in close and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “The exact same thing happened!” I agreed that this was terrible, and would have been on my way, but she had yet to impart the most important piece of information. “You know who they were serving?” she demanded. There was a moment of charged silence. “Who?” I finally asked. “Attractive gay men!” She looked at me with an air of knowing triumph. “I wanted to tell you especially,” she explained, “so the same thing didn’t happen to you.” And then, “Thank you for your time.” I think we can agree that the gratitude was all mine. I did not attempt to order stuffed cabbage, because, really, life is hard enough.
January 9, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Beautiful Hide By Sadie Stein Jane Powell and Howard Keel in a poster for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Not that long ago, I was walking down a Brooklyn street and encountered an elderly woman surrounded by grocery bags. I offered to help carry them into her apartment, and I was sort of disappointed when she said yes and I saw what a long staircase it was and how heavy the bags were. After several trips we’d gotten them all in and she thanked me. “I was worried I was going to miss the beginning of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on TV,” she explained. “It’s my favorite movie.” “You know,” I said, “it’s out on DVD now. I’d be glad to loan it to you.” “Oh, I have the DVD,” she said blithely. The film inspires such irrational devotion. Whenever I am down, I go to YouTube and watch the barn-dance scene, which is famous not just because of the number of accomplished dancers in the cast but also because of the sheer, exhausting athleticism of Michael Kidd’s choreography. As a child, I decided that my wedding party would replicate the entire number—I was going to be Milly and do the pas de deux in the middle—but then you grow up and realize that unless you are a dictator on an international scale, this kind of thing is impossible. Nevertheless, I defy anyone to watch it and not get just a little bit cheered up. Read More
January 8, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Charmed, I’m Sure By Sadie Stein Contestants for Miss New York City at the Grace Downs Airline Hostess School in New York, 1960. Library of Congress. While visiting my parents over the holidays, I spent a few hours looking over my dad’s extensive magazine archive. He happened to have a copy of the first-ever 1963 New York magazine, Clay Felker’s then Sunday-magazine supplement to the New York Herald Tribune. The articles, by Tom Wolfe, Barbara Goldsmith, and Jimmy Breslin, among others, were fascinating enough. But the thing that captured my imagination was the classifieds section—and one classified in particular. Nestled among the ads for military schools, summer camps, and tutors was the following: I was torn between natural horror—was this some kind of coded reprogramming for “tom-boys”?—and envy for the awkward girls who’d spent three months on said manor and returned to school in September not merely poised, slim, and well groomed, but also proficient equestriennes. One can easily imagine wistful mothers trembling on the brink of the 1960s feeling exactly the same way. Read More
January 7, 2014 First Person, Our Daily Correspondent Makeovers By Sadie Stein “There is a new hotspot for heavy petting on the Upper West Side,” declared the West Side Rag, awesomely, some months ago. Widely considered the dirtiest, crummiest, saddest, and generally worst movie theater in Manhattan, the Loews Eighty-Fourth Street transformed itself in 2013 into an amorous teenager’s paradise, instituting luxurious, fully reclining seats and removable armrests. Reported the New York Post, The new loveseats are a huge hit with teens. Upper West Sider Richard Velazquez, forty, was seated in the same row as an enthusiastic teen couple at a World War Z showing last month. “Even before the previews started, they were going at it,” says Velazquez. “She was not entirely on top of him, but a quarter of the way there. When the movie ended, they were still at it. I was thinking, ‘Get a room already,’ but the theater was their room!” I don’t know if this gamble—or whatever it is—has paid off. Did anyone want an unsanitary multiplex with business-class seats? Who knows? All I know is that the Love Theater is my local, a mere five-minute walk from door to door. They don’t often show films I want to see—I guess the lineup is more geared toward the tastes of the heavy-petting demographic—but yesterday I crossed Broadway to see The Wolf of Wall Street, my thinking being that a comfy seat might come in handy in watching a three-hour film. Read More