Fetch » Julia Reed

Catching Summer

Julia Reed — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:17:31 +0000

No matter how old I get, every year at about this time, I still fall prey to “back-to-school” dread, accompanied by a big dose of regret over all the things I meant to do and didn’t. Labor Day’s less than two weeks away, the autumn grind is about to begin in earnest, and I still haven’t read half the “vacation reading” books in my stack, worked my way through a single Food & Wine “best grilling recipes” (from the June 2009 issue!), or used even half the basil and mint that have taken over my garden.

Like millions of other people, I did manage to plow through The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire in anticipation of the third volume, about which I fought with my husband over who would read first. (We both did after I couldn’t stand it any more and bought an unbelievable TWO hardcover copies.) They kept me up late for nights on end and got me through a ten-hour plane ride to Brazil, but I ultimately found lots more summer satisfaction in Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic.

As much as I completely adore Lisbeth Salander (sorry but Blomvquist left me cold, a fact that the divine Daniel Craig, who will play him in the English-language version of Dragon Tatoo, will undoubtedly remedy), Russo’s characters are, well, more like you and me. There’s not a brave bisexual/autistic chick in the bunch, and the only evil they battle is the way watered-down version that lurks within all our hearts. The characters are familiar and welcome messes, full of goodness and lots of flaws, and in the end they manage to find the kind of redemption that doesn’t require a body count or a courtroom victory. I bought it because every year I vow to get a summer house somewhere on Cape Cod or in Maine, two of the places where the novel is set, and every year, summer ends with that particular item unchecked.

The great thing about Labor Day weekend is that it affords us one more chance to catch summer before it gets away. I may not be on the Cape, but I’ll be in an equally lovely (if slightly hotter) spot, my mother’s house in Seaside, Florida. Located between Pensacola and Panama City (where the president recently powered through a 24-hour “vacation”) on the Gulf of Mexico, Seaside’s beaches are white and powdery, the local seafood is amazing, and I’m thrilled to report that there’s not a drop of oil on the horizon. I will gamely pack a canvas tote full of books, an ice chest full of my new favorite rose (a delicious Crosby Roamann “Introsé” from Wine for All), and Ziploc bags full of basil and mint for marinating. Then I guess I should pull out that 2009 Food &Wine and get to grilling. As the aforementioned books teach us, it is never too late for redemption.

In the Moment

Julia Reed — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:42:10 +0000

One of the pieces on Fetch this week is a remembrance of Herman Leonard, the great photographer who died last Saturday at 87. In it, Samantha Richter, who was both Leonard’s friend and dealer, had this to say: “He lived and loved every minute of every day, and like the music he loved so much, he was always in the moment.”
While we’re throwing the word “love” around so freely, I have to say, I love that quote. Leonard clearly lived in the moment—he decided to move to New Orleans almost immediately after he arrived for an opening of his show there—and his pictures capture amazing moments that the rest of us would otherwise never have gotten to share. David Houston, chief curator and co-director of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art who collaborated with Leonard on Jazz, Giants, and Journeys, The Photography of Herman Leonard, said, “You could teach the personal and musical evolution of jazz through his work.”
It’s true. He was able to capture his subjects without artifice because he had become of their world. They trusted him and were used to his constant presence, so that Billy Holliday, fresh from jail and frying up a steak for her dog, for example, didn’t mind at all that Leonard was in her kitchen snapping away.
So much of what Leonard captured so “up close and personal” gives us rare insights into the human condition and the nature of art and artists, a subject that has been on my mind a lot lately. Two weeks to the day before Leonard’s death, the Ogden (where I’m board chair) opened a remarkable show that included Marty Stuart’s photographs of country legends. Marty is a virtuoso musician whose talents were on full display at the concert the night before the museum show. But two years after he went on the road at 13 with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, he was also smart enough to pick up a Nikon and document the extraordinary array of musicians he was lucky enough to know and to play with through the years. The results are much like Leonard’s—there’s a haunting portrait of Dolly Parton, Jerry Lee Lewis flipping someone off, Johnny Cash cracking Ray Charles up. My husband said Stuart’s stunning portrait of Cash—the last before he died—reminded him of an American eagle. Every single moment of Cash’s own life was distilled in that iconic, but ultimately very human, face.
When he was in New Orleans for the show, Stuart told me that Eudora Welty was his favorite photographer, and I’m not surprised. As it happened, the Ogden hosted a Welty weekend of sorts the week after Stuart’s show opened. On a panel the same day that Herman Leonard died (though we didn’t yet know it), David Houston talked about Welty’s work as a photographer for twenty-some-odd years, first working for the WPA in her native South. The portraits and scenes of every day life in rural Mississippi are every bit as vivid and knowing as her prose. Houston said that with her typical modesty she always referred to her work as “snapshots,” but he also pointed out that the term is not a bad thing. In the introduction to a book of Welty’s photos, Reynolds Price writes that “the word does define both the frozen moment she always sought and the absence of any trace of pretension to studied art.” The same could be said of Leonard and Stuart.
All three were/are above all witnesses and they have all given us extraordinary gifts—windows into times and places that great fiction, and, indeed, great music, can also provide. But you don’t have to be an artist to learn a lot from their passion for the moment. Few of us reside there anymore, what with jammed voicemail and email queues and the persistent call to the next thing. We’d do better to remember what Samantha Richter reminds us about her dear friend Leonard, “who lived and loved every minute of every day.” That’s precisely why he could share so many so movingly with the rest of us.

Summer Weekends

Julia Reed — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:58:28 +0000

One of my very favorite cookbook authors is the much-loved Lee Bailey, who died in 2003 at 76. Bailey wrote 18 books on food and entertaining, had an extraordinarily chic tabletop boutique in Manhattan’s Henri Bendel (when it was still on 57th Street and very, very cool), and was a sort of lifestyle guru before there was such a thing. He was also the utter antithesis of Martha Stewart. “I really am too lazy to make radish roses, even if I liked them,” he wrote in the introduction to “City Food,” where he also explained why the coconut flan was photographed showing the crack where it had been put back together. “I wanted you to see that it is the overall presentation that is important and that a few imperfections are perfectly acceptable.” I read that those lines in my early 20s, when I first began entertaining in earnest—mostly for Newsweek colleagues, who were much older and far more accomplished than I —and I cannot tell you what a great relief they were.
I loved all Bailey’s books, but “Country Weekends,” his first, became my bible, even though there was very little “country” in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. where I lived. I think I was drawn to his undeniably Southern approach to things, even though his own country weekends were spent on Long Island. Bailey had grown up in rural Louisiana; he wrote that, like Colette, he realized he’d spent most of his life unconsciously trying to recreate the country atmosphere of his childhood. So it was that while most of the world was in the throes of “Nouvelle Cuisine,” Bailey offered up fresh ham with pan gravy and peach cobbler with whipped cream for supper, toted sour cream corn bread to a picnic at the beach, and served drop biscuits with homemade jam for Sunday breakfast. If he could do it, I figured I could too—I fed a famous columnist his steamed okra in tomato vinaigrette at a dinner party in his honor, and it was met with such success it became a staple.
Something of a revolutionary in an era when the overwrought studio photographs of Gourmet were the benchmark, Bailey advocated cut garden flowers loosely arranged in pitchers or simple glass cylinders, and long cocktail hours while he puttered in the kitchen and guests wandered in and out. Long before the nation became obsessed with all things regional and seasonal, he recommended simple dishes like fresh ripe figs for dessert and peaches dressed with lemon juice and cayenne pepper as a main-course accompaniment.
But the stellar recipes and totally relaxed approach to entertaining are not the only things that keep me coming back to the book. In these increasingly fraught times, “Country Weekends” provides a window into an entirely civilized world, one before email, Blackberries, or even cell phones. A world in which a shortened summer week in the city gave way gave way to undisturbed leisure in the country, where you supped on boat docks or set the table for languid lunches beneath backyard trees—two of the many scenes lovingly documented in the book.
These days Bailey’s weekend world seems remote and idyllic, and I have to admit I pride myself in providing my own houseguests with wireless internet and bedroom flatscreens. But I think it’s more important than ever to at least try to make like Bailey and supply a seemingly effortless stream of lovely meals and lively conversation. In the next several weeks on Fetch, we’ll be focusing houseguests, house gifts, and long summer weekends. We’ll also be creating some our own Bailey-like entertaining vignettes, and we hope they’ll inspire you to embrace some of the lost joys of summer before it’s too late.

The Songs of Summer

Julia Reed — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:06:54 +0000

The summer of my ninth year, my parents took my cousin Frances and me on a summer trip to Washington, D.C. and Williamsburg, Virginia. My father was on Nixon’s Bicentennial Commission and while he and my mother were at daytime events, Frances and I hung out in the gift shop at the brand new Madison Hotel, where the young and glamorous (to us, at least) manager let us wait on people and ring things up. That thrilled us far more than the walk to the top of the Washington Monument and almost as much as my mother peddling us around the tidal basin in a paddleboat at night.
On the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Williamsburg we drove my parents completely crazy by singing “Ruby,” the song by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, at the top of our lungs. It was a big hit that summer and, unfortunately for everyone around us, we knew every word. In retrospect, the lyrics, about a paralyzed Vietnam Vet and his catting-around wife (“Ruby, don’t take your love to town”) were almost comic, and certainly far out of the range of our limited life experience, but to this day, I cannot hear that song without reliving every detail of that trip and much of the rest of the summer.
That’s how it used to be. Every summer had a song, or maybe a couple of songs (the other song of 1969’s summer was “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat, and Tears). Broadcast on AM radio (Frances and I learned “Ruby” by careful listening to Nashville’s WMAK), they became touchstones, reminding you of who you loved, what you drove and what you wore, what was going on in your own narrow world and beyond.
The first summer I had a driver’s license, for example, Bonnie Raitt’s “Been Too Long at the Fair,” perfectly defined my teenage longing/despair and weird nostalgia for experiences I hadn’t even had yet. It was on a bulky 8-track tape, the player for which had been installed in my ’67 blue Mustang convertible. I must have listened to that song hundreds of times over hundreds of miles while riding around with my best friend, smoking Marlboro reds and drinking Miller ponies. Later in the season, I made the switch to Jesse Colin Young’s “Miss Hesitation,” track from the brilliant “Songs for Juli” and the nickname teasingly bestowed upon me by my very inappropriate first true love.
Fast forward 14 years to the summer I was supposed to have gotten married in June. Mary Chapin Carpenter’s just-released “Quittin’ Time” was my happy anthem that year, followed the next summer, when I’d fallen in love again—hard—by “Let’s Give Something to Talk About,” which we did. That was from the always reliable Bonnie again, who had by this time graduated from 8-track to cassette, and when I hear it all I see is me mooning around the French Quarter in ballet flats and Michael Kors white linen.
These days there are no real songs of summer. Our listening habits, even in our cars, are no longer defined by a handful of radio DJs or what’s in our tape decks. With a literal touch of an iPod, you can hear the songs of every summer; likewise on XM radio, particularly on The Blend, where I find myself pathetically humming along to “Horse with No Name” or Pure Prairie League’s excellent “Amy.” Now, I love both my XM and my iPod, but I miss those emblematic tunes—the ones that play over and over for three months and then disappear to make room for the next wave of new releases, so that when you hear them again much later they are literal blasts from the past, summoning smiles or tears or both and taking you immediately back to a very specific place.
Still, there are tons of new artists out there, and amid the clutter I’ll find one or two to get me through July and August. In the meantime, I’m working on my own play list of touchstones of summer’s past. It will contain most of the aforementioned tunes, along with “Morning Girl,” written by my old friend, the recently and sadly departed Tupper Saussy, who used to play it for Frances and me on my aunt’s piano. That too was in the prolific summer of ’60, but there will be slightly more recent hits as well, including the newly relevant “Mercy Me” by Marvin Gaye, and, of course, Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” which should be on everyone’s summer play list mainly because it’s so much fun to drive to—preferably with a cold beer in hand.

Julia Reed — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:36:40 +0000

You do not have to be a divorced bride to regret a walk down the aisle. You can also be a hideously dressed and extremely miserable bridesmaid. Most of us have made the dread trek, forced into shapes and colors we would never, ever choose to wear on our own, in “silk” or “satin” fabrics possessing the unmistakable chemical sheen of polyester. They are dresses too ugly to give away, dresses that were the reason the line “next time you start a fire, use that dress” was invented. But it wouldn’t work—if you tried to burn them, they’d melt instead.

I have worn strapless pale yellow with a sheer overlay and a crinoline tea length skirt that was without a doubt the most unflattering garment that has ever been on my body. I discovered that turquoise was definitely not my color when I wore a turquoise Nyesta gown with a plunging neckline and bell sleeves.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I have had a handful of happy walks. One friend had a favorite Calvin Klein above-the-knee cocktail dress copied for her bridesmaids. Hers was black velvet with tight three-quarter sleeves and a wide portrait neckline; for us she had it made in oyster silk taffeta with covered buttons, rather than a zipper, up the back. Another married in December and I carried a bouquet of creamy white roses and rosemary and wore a long dark green silk velvet column with long sleeves, a jewel neckline and a slit off to one side. Neither marriage lasted, but I still have the dresses.

My mother’s bridesmaids’ dresses were beautiful. Copied from a design by Elsa Schiaparelli, they were in a flattering deep dusty rose silk with a cap-sleeved bodice of diagonal pleats and a straight long skirt to the floor. Like my mother, the bridesmaids all wore white kid elbow-length gloves and looked gorgeous on the arms of the groomsmen in white tie. They carried enormous bouquets of pink roses in a shade identical to the dresses. As a child, I studied the black-and-white photograph album of my mother’s wedding as though it were a textbook: my mother’s bridesmaids lining the staircase of the Belle Meade Country Club for their formal portrait; my mother at the top of the same staircase throwing them her bouquet.

I knew I’d have as many bridesmaids (seven) and that they’d have dresses at least as pretty as theirs. And for a long moment, I almost did. By the time I called off my own enormous, white tie wedding, a bolt of pale lettuce green silk had already been cut into seven patterns; I had planned to wear a white dress with hand-beaded lilies of the valley.

Instead, more than a decade later, I was the one in lettuce green. (It was by Carolinia Herrera, in Scalamandre silk). As for bridesmaids, I had a new rule: if you are very much past thirty, they need to be under 12 years old or five foot two, whichever comes first. Years ago, in the eighties in New York, I had seen a photograph in a well-known socialite’s apartment. It was of her second wedding and she was surrounded by bridesmaids in their forties and fifties wearing low-cut ruffled silk taffeta. They looked even more ridiculous than I had in the pale yellow and the turquoise and I decided when the time came that I would spare the women I loved the most the indignity of a procession that would look like the Mrs. America pageant.

Instead, I had my two nieces, my Goddaughter, and the daughter of my first cousin. The fabulous Carolina made them extraordinary dresses in woven green Clarence House silk with persimmon sashes and organza fichu collars. My friend the great and hilarious hairdresser John Barrett did their hair and they were completely adorable and had their picture in Vogue. That was seven years ago and my only regret is that I didn’t treat them to a proper bridesmaids’ lunch. To make it up to them, I think I’ll wait until my tenth anniversary. They’ll be drinking age, or close enough, and we can have lots of champagne.

Party Girl

Julia Reed — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:33:05 +0000

My New Orleans neighborhood abuts the Irish Channel, which means my streets are still littered with green beads and wilted cabbages from the St. Patrick’s Day parade last weekend, and with several hundred “to-go” cups from the block parties on Wednesday. Like most occasions that demand revelry, St. Patrick’s Day is a big deal here. It is not a big deal in Greenville, Mississippi, where I grew up, but still we had a party. I’m willing to bet I was the only child in town who did.

That was (still is) entirely typical of my mother. She made cucumber sandwiches and petit fours with green icing and tied construction paper shamrocks to the chandelier with satin ribbons. My friends and I sat around the dining room table as though we were born to celebrate the patron saint of Ireland, even though I am almost entirely English with some Scottish thrown in. But ancient familial roots were not the point—my mother is simply a born party-giver.

I had Valentine’s Day tea parties with construction paper hearts replacing the shamrocks, an especially memorable Easter dinner party featuring votive candles my mother and her friend Bossy made by dripping layers of different colored wax into blown out eggshells (I was six!), and a fourth birthday featuring two kinds of ponies (real ones and the painted ones on the merry-go-round that was the gift of my extremely extravagant grandmother’s). When Bossy’s brother-in-law turned fifty, she and my mother announced the occasion by placing a bill-board-sized light-up sign proclaiming “Fifty is Nifty” on the front lawn; for another friend they enlisted a dancing chicken as a live illustration of the honoree’s favorite story. When they hosted Bossy’s nephew’s rehearsal dinner, they made pretty pastel checked tablecloths for the tables outside and cooked (by themselves) Chicken Kiev for 85 people.

The lesson was that holidays, milestones, random good news—life itself—should be marked, celebrated, made the most of. The result was that my parents and their friends had to endure my own early party-giving efforts. For their birthdays I struggled with quiches and cakes, thought it was hilarious to use those birthday candles that keep re-igniting, and set the table with the surprise balls I loved. (I still love surprise balls. I asked my friend Jane Bensel, owner of New Orleans’s (and Taigan’s) The Stationer, to order some for me a few years ago, and now they are a staple in her store.

As I grew older, the parental birthday parties got a tad more sophistcated and larger scale, but no less silly. My mother is a die-hard Elvis fanatic, so we recreated a Las Vegas nightclub, formed a female singing group (the Elvettes), and forced my father to don a white jumpsuit, gold shades, and an actual Elvis concert belt in order to serenade her with Love me Tender. My father’s 80th birthday at the 21 Club featured the same girl group reconstituted as the Satin Dolls, an eight-page rhyming toast from my mother, and countless other raucous tributes that left the waiters enthralled. Never had they seen so many people go to such lengths to entertain themselves.

In these days of economic anxiety, a scary health care bill, and two wars, it is more important than ever to find something to celebrate. And really, it’s not that hard. In another piece in Fetch, I mention one of my favorite cookbooks, Silver Spoon Pasta, and the fact that my friend Aram Bakshian of the Wall Street Journal made the book’s linquine with caviar and vodka to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War. Surely, there’s an anniversary of something every day of the year—people are born, books are written, wars (cold and otherwise) are won and lost. At my own recent book party hosted by Bossy’s two daughters, I was gratified to see that they used those same checked tablecloths from the long-ago rehearsal dinner. We may well whip them out again this weekend. Both women are members of the Satin Dolls and we will be serenading two other charter members on the occasion of their 50th birthdays. I can assure you that there will be streamers tied to my chandelier, surprise balls at each setting, and rhyming toast phoned in from my mother. And we will in turn toast her—the consummate celebrator of life who taught me that no occasion is too trivial to remain unacknowledged.

Alexander the Great

Julia Reed — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:02:50 +0000

I bought my first Alexander McQueen suit more than ten years ago. On the hanger it didn’t seem like that big of a deal—it was black lightweight wool with a short skirt and a jacket with horn buttons that nipped in at the waist. But when I tried it on I was immediately transformed. I looked in the mirror of the dressing room and saw someone who looked like she knew what she was doing, someone strikingly confident, not to mention someone possessed of a far better shape than she actually had.

I wore it to a fundraising breakfast where then-presidential candidate Bill Bradley was speaking, and a photo of me interviewing Bradley I didn’t even know had been taken wound up on the pages of New York Magazine. I wore it to the trial of former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards and the next day, there I was leaving the courtroom, above the fold on the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

It was the suit. “I try to protect people,” McQueen once said of his clothes, explaining that even a simple two-piece suit was for him a kind of armor. I knew exactly what he meant.

Alas, McQueen, who took his own life just before the start of New York’s fashion week last Thursday, was unable to protect himself in the end, and the loss to the industry, and to the legions of us who adored his clothes, is incalculable.

“When I first heard the news, I felt a deep knot to my core, just like the day John Lennon died,” Shelly Musselman, owner of Dallas’s Forty Five Ten, told me. “Having McQueen gone is not just a loss to the fashion world, but a loss to everyone who appreciates true art. Yes, he became a spectacular showman—a genius—but the art of his designs and the choices of his fabrics were mind blowing.”

Musselman and her partner Brian Bolke have carried the McQueen line since Forty Five Ten opened a decade ago. She, like the rest of us, understands the secret of McQueen’s ability to provide such excellent, transformative armor: He was a tailor first and foremost. In an age when fewer and fewer designers actually know how to properly cut clothes, McQueen had trained on Savile Row at Anderson & Sheppard and Gieves & Hawkes where he made suits for Prince Charles (in whose jacket lining he later claimed to have sewn a disparaging epithet!) and Mikhail Gorbachev. Upon the news of his death, Steven Cox of Duckie Brown called him “the best tailor in the world.”

Of course, he could also create spectacles. His shows might have been chronically late, but they never, ever disappointed. A show featuring a model dressed as Little Red Riding hood and leading a a mini-pack of grey wolves on leashes was held in the vaults of Paris’s Conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette awaited her execution. His Fall 2006 show ended with Kate Moss in a pyramid hologram writhing in miles of silk organza ruffles—a sight a friend of mine calls “seriously the prettiest thing I have ever seen.”

The collection Musselman saw in New York last week was also among his best. “I was thrilled it was so magnificent,” she said. “It was very bittersweet. But it did nothing to help the knot in my core. I have a feeling that knot will be there for a long time. As well it should be.”

A Fan’s Notes

Julia Reed — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:14:22 +0000

When the New Orleans Saints won the game that sent them to the Super Bowl, I was sitting in a bar, alone in the Napa Valley, surrounded by people drinking wine and nibbling at cheese plates and not paying a bit of attention to the activities on the screen that were making me increasingly crazy. Finally, some Green Bay fans pulling for the Saints showed up, and I switched to beer instead of wine, and when the game was over I was jumping up and down like the crazed cheerleader I never was and hugging total strangers.

Anyone who knows me well would have been amazed by this scene. Ordinarily I’d have been the disinterested snob comparing the relative merits of the chardonnay and chevre. In junior high, I went to every football game—everybody did—it’s just that my best friend and I hung out beneath the bleachers, not in them, waiting on the long-haired boys to show up, the ones not allowed on the team.

But now, like everyone else in my adopted hometown I am a woman possessed of Saints fever. There’s no way not to be rooting for this team, who were so bad for so long that fans wore paper bags over their heads. It used to be the long-suffering Saints supporters who were heroic; now it’s the hard-working, inspired, and completely inspirational players in black and gold. In Miami, they will be carrying the entire city on their backs, and win or lose, the joy in New Orleans will still be palpable. It has been less than five years since Katrina devastated the city and the Superdome itself was a grim symbol of death and disaster. Now the Dome has been superbly refurbished and the Saints themselves are a symbol of a rebuilt, energized, united New Orleans. No wonder the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins got a gold fleur de lis tattooed on his chest. As my friend the chef John Besh says, “New Orleans has no place for people who are lukewarm. You are either with us or against us. More than any place else, this city is made up of people who want to be here.”

It is also a city where it is increasingly easy to dress—there are only two colors in New Orleans right now, black and gold. My friend and neighbor Olivia Manning, wife of Archie and mother of Peyton and Eli, will of course be rooting for her son, Colts quarterback Peyton, during the Super Bowl. But Olivia is a class act and last week she gave a raucous Saints party for all her female friends. Every one of us, from the very chic Rita Benson LeBlanc, vice president and part owner of the Saints, to Mimi Bowen, owner of Taigan’s own Mimi, came decked in some combination of Saints colors. Rita was a vision in low-key black and butterscotch cashmere and Mimi was toting one her Ted Rossi jeweled gold snakeskin clutches. There were gold leather mini-skirts, gladiator style gold cuffs, gold lame and gold sequins. If I’d been thinking ahead, I would have ordered a pair of Charlotte Olympia leopard print lace-up booties and a Melissa Joy amber cuff from Forty-Five Ten. I have not yet gone as far as my buddy Kermit, but I have been sporting quite a few heavy gold chains from Mimi in my own décolletage.

And as soon as the game is over, Saints fever will give way to Mardi Gras Madness and new colors will be added to the local palette: gold, green, and purple. I am now sick I didn’t order the purple Alexander McQueen dress I saw last season; however, I do have no less than three pairs of purple satin Manolos. Conveniently, my engagement ring is an emerald.

Still, I need to augment my new New Orleans-centric wardrobe in time for next year’s back-to-back seasons of football and carnival so I’m planning ahead. During fashion week I’ll be watching the runways for black and gold, purple (or perhaps a slightly more sedate aubergine) and green. I am a full-fledged fan now, not to mention a fully invested citizen of my increasingly fair city, and these are my true colors.

Julia Reed — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:00:47 +0000

As 2009 drew to a close, we all listened to the by now too-familiar litany of why the first decade of the new millennium had been so God-awful lousy: 9/11, two wars, Hurricane Katrina, the economic collapse, Bernie Madoff, the implosion of print media as we know it. Toward the very end, even that great multi-cultural hope Tiger Woods had let us down (though I am firmly in the shockingly minuscule camp of folks who think that’s none of my business).

It’s true that as 2000 dawned our biggest fear was the now quaint concern that a Y2K virus would shut down all our computers. That year on New Year’s Eve I put on a cap-sleeved black chiffon Oscar de la Renta gown and went with my now-husband to a black-and-white “Venetian” Ball thrown in New Orleans by my sometime neighbor, a very generous actor and playwright. He’d had black-and-white glass beads hand blown for us in Venice and I wore mine with a white silk mask. Beforehand, I fed fellow revelers a supper that included blini with ossetra caviar and another neighbor brought lots of Chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf du Pape to go with the daube. Life was great and full of promise.

This year I was decidedly less dressed up. I wore my favorite ancient gray sweater and we stayed in with the dog to watch The Thin Man marathon on Turner Classic Movies. We still had caviar, but it was American hackleback.

Of course I’m a bit nostalgic for those supposedly innocent days before 9/11, and as a resident of New Orleans, I’m all too aware of Katrina’s damage. Still, we’ve managed to come up with some silver linings in the wake of the latter (an entirely new school system, one that works; a sense, finally, of the need for civic responsibility and government that is not a joke).

The fact is that there are pretty much always silver linings—somewhere—if you search hard enough, and as I sat watching Myrna Loy and William Powell running around being completely charming, I realized once again how lucky most of us are. (And I thanked the ghost of Dashiell Hammett for creating Nick and Nora in the first place—when all else fails they are perfect diversions.) I’d just finished Josephine Hart’s wonderful new novel, The Truth About Love, set in post-World War II Ireland. And I thought, my God, I can only barely grasp what it must have been like to have lived in such a small, small place and to have watched people blow each other up week after week, year after year, until just a couple of short decades ago.

That’s still happening in a great many places in the world, but not here. Yes, things are a bit depressing. Yes, no one knows what’s going to happen (no one ever does). But that doesn’t mean we should wear sackcloth or even old cashmere sweaters every day. Anyway, all kinds of good stuff happened in the last decade. For example: the amazing explosion of the technology that allows me to write this column on this site.

As someone who decided at age eight that she wanted to be the editor of Esquire, what is happening, so fast, to newspapers and magazines is discombobulating to say the least. But I’m old enough to remember when computers first replaced typewriters in the Newsweek Washington bureau, and you would have thought the plague had arrived. We adapt. Something else—something new—always comes and something good is always somehow salvaged.

And there are so many outlets these days through which to create. The decade opened with Tony Soprano and closed with Mad Men—and we can watch them at home any time thanks to the greatest invention ever, Tivo (or whatever Tivo has now morphed into already)! Or we can watch them on the other greatest inventions ever, the iPhone and the iPod! (Speaking of which, some damn fine music was produced in the last ten years—and I listened to it on my iPod and on yet another greatest invention ever, XM radio.) My friend Sara Colleton produces Dexter, a show so well written and acted that a serial killer is truly loveable. Who would have thought? Who would have thought, for that matter, that my friend Jon Meacham would become the youngest editor ever of Newsweek and lead it in a mould-shattering new re-design while simultaneously winning the Pulitzer Prize for his wonderful biography of my hero Andrew Jackson (after writing a really lovely, wonderful, important, book on Roosevelt and my other hero Churchill).

Who would have thought that Jay McInerney, who blazed into our collective consciousness with the era-defining Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, would also become a terrific and respected wine critic and then get the best reviews of his career for a fiction collection a full quarter century after his first success. My friend and wowOwow.com colleague, Joan Buck, a brilliant writer, an incisive critic, and great editor, surprised us all last year with her star turn in “Julie and Julia” as Julia Child’s nemesis, the scary-mean head of the Cordon Bleu. An actress was born!

The list goes on. I bought my first Michael Kors suit in 1986. I watched him go briefly bankrupt and resurrect, and now he’s designing some of the best clothes of his career—great, sporty, exuberant American clothes infused with can-do dash and a tiny hint of healthy nostalgia, just like us.

I love that Scott Fitzgerald was wrong about second acts in America. We have countless acts—along with resilience, and the good sense to know, most of the time, that we are indeed lucky, and that life, whether on happy “innocent” New Year’s Eve nights or pretty much every morning that you decide it does, has promise.

Flying The Holiday Flag

Julia Reed — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:43:42 +0000

In December 2001, less than two months after 9/11, The New York Times Magazine asked me to write a holiday food column. I’m pretty sure my editors thought they were going to get instructions for a somber celebration that befitted the mood of the times. What they got was a very different kind of how-to guide—how to go all out and show the bastards that they can’t keep us down.

In the piece, I offered up my recipe for milk punch made with brandy and bourbon, as well as with my friend Keith’s excellent recipe for homemade cheese straws. I described in great detail the Christmas Eve feast my friend M.T. and I intended to cook for our families, which included blini with caviar and chateaubriand with black truffle sauce. I mentioned that in reaction to the new sobriety, I planned on sashaying around in my silver lame Manolo mules with the chinchilla trim every chance I got—and I did (along with the festive green felt antlers that were part of my standard present-delivering attire until the dog ate them last year).

After Katrina devastated New Orleans, the Times asked me to do another holiday column, and, again, I was determined to show the flag. I advocated lots of rich New Orleans-centric dishes (gumbo, crabmeat ravigote, shrimp remoulade, oysters Rockefeller, oyster dressing, ambrosia) accompanied by more of the highly successful milk punch and plenty of champagne cocktails. Our house, which had been under renovation before the storm, was still largely unfinished, but we managed to move in both a grand piano and a dining room table seating 24, which we filled at both Thanksgiving and Christmas. In between, I threw so many parties my friend Elizabeth gave me a guest towel reading, “A Fool and Her Money Can Throw a Hell of a Party.”

Yes, she certainly can. But it’s not even about the money. My point is that in times of duress, it’s especially important to don the right attitude. Whether you are confronting the evils of Al Quaeda, an uncertain economy, or just an unpleasant relative, I have found that props (sexy shoes, ridiculous headgear, lots of greenery and lavish decorations) accompanied by good food and drink go a long way. Even the long-suffering pilgrims had a swell time at Thanksgiving.

In fact, that first celebration at Plymouth bore little relation to the rather ascetic Thanksgiving observances that marked the rest of the 17th century. Relieved to be still standing, the pilgrims and their Indian saviors had a full-blown three-day harvest festival rather like ours, complete with hunting and games and lots of food, including venison, lobster, clams, winter squash, watercress, and corn. It turns out that there’s no documentation of turkey being on the menu, just wild geese and ducks, but I intend to have one, a tasty heritage breed (as opposed to those bland industrially raised Broad-Breasted Whites from Butterball, etc) that I’ll order from D’Artagnan or Dean & DeLuca or Local Harvest.

In homage to the menu of our intrepid ancestors, I’ll start with grilled oysters and venison sausage accompanied by a watercress salad, followed by a lobster pan roast or perhaps mini lobster or crab cakes. After the turkey and maybe a butternut squash gratin and/or a corn pudding, we’ll celebrate my own harvest of Meyer lemons from the back yard with the perfect lemon tart from Patricia Wells At Home in Provence along with a pecan pie made with pecans from my friend Bobby Harling’s plantation.

I haven’t gotten around to my Christmas menu yet, but I’m on the lookout for a stole or something equally extravagant to match my chinchilla mules. And I’ve already located a new set of antlers. Even if it means looking like a fool, I think it’s more important than ever to enter into the spirit of the season.