December 3 2023
December 3, 2023
# 1633
the Getty children.
Are they perfect?
You bet!
Colleen Getty’s Note:
Hey Dom!!
I'm so excited to say that I was able to read your blog this time around:) Being able to read your wonderful online magazine could be a good gauge of sanity on my side of the screen. If I'm too busy to read Dom's blog then I need to slow down. I really was hoping November would be a bit calmer for me and--well, I read your blog. So something has finally settle. Perhaps it helps that I am heading into my favorite weekend of the year: Thanksgiving weekend. I love this holiday and how it is a free pass to slow down, eat food, drink drink, stoke up the fireplace and just sit and connect with other humans. Why is such a simple and fulfilling concept something that only happens once per year. I absolutely love it!
Editor’s Note:
“I didn’t set a place for my brother.
I’m going to make him stand for the whole turkey dinner!”
Colleen Getty’s Note:
I loved your turkey purchasing story, but there was one image sorely missed: a photo of you with that backpack on and those two huge turkey legs sprawled and sticking straight up and out the back. That could have been your Christmas card this year:) You'll be happy to know that we shelled out more money than we ever have for a 20 lb turkey this year (those the feet weren't still attached) . . . in fact we payed double what we usually pay at .99 cents/lb for a whopping $20.98 total. Ugh!! :) And it will always turn out delicious because--it's turkey!!:) We brine the night before now for the last several years, but honestly--even before that our turkeys were always delish . . . the secret, which is likely sacrilege to some, is what my mom always did and now I do: slick that bird up with oil and herbs and give him the best massage of his life, then put a little water in the bottom of the roasting pan with some sliced onions (my mom used onion soup mix, but we go ah-natural) and then tent that baby with foil so that it is completely covered and bastes itself. Then about an hour before done time we take the foil off and let it brown up a bit because like the true carnivores we are--we hand out crispy turkey skin to wet everybody's appetite while the turkey is being carved. Yum!
Editor’s Note:
Please send photos of your family for this issue.
Colleen Getty’s response:
Wow, Dom--you are pushing it:) Haha.
I'll compromise . . . I'll send you a few photos . . . of food from past thanksgivings, a table or two and perhaps my kids. But, we don't need me to be in the photo:)
So, you can pick. My kids usually help tear up the bread in the morning and make the stuffing, so maybe I'll send one of those.
Have fun!
Cheers and happy turkey day!
Cheers,
Colleen:)
Colleen Getty’s Note:
My last thought is that your daughter is such a wonderful writer! Really. It is clear that she just absolutely luxuriates in words and that is so lovely to see:) I know you are already proud, so I don't have to say, "You should be proud." but I just had to say how much I enjoy her writing. What a gift it is to be able to craft words and then another level of appreciation to read words well-crafted by others. Kudos to youdos! You've pass along your love for language.
So, it's likely a good thing I don't always have time to read your blog because then I come back with a very long response.
I hope that fancy-pants pricey turkey is good down to the very last slurp of turkey soup from its carcass.
Have a very Happy Thanksgiving. Someday you'll have to come here for Thanksgiving and see how the other turkeys live:)
Cheers,
Colleen
Editor’s Note
Always delighted to hear from Colleen. A most remarkable writer. I am a great admirer of her writings about teenagers. And her work as mother and wife. And friend.
What a great American family is the Gettys.
NB: ‘is’ is correct as per ChatGPT3.5. Just in case you were thinking of correcting me. I could have changed the style [a change being Chat recommended] but i like the style.
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Commentary
I have no qualms concerning the election of right-wing candidates. Over time, the Western democracies muddle through with either the left or the right. But the current emergence of extreme right-wing populist leaders using emotionally inflammatory rhetoric to paint themselves as champions of the common people against elitists makes one fear the creation of an entire generation of Nazi crazies. As weeks and months of ferocious and threatening campaigning pass, obscene notions of governmental abandonment of our most cherished principles and political structure are percolating through our electorate. This radicalism makes me fear for our country.
Jumping Into the Deep End
Hatha Yoga is a traditional branch of yoga that emphasizes physical postures (asanas) and breath control (pranayama) to achieve physical and mental balance.
What if life actually turns out okay?
That’s something I’m trying to ask myself whenever I feel my anxiety start to creep in. Life is complicated and often not easy, and so my mind likes to fill moments of perceived uncertainty with all the possible unfortunate scenarios.
But, really, reflecting back on my recent adulthood, I’ve been immensely proud of the person I’ve worked so hard to become and the life I’ve been so intentional in creating. And that ability, to surround myself with loving and wonderful people, to engage with the city and my passions in truly fulfilling ways, is mine forever.
Remember that previous post about how I “long to quit the 9 to 5 monotony and dedicate a year to spiritual realization and betterment”? Well, I just bought plane tickets to India where I’ll be attending a month-long Hatha yoga teacher training in an ashram in Mysore.
I’ve never traveled abroad alone before. I’ve never been to India. This will be a little like jumping blindly into the deep end, but it’s exactly what I need as a palate cleanser in between jobs and to more seriously tune into my wildest callings – not just the ones that feel safe and secure. I’m 25, afterall.
I am writing this from the cozy comfort of our Upper West Side apartment. I will miss it, along with my cat and my loving boyfriend. I love my life here so much, and I never, ever take it for granted. But it will be waiting for me when I return on February 7. And the time away will make me honor its specialness even more.
More to come. Wish me luck.
Editor’s Note
Oh yes! My dear.
We wish you a ton of luck.
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Tucker’s Corner
May December - Directed by Todd Haynes
From its very first shot Todd Haynes’ May December announces itself as an intoxicating, intentionally controversial film. Close-up images of Monarch butterflies and their surrounding manicured flower gardens are scored by the theme from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film The Go-Between. The dramatic music lends an uneasy feeling to the scenes of domesticity (a cookout for friends and family in Savannah, Georgia) that soon follow. Such a jarring juxtaposition, best encapsulated by said music leading into a character complaining about not having enough hot dogs, sets up a film that wants to blend the melodramatic and the mundane, creating in the process a masterful meditation on performance and predation.
Gracie and Joe (Julianne Moore and Charles Melton) have lived in Savannah their entire lives. On this particular day, they are hosting a friendly get-together where their two youngest kids (twins soon to be high school graduates), as well as their friends and neighbors can all enjoy some of those hot dogs, not to mention one of Gracie’s famed cakes. Such vision of domestic contentment disguises a sordid history everyone’s all too happy to avoid; except for the fact that famed actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) has arrived to get to know Gracie better before playing her in a movie. A movie that will yet again unearth the tabloid headlines that first made their romance national news.
For, as we slowly learn from bits and pieces of conversation and many a clipped news headline pored over by Elizabeth in her hotel room, Gracie first met Joe when they worked together at the same pet store in the early 1990s. She was married with kids. Her affair with a seventh grader became gossip news fodder once she was arrested, all while she professed to have fallen in love with the young man, whom she’d later marry and start a family with after serving time. This is all backstory and backdrop for May December, which relishes instead in following urbane and sophisticated Elizabeth as she yearns to connect with sunny and naive Gracie so as to gather enough “truth” to bolster her performance. That means shadowing Gracie at home (as she bickers with her teenage son and needles at her teenage daughter; as she bakes cakes and makes flower arrangements), and probing her with questions about her past (which Gracie skillfully deflects, telling the actress she rarely spends time fussing about what was or what could’ve been).
The cool detachment Elizabeth must wrestle within herself as she gets to know Gracie drives her conversations with many around town, all of whom feed her and us wildly varying versions of what happened and how it was understood by the woman at its core. Her ex-husband, her lawyer—even her son (the same age as Joe!)—feed Elizabeth enough clues on how best to understand Gracie; a wounded young wife, a knowing older lover, a fretful mother. The actress’ inquiry, which Samy Burch’s screenplay openly presents as a selfish intellectual exercise masquerading as an empathetic plea for understanding, slowly begins to reveal cracks in Gracie and Joe’s life. Elizabeth needs to tell herself she’s being empathetic because in reality she can only grapple with Gracie as a character in dire need of an explanation and less so as a woman who yearns to simply be and bake and cook and go out to dinner with her family.
It’s perhaps why Elizabeth so focuses on Gracie’s wispy mannerisms, her muted girlish hair and makeup, and her distinctive sibilant lisp (which only an actress like Moore could elevate above caricature). Making herself as malleable as can be, losing her smoky eyes, severe hair style and movie star jeans/blazer combo in favor of Gracie’s softened features and shirt dresses gives Elizabeth an in, even as she struggles with getting at the root of who Gracie was, is, could be. Conflicting accounts and ideas and memories are harder and harder to parse out into a tidy character study.
And as the two women dance around one another, with equal parts suspicion and seduction, Joe is driven toward the kind of self-examination that risks upending everything he’s known and thought about himself. Here the music cues from The Go-Between help place us squarely in yet another story about stolen innocence and torrid affairs: in Melton’s commanding performance, Joe soon reveals himself to us as both too old and too young for his age. He’s a father who can’t quite connect with the youthful abandon of his son and a husband who’s forced to baby a wife prone to fits of hysterical tears. No surprise Elizabeth would, in a canny bit of method acting, insinuate herself into his world with increasingly dangerous results.
With May December director Todd Haynes has crafted an implausible blend of raw authenticity and stylized melodrama that’s fueled by a curious intellectual inquiry: what role do we play in our own story? With his choice of actresses, Haynes offers up differing approaches to performance that further muddle the brilliant ambiguity that pulses throughout Burch’s screenplay. Moore, here reuniting with her Safe and Far From Heaven director, has long thrived with motherly roles that she arrives at with grounded flair. A bold actress who tackles her performances with fearlessness, she here turns Gracie into a warm cipher of a woman who wears her ingenuity with such nakedness you don’t notice how much of it is not just an armor but a weapon. Hers is a portrayal that refuses the pull toward clear cut understanding.
On the other end of the spectrum is Portman, who’s long excelled in bringing steely if brittle insecure women to the screen. With a performance that should sit right alongside her Oscar-nominated ones (Closer, Black Swan and Jackie), Portman deploys yet another signature portrayal of a woman seducing and being seduced by the thrill of who they may yet be. As an actress whose portrayals often demand to be understood she’s a perfect match for Elizabeth. Lost in a world where all she sees are performers, Portman’s Elizabeth keeps finding Gracie much too slippery a person to anchor with whispered speech patterns and how she wears her makeup. It’s fitting that, in a late monologue played in front of a mirror (the film’s central image and metaphor) where Elizabeth seems to finally capture who Gracie is, we get to witness Portman-doing-Elizabeth-doing-Moore-doing-Gracie in what is arguably one of the most searing onscreen moments in her storied career.
This is all to say: May December, a prickly story about performance and persuasion, about prejudgments and predation, is a triumph. Its final moments alone will be rattling in the viewer’s head for days, if not years, to come. And its trio of performances, all perfectly calibrated to Haynes’ tricky tonal tightrope, are a wonder to behold and the better, perhaps, to be savored upon repeat viewings.
Boston’s Italian North End
where every dinner was a repast
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Do You Believe in Magic? Anthology of Stories from the North End
Edited by Dom Capossela
Restaurant du Semaine
Carrie Nation, Restaurant and Cocktail Club
A dozen oysters: $12.00; $1/ea, 12 maximum/person
Fresh, cold, and salty
Delicious
available Tuesday through Friday, 4-7pm
A good place to satisfy your need for oysters while avoiding the $4/oyster typical cost
Not an ambitious menu but no one demands that you eat there.
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MONTHLY HEALTH REPORT CARD: of an 81-year-old male.
November, 2023
Natural Physiological Change
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Grade: A
Weight-lifting
Am lifting regularly.
Grade: A
Walking
November was a great walking month. I’m at my peak.
Grade: A-
Illness
The actinic keratosis issue on my arm seems to have been resolved in my favor.
Grade: B+
Injury
None.
Grade A+
Weight
(Using only weight as a measure of health is simplistic. I know. Health care specialists consider an entire range of metrics. Two commonly used indicators are the Body Mass Index that takes into account a person's weight and height. And Body composition, considering the distribution of body fat and muscle mass rather than solely focusing on weight. But this analysis of the state of our health is meant to be doable in our regular day’s living. We’ll use simple body weight and take other steps when we feel things going really poorly.)
My weight is pretty good or even better than that.
Grade B+
Oral Health
I have no teeth or gum issues.
I brush and floss regularly.
Get a cleaning twice a year.
Grade A+
Substance Abuse
My morning coffee is getting a bit smaller. From 11oz, to now 10oz. My afternoon Italian coffee stays the same. I drank two glasses of wine at dinner time.
This grade is based on the absence of stimulants and mind-bending substances. My grade stays unchanged.
Grade: B+
Stress Management
Being retired and living alone I am deprived of the joys of gainful employment and daily social intercourse. But, on the other hand, I have the pleasure of a multitude of happy relationships.
Grade: B+
Sleep
I’ve started sleeping without any aids. No aspirin. No melatonin. The result so far, three weeks in, has been terrific. I am always able to get five hours sleep. Sometimes six.
Grade: B+
Regularity
I maintain a decently balanced diet which is not only good for my weight-control, but also for my regularity.
Grade: B+
Memory
I do a lot to stay mentally active. One of my primary activities is writing. I recently published a book I edited, I work on this magazine, I am planning a website for the North End, , and I am completing work on a novel.
My other major memory activity is meal preparation, from the planning of the menu, the shopping, the preparation which sometimes involves me in writing recipes.
Yet, despite all I do, memory loss is real and a nuisance: I am the subject of those 1,000 jokes about walking into a room and wondering what I’m doing here.
Grade: B+.
All in all, not too shabby a bill of health.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
ROBIN WILLIAMS
You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.
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Six Word Stories
"Lost key, unlocked heart, unexpected love."
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts, including links.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
text to 617.852.7192
This is Kat C’s response to praise from Colleen G:
So kind of Colleen -- please tell her thank you and this made my day.
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Last Thought
Wish I were home taking a nap.
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