Girl Talk

Girls Who Wear Glasses

“Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” Marilyn Monroe famously alleged in the 1953 comedy, How to Marry a Millionaire. Phooey, I say! Because I’ve been on the receiving end of the pick-up line “I like your glasses” enough to know that’s just not true.

For me, the decision to wear glasses was a no-brainer. I needed them to watch movies and to drive. And, well, basically to see. For a while, I wore contacts but eventually went back to glasses. Eyewear is, in my opinion, the most under-utilized accessory a woman has at her disposal and I love wearing glasses. Because the right frames can do more to make a fashion statement than a great scarf or even a fabulous pair of shoes. After all, your eyes are the first thing people notice.

Geek frames are undeniably cool. Rayban Wayfarers are timeless. Cat eyes are pure glam. And right now tortoise is everything! What kind of image does the phrase “sexy librarian glasses” conjure up? And when you’re not feeling or looking your best, your shades are more dependable than any miracle under-eye cream or concealer! Yet some women still resist wearing specs. Go figure…

Case in point: my friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter is nearsighted like me. When she had trouble acclimating to her contacts, I suggested she wear glasses instead. She just wrinkled her cute little nose in disapproval. Then on a shopping expedition, I jokingly handed her a pair of big Jackie-O sunglasses. I coaxed her into trying different styles and as she posed wearing geek frames, cat eyes, and school boy frames, she liked what she saw in the mirror. She eventually ditched the contacts for a pair of oversized geek frames that look great on her.

So whether you go vintage or modern, choose oversized or teensy wire rims, you’re sure to find specs that are right for you. And remember that men do make passes at girls who wear glasses!

Life Lessons

Breakfast with NYC’s Bravest

The mood in the hotel restaurant was subdued, save for the witty banter taking place at the bar, where I sat with four men to my left, and four more to my right. You see, a friend was visiting Beantown with “some of the guys” for the Yankees-Red Sox game and we met for breakfast.

I watched in amazement as they devoured large plates of hearty breakfast fare and washed it all down with Bloody Marys and black coffee. In between talk of sports and politics, and poking fun at the guy who got carried away with his Fitbit, I caught a rare glimpse into the stuff of male friendships.

“How long have you guys been together?” I asked. “Eight years.” “Eleven years.” “Thirteen years,” they were all chiming in. One of them patted my friend’s shoulder declaring, “I’d do anything for this guy…” Their ages ranged from barely-thirty to mid-fifties, but these were no ordinary men and theirs were no ordinary friendships. Because they were firefighters. New York City’s Bravest. I’d heard about the brotherhood of firefighters, but I’d never seen it up close before.

When the bartender presented the bill, one of the guys called out, “Credit card roulette!” and took off his baseball cap, then pointing to me, clarified, “But she’s not in it.” Each of them took a credit card from his wallet and placed it in the hat. The fellow next to me explained the rules. A stranger – always a woman, preferably a hot woman – would be asked to pick the credit cards, one by one, and call out the names. The final credit card would be used to cover the entire bill. This is so NOT how women divide a check, I thought.

As we said good bye, I thought about their selflessness and their character, the extraordinary work they do, and the bond they share. I was in awe of them. NYC’s Bravest – thank you for your service, and thanks for breakfast.

Girl Talk, Life Lessons

The WWE

No, I am not referring to World Wrestling Entertainment. I’m talking about my girls, aka: the Women Who Eat. The WWE, for short. The four of us have been friends for about a hundred years – collectively speaking, that is – and were named by a long-forgotten boyfriend one night during a raucous and lavish dinner.

“I love these women!” he gushed. “They eat.”

Truer words were never spoken… We’ve gone to Tea at The Ritz. Eaten Fenway Franks standing up. We’ve been to Morton’s for steaks, and the North End for pasta. We’ve sipped Malbec, toasted with Kir Royales, and indulged in a margarita or two. PMS’ed on obscenely expensive and highly caloric cupcakes. We’ve had breakfast for dinner, brought in take-out, and cooked for each other.

But who we are, and who we are to each other, goes way beyond our shared healthy appetite. During our collective hundred years of friendship, we’ve celebrated weddings and babies, hosted showers, housewarming parties, and milestone birthdays. No topic is off limits and the laughter is infectious whenever the WWE get together.

Over the years, there have been some dark times spent in hospital waiting rooms. We’ve lifted each other up through illness, prayed for each other as well as for ailing parents. Too many times, we’ve comforted each other through heartbreaking losses.

Our lives are complicated and we can’t get together as often as we’d like. But we do our best. Just last week, as the weather turned pleasantly warm, a flurry of late-afternoon emails and texts were exchanged. We not only wanted to dine outdoors, we wanted to be near the ocean. The waitress was overburdened and the food was a long time coming. But we didn’t mind. Because the view of the harbor was breathtaking. And we were together.

Life Lessons

The Violet Hour

The violet hour. That’s the phrase T.S. Eliot used in his poem The Waste Land to describe the end of the day. But he wasn’t only describing the color of the sky at sunset, he was also evoking melancholy. Eliot got the visual right – the sky is actually purple some evenings. But I’m not buying into all of his sadness and gloom. Because for me, the violet hour offers serenity, a respite from the fast-paced day.

Singer/songwriter Carole King – now she got it right. Her song Up on the Roof is one of James Taylor’s signature hits. The notion that you can find solace and peace by climbing up to the roof might seem idealistic, romantic even. A skeptic would ask: Who does this? How high up does one have to climb? Isn’t it dangerous?

I’m not exactly sure how high up it is, but my roof deck sits atop a seven-story brick building, offering a 360-degree panoramic view of my city. One of my neighbors goes up there at dawn with her first cup of coffee. Another likes to sunbathe in the noon-time heat. Me, I wait for the violet hour, when all of nature slows down. It’s my favorite time of day.

How do you spend the violet hour? Whatever you do, here’s a little mood music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1lwPQhN9gI&list=RDR1lwPQhN9gI&index=1

Girl Talk, The Brownstone

Closet Space

Should I invest in a nanny-cam? Maybe that’s extreme, but how else can I catch that mischievous little closet fairy in the act? For years, she’s been subtly shrinking the dimensions of my one-and-only closet.

Like most city-dwellers, I daydream of the perfect walk-in closet; however back in 1888, my brownstone apartment was designed with eleven-foot ceilings and no closets. Years later, a tall but narrow closet was built into one of the bedroom walls. So oddly shaped is this closet, I’ve yet to find an organizing system to fit.

Hangers touching, my garments weigh down a closet rod that’s starting to buckle. My shoe boxes not only cover the closet floor, the extras are piled atop the sweater and hat boxes on the overhead shelf. Not your typical closet, I need a six-foot wooden painter’s ladder to reach most of what’s stacked on that scary high shelf. Like playing dominos – one false move and it all comes crashing down. Over the years, I’ve been pelted with purses and stabbed with stiletto heels.

So cramped for closet space, I’ve guilted my mother into letting me keep off-season clothing in my childhood bedroom closet. Having some of my apparel two-hundred miles away is unsettling, but it beats paying the neighborhood loan shark-dry cleaner to store my belongings off-site for an absurd monthly fee.

Last weekend, while in the midst of my seasonal closet switch-over, I found evidence of the closet fairy’s latest prank. In addition to my clothing no longer fitting in the closet, some of my favorite garments actually shrunk during their winter hibernation! I imagine the closet fairy hiding in a pocket, giggling as I lie on my bed struggling to zip up a colorful pair of summer Capri pants.

I give up. It’s time to weed out. Donate some of my gently used clothing. Maybe that’s what the closet fairy intended all along.

Life Lessons, Mothers and Daughers

Shades of Gray

My mom’s about to celebrate a birthday. How old is she? If you ask, she’ll gladly reveal her age.

Married young, she had her children right away, so my mom was always the youngest of all my friends’ mothers. However, she inherited the “prematurely gray” gene prevalent on her mother’s side of the family, and was coloring her hair by her mid-twenties.

Funny, now the young women that age are dyeing their hair “granny gray” to get the same look.

My mother remained patient as I, an indecisive teenager, was shopping in the junior department in Macy’s Herald Square. The way the florescent lights caught the top of her head, my mother’s hair no longer looked dark brown, but a rather unnatural shade of olive green.

“Mom!” I gasped. “Your hair looks really strange.”

She peered into a mirror and blurted out, “EXPLETIVE! It’s oxidized!”

A few weeks later, instead of getting her roots touched up, she began wearing a wide headband to cover the gray. Then she skipped a haircut. There was a method to this madness, I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

When she finally went to the hairdresser, I accompanied her. “Cut off all the dark brown, the red highlights, and that other color that defies a name!” she instructed her hairdresser. “I don’t care how short it is. I’m ready to be gray!” Mind you, she was still only in her forties.

Luckily, it was the new wave 1980’s and short asymmetrical punk hair styles were in vogue. Her new look was chic and dramatic. She looked fabulous. She still does.

The “prematurely gray” gene skipped over me. But as soon as I graduated from a subtle sprinkling of “icicles” to looking as if I’d been house painting and doing a messy job of it, out came the bottle of hair dye. Like any other addiction, it’s become a nasty habit. Lately I’ve been thinking about quitting.

My mother has always been comfortable in her own skin. She serves as a model for me on how to age gracefully.

Thanks Mom…

And Happy 77^th Birthday!

Zitella's Favorite Recipes

Buona Pasqua!

Buona Pasqua means Happy Easter in Italian. Saying it evokes vivid childhood memories of Easters spent at my grandparents’ house. I remember each and every Easter dress, coat, and hat I wore. But mostly, I remember the food.

An Italian-American immigrant, my father’s mother was old-school when it came to holiday cooking. For Easter, she made lamb. A whole baby lamb. Maybe it’s a texture thing, but I’ve never cared for it. Despite the accompanying caramelized roasted vegetables that decorated the large oval meat platter, the lamb looked like a small dog sprawled out on the good bone china. It was enough to make my little brother cry. “It’s a puppy! Don’t make me eat it…”

My reward for suffering through the lamb was the Easter bread, called “cuzzupe.” My grandmother and her sister each made it differently. A serrated knife was needed to saw through my grandmother’s cuzzupe, which was intentionally dry and hard, to symbolize unleavened bread, while my Aunt Theresa’s cuzzupe was moist with a subtle vanilla aroma. Regardless of which sister you asked, getting the recipe for cuzzupe was not an easy thing. My mother eventually pieced together this much from them:

7 ½ eggs
1 stick butter
1 ¼ tbs vanilla extract
2 ½ tbs sugar
3 ¾ tsp baking powder
Salt
Add flour, a little at a time – enough flour to knead
confectioner’s sugar and egg white for the icing

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Why were they so specific about the SEVEN AND A HALF eggs, yet so vague about the quantity of flour? Did they know just how much flour was needed simply by how the dough felt in their hands?

When I began hosting Easter at my house, I tried making the cuzzupe. It was a disaster. Luckily my mother has the patience, and she continues to make it every year, adjusting the recipe here and there.

Me? I like a sure thing. So I make the “cassata” or Easter cheesecake. And I’m happy to share the recipe with you.

Easter Cheesecake recipe

Life Lessons

I Blame Shakespeare

The “rom-com” plot never changes: the pretty, but downtrodden, single woman gets saved by the rich, good looking, completely idealized man, whose only flaw is that it takes him a little while to figure out that he’s in love with her; then in the last ten minutes of the movie, he must race somewhere to find her and keep her from leaving town.

“Feel good movies,” that’s what they’re called. But who feels good after seeing them? Single women? Like seeing this one movie is going to wash away past hurts and disappointments, bringing instead, inspiration and hope to carry on – and to believe – yes believe, that the exact same thing will happen for you because Mr. Right is just around the very next turn…

While channel surfing late one night, I realized this movie formula was well-established with 1950’s films like Sabrina, and the Doris Day comedies. Who says that in order to have a happy ending, the couple must get together?

Shakespeare. He’s the one. All the comedies end with a wedding, just as all the tragedies end with a death. We’ve had over four hundred years of conditioning! But The Bard was wrong. This is the new millennium and, back me up here ladies, in the real world the guy tells the girl that he doesn’t deserve her, that she’s going to be a great wife for some other lucky guy, blah, blah, blah, before leaving her with a few mementos and a broken heart.

So what’s a modern girl to do?

I muted the television and sat for a while in the darkness, only the blue glow of the screen lighting my way. And in the solitude of my apartment, I figured it out.

It’s time to change the narrative. You can’t expect or rely on another person for your happiness. You have to find your own bliss. A happy ending can be whatever you want it to be.

Life Lessons

Depleted

Stick a fork in me – I’m done. Am I exhausted? Stressed? Try depleted. Like many of you, I’ve been working late nearly every night. When I get home I’m tired and hungry. My evening is deemed a success if my dinner goes beyond scrambled eggs, everything gets organized for the morning, and I’ve caught the 10:30 pm weather report.

This month’s issues of Marie Claire, Food Network Magazine, and MORE are waiting to be read; a neat stack of books on my coffee table including Adriana Trigiani’s latest, “All the Stars in the Heavens,” and Mary Karr’s memoir “Lit,” are temping me. But keeping up with my reading has been challenging of late.

Last week, an out-of-town friend texted me: MISS U…PHONE APT NEXT WED NITE? Since when does a phone call need to be scheduled? And how did we get so busy that dinner with an upstairs neighbor is not possible until the last week of April?

Our lives are cluttered. The rushing around, I don’t mind so much. Despite my many years in Boston, I’m still a New Yorker at heart. What I miss is the time and the quiet needed for meaningful contemplation. Decompression from the work day takes place on the noisy, bumpy bus ride home. Thinking and planning occurs in the shower. And it’s just me. How on earth do the moms do it? They deserve Superman capes!

It’s no wonder we’re all addicted to coffee. But caffeine can only do so much when you’re depleted. It’s time for a dose of something that can really heal me.

In a few weeks, I’ll be going on retreat, returning to a welcoming old house by the sea. I know my weekend at the ocean will be restorative. And the spiritual renewal will lift me. The tranquility of the retreat will be the shot in the arm I need. Until then, I’ll have to settle for another cup of joe.

Best of Boston

Just Add Ice

Last Sunday night, while most people were watching the Oscars, I was at a Boston Bruins hockey game. What can I say? Hockey is my favorite sport. Ordinarily my brother’s my hockey buddy, but he couldn’t make it. A friend was eager to join me, much to the chagrin of her husband and children. We brought a sign we thought would surely get us on camera. It said, COUGARS LOVE BRUINS. We were, after all, women of a certain age. And my Boys are wicked cute.

When the roving cameraman ignored us, a couple sitting nearby shouted to get his attention. He shook his head and said, “Can’t show that during prime time.” Meanwhile, another live broadcast was underway where at least a half-dozen Hollywood starlets were dangerously close to having wardrobe malfunctions. And my sign was too risqué? Seriously?

My B’s scored first, but their puck luck didn’t last. Suddenly they were behind 2 to 1 and it grew uncharacteristically quiet in the Garden. That’s when I overheard the dad sitting behind us explaining the game of hockey to his two small girly-girl daughters. “How many shots on goal do we have?” he asked one of them. “Hear the tap tap of the stick on the ice? That means pass me the puck…”

He reminded me of all the things I love about hockey. The sheer speed and perfectly choreographed chaos of it. The rattling of the boards. How watching a game clears your head and gets your blood pumping.

Warriors on skates, my Bruins play with grit and grace. At six-foot-nine, captain and defenseman, Zdeno Chara is the tallest player in the NHL. When we say, “don’t poke the bear,” we are referring to Big Z. Patrice Bergeron is the league’s best two-way forward. He played Game 6 of the 2013 Stanley Cup finals with a cracked rib, torn cartilage, and a separated shoulder. It’s been said: If hockey was easy, they’d call it football.

Win or lose, I love these guys. Sunday night’s match up with Tampa Bay was a crucial game in the standings. The final score was 4 to 1. My Boys didn’t just lose, they stunk up the ice. But no worries. We’ll make the play-offs. Just add ice. And drop the puck.

POST SEASON SHOCKAH — My Bruins didn’t make the play-offs. Instead, they’re off playing golf, and I’m rooting for the Blueshirts. Go Rangers!

Dolce Zitella

written by Christine Colacino

Girls Who Wear Glasses

Breakfast with NYC’s Bravest

The WWE

The Violet Hour

Closet Space

Shades of Gray

Buona Pasqua!

I Blame Shakespeare

Depleted

Just Add Ice