My New Gig: READ THIS Before You Leave the Country

Wendy and her two boys atop the Eiffel Tower.

Travel savant Wendy Perrin launched her new website today and it is so good it's almost scary. I played an itty-bitty role in the launch, reading through approximately a gazillion words of insider advice from travel experts all over the world, sorted by destination—priceless advice gathered and vetted by Wendy and her team in a superhuman effort to save you and everyone you know from mediocre travel experiences. (Do not—do not—come to visit me in Paris without checking out the Paris for Food Lovers Insider's Guide.) Wendy was a superstar at Condé Nast Traveler, and I'm ecstatic to be part of her new venture (truth in travel lives!). The wendyperrin.com "About Us" page includes some of my favorite people from Traveler days, people like Debi Dunn, who once sent me to Moscow in the dead of winter (for which I utterly forgive her). As some of you know, I was in a funk about the direction the "new" CNTraveler was taking, but I am done with all that. Magazines, pleh. I am Miss New Media now. (I just wish I could remember my Twitter password.) Linking, linking, linking . . .

Happy Endings

Amanda Stern

The Happy Ending Reading and Music Series, hosted by Amanda Stern, requires authors to take one public risk (do something they've never done before) on stage. This is where I'll be tonight. Here's what people have done in the past:

Jessica Anthony sang “What a Feelin’” in sign language

Lucy Corin gave a science lecture without understanding her lecture topic

Michael Cunningham gave a five minute lecture on the entire history of English literature. 

Julie Orringer played “2 second animal,” with the audience, a game she made up on an airplane

Ryan Harty breathed fire

Kevin Wilson read obituaries he wrote for himself in high school. Each one cast him as a man of great importance in fields as varied as football and movie star

Dear Peter: My Inner Teen Is in Love With Your Inner Teen

Two thirds of the way through Always a Catch, Peter Richmond's first YA novel, budding prep-school football star Jack Lefferts finally gets up the balls to bare his soul to Caroline Callahan, a brainy eleventh-grader with more literary references at her fingertips than the Library of Congress. So what does the kid do? He suddenly busts out—no more Mr. Shy Guy—and barges into her dorm (strictly off-limits), bounds up the stairs, looks both ways and, seeing the coast is clear, rushes to her door and knocks. The door opens:

She was wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants, her hair pulled into a ponytail. "What are you doing here?" she said. "This is stupid, Jack. Booth's a bitch. If she catches you . . . " She pulled me in by my sweatshirt and closed the door. "So whatever you have to say couldn't have waited?"
What did I have to say? Wait, that was easy. "I just wanted to know if . . . if we, you know, are . . . I don't know . . . "
"You're going to have to learn how to finish a sentence, Lefferts, if Jarvis is going to give you an A."
We stood there, stupidly. Then she reached out both her hands, with her palms up. So I put my hands in hers. And maybe then there was some sort of current. It was definitely electric. For me, anyway. She was just totally cool and relaxed.
"We're something," she said. "Why do you have to label it? Now, get out of here. All we need is Booth busting me. Or you."

Two Actors Meet in an Alley

The actor and playwright Ethan Phillips (aka Johnnie) sent this email to several friends today and I asked him for permission to publish it here. If I remember correctly, Johnnie and I first met when we were both waiters for Brew & Burger back in the seventies. Soon after that he landed the role of Peewee on Benson. Much later he played Neelix, the chef aboard the Voyager on Star Trek. Neelix's biography describes him as “a Talaxian originally from Rinax, a moon of the planet Talax, in the Delta quadrant.”

Ethan Phillips getting prosthetic makeup applied for the character of Neelix.

By Ethan Phillips

Once many years ago when I was working on Star Trek I experienced the sweetness of Robin Williams. It was about 6 a.m. on the Paramount lot and I had just had my Neelix makeup applied. I left the makeup trailer and made my way to stage 16; to get there I had to go down a long alley between stages 8 and 9. As I turned the corner to start my way down the alley, I saw someone turn at the other end of the alley and walk towards me. It was dark, just before dawn, and as the two of us approached each other, I saw it was Robin Williams. When we were maybe ten feet apart Robin shouted, “Mr. Neelix!” He then went into a very funny totally off-the wall two-minute riff on being an alien chef. The jokes and puns and crazy sounds and accents were nonstop, and it was obvious he knew the show and my character very well. I was his only audience. I was beaming! After a few minutes, with the kindest smile, he bowed, and said, “I love your work,” and he walked on down the alley. I felt like the luckiest actor in the world that day.

Radish-Leaf Soup

While I'm in New York this summer, my husband is in France, and I was very downhearted to learn that he was making soupe aux fanes de radis for supper—without me! I asked him to send me the recipe so that I could share it with you. It's based on a soup that his grandmother used to make (she was from Alsace). It is written in French, and it is very sketchy, but I will attempt to loosely translate:

Get a bunch of radishes (about 40 to 50, he says, which sounds like a lot but who am I to say?), making sure the leaves are really fresh. Remove the leaves at the stem, throw them in the blender with a little water, and chop them on low. Put the mixture in a pot with some salted water, and cook over medium heat for as long as you like because he didn't specify. Meanwhile, boil two potatoes, mash them roughly, and add them to the pot. Season with 1/2 tsp (each) cumin, curry, and pepper and cook another 20 minutes or so on low. Add 1/4 liter of milk and 2 tsp creme fraiche, and a little more salt if necessary. 

And that's it. But just in case I've forgotten something, here it is in French, exactly as he sent it to me.

The Invisible Illness

William Styron's essay on depression, published in Vanity Fair in 1989, is the best description of the disease that I have ever read. Its symptoms do not always yield to treatment, leaving the victim in so much pain that the thought of another day is unbearable, and there is nothing a spouse can do to alter that perception (believe me, I know). In the past 24 hours, people have said a lot of things meant to give sufferers hope, but much of it is bogus. Until we know more about this lethal disease, we will continue to lose its victims at an alarming rate, and until we take steps to erase the stigma of mental illness, we will remain in darkness. A good way to start is by listening to its victims. There is none more eloquent than Styron, whose essay can be read by clicking here. (The link takes you to the Vanity Fair website. Styron later published a longer version of the essay as the 81-page memoir Darkness Visible.)

My Mother's Dresser

I finally got up the courage to go through my mother's dresser. Two years have passed since she died, and in that time I've gone through the entire house, emptying and sorting. In June, my sister and I emptied the dresser. It was hard, but not as hard as it would have been last summer, when we were emptying out the attic. My mother's dresser was neat as a pin and smelled like lavender. I photographed almost every item, unwilling to let her personal things go without retaining a memento. Jewelry, scarves, my father's wartime ID bracelet (before dog tags), a necklace of gold beads that had belonged to her mother, dress gloves, a box full of discarded hearing-aid batteries with hundreds of notations in her handwriting, signifying the dates they had been changed. Her bedroom, her private sanctuary for 67 years, now bears no trace of her. But I have the photographs, and the handkerchiefs (my sister has the gold beads). I remember her giving one to me every Sunday when I was a kid (I would pick). That was so I would have something to carry in my purse besides the dime for the church offering. The lace and the embroidery was done by Grandma Tucker.