Whoa, there’s a lot going on in the Big Apple over the next six months – Denzel Washington in An Iceman Cometh, Aaron Sorkin adapting To Kill a Mockingbird to the stage, Bette Midler tackling Hello Dolly.  By the end of the day, I was exhausted and I hadn’t left my chair. After a successful meditation, I calmed down and cherry picked. Women take centre stage.

On the small screen, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays savvy platinum blonde prostitute Candy  in The Deuce.  From the creators of The Wire, the fast-paced TV series is set in Manhattan’s seedy Times Square in the 70’s when the billion-dollar sex trade was on the rise, and Candy wants to get in on the action – without the help of the bejewelled, not always sweet as pie, pimps in her hood.

Battle of the Sexes starring Emma Stone as Billie Jean King and Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs is a sport I will be spectating.

Like The Deuce, this film resonates now; earlier this year tennis legend and sports commentator John McEnroe claimed Serena Williams would rank 700^th if she played on the men’s circuit. And let’s not forget Trump’s comments about women – there to be grabbed.

Leaping from screen to stage, get your Downton Abbey fix with the revival of J.B. Priestley’s 1937 Time and the Conways at the Roundabout Theatre. Actress Elizabeth McGovern can’t wait to be a bad mom.

 I’m just so blatantly loving being this woman. She’s not somebody who is very emotionally intelligent or developed or mature. She’s not really grown up herself, so she’s an absolutely terrible mother. And you see the damage that she wreaks on her children, all done in the most unconscious fashion, never meaning to tear them down, to break them apart”,

Mc Govern tells the NYT.

Warm, foul-mouthed feminist Amy Schumer is starring in a new comedy by Steve Martin and directed by four-time Tony Award winner Jerry Zaks. Also starring will be fellow American comedian Keegan-Michael Key (of Key & Peele fame, also played “Luther” – Obama’s anger translator at White House Correspondent’s Dinner)

Meteor Shower takes a coastal Californian dinner party and lets it go very, very wrong.

I can’t wait to devour culinary queen Alice Waters’ long-awaited  memoir Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counter-Culture Cook.

The celebrated chef moved from a repressive household in suburban Chatham, NJ to UC Berkeley in 1964, the height of the Free Speech Movement. The bohemian lifestyle she discovered there formed the basis for Chez Panisse’s fresh and in season culture, revolutionary then, commonplace now.

I was a freshman at UC Berkeley in 1980, the same year Waters’ introduced her baked in-house Californian pizza drizzled with local ingredients. My boyfriend used to take me to  Chez Panisse’s cafe for pizza on  Saturday nights. The restaurant on the ground floor with its set menu was far too expensive and adult for us. But the homemade thin crust pizza upstairs was novel, mouthwatering and definitely impressed me.

I hadn’t grown up going to restaurants, no one did.  As a teenager I went to diners for a hamburger or grilled cheese sandwich. The only pizza I’d ever tried was from a NY chain called Ray’s where we burned our tongues gorging on greasy slices off of a paper plate. Then all of a sudden I’m being taken to this nicely designed cafe (I remember a lot of wood interiors)  with a pizza oven (!)  fresh mozarella and organic vegetables. On the same Berkeley street as Chez Panisse was a gourmet cheese shop and a homemade ice cream spot called Vivoli’s where we’d go post-pizza. It was a dazzling street for the times.

September 2017

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She’s a great actress – often playing feisty, talkative women – a prolific reader consuming 1-2 books a week and she’s a powerbroker via her production company Pacific Standard. The New Orleans native turns books she loves into highly watchable, money-churning films for both the big and small screen.

Take Wild, Gone Girl and my new binge Big Little Lies set in picturesque Monterey and based on Lliane Moriarty’s novel. Reese is drawn to smart, flawed, gritty and not so likeable female protagonists, not a bland housewife or girlfriend in sight. Whether you like  the rebellious, promiscuous Cheryl Strayed in Wild or the argumentative, controlling queen bee Madeline Mackenzie in Big Little Lies, there is no disputing that these women are fun to watch.

If you’re wondering what Reese is reading now, or want a head’s up on her next film adaptation, join Reese’s Instagram bookclub #RWbookclub. Her crisp Instagram images and folksy comments make me want to find that hammock in the shade and get lost in a good book.

#Diving head first into #EleanorOliphant, we are HOOKED! What part are y’all up to?

or

Who can’t put down #EleanorOliphant …Where you at?

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine features  the  socially awkward, loner Eleanor  who works in accounts receivable, has no friends, speaks to her mother every Wednesday night for fifteen minutes, buys meals for one and vodka for many every weekend. Here she talks about her favourite mug:

I purchased it in a charity shop some years ago, and it has a photograph of a moon-faced man. He is wearing a brown leather blouson. Along the top, in strange yellow font, it says ‘Top Gear’. I don’t profess to understand this mug. It holds the perfect amount of vodka, however, thereby obviating the need for frequent refills.

I can tell good things are coming Eleanor’s way (read the book flap, obvs). ‘Fine’ just isn’t good enough.

Also on my list to read is Anna Quindlen’s Miller’s Valley to which the New York Times gave a big thumbs up. The Pulitzer prize winning Quindlen is one of those writers whose books I always buy. She never lets me down.

Plus I am nostalgic. I fell in love with Quindlen’s honest, graceful prose when I used to read her Public  & Private column in the NYT’s back in the eighties. I had a banking job I loathed and Quindlen’s column inevitably cheered me up on my subway ride from Wall Street home after work.

In Enough Bookshelves Quindlen discusses why she loves reading so much and the joy she felt when her young son also caught the bug.

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion…Yet of all the many things in which we recognise some universal comfort…reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung…

And for a laugh – we all need them – We Are Never Meeting in Real Life is defs getting tossed in my beach bag.  Samantha Irby, the comedian and blogger behind “Bitches Gotta Eat”,

has chosen a group of essays with winning titles like  “I’m in Love and It’s Boring”,  “You Don’t Have to Be Grateful for Sex”, and “The Real Houswives of Kalamazoo”.   I know it will be a page turner. This review in New York Magazine says it all:

A memoir of the life of a sardonic, at times awkward, at times depressed black woman with Crohn’s (an inflammatory-bowel disease) and degenerative arthritis…. Her acerbic, raw honesty on the page — often punctuated with all-caps comic parenthetical asides — unflinchingly recounts experiences such as the humiliating intrusion of explosive diarrhea on romantic and borderline-romantic interludes.

Happy Reading

June, 2017

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