5 things for friday
our parents are people too! plus: a perfect throwback podcast, peanut butter cookies, my new makeup obsession + more
happy friday, friends.
it is officially peony season, and of all the little things bringing me joy right now, that is high on the list. peonies are tied with ranunculus for my favorite flower (dahlias are a close runner up!), and to see them dotting the edges of the farmer’s market and filling the flower buckets at trader joe’s over the past few weeks has made me very, very happy. as you read this, i will be bidding my mamas adieu, having just spent the past 3 days shepherding them around new york city. i don’t know what it is about parents (and family in general), but i feel at once exhilarated and totally exhausted by their visit. perhaps it’s because i’ve lived alone for a long time now, and i’m not used to having to accommodate for others for days on end? perhaps it’s because i am on guard when we’re out on the streets, making sure they don’t trip on an untied shoelace, or step off an uneven sidewalk, or get shoved on the subway. they, like all of us, are getting older, and while they are still quite with it, and in generally good health, i feel like i have to both watch them like a hawk, and account for the type of slow pace that new york city wholeheartedly disapproves of. the amount of times i’ve said, mama, try and stay to the side so people can pass you over the past few days is absurd. on wednesday, i clocked 20,000 steps (part of which was a morning run, but still!); yesterday, i hit 17k by bedtime. my feet ache, but my heart is full.
tuesday night, i took them to a new-ish palestinian restaurant in the east village that i’ve been wanting to try for weeks now. on our walk back to the hotel, i suggested we detour to my favorite community garden, thinking we’d just be able to peer through the metal gates to see the greenery inside. imagine our surprise when we heard a chorus of voices coming from behind the gates, and poked our heads in to see that a concert was about to begin! we stood and listened to hour (a 10-person instrumental ensemble) play dreamy music on xylophones and string instruments, and i felt both lucky and proud to call myself a new yorker.
the next day, we saw a 2pm matinee of hell’s kitchen, a new broadway musical featuring songs new and old from the icon that is alicia keys. we’re big alicia fans in our family, and the show was both the reason for and the cornerstone of this week’s visit. i shared a bit about it on instagram, but suffice it to say: WE LOVED IT. the cast! the level of talent! the dancing, the energy, the choreo, the costumes. it was everything that broadway should be. i felt emotional from the moment the show began to the very last note, and i don’t think i was the only one. there were multiple moments throughout the musical in which i could hear audible sniffling around me. i know you might be thinking to yourself, how could they take alicia keys’ catalog and make all of the songs make sense within the context of a powerful story, but they DID, and then some.
case in point: this rendition of no one reiminagined as a mother/daughter story. CUE THE WATERWORKS.
i sent a long and overly effusive voice note about this to my friend and fellow broadway fiend jo this morning, but i found myself so struck by how well the show captured the feeling of being of a time, of a place, of a people and a neighorhood. it felt incredibly specific and wholly universal. it reminded me oh so much of RENT, my favorite musical of all time (#2 is spring awakening, which i think desperately deserves a broadway revival!!). during intermission, my mommy leaned over and told me that hell’s kitchen was directed by michael greif, who was also responsible for dear evan hansen and…you guessed it: RENT! this factoid makes my musical theater nerd heart very, very happy. as does the fact that maleah joi moon, who stars as ali, was in her high school’s production of RENT (the entire NYT profile linked here is worth reading—the woman is a STAR).
anywho. the long and the short of it is that everyone should see this show. i would see it again in a heartbeat.
afterwards, we tugged on our raincoats and braved the nasty weather for a trek down to le parisien, a tiny french restaurant in murray hill that my moms stumbled on years ago and have loved ever since. we hung up our raincoats and dug into the most exquisite roasted artichoke salad before transitioning to our mains (duck, trout, and a half roasted chicken for me). then we came home to my apartment for dessert (to know me is to know i always have dessert, generally homemade, on the counter) and sat on the couch talking for over an hour before they called it a night and went back to their hotel. the older my moms get, the more i find myself wanting to know every little detail about their lives. wanting to soak up all the pearls of their wisdom, to understand how they came to be the people they are in their 70s.
here are some things i learned the other night that i hadn’t previously known:
50 years ago, when my mom applied to medical school (she is a retired physician) and my mommy applied to PA school (she’s a retired physician’s assistant), the fields were so competitive that my mom applied to nearly 20 schools and had to effectively beg to be let into one, even though she was more than qualified to attend. meanwhile, my mommy went to a PA program at GW that had hundreds of applicants for just 40 slots.
before deciding to become a PA, my mommy worked as a research assistant in cancer research, and before that, she thought she wanted to be a vet instead of a doctor. she once took a class called “animal husbandry” and had to chase down a sheep who was so against her presence that she’d sit in his little pen and meditate in hopes that he would come her way. she ultimately decided she wanted to work with people, not animals, and hence, chose PA school over lab work, devastating her mentor in the process.
they dated for under a year before my mommy got into PA school. with my mom in new york and my mommy in DC, they took the amtrak back and forth to see one another every 2 weeks. my mommy moved into a “radical lesbian commune” where (this part i knew already, but it always gives me the giggles, so i’m sharing it with you!) the residents had herbal nicknames. my mommy (amy) was clover. then there was mint, yarrow, weed (!!) and shirl. shirl, apparently, didn’t want an herbal nickname, and “no one could tell shirl anything.” my mom, didn’t want one either, so although she was a frequent guest at the house, she remained lynn. to this day, my moms are very close with mint (who reads this newsletter). hi mint!
i think there’s this tendency, especially when we’re young, to forget that our parents had ENTIRE LIVES before we were born. that they were big, brilliant, interesting people before they had kids. i don’t think i want kids (never say never re: late in life adoption, but at 38 and single, having them naturally seems unlikely at best), but sometimes i think about how if i did have them, i’d have lived this whole life before they came along. now that i’m nearly 40, i look at my parents with something like awe. they are imperfect, as all people are, but they are also so goddamn interesting. they lived such big, fascinating, heartfelt lives before i (and then my little sister) came along.
listening to them tell stories on my sofa the other night, i was struck by a desire to write it all down. to record it, capture it somehow, just to have—whether for myself or for a big, multi-generational epic novel someday. every so often, i hear them say something and i think, gosh i wish i had that on tape. because someday, they won’t be with me anymore, and those stories—all the hilarious, horrific, heartwarming stories—will be lost to me, having evaporated into the ether. none of us are here forever, you know? and all of us have oh so much to say.
this past saturday, i attended roxane gay’s novel writing bootcamp at rutgers alongside some 200 or so other writers, and i found myself struck by that thought: that there are so many people with so much to say. that all of us, arguably, have something to say. so often, we play down our experiences, our feelings, the stories that make us who we are. we think to ourselves, that’s just a me thing. no one else feels that way. or, this is interesting to me, but no one else would care about it.
but what if the opposite is true? i think this is what i love about the internet, and about substack in particular—that it’s this portal into all the tiny stories that make up the big, big lives of those i know, and those i don’t. the human experience is at once inherently personal and highly universal. we are different; we all want the same things. so next time your inclination is to look the other way, or ignore the person with a differing opinion, or roll your eyes at your aging parent, maybe you take the opposite tact. maybe you ask them to tell you a story—any story (within reason) will do. and open yourself up to the magic that is remembering that this world is comprised of a million different lives being lived in parallel to yours.
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and now for our 5 things!
if you, like me, came of age in the early aughts, you were probably obsessed with the oc, which premiered in 2003 and made ben mckenzie (and everyone else on the show) a star overnight. i know people say that we’re living in the golden age of television, and maybe we are—but part of me wants to argue that the golden age of television really started when ryan atwood met the cohen family and fell head over heels in love for marissa cooper. they do not make teen shows like they used to (the gossip girl reboot tried, it really did, but it just wasn’t the same!). nor do they make tv soundtracks like josh schwartz used to. i mean, the way those opening bars of phantom planet’s california hit…there is no drug that feels like those opening bars do.
CALIFORNIIIIIIIIIIIA.
ok, i’ve gotten it out of my system. which means i can now tell you that this episode of work in progress isn’t entirely about mckenzie’s time on the oc (though he and sophia do talk about what it was like to grow up in the glare of the spotlight), but also, about a book he apparently recently wrote about how crypto is basically just one big ponzi scheme? talk dirty to me, ryan atwoo—i mean, mr. mckenzie. if you’re like, i don’t have any interest in crypto, me either. but i promise this is still a really interesting and enlightening listen. just trust me, okay?
if you somehow despise the OC and have no interest in the above, i also really loved this bad on paper episode featuring
, who is the brains behind the amazing IG account, @taylorswiftstyled. they break down “swiftanoff” (taylor + jack), talk about how taylor uses style to drop both red herrings and easter eggs for her fans, and about that scary bad but also good AI fortnight clip that circulated pre-TTPD drop.look, i know historical fiction isn’t everyone’s jam. but it is mine, and as someone who loved lilac girls, i was over the moon to see that martha hall kelly had a new ‘badass women doing badass things during WWII’ novel. like lilac girls, it’s centered around ravensbrück, a (real) all-female concentration camp conceived of by heinrich himmler, the prime architect of the holocaust. the golden doves follows two women—an american named josie anderson and a parisian named arlette larue—who work together as spies to bring down the nazis in occupied france, and reunite after the war to hunt down nazi fugitives in hopes of bringing them to justice.
though the women themselves aren’t real, they are based in reality. kelly was inspired to write the novel after discovering that many american women were held prisoner in ravensbrück (case in point: gemma la guardia gluck, sister of famous NYC mayor fiorello la guardia, was one of the famous americans imprisoned at the camp). in following the thread of her characters, who come together after the war to hunt down the reclusive nazi doctor responsible for the death of josie’s mother and the theft of arlette’s son, kelly found herself traveling to italy to investigate the ‘ratlines’—aka, the ways in which nazis evaded justice, escaping from POW camps in germany and austria and slipping across the border to northern italy, where they were hidden in plain sight by the catholic church until they could be safely smuggled out of europe with fake names and fake passports.
WILD, right? this is what i love about historical fiction. you’re swept up in the story, and you’re learning something as you read. it was clear to me in reading this book—which, even though it’s nearly 500 pages, i flew through in a matter of days—that martha hall kelly did her research. and as a result, i learned a hell of a lot. if you’re a historical fiction fan, don’t miss this one.
pps: if you’re a big reader, follow me on goodreads! i try and rank/save every book i read (and i read about 50-60 a year!)
i shared a bit about this on instagram stories earlier this week, but on sunday, i went to a screening of three promises—a documentary comprised almost entirety of home movie footage shot by suha srouji during the israeli army’s retaliation against the second intifada. it’s the start of the 2000s, and suha captures her family’s daily life in the west bank—which is punctuated by frequent trips underground, and a period of time in which they leave their home behind entirely, taking shelter in an empty school, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. every time intense danger strikes, suha makes a promise to god: if they survive, they’ll leave. and yet, it is not until the third time—the third promise—that they actually do.
i’ll be honest: watching this film as a jew was tough. i felt uncomfortable, like my skin had been stretched too tight. after the screening, there was a short zoom Q&A with the family: yousef (the filmmaker), his sister dima, and suha, their mother (their father is also featured in the film, but was not part of the Q&A—he was filming suha for zoom!). they talked about what it was like to (re) discover this footage during covid; what it was like to release the film given what’s going on in gaza. a few folks in the audience asked questions. questions about motherhood under fire, questions about whether suha regretted leaving palestine, or whether she wished she’d left sooner. and the whole time, i wanted to raise my hand and identify myself as a jew. i wanted to ask them whether they had words for me, words i could use to help folks in my position see how things look from the other side. but i found i was too scared to speak up. i was scared that they’d hate me, and also, that i wouldn’t like what they had to say. i wondered if anyone else in the room was jewish, like me. if they, too, felt uncomfortable. if they, too, were rethinking the things they’d heard, the things they’d been told.
yesterday, my moms and i spent a few hours at the center for jewish history, a small museum and archive space in chelsea that has both permanent and rotating exhibits. one of them detailed the waves of german jewish emigration to the states, and just how difficult it was—both before and after the war—to get permission to come to america as a jew. another one, titled the jews of andalus, featured documents dating back to the middle ages that were found in a synagogue in cairo. while not the point of the exhibit, it got me thinking about how i feel like there’s this narrative circulating on the internet, and among many well-meaning liberal folks, that there were no jews in the middle east pre-1948. as in, no jews lived in palestine, or any of the surrounding countries, until israel was created after WWII. this, in turn, leads (understandably) to a strong feeling that jews came in for the very first time and ‘conquered’ land that was not, and had never been theirs. but the reality is that jews had been living in arabic nations long before 1948, long before world war II, dating back hundreds and hundreds of years.
i don’t say this to excuse what the israeli government is doing in gaza, nor to excuse any violence that it has perpetrated previously. but i do say it to remind us (myself included) that the history is more complicated than we think, too complicated to fit in a single tiktok hot take. i, for one, have been finding that i desperately want to take some sort of middle east political history course, or hunt down a podcast (or maybe even an audiobook?) on the topic. i feel like what i know—from all sides—is slightly skewed, and i would really love to get a true handle on the facts, if only to better inform my own opinions of the conflict. the pessimist in me says there’s no such thing as the truth, and that everything will be colored in by the belief system of the person who wrote it—but if you’ve got resources that sound like the above, please share them in the comments below!
i am a big believer that the best desserts are simple desserts. don’t come at me with a fancy profiterole, or a perfectly made tiramisu. i don’t need a cake with a zillion layers, or some other high falutin sugar-y sitch. i’m happiest with a classic cookie, a slice of perfect birthday cake, or an ooey gooey brownie. or, of course, an ice cream cone. i like desserts i can make myself, at home, without a lot of fuss. and these peanut butter cookies fit the bill. i used this recipe, but added extra peanut butter chips from trader joe’s, because why not go all in on the PB flavor, you know? i think chocolate chips would also be yummy here (what is better than chocolate and peanut butter?!).
ps: don’t skip the step of rolling them in the sugar (ideally, you’d use turbinado sugar, but granulated will do just fine!). it adds the perfect tiny bit of crunch to your bite.
pps: as you can see in the photo above, i didn’t bother forking them to make the criss-cross lines, but you do you!
i saw this fenty beauty lip + cheek stick on emily schuman’s instagram, and i’ve never hit add to cart so fast. i know, i know, i do not need another all in one, watermelon tinted beauty product. but also, i do, because i go through these like candy! the perfect wash of color, thanks to color-shift technology that adapts to your skintone, giving you the most flattering rosy tint. it’s currently on its way to me via sephora, and i cannot wait to receive it. we’re just a few weeks out from full humidity here in new york, aka the season in which i cannot bear to wear anything heavy on my face, since i’m constantly rocking what i’ve heard peloton instructors call “the glazed donut look” and i feel like this product is going to do wonders for my summer skin.
bonus round:
did you see jessica helgerson’s insanely gorgeous little parisian apartment in architectural digest? i didn’t think i was a green girl, but now i might be?! if the AD link above doesn’t work for you (and even if it does), you can see the full set of photos on her site, which is a treasure trove of inspiration for my fellow interior design nerds. it’s just 550 square feet, but helgerson made impressive use of every last inch of the space. there’s a cozy bedroom, a nice living/sitting room, a kitchen, a dining room, even a small parisian terrace. it’s what dreams are made of. take a look here.
and that, friends, is where i leave you. if you like this post, it would mean the world to me if you’d hit the little heart icon, as well as consider sharing it with your network—so that the grand weekly can be seen by more people.
All of this was so beautiful, Sarah. Also, have you read The Alice Network?? One of my historical fiction faves! Kate Quinn never disappoints. I have her book The Huntress on my TBR!
Thanks for such thoughtful and honest words and delightful recommendations. Can’t wait to dig more into that apartment! 🤩