What are your two favorite things to wear?
Bonjour from Paris! We’re having a great time, but it’s a little chilly. My puffy coat and headband are currently my two favorite clothing items.
They’re very busy getting ready for Christmas and the Olympics here. Very exciting! Sending good vibes and a delicious warm croissant to all of you, wherever you are around the world. 🥐 🇫🇷 🌍 ☮️
Beach or mountains? Which do you prefer? Why?
I’m a beach person. I love swimming in the ocean and sitting in the warm sand. I’m extremely fortunate to have a close and generous friend with a home near the greatest beach ever. Here’s the view of her beach, as you first see it from the dunes above.
I do appreciate a mountain view and I’ve climbed a couple of them. My husband and I hiked/camped overnight in New Hampshire’s White Mountains a few times. (This was something he used to do with his friends before we met.) Man, that is HARD work. The exhilaration of reaching a summit is tough to match, but the pain of carrying a heavy backpack and trudging endlessly is not for me.
And the winner is…BEACH
What is your favorite place to go in your city?
Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, particularly the Commonwealth Avenue mall, is my favorite part of the city. I worked in this neighborhood my entire career, starting with my first job after college at The Institute of Contemporary Art, when it was on Boylston Street.
Back Bay is so beautiful and so historic. Many movie scenes have been shot here. I’ve seen several of them underway over the years, with my closest brush with fame being a glimpse of Benedict Cumberbatch. He was shooting a scene for Black Mass at the Harvard Club. Cumberbatch played Billy Bulger, the brother of Boston’s most famous mobster — Whitey Bulger. I saw the film, but can’t remember if he got the accent right. They rarely do!
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
I think I’ll stay in Massachusetts. It’s such a boring answer, but with the world the way it is, I really wouldn’t want to risk any other state or country. The long cold winters are a big problem for me, but you can always jump on a plane to someplace warm.
Top 5 things about Massachusetts:
We have many beaches — from Salisbury to Westport, plus Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket
We have mountains — the Berkshires are a magical region loaded with world class cultural organizations like Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow
We have Boston — it ain’t NYC, but it’s a real city with an international airport and several wonderful art museums
Most of the people I love and care about live here.
Politics: we were the first state to legalize same sex marriage and pass universal healthcare. We guarantee women’s reproductive freedom and have restrictive gun laws (although loopholes still exist). Trump lost every single Massachusetts county in the 2020 election.
People call us “Massholes,” but that’s just because they don’t know how to fuckin’ drive.
How much would you pay to go to the moon?
I traveled a lot when I was young and single. I took many trips to Florida and one or two to Southern California and Mexico with my high school friend Debbie, who was a year older. I also made several trips to San Francisco with friends and also with a boyfriend who moved there from Boston. (We visited each other a couple of times and then it was over.)
One year, shortly after college, my friend Julie and I flew to LA, rented a car and drove up that stunning Pacific coastline to San Francisco, staying with friends in both cities. I went to Jamaica and Colorado with boyfriends, and to NYC, DC, and New Orleans with girlfriends.
I liked road trips but I really loved going to the airport. It was so exciting getting on a plane in Boston and getting off somewhere completely different – with different weather. It was exhilarating. I prided myself on never checking a bag. I was really good at packing everything in my carry-on.
It’s amazing how much your feelings about air travel can change in thirty years. Now, I really don’t enjoy getting on a plane. I can handle the 3-hour flight to Florida, but anything longer than that is a real deterrent in terms of planning a trip.
So, this is all a long way of saying that I probably would’ve paid a few thousand dollars, when I was in my twenties, to go to the moon. I mean, come on, it’s the moon! The 3-day flight would not have stopped me back then.
Now, I can’t imagine being in an aircraft for that long. It sounds very uncomfortable. And how do they pee?
My mind is going straight to food.
Let’s see…I’ve tried caviar and snails (escargot), but I’ve never had frogs’ legs. They sound kind of gross, but I just learned how to ask for them in French: Vous servez des cuisses de grenouilles? This was like the number three food item they taught me how to say in my French app, so they must be popular there.
I guess I could try them for the first (and perhaps only) time. When in Rome Paris…
What skill would you like to learn?
I have studied French, Italian and a bit of Spanish, but never became truly fluent in any of them. It would be great to speak a second language really well.
I’m currently using the Mango app (on my phone), which is free with your public library card, to study French. I recommend it. It’s easy to use and way less annoying than DuoLingo!
I am a church-goer, but not a Christian. For many years I have attended Unitarian Universalist (UU) churches in Massachusetts. Nearly every town has one. My #1 reason for going to church is to sing in the choir. My #2 reason is to hear a good sermon. I’ve been lucky to have some very smart ministers who consistently deliver thoughtful, interesting sermons.
My current minister opened the church year last Sunday (UU churches take summers off) talking about how she likes learning foreign words that have no real English equivalent. “Esperanza,” she said means both hope and waiting in Spanish. She said “expectancy” was the closest English equivalent.
That got me thinking about other words like that. In Italy, they say “prego” all the time. Sometimes they say it twice in a row – or even three times. It can mean anything from please, to what, to “after you.” On a trip to Italy in 2009, my family got a quadruple prego, which meant “hurry up and get on this bus NOW.”
There are a couple of German words that have made their way into English that I really like. One is “schadenfreude.” So fun to say. And I mean, let’s face it, Facebook basically required the adoption of “schadenfreude” into English. (Show me 67 pictures of your perfect family Thanksgiving and you’re setting yourself up for some schadenfreude. Sorry!) But the one I really love is ZEITGEIST. It’s SO fun to say and to think about. Something in the zeitgeist helped make Barbie the top-grossing movie of 2023. I wonder which new streaming shows will truly capture the zeitgeist of the 1980s?
My husband knows I like “zeitgeist” and texted me at work to let me know that Dana Bash had just used it on CNN. About what? Hunter Biden.
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