Search results for: Lois DeSocio and Julie Seyler

A Needle is Better With Linen (And Vice-Versa)

01 Thursday May 2014

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frames 297

No good. Take it back.

BY JULIE SEYLER AND LOIS DESOCIO

Three out of seven mornings, I crave an unsweetened green ice tea, with extra ice from Starbucks. It’s acerbic and crisp. Usually, on my way to work, I am wearing my headset as I walk into Starbucks because Lois and I discuss every morning what we will post on the blog that day.

Like clockwork, in the middle of the conversation, we pause, because I have to order my tea. I always emphasize UN-sweetened, with EXTRA! ice to the barista behind the counter, because it’s the little touches that convert an acceptable drink to one that transcends even morning e-mails.

bathrobe sweater

No good (as a sweater).

This morning (still in boot-mode), I got off the bus. It was raining, but before heading into my office, I walked in to Starbucks for that green tea. Lo and I were on the horn figuring out the schedule. I ordered, got my tea and hobbled across the street, and up the elevator to my office. I took my first sip of tea.

UGH! It was sweetened! A cloying, fake taste of sucrose. Impossible to ingest. I explained to Lo I had to hang up and go back to Starbucks to return my tea.

Her reaction, quoted below, in my opinion, offers an unedited window into how different we are.

Lo is a piece of white linen – pure, malleable and moves with ease through wind. I am the needle, although rigid, pointed, and not retractable, am needed to pull in and sew it up (blog included):

You mean you can’t suck it up just this one time?

Absolutely not. It’s disgusting and I paid for it and I am going to exchange it.

I would never do that. And with a boot on? I would have sucked it down even if I hated it.

I must. It is a travesty to the palate that defeats the purpose of the pleasure.

So, with a boot on, after settled in at your desk, you are going to go back to Starbucks just to exchange tea?

Yes.

I hate returning things. Even clothes and furniture. I kept a chair from Pier One that I found out was broken once I got it home in my kitchen for three years rather than lug it back. It still worked. And I spent $75 for a really ugly sweater years ago. Is definitely worthy of a return trip, but it’s still in my closet, five years later. I use it as a bathrobe.

Spines, Heads, Menopause and Fish

28 Friday Jun 2013

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FISH HEADS SEATTLE

Photo by Julie Seyler.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

The two fish pictured above, whether staged for sale, or captured in their final moments, gills packed, mouths agape in a gasp for “air,” moved me with its perceived spirit of, “Don’t give up!”

I’m drawn to fish faces, whether viewed in tanks, or when snorkeling and swimming with them. There’s something in their eyes. Perhaps because they are always open.

When my kids were little, we had a goldfish, named Cootie, which had a nice big tank all to himself. (We decided it was a he.) We loved him. He would swim to the edge of the tank and nostril-up to the glass whenever we were in the room, and stay there. I assumed he was happy as a clam, because he was always smiling. And he lived so long, that he grew to be the size of a carp. When he died, we buried him in the back yard.

There are barrels of studies that suggest a connection between fish and people, including:

We owe our heads to fish. (In utero, our eyes are on the side of our heads.)
Fish were the first to have a backbone.
They make friends.
They help each other when one is in danger.

And especially fascinating:

Female guppies go through menopause. (Cool, that doctors recommend fish oil for easing symptoms of human menopause.)

So, let’s give a Friday salute to the two fish out of water above, which were undoubtedly sold, then eaten. Let’s, instead, weigh them on the scale of our homogeneity of the human kind.

The Right to Bare Arms, and Everything Else, at 50

05 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by in Confessional

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arms and the woman. photocollage by Julie Seyler

Arms and the woman. Photocollage by Julie Seyler.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

The first thing I’m going to bare, as summer approaches, is my soul. I’m having doubts about wearing my favorite orange (short) shorts this year.

I’ve always been a bit of a paradox when it comes to being bare. I love clothes, and I’m modest. I believe the more left to the imagination, the better – no matter what age. But I also love air on my skin. I’m barefoot more than shoe-ed. And I love bare legs, bare arms, and bare anything else that’s legal … or out of sight.

My doubt was fleeting, but it had crept in because of my age. Because, as we all know, ladies, it is incessantly hammered into us that we should burka-up once we hit 40. So says … just about everyone under 40. And just as tiresome, repetitious, and saluted (ad nauseum), is our generation’s mantra: “We-will-be-the-first-to-look-40-at-50-so-take-that-we-look-great-and-we-will-not-be-held-back-nor-told-what-to-do-nor-what-we-can-wear.”

Don’t listen, girls. To either hail. Instead, don a sense of delusion, and face this summer bare-backed, bare-bellied, bare-armed, bare-legged; bare breasted. Embrace this stratagem with aplomb, regardless of what you may look like, or what others may see.

Or create an allusion:

If you think you look better from the front in a bathing suit, than from the back (we all know how those lycra suits push everything that’s loose to the back), then never let anyone see your back while standing up. When taking that long walk to the ocean for a swim, you can bend over to pick up the most breathtaking seashell you’ve every seen. Don’t stand back up. Instead, cup the shell in one hand with the elbow inward, and at hip level. Your other hand meets your forehead to keep the sun out of your eyes. This allows you to remain bent over frontwards the whole way down the beach, and into the ocean.

At the pool, prepare for that perfect plunge with a stretch and a salute to the sun from chair to the pool’s edge, then dive in. And when surfacing from any body of water, it’s perfectly acceptable to elongate your whole torso, upper arms vertical, elbows bent, hands on your head, biceps flexed, while you are squeezing, fluffing, and tending to your wet hair. The four parts of your trapezius muscle, in back, will take it from there, beautifully.

Arms are tricky. Especially in broad daylight, or fluorescent lighting. No amount of planking or pumping can tone that free-flowing (sometimes flapping) underbelly of an aging, uncovered arm. If you’re lucky enough to have toned arms at 50-plus, believe me, in the wrong light, they, too, can look pocked and piebald.

So, when possible, especially when being photographed bare-armed – never, ever put your arms front and center, with the “No! Don’t take my picture!” pose. Always turn your inner arm towards the sky, palms secretly pressing down on the arms of a chair, chest out, head up, and a tad forward. This tightens your upper arm, and creates that dip in your neck, thanks to the much-underrated clavicle bone that will project and appear to be part of a toned, upper arm. And if this picture is taken on the beach: head to the beach chair. It’s low to the ground. So everything that’s falling down, will fall back when looking up to the picture snapper, who is looking down at you looking up.

Breasts never get “old.”

And my hat is off to any woman over 50 who bares her belly with verve. I only feel that verve when exposing my front while lying on my back. And buoyant. (Floating in water, palms down, arms up, head back, can give the allusion of a 25 year old from head to toe.)

Legs can hold their own, no matter what age. The question is, how much do you show? Show as much as you want. Especially if you are also baring your arms or belly. Because unless your derrière is sagging down through the bottom of the hem of your shorts, or short skirt, no one will be looking at your legs.

I Made a Mess of My Picture Wall, and Nailed It.

17 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Art

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P1130182

Photo by Julie Seyler.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

When you walk through the back door of my house, and look to the right, there is a long narrow hallway, with a 15-foot-long wall that is chock-full of a 4-foot rectangle of crooked pictures. There’s a bathroom down towards the end of the hallway, and by the time the uninitiated, first-timers-to-my-house walk down that hallway, and come out of the bathroom, they often ask: “What happened to your wall?” Or they let me know that: “Your pictures are all on top of each other, and not lined up.” Or even worse – they start to straighten them.

Thing is – I want them to be this way. I deliberately piled frame on frame. It looks like there was an earthquake. Actually, there is a science to it, and a lot of planning to make it look like there is no planning. But no tape measure or pencil is needed, nor any other fancy how-to-hang-a-picture gadget. The planning comes in the mission to leave no wall space between the frames. Much like the “splatter and action” technique of abstract expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock, I like to make a mess of my wall. I’m a twisted madwoman when I’m hanging – mixing big frames with small, topping the corners of grandma’s 8 x 10 portrait with a sideways snapshot of my two sons as toddlers in the bathtub with their Ninja Turtles. Often, I have to tilt and turn to get rid of as much peeking wall as possible. If I hit a glitch, or there just isn’t an easy fix – I hang an empty frame: wall 2

I can’t claim this idea as my own. And there is a name for this, I just can’t remember it, nor can I find it anywhere. (A friend told me recently that she saw something similar in Pottery Barn’s Halloween catalog – how to make your wall “spooky.”)

I first saw the technique decades ago, in an old black-and-white movie that had a wacky wall of pictures in the background. It stuck with me. I just needed a wall. In the 1980s, my husband and I bought our first house, which had an odd-shaped wall on the second floor. One side just about met the floor. It was here that I began my picture tapestry, because not only did I have a potential canvas, I also had a new baby. So those photos of his every wiggle, squirm, drool, cry, laugh … went up on this wall. From here, and from house to house, and with a second new baby, the wall became a baby wall – filled with baby pictures of everyone in my and my husband’s family.

The wall I now have in my current house is the grandest of them all. It is a culmination of 27 years of previous, twisted walls – an overflowing chronicle of my two sons’ lives so far, plus anything else I want to put up there. Parents, grandparents, brothers, nephews: all there. People I love who have died: lovingly placed. Girlfriends: in place. (One old boyfriend.) Beloved dogs: check. (Two are dead.)

I’m writing about this because I’m going to be moving at some point in the near future, and I will have to take my wall down. I most likely will not be able to replicate the wall as it is, wherever I end up, because I don’t believe I will ever have as perfect a wall as I have now. But on all the new hallways and walls that come my way in the future, there will always be a small cluster of twisted and bundled photos of my clustered, twisted messed-up picture wall.

An E-Mail Ode (And Reply) to the Oyster Pearl

28 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Art, Words

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Tree burls and pearls. Drawing by Julie Seyler

BY LOIS DESOCIO

An integral part of our blog’s beginnings were incessant e-mail exchanges between Julie and me, with ideas for what the blog should be about. Threaded into the scores of business e-mails and blog ideas, were some slices of raw revelation, as the ever-evolving voice of the blog drifted from a focus on food and travel to one about navigating our 50s. The e-mails generated tons of ideas, so we diligently filed them away in our queue.

One day in May, Julie dashed off a short poem and e-mailed it to me, thinking it was quite a witty characterization of being on the right side of 50. Her poem, and my e-mailed response, copied and pasted below, sums up how differently we view the physics of aging. For Julie, the two lines conveyed how fleeting the time is between the dewiness of youth, which we take for granted, and the next moment, when it has evaporated. As she sees it, it doesn’t come at one point in time, but throughout the transitions in life. You assume your oyster pearl complexion will always be a part of you, and then … it isn’t.

My poem was better:

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 3:04 PM, Julie Seyler wrote:

One day you are the oyster pearl
the next time you looked you were the tree burl.

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 3:28 PM, Lois DeSocio replied:

OOH – that hurts. Props on the poem, but I refuse to be deformed. I will be: 

One day I was just a girl;
The next time I looked I was the oyster pearl.

Lemonade, Jule

We’re Morphing

20 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by in News

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New Day. watercolor. Julie Seyler.

New Day. Watercolor. Julie Seyler.

BY LOIS DESOCIO AND JULIE SEYLER

To Our Readers:

Without any conscious intent on our part, and with the intrepid adaptability that is necessary in the face of the unexpected slings and arrows that life in our 50s is rife with, we had to allow the blog to morph into a new direction yesterday.

We have been talking for some time now about whether or not we should shutter the blog. Not because we don’t love it – we do. It is our baby, our artistic release, and a ton of fun. No, we were thinking of shuttering because our schedules and obligations and responsibilities are endless. And yesterday, without warning, they all caught up with both of us.

We all know that this journey through middle age is unlike previous journeys. It seems as if, all of a sudden, we go from our crazy, partying 20s to careers, marriage and kids. Then there is the 10-year respite – when children leave home, and we have to re-define ourselves. Our generation has managed to (at least in our minds) extend each stage of our lifespan – 27 is the new 17, 40 is the new 30, 50 is the new 40! Until now.

How could we project what it would be like to have to worry about, take care of (and sometimes bury) our parents? We don’t want to retire – but can we if we wanted to? Is there enough to live on? Loss and change can be daily, and decisions are often of the momentous kind.

Plus, we are being reminded every day that our days are shorter. It’s daunting.

So all that stuff, plus our demanding full-time jobs, took over yesterday. Neither one of us had a moment to get the blog up and out. This was a first. We’ve published 412 posts in over a years’ time. And have not missed a day.

But we have 105 possible posts in the queue, from us, and our contributors.

So we’ve decided to do the lemonade-out-of-lemons thing. The blog is here to stay, but it will be a little different. It may not always be six days a week. If our responsibilities pull us in all directions, simultaneously, the blog may be dark for a day.

One last thing. Without a doubt, this blog is the sum of its parts, and we thank each and every person who has contributed. And a special nod to Bob and Frank, who were a part of it on November 19, 2012, when we launched.

And that’s the sweet spot in all of this – yesterday’s date. We realized today, that it was the perfect day to change course. It was March 19 – our 16-month anniversary.

Newark is Nothing New to Those of Us in the Know

24 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Food

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Forno's of Spain

Fornos of Spain. All photos by Julie Seyler.

BY LOIS DESOCIO AND JULIE SEYLER

My little New Jersey town conveniently straddles two big cities – Manhattan and Newark. I can make it to downtown Newark in 15 minutes, and on a Sunday, sans traffic, can drive to Manhattan in 20.

But it’s a hard sell to get my Manhattan friends to bridge or tunnel it over to the Jersey side for anything, much less dinner. Why would anyone leave Manhattan to eat? And eat in Newark? For the 25 years that I’ve lived nearby, a suggestion to dine in Newark has provoked comments from the uneducated about how they don’t understand how I could live so close to a city that they consider to only have bragging rights as a murder capital. Given that Newark’s Ironbound district rivals any Manhattan neighborhood for flavor of both the palatable and neighborhood kind – they are missing out.

But Julie was recently open to giving it a go, and took the PATH to Newark, where we met at Fornos of Spain – a somewhat touristy, but still tasty, Ironbound fixture. Shocking that Julie, a born-in-Jersey girl, who will fly for seven hours to eat tapas in Madrid, had never, in 50-plus years, ventured anywhere in Newark beyond its Penn Station platform. Dare I say – she and her camera were smitten? At least with the name:

In the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey there is a restaurant called Fornos of Spain. It is readily accessible from Manhattan via either the PATH or NJ Transit to Newark Penn Station. Last week, Lois and I dined there with our contributor buddies, Frank and Bob. We reveled in clams casino and gambas al ajillo; grilled grouper, paella valencia and filled-to-the-brim pitchers of sangria. I am pleased to say the sangria was not cloyingly sweet, as I, too, as this New York Times article points out, remember it being when I was drinking it in the 1970s.

Paella Valencia.

Paella Valencia.

Sangria.

Sangria.

The next day I set about looking for the Fornos, you know, the restaurant “of Spain.” I assumed that the Newark joint was a scion of a famous place in Spain, probably Madrid. An Internet search just turned up thousands of reviews of the Newark restaurant. I discussed the dilemma with Lois, who had a simple explanation: ‘Well, Jule, fornos means ovens in Portuguese, therefore the restaurant is actually called the Ovens of Spain.’ What? I mulled this over. That doesn’t make sense, because if fornos means ovens in Portuguese, why didn’t they call the restaurant Fornos of Portugal? And even that is not the final word on the subject because couldn’t there be a family named The Fornos? Maybe they came from Spain. So, what’s in a name? Whether it’s forno, or Newark? What I do know is that I want to go back to Newark’s Ironbound and find a Portuguese restaurant without “Spain” in the name.

When My Words Collided With Björk’s

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in Confessional

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I cry to my left; I dance to my right

“I Cry to My Left; I Dance to My Right.” Watercolor by Julie Seyler.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

Björk and me. As polar-opposite as Iceland and New Jersey. She’s a brilliant musician. I’m a brilliant … hmm. (I can’t recall being called “brilliant.”) She’s an international “queen.”

I’m a “Jersey Girl.”

She can write music like nobody else.

I listen to music — like everybody else.

She can sing.

I carry a tune by plugging myself into my phone and toting the music in me along with me, through dancing, from room to room.

But we do have a parallel. We both recently wrote about betrayal and a breakup. And in keeping with the disparity in our places in the universe — I wrote an essay. She wrote a best-selling, breakthrough album, out of which a MoMA exhibit will spring.

We are dead-on, though, with our innate use of a creative outlet to mine through life events that are coated with agony. Agony that words can’t recount. Until you find the words. We both found the words. We both wrote the words. And, in her big way, and in my little way, our written words hit a collective nerve.

A few days after Julie told me I had to read The New York Times’ article by Jon Pareles, “Sometimes Heartbreak Takes a Hostage,” a review of Björk’s “complete heartbreak” album “Vulnicura,” another friend sent me a link to the Web site Journal.ie, which ranked my BuzzFeed essay as last week’s number-three best read on the Web.

Number one was an interview with Björk about “Vulnicura.”

Cool. So I threw myself into everything Björk. I read what I could find. I bought and repeatedly listened to “Vulnicura.”

I feel her words — both in her music and in her interviews about her album and the process of creating it. The words were mine, but hers. For both of us, moving through betrayal and “the death of the family,” was for me, as was for her “the toughest thing I’ve ever done.”

For both of us it took years to write about it and muster the nerve to put it out in the world. We both wrapped our articulation around the arc of a timeline. We both had a run-in with the magic of karma. And we both came through liberated.

I relate to her metaphors: “You feel like you’re having open-heart surgery, with knives sticking in, so everything is out, and you have this urgency and immediacy. It has to happen right now, that you have to express yourself.”

And her letting-go: “She hopped out of the D.J. booth to dance on the pool table, rolling across it like something in a vintage MTV video. Around midnight, she led her flock to Prikid, a packed hip-hop club, where she danced nonstop, sang along and downed shots of birch schnapps until nearly 4 a.m,” wrote Pareles. (I would have been there, on the pool table, had I been there.)

When I write, I listen to music. I have a stable of songs that I draw from. They range from opera to ’60s pop melodies. I pick the song that moves me along with my writing. I click “repeat” and it plays over and over and over for hours. I blast it. It takes over my head and let’s nothing in but me. Rarely, do the words come to mind without music in my ears.

Sometimes I need violins. Sometimes I need a rousing choir. Sometimes I need Roy Orbison. Sometimes a voice hits me out of nowhere. (B.J. Thomas!?)

But for this piece, I needed Björk and “Vulnicura.” Specifically “Black Lake.”

So while I was formerly more in awe of pieces of Björk (yes, her swan dress, her avant-garde-ness), I am now a forever-fan of all of her. I hear her now.

Me and Björk. We were on the same page. The Icelandic queen and the Jersey girl — scribes of the separation; chroniclers of catharsis. All-consuming, heart-breaking, gut-purging, pool-table-dancing, shot-drinking reclaimers of us.

How to Throw a Party

20 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in Entertainment, Food

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Come in and have a drink.

Come in and have a drink.

BY JULIE SEYLER

This post is about the Perle Mesta’s of the world, those men and women that know how to throw a fete without sweat. Lois DeSocio, my friend and co-collaborator on The Write Side of 50, is an extreme maven in the field of party-giving. Her menu is never less than inventive: French bread slathered in Nutella and topped with hot sausage, sardines with avocado, swiss cheese, olives and mayo, and meatballs made with grape jelly grace the table. Odd as the concoctions may be, they are always displayed invitingly and usually work as conversation starters. The bar is set up and user-friendly. What looks like thousands of glasses are at the ready for wine and beer, water and soft drinks, distilled liquors and fruit mixers. Olives. The guest list is varied. The combination of every “thing” never fails to make for a great party.

flowers flowers2

From observing her over the years, I have deduced Lo’s tricks for converting hostess “responsibilities” into a really fun time:

She starts working on her guest list.

About 45 days ahead of the party day, she sends out Save the Dates.

Menu contemplation commences. Different ideas percolate, like whether she’ll have it catered, self-prepared, or a combo of each.

Then there’s the issue of space and place. She’s always thinking of the comfort factor — where people will sit, stand, talk and eat and not feel crowded and overwhelmed.

For herself, she starts the party the day before when she puts on Dean Martin, pours a glass of celebratory wine, and sprinkles the finishing touches on the food. This allows her to act as if she’s going to a party, not giving the party.

And the last most crucial ingredient to being a hostess with the mostest:

feet at party

She always has a fabulous time at her party. She’s not worrying. She knows she has given her love.

So here’s to those that know how to throw a party. May we learn from the best of them.

Morning after

(And of course, there’s Lo’s prized morning-after mess.)