Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee


Anyone else grow up wanting to be just like Sandra Dee? You might dig my #ThrowbackThursday post about Gidget over at Chapter1-Take1, including a clip of James Darren AKA Moondoggie singing to Sandra Dee aka Gidget. SWOON!

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Baker Street Station—Sherlock Holmes was there

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Baker Street Station The main thing my husband wanted to see in London was London ... as Sherlock Holmes saw it. So our first move, like any fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation was to take a double decker bus to Baker Street. As it turns out I read the map upside down or sideways or maybe it was backwards but we found ourselves in Putney at the bridge. Very much in the wrong direction. Over half an hour by car, which we didn't have. We wound up taking the tube back in the right direction which delivered us to the Baker Street Station. The station is one of the original stations opened when the Metropolitan Railway—the world's first underground railway—was built in 1863.  While we don't immediately think of Sherlock dashing out on the tube, he very well could have and in fact the rail, train etc is alluded to in several dozen Sherlock stories. The Baker Street station is situated on the very block where Sherlock lived at 221B Baker Street. Or should I say th...
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#4 Turkish Delight: Izmir, Turkey, 1957

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Turkish Delight There’s darkness everywhere, shapeless black all around except for a blur of wavering yellow light in the distance. Something has woken me up. Muffled voices in the darkness; a man’s—deep, hushed, whispering. Then another—higher pitched, a lady’s? My mother’s? I hear my name, “Simmy” but I can’t make out the rest; just sharp, staccato sounds.  A shadow crosses the yellow light, so big it blocks the brightness, and there’s nothing but blackness again. The dark shadow, darker than the darkness, is moving fast, coming closer, heading towards me and I’m too terrified to move or breathe or close my eyes. If I stay perfectly still maybe it won’t get me. I watch as the black blur moves towards me, growing larger as it comes closer and closer and just as it reaches under the blanket to scoop me up with its big hands, I want to cry because I can tell from the smell that it’s my father.  “It’s Daddy” he says, pulling a blanket around me, a...
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Storming the Bastille ... it was the summer of '89

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The Bicentennial Parade, Paris. July 14, 1989 [Photo by Rene Burri] Mindy and I tried to crash course our French historical knowledge but budgeting just a week in Paris that July of '89, we were mostly interested in hitting the Left Bank, the major museums, the cafes. She was a shopper, I wanted to see where the expat gliterati hung out, drinking absinthe, back in the day. We hit the Gallerie Lafayette, Les Deux Magots, Shakespeare & Co. We  climbed Notre Dame , took a boat ride along the Seine, saw the Eiffel Tower. We went to a bar where we bought our own drinks. I had a $9 beer; almost half of what I planned to spend on my hotel room. We took the metro to a famous Paris flea market where Mindy bought nothing but I spent $90 on a killer pair of black leather cowboy boots. I must have been out of my mind, I had to schlep those boots in my backpack all across Europe. As our week in Paris progressed, it was clear this Bastille Day celebration was a very big thing and we w...
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