Upcoming - The Book Club Play

Here for most of the summer - anyone want to go????

Waiting for Gordon...

Cali has a new little friend. I've been calling him Gordon. Gordon the gecko.

The poor girl is obsessed, waiting every day by the bathroom window, like she's staring out to sea for her sailor to come home.

#TEAMLH

I admit it, with regard to Formula 1 racing, I used to be one of those "go along to get along," "fake it 'til you make it," "smile and nod" bystanders watching as all those cars sped off to the finish line. But things have changed. 

I picked my driver, 

Lewis Hamilton,

went to Montreal and he won! Then we went to Austin and he won again! Can Montreal '14 make it three in a row? Montreal, here we come, and I'm even more of an expert. The cars have changed, the rivalry within the team is intense, the competition fierce.

C'mon, Lewis, let's do this.

NYC

Amy finally took a big, juicy bite out of the city and bought an apartment, terrace and all. 

Headed over to take a look and did some packing, ate some bagels, did some sight seeing - The Highline, The Met,

some reflecting,

some hip NY Broadway (and off) plays -
Casa Valentina
Buyer and Cellar - Joan Rivers sat near us!
I always forget the fast-paced energy, the running around, the coolness of the people as we had a big movin' on up, good-bye to the old, hello to the new, celebration.
But, if Amy needs to relax after her move, she knows where to find me...

Shana's sweet new ride

I go off to the Big Apple and Shana goes and buys a pretty big apple for herself.

Book Club - Sacre Bleu

A fun gathering on a perfect night on Maggie's primo patio.

A Walk With Dad

By Amy Segal

When I was 3 years old and my sister, Lisa, was 5, she got to do something that I didn’t get to do. I have no recollection of what it was but, as our dad used to tell the story, I was none too happy about it.  I told him, “It’s not fair!” He said, “Amy, life’s not fair.” And I said, “I know that.  I’ve known that for a long time now.”

The reason I knew that at such a young age is because it was one of the many lessons that he taught us early and often.  He understood that life wasn’t fair so it’s fitting that he devoted his entire career to seeking justice. 

He was a brilliant lawyer.  But it’s not something we knew much about growing up.  He was a man of few words and didn’t speak of his accomplishments.  So it was only over the last few weeks that I heard certain stories about his career for the first time.  One of them was about how when colleagues asked him to review briefs, he would often reduce entire paragraphs to one sentence.  I was amused by this because he was no different at home. 

When we would ask him to review a homework assignment or a college application essay, he’d get out his pen and say, “Write like a man!”  It didn’t occur to us at the time to say, “Dad!  You can’t say that to your daughters.  It’s sexist and politically incorrect.”  Instead we just took out everything that was superfluous and are still doing that to this day.  But even if we had articulated those thoughts at the time, it would’ve been nonsense directed at him because he was neither sexist nor politically incorrect.   In fact, he was the exact opposite and always brought us up to believe that we could do anything we wanted to do. 

Though he was fond of striking out words, he did love them.  He was an avid reader and encouraged intellectual curiosity in those around him.  When we would ask him how to spell something, he’d say, “Look it up!”  And we’d say, “How can we look it up if we don’t know how to spell it?”  And he’d say, “You’ll figure it out.”  And we did.

In addition to reading, he loved to travel, hike Camelback Mountain and cook.  As Lisa said recently, he was a foodie before foodie was even a word.  I recall many weekend afternoons of him making elaborate meals with a football game on in the background.   He loved to eat and he and Lisa would often have lunch at the latest restaurant in Phoenix while he and I would share reviews of restaurants in New York. 

Not long ago, there was one in the Times about a new place called Uncle Boons.   Boons is spelled without an apostrophe -- even though one belongs there -- and the food critic wrote, “Some New Yorkers are offering opinions about the curry while others are still puzzling over the fugitive apostrophe.”    I read this on the subway on the way to work and smiled as I imagined an apostrophe on the run, holding on tight to a subway pole as it high tailed out of town.  

I emailed the review to my dad and said, “Who would have thought that the words ‘fugitive’ and ‘apostrophe’ would ever appear in the same sentence, much less next to each other?”  He wrote back almost immediately and said, “In Ulysses, James Joyce describes a man carrying a sign that is part of a letter sequence advertising some Dublin firm.  This man carried the apostrophe.  Maybe that is the one you’re looking for.”

It’s this type of answer that I’ll miss the most.  Dad’s mind housed such a deep reservoir of knowledge and yet it revealed itself in measured and surprising ways.  We all know really smart people who spend a lot of time telling us how really smart they are.  He was not one of those people.  Rather, he doled out wisdom more on an ‘as needed’ basis.   But it wasn’t always what we expected or wanted.  When we would ask him what the meaning of life was or what the purpose of it all was, he’d invariably say, “Wet birds don’t fly at night.”

What does that even mean?  It made no sense to us and we wanted answers.  So we asked the question in different ways -- from all angles -- hoping to catch him off guard so he’d tell us something more satisfying.  But no.   To the ‘big question’, all we ever got was, “Wet birds don’t fly at night.”  

As young girls, this was a hard concept to wrap our minds around.  As adults, we still have no idea what it means.  And, yet, we know exactly what it means.  He knew a lot but he didn’t presume to know everything and there were some things that he just wanted us to figure out on our own. 

As we continue that journey, it won’t be the same without him.  But Lisa and I have decided that whenever the ‘big question’ comes up, we can watch Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life because Dad loved Monty Python and we think that, in his absence, he’d find it perfectly fair for those guys to stand in as his proxy.

Camelback

Are we buggin' you?

Meet Millie and Unum, my year 2000 Millennium Bugs. Remember all the hoopla back then? The impending doom? The desperation to withdraw all your cash? Buy bottled water? Stock up on canned goods? All because the Y2K bug would bring down the system, crashing computers all over the world when the clock struck midnight New Year's Eve. Well, not much happened that night, but soon after I did get these little smiling gals on sale. Thirteen years later, after Millie lost her left antennae during a fall, I initiated a relocation from out in the sun to a safer, greener, more shady spot fit for a couple of teenagers. Millie and Unum are now becoming part of the house with vines and tree leaves twisting and curling around them,

 a la Angkor Wat,

where the trees almost gobbled up these two wild adventurers (Amy and Shana).

Maybe in a thousand years, when the trees have taken over my house, the bugs will be here, smiling still. 

Just Peachy

It was the Instagram peaches that did it. For weeks I'd resisted the lovely photos of goats and herbs and even caramels, figuring finding time on a Thursday morning to get to The Simple Farm, even though it's about seven minutes from my house, was just too, too, I don't know, I've had a lot of other stuff going on. I called in late to work, put on some sneakers and hit the farm for the first time in over two years and this morning, with slices of local, seven-minutes-from-my-house-local, peaches on top of homemade granola from the farm, too, I sat outside by the pool for breakfast and could swear I heard some goats.

Big Surf! Legend City!

What a fun trip down memory lane! Catching the big waves, the water slides, the log rides and the old, old Tempe photos. 

And, who knew the Tempe History Museum was so cool?

O'Canada

Next up...

La Cucaracha

Cinco de Mayo 

Ole!

Venus in Fur

Ohh la la! Fantasy or Reality? Goddess or Mortal? S + M, oh my. Those guys at AZ Theater Co hit it out of the park with this one - a marathon performance, extremely racy for little ol' Phoenix at the matinee. Loved every minute. Still here for a couple more weeks. 

Cinco de Leslie!

Back in the big house!

May Day! 

Kegger, hot dogs, toes in the pool, Cards Against Humanity and a big ol Ole! to kicking off the summer in style.