Three little words

I know what you're thinkin'. But I don't write ballads, you know me better than that by now.

I was up on the hill behind the house today. A fiercly cold breeze made my nose tingle. I dug my hands deep into my pockets. It is undeniably that time; when those three words start to define what I know about life and family. Or at least, they do around here, on this hill, and on a few others atop which I've perched.

Emotion seems at times to be balanced on three little words. I'm not here to judge whose words are right and whose are wrong. All I know - which I have clearly established here is little and fleeting - is that there are about a million words and a lot of intonation all of this centering on the indefatiguable and highest pedstal of human wordiness - I love you.

High school is with me so vivdly in many ways. It was there I learned that a girl walking across E-Wing with a tall kid in a lettered-leather sleeve jacket, her smile seemingly the width of the span of a bridge, had heard the happy side of three words. Another girl, arms crossed at her chest, eyes to the floor, and back to the lockers in K-Wing was on the wrong side of three-word paradise. I watched the smallest things make and break; speak to your soul, define your memories, make you resolute. It still awes me what three words uttered thoughtfully or carelessly can do: Change a life, move a mountain. Or just not.

The words that those high school couples surely passed, while throwing around the optional fourth verbs -the dredded 'don't' or reassuring 'do' - can't all be wrong. After all, I have come to define a million moments with my own girls in the same terms: I love you. Certainly those three are powerful and moving, but they are anything but alone in meaning or synonyms.

This is my kid brother, who I love and because of this I know there are three words just as powerful; equally as defining and irresistible. There is no truth to "I love you," being the most moving phrase encountered by the human heart. After all, it depends on the heart.

I don't know about you, but as the family ski holiday over New Year's approaches, I know there is a phrase just as likely to cause us to move too far too fast, blaze inadviseable out-of-bound routes, carry on loudly, saying things we shouldn't, landing in a wreck of twisted humanity on our Mama's doorstep begging for help, her hot chocolate, and sympathy, all the while still arguing our rightness and swearing to even up the score as soon as we're healed.

Those three words, completely irresistible to the human heart in our world are not I love you. But they move us just the same, and as I think about it now, they are a familial translation of the same sentiment.

Race you home.

I have yet to meet the human heart that can resist it's appeal.

Here's hoping you are raced to the pile on the doorstep this season. I will meet you there in spirit.

Blushing letters: Workhorses and Bad Girls

Blushing,

I need the workhorse dress for the season. Will you show me?

Much love,
Stephanie
Dallas

Stephanie,

So many workhorses for so many women; with luck yours is in here. If it is the last, I will toast you tonight.

Wishing you great parties!

Warmly,
Catherine

Dior

Donna Karan Collection

Narciso Rodriguez

Andy & Debb

Halston

DVF

Disclaimer: The dress that follows has no business being here. It is no workhorse.

DVF

It took me a second to process it on paper because it was at once so fearlessly right and so categorically wrong: The softest black lamb skins tanned to be millimeters thin and trained into feminine movement grabbed me. Then so did the obvious presence of the closet renegade in the studio. That designer who took the country-club party dress notion and slapped it square across the face; Riotously cranking up all that baby soft leather in blackest-black, laser cutting it to shreds, and (sometime long after over-driving the fifth gear of childhood madras dress resentment) stitched it all up into something haltingly feminine but overtly bad girl.

(Note to the closet renegade: That must've felt good, huh? 'Cuz: damn.)

It is that last part which, when this dress steps into the predictably Tory Burch/ Nanette Lepore clad party it is headed to, will tip the balance between got-a-nice-dress and this-girl-needs-no-introductions. If a dress could be a good girl gone bad and come (tenuously at best) back, all the while fearlessly owning up to her scars and tendencies, this is her.

The girl in this dress prefers you not labor under misconceptions. At the split second her chin rose when the zipper reached the top of this dress, and she wiggled her hips gently to set the seams on her curves, she defined herself with perfect clarity.

While it may be no workhorse, the juxtaposition it declares for the woman in the dress is the unavoidable workhorse in her character - the "And Model of Identity" as it were - as coined unforgettably on these pages by LPC (right here). The girl in this dress came from conservative turf but she has taken it on the chin a couple of times. She has definitive texture and not just in her dress. She's packing an unburied hatchet in all that soft skin. Proceed with caution.

She can come sit next to me.

Don't bend

It is one of the most commented upon articles in New York Times online history. And it is no coincidence that the pen was long time friend and supporter of Blushing Hostess, New York Times contributor, author of Slow Love Life, and former House and Garden editor, Dominique Browning. Those who read Dominique, as I hope you do, know her grace is as fearless and meaningful as her pen.

When, on October 21, 2010, this byline - Fear of Flying a Long Flag of Rebellion - was published it seemed clear a storm was coming. It is the great unsaid thing among women: You will cut your hair as you age. It has something to do with seriousness and how whimsy is expected to appear on novelty sweaters from Talbots with honking big appliqued apples, but not, on your head.



I was thirty-four when, for reasons I had honed for a solid two days, I had my hair cut madly short, for me, anyhow. I had new babies. I was exhausted. It was summer in Florida. I was thirty-four for God's sake and practically dead or so the part-partum illogical thought pattern went. Anyway, Stevie - who always sported a bleached or blue pixie, took it off in long strands - just blond wisps everywhere. I watched it hit the floor with no emotion. It was time. But if, at any other time in my life I had seen my hair about me in hacked piles, I would have swooned.

It wasn't me. It was a mistake. I also am not honey medium brown in hair color and I don't care for curls. Also not me. But I have had to learn all that on the way to this place.



Once it was gone, other signs of my multi-faceted identity remained because you cannot hide from who you really are with the help of a shear.

Above is my hair as it was this summer when Nick revised my tattoo (calm down, haters). One small piece of ink, but that too figures into me - and an identity I adore. It is not at all an identity that was dictated and doesn't mean (to reiterate) that I don't know how to set a table, iron linens, or where the guest of honor's wife can pull up a chair at dinner, okay? They are just puzzle pieces, they don't mean I don't pray.

Life is so much more complicated than hair and ink, but it all builds a spectacular and singular whole. If you can just get up the nerve and time to go with it...

A month before I had my hair cut off, I sat in that same chair before Stevie and we listened to the woman in her mid-forties next to me explain that she needed to have hair like Kate Hudson's in color. She also couldn't cut it because her husband liked her best and was most affectionate towards her when it was long. Stevie and I both cringed: If he loves you, then he loves you. Who cares about your hair?

Screw him, we said to each other over a glass of wine later on. Because we - however unrealistic this may be in truth in some lives - believe that love sees no hair color or cut. And that we choose the style. Because, look, it will always inherently tie back to the woman herself, and consequently, to the girl he fell in love with, no?

So, I pick the poison. I'm platinum, and it is long and a little edgy at times. Not just because that is how I like to keep my hair but also because that's what you get. I don't like my hair to tell lies for me. I'm not sporting a bob and headbands, I want to keep it real. It's far more comfortable.

Dominique, by the same token, is doing the same at fifty-five years old. I am proud of her, but this is only one small reason. She took her stand, in the New York Times no less.

I capitulated to whatever sense society and exhaustion could be mashed together to make to settle on a decision about my hair while a child kept me up all night and our world took some pretty fast and harrowing turns. I've been on the mend ever since.



More or less, as you can see now, I'm there. I am also still kind of exhausted as you also note, but that is another thing altogether.

I'm keeping longish hair.

I've got your back, be fearless. Cut if you want to, but not because social more's flattened your resolve to maintain it. And not because someone else prefers it another way. Do it because you want to see someone you recognize in the mirror. And because she is beautiful that way.

I Tweet. Therefore, I read.

No joke.

The other day I was an unwilling victim to a man who insisted on explaining that "real men don't Tweet."



In that case - and following that unimpeachable logic down its weedy and dark path - it might be of some use to point out, especially to those giving gifts to the kings and queens of the social media game this year, that indeed, not only do real men Tweet, they also read. And promote literacy.

The Chardonnay and Pinot Noir made by Crushpad for Biz and Ev, founders of Twitter, Inc. under the Fledgling label made their way into my home this week as Blushing gifts. 100% of the cases sold will promote literacy. 100%.

These Hostess gifts are among the greatest I have known: In a class with the highway I was gifted, and the bottles of Absolute Boston for the Charles River Conservancy Charity.

I don't know what's in the bottles and I don't care. 1. I would serve it shamelessly to a table of hideous wine snobs and glare at them with daggers in my eyes if they chose to remark on its quality (although, knowing what I do, I can assume it is delicious). 2. I don't care if Biz mixed Concord grape juice and vanilla extract together and called it a Pinot - because it is the right thing to do.

It's on my bottle list now so don't come by if you're a real man who doesn't Tweet.



To you, Biz and Ev; real men who Tweet. Well done.

Order it here, by the palate.

I've adopted

This 2.7 mile stretch of Zulla Road in Middleburg, Virginia on John Mosby's Historic Trail is now clean, mannerly, and soon to be decorated with abandon.

You don't think the homeowners will mind, do you? Surely not.

It was literally a perfect hostess gift. I love it more than any other, ever.

Honk if you love the Hostess! I can hear you from here...

The Dark Bride

The movie Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows will be released this fall. The wedding scene featured in this picture is the most closely guarded cinematic secret of the Halloween season. The Los Angeles Times danced around the moment with costume designer Jany Temime here, it is worth reading. You will also find the typically darkly irresistible and arresting movie trailer there.

I can't help but wonder what that cake must look like; the fantasy of this series has been so accurate and compelling, what would do the dark trick there?

I digress.

Regarding Temime's comments: I have to hope it is not too light and confectionery. I like my weddings a little more dark, with a little more edge.

After all, I too was an October bride.

Just a nuance, but it's there

One piece of paper will make all the difference at dinner. Written in long hand on personal stationary, tapped into a spread sheet, scribbled on a cocktail napkin with a bartenders borrowed pen: It looms largest in the host's consideration. It will be the document on which the greatest party music was written or the first shot fired at an evening which will go down in unmerciful and memorable flames.

The guest list creates evenings we will never forget, and parties we try not to remember. I write from experience: I didn't get here because I do not have few scars from the great sport of Inviting. My engagement party, owning to the perfect lack of control of one person (who I well knew was careening party-train off course and pleading for a catastrophic drunken wreck), was, for my closest friends, an exercise in grace and meditation over cocktails.

This was an error born of misguided magnanimousness on my part. She is the wife of a friend, and we had witnessed her in action before in a glazed-over state of startled speechlessness, I suppose. I was nervous about her from the start and should have followed my instincts.

In the time that has passed, she is a persistent issue with regard to guest lists and chemistry. In perfect sobriety, she is one of the most deeply miserable individuals I have encountered. I have learned I cannot overcome her raging insults of other guests or her falling down drunkenness in the best of circumstances, but her grotesque bigotry and racism became apparent during that party as well, and she has never been invited back (to say the kindest thing I can of her, actually).

We often say how much we miss her husband. He was one of those people my Brother and I knew first in life and one of the best. But, sadly, this is the way it has to be. Please leave your wife at home is just not an option at the foot of an invitation. And we are years beyond the how did he end up with her? conversation. I do not write his name on lists any longer, I am unhappy to tell you. But it would be better not to have people over than to subject them to this person.

There are other names on guest lists when followed by other names, and still others, that present difficulties in creating a festive night for less obvious reasons than my example. The stories of how some names go together and then must be parted on a guest list are intriguing, fascinating, and sometimes emotionally horrific. By virtue of all that, many are glaringly obvious to the aware host if one gave it some thought. But some enormities of interpersonal conflict could easily be perceived as no greater than a nuance.

Nuance is the key to everything between human beings. As J.M. Barrie noted so wisely in the original text of Peter Pan, "It's not that it didn't matter. It's that didn't make a difference." You have no way to judge how relevant an old story is to those parties now, best to yield a wide berth to a thing that happened, but does not outwardly seem to make a difference.

For this reason, a good host has either the memory of an elephant or the record keeping ability of Thomas Jefferson. The host is the eternal keeper of old grudges and flames, dark facts, circumstances, controversies, occurrences, phenomenons, and statistics. Success at the party which manifests on an enchanted evening from the first scribbled nickname is determined by the grasp of history in the hand holding the pen.

Those are not just names on paper or bodies in the living room; They are mortals. While they bring a world of talents, experiences, and jovial conversation to the mix, they also bring the facts of mere mortality and human nature. An astute host holds a guests' scars as closely as their own and knows the fatal social flaws of all the dinner guests. One misstep, one careless invitation, and the night is laid to waste.

There are just a few people in this world whose hands I will not shake and across from whom I would not attempt to keep down a meal (aside, obviously, from war criminals, murders, savages and so on). I am reminded here of Pat Conroy's Beach Music, "I shook his hand, and I thought it would kill me." I know that ground so intimately.

To have arrived at the conclusion that I would sooner chew tin foil in a locked closet than sit across from one of my known scoundrels, I would have known the reprobate well at some point. As a guest, I am counting on the host to know as much and not to get me into that position. There is an inherent and critical sensitivity to sorting out relationships which have not mended if an evening is to succeed. When these differences are not obvious and the host is innocently clueless is when a guest may quietly beg off on a stomach ache and disappear into the night. Not that it will save the evening, just the guest from an uncomfortable situation.

It is not possible to know all the hot spots, but critical to try and recall that Kate is coming with her new boyfriend and consequently, it is unwise to also invite her ex and his new wife, and/or her gynecologist. If the party is smaller, no one has anywhere to go, conversation is guarded, and the night is a bust. Bring on the grappa, it is sooooo over.

Once all the divorces, bad investments, infidelities, and lies are sorted: It is my opinion there should be an artist, a musician, a pol, a lawyer, a horse trader, an adventurer, a war horse, a dryly amusing Brit, and a siren.

Now, that's a party.

Behind the music

"No matter how good the food or the wine or the music, if the people are dull, the party is a failure. And, when it comes to entertaining, beginning with a real liking for people is the best guarantee of success.

"If there is a single key, that is it.

"Neysa McMein will always be thought of as a great hostess. But I can't remember anything I ever had to eat at her apartment. Food was a matter of tremendous unimportance to her and to us - when we were her guests. What mattered was her gift for filling the house with gay, amusing people... writers, and theater people, and artists. Her special kind of warmth (everything at Neysa's seemed to turn into a game) kindled more life and spirit in all of us than we ever had any place else."

- Dorothy Rodgers, decorator and wife of Dick Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein, known for Broadway productions South Pacific, Carousel, and Oklahoma among hundreds of other scores and songs), in her musings in My Favorite Things (Antheneum, 1977)

Live simply. Let others simply live.

Tuber melanosporum. Translates to sexy brown thing in Latin and every other tounge.



Sexy dog: He's going to go get the brown thing. Thanks, pal.



Sexy French dog owner/ possible poacher/ believeable sales person.



Little more sexy now?



(Yeeeeeesssss, gimme those!)

Champagne Taittinger, Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs; I think you hear me knocking.

Shaved truffle. Olive oil. Fleur de sel. Taittinger: Don't muck up dinner for two at nine with actual food.

Pant quietly, Gorgeous Creatures.

The international incident

"... you're not going to believe this."

"Tell me."

"One of the guests put her finger in the dressing to taste it."

"Wait. Whaaaaat? In the actual dressing bowl or was it on her plate? The one on the buffet?"

"Yes. The buffet. And it had a serving spoon."

"What did you do?"

"I said, 'Really? Reaaaallly?' What else can you do?"

"Not sure. Did she like it?"

"I suppose so. She ate it, didn't she?"

And that is what was said between a colleague and I after an event hosted for a group of international visitors recently.

Once this happens, you would rightly pitch the whole dressing bowl and begin again because, frankly, eeeeeeewwwwwwwww: That about covers our collective thoughts.

The trouble in this instance however, was that it was an off-site catered event and there was no replacing the entire untouched bowl of dressing. The caterer was already gone. This woman was at the head of the buffet line, and all the guests behind her witnessed this lunch hour treachery in horror.

Now, one could do any number of things after swooning and being revived (and then once again remembering what happened and naturally passing flat out a second time - but anyway assuming you do, at some point, recover). I have thought of some options, maybe you have some thoughts too?

A. Pick up the spoon and stir up the fingertip germs and bacteria. When you are finished squeal with delight, "Yummmmm, delish!"

B. Using the serving spoon as a sword, you engage the perpetrator in a duel, landing her in her seat safely away from the buffet and presumably preventing her from "testing" any of the other dishes she encounters, all the while growling, "Back! Get back! Away!."

C. You pick up the dressing bowl walk it over to the trash and instruct your assistant to go decant some olive oil and vinegar ASAP.

D. Throwing the dressing to the floor while awash in elephant tears and wailing, "You... you, animal. You've ruined it! My lunch! My life! You filthy, filthy beast!" While waiting for the ambulance to arrive and administer oxygen which you will refuse as you dramatically flee the building with tissues clutched in both fists, you fling as many insults in as many languages as you can manage and advise her she will be hearing from your lawyer and to expect some papers arriving to her cave shortly.

Just loose thoughts of course...