Liz Under the Bridge

Cafe Colette

In case you've been sitting on the edge of your seat wondering, we're settling in to the new neighborhood quite nicely. There have been a few rough patches—no hot water, freezing cold wind, and a blizzard—but overall I'm giving Williamsburg a "thumbs up." (Okay, Williamsburg, you can relax now.)

One of the things that Williamsburg has all over Dumbo is great restaurants. Years ago, when we first moved to Brooklyn, I had this idea that we'd find a great restaurant and go to it regularly and we'd be, well, duh, regulars. I love the image: you walk in on Friday after work and the bartender is already mixing your favorite cocktail, the one he's named after you.

Well, it never happened. One, there aren't so many restaurants in Dumbo, and two, the ones that are there never really inspired repeat visits. Except Vinegar Hill House, but they were always mobbed and didn't take reservations. And, if you know the Under-the-Bridge spouse AT ALL, you'll know that he doesn't abide that particular scenario.

Okay! Those days are over. Now, the only reason we haven't settled in to a "regular place" is that there are so many good places and we feel compelled to try them all. But there's one spot that's carving out a special place in my heart already: Cafe Colette.

We wandered in first for breakfast and I had, no exaggeration, the best omelet I've ever had. The egg was ribboned with fresh basil; nice ripe avocado was nestled inside with just the right-sized dollop of goat cheese, and a perfectly dressed salad finished off the plate. Oh! And a most delicious piece of whole grain toast. With a lovely pat of butter.

Ah, Cafe Colette! You had me. But then you topped it with a most wonderful coffee and—are you ready?—a bloody mary to die for. We ventured over the day after the blizzard and were so happy to find them open: a cozy lovely lunch in a cozy sweet cafe. So far, Cafe Colette, you are at the top of my list.

Cafe Colette
79 Berry Street
Brooklyn

Fa la la la la . . .whatever.

(my chorus!)

I wrote last year about how much I adored the movie and the live concert version of Young@Heart. For those of you who don’t know them, the Young@Heart chorus is a bunch of really old people (seriously old) who sing songs from an only slightly younger generation. Think 90-year-old lady singing The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” and you get the general idea. It’s actually incredibly moving. If you haven’t, rent the movie as soon as you finishing reading this post.

After seeing them in person last year, I was determined to join a chorus myself. I found The Brooklyn Community Chorus through a co-worker and was immediately drawn to them, mainly because there were NO AUDITIONS. It’s been a hoot and a half each week to rocket back to some of my happier high school moments in chorus with vocal warm ups, and singing Handel and reading music and, well, all the fun stuff that’s involved with being in a chorus. How wonderful it sounds when all those voices are singing! And chorus people are sort of preternaturally friendly.

But, now, well, gee . . . I’m sort of over it. First of all, since we’ve moved, it’s now a bit of a commute to get to chorus practice each week. Plus, it’s COLD outside, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m often not back until like 10:30 on Wednesday night, and, ahem, I’m kind of usually thinking about bed at 10:30, not just getting off the subway. There’s a big part of me that thinks I should stick with it, just to show I can. But another part feels like “okay, check that off the list and move on!” Is my attention span that short? Am I that lazy? Or is it perfectly okay to say it’s just not working for me right now?

Under a new bridge

Okay, perhaps I have asked for forgiveness and pledged to be a better poster a little too often. This is all beginning to feel like school, when I would again and again absolutely swear that this semester I'd be good and do everything on time—no, early!—only to watch all my good intentions slowly unravel.

Well, here I am, once again, swearing to be better and offering up excuses. This is a good one, though—I swear!—I have officially moved. Luckily for the integrity of my blog name, I'm still sort of under a bridge. I've relocated from the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge to sort of the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. (That's it viewed from my new window, above.) I have been a bit nervous about this new venture into the land of hipsters and Williamsburg, but so far, so good. Under-the-bridge spouse and I are settling in quite nicely and I'm happy to report that there appear to be many fun things to write about in the future. This bodes well for the blog: lots of restaurants and fun galleries and good walks, etc.

And, it's been a busy fall for many reasons: I've joined a chorus and taken a cooking class and, well, lots of fun stuff and will report on those in upcoming posts.

So, I'm back. And if anyone's still here, let me just say: This time, I promise. I'll be better.

And here's to a bright future in my new home.

Coney Island, Baby!

A huge part of my childhood was taken up with weekends at my grandparents' house in Long Island City. In my memory I was there every weekend. It's probably not entirely true—we all know how unreliable those childhood memories are—but regardless, I have an enormous store of memories that revolve around my grandmother. My sister's blogged about her (you can see a picture of her there), but, you see, my sister's considerably, ahem, younger than I am, so we have very different experiences of our grandmother. I had the good fortune of being the first grandchild, and Grandma had the misfortune of having a husband who was much happier sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of gin and a pack of cigarettes than seeing a show at Radio City Music Hall, shopping on Hester Street, or getting into arguments with fruit vendors about the price of plums. She needed a companion, and I was, I like to believe, a pretty adventuresome kid.

That's how it came to be that an inordinate amount of my early childhood memories take place looking up at Grandma Mariano as she took my hand and we set off for a day of adventure.

In retrospect, I kind of can't believe how lucky I was. Not many five- or six-year-olds have an energetic grandmother who's genuinely interested in them, and happy to spend a day going to the circus. And not many grandmothers were so interesting themselves, I'll bet. She loved to argue, didn't suffer fools, was always looking to sneak in someplace, break rules, steal a piece of fruit. (Or something bigger. Who are we kidding? She was a thief.) It was exciting, scary, and thrilling to be with her. And she made a delicious BLT and homemade raviolis. Jealous?

One of her favorite places was Coney Island.

So, as soon as summer hit, many, many Saturdays involved getting on the subway in Queens and taking it all the way to its end: Coney Island. In those days (yes, I know, I'm OLD), there were still subway cars with cane seats and ceiling fans, and I can recall with complete clarity the scratchy cane on the back of my thighs as we chugged along on that LOOOONG subway ride, and then ran to the beach to swim, swim, swim, ate hot dogs at Nathans and then maybe went on a ride or two before the long subway ride back, crunchy with salt from the ocean, and itchy with sand.

And somehow in all the years since I was a little girl at Coney Island with grandma, I never made it back. Never?

Until last week.

I finally went back to Coney Island to walk the boardwalk, check out the rides, and, yes, eat a dog at Nathans (this time with a beer).

We called our friends Roger and Randall, who happen to share the fine quality of being up for anything. Plus, we were willing to drive and it was a spectacular day.

The strangest things for me was how little I felt like this was the place I remembered. Amazing how our memories can seem so clear, yet in reality be so cloudy. Everything was oriented differently than in my memory, and, of course, things have probably changed a bit since 1970.

 

We headed for the Wonder Wheel, which seemed like exactly the right idea.

I mean, you HAVE to go on a ride at Coney Island, right? Especially if you're too chicken to go for a swim. And, if you're going to go on the Wonder Wheel, you need to GO FOR IT. Right?

Until you see someone cleaning vomit out of one of the cars and wonder, hmm, am I really the swinging type?

But we screwed up our collective courage and got in the swinging car. Except, I did have to say: NO SWINGING!

I'll admit. There was swinging. There was screaming. But most of all there was laughing. Now that we had been adequately swung, it was time for that dog. With fries.

And more wandering. Oh, how we amused ourselves:

And amused ourselves:

And then back home. Grandma might have called us all wimps for not swimming, but I like to thnk she still would have been proud. Next time: The Cyclone.

No more pencils, no more books . . .

It's September. And for the first time in 24 years, I don't have a kid who's heading off to school. In fact, if I count up all the Septembers that meant school, 42 of my 51 years have been back-to-school Septembers in one way or another. Now, I don't mean to imply that my son heading off to his third year of law school really impacted my September last year, but still . . . still, it was September, so schedules were shifting and studying was commencing.

Weird.

Now I could sit here and pretend that I'm feeling all nostalgic and weepy about the loss of putting together a packet of pencils and buying new notebooks, but the fact is I don't miss those days. I always felt a little sad when my kids were going back to school; I hated sending them into that judge-y world where they had to sit in chairs and follow rules and get into lines, and be subjected to other stupid, potentially mean kids. I'm so relieved not to worry about their grades, their homework assignments, lunch money, and new shoes. I felt compelled to volunteer and go to parent's meetings, and boy-o-boy did I cringe at that. Sure, there were plenty of nice moments, but I do tend to side more with the argument that great swaths of school are a waste of time, and many kids just don't fit. And don't get me started on those years when we were saddled with mediocre—or outright bad—teachers.

And now it's over. We all made it! Somehow, despite my negative attitude, I ended up with two kids who made it through, excelled in college (and grad school) and are now the good citizens the system was hoping for, so job well done, school! Don't let my door hit you on the way out.

Unplugged

So, our extended family just spent a week at a vacation house near a beach . . . grown kids and significant others, parents, siblings with respective families, yes, a whole messa people all in one house, and well, it was actually really nice. At least from my perspective. The Under-the-Bridge spouse and I spent most of the car ride back yesterday saying (with amazement) things like:

"That was really nice."
"Yes it was, wasn't it?"
"It sure was."
"Hmm. I have to say, it was nicer than I expected."

Well, you get the point. It was a pretty boring conversation. A friend once remarked to me that the best thing about being married is the car ride home after a party, and I do relish the great dishy rides during which the conversation is much more about what stupid thing someone said, or how drunk someone got, or how awful dessert was. But no such luck this time!

I don't need to bore you all with any more details, but I did want to note that I sort of unplugged for the week. I mean, not to any crazy extreme: I checked my email in the morning just to be sort of responsible, and I played scrabble with my sister on an iPad (she won), but other than that: no computer. No facebook, no blogs (reading or writing), no obsessively checking facts on wikipedia if someone off-handedly mentioned something about Mickey Dolenz being dead. (I was pretty sure he wasn't and left it at that.) It felt pretty great, I have to say. I was actually beginning to feel my brain untwitch, which was most satisfying. I've had that itchy-twitchy brain feeling too often lately, and well, I felt calmer than I had in a long time.

Of course the minute I returned I dove for my poor neglected laptop, which was all dead and sad, but I did come to the conclusion that we need to cool it, my little MacBook and I. It's been a little too obsessive lately, like when I'm watching a really interesting movie and wondering if I got any email.

The down side? I'm not looking forward to getting back to it: work, email, computers. I feel very rested. But here I am, and I'm sure I'll be all itchy-twitchy again soon. Sigh. . . .

Decorating 101

So, the Under-the-Bridge household is moving to a  new location in a few months (not to worry, still in our beloved Brooklyn, and under a different bridge, so phew), and I'm beginning to get fretful about the whole DECORATING thing. I've never been particularly good at figuring out what goes where, and if that swatch will really look good on that piece of furniture, or if that sofa is too large. And yet, I want to feel all settled and grown-up with furniture that's meant for the space we'll be in. To top it all off, our space has lots of windows, which is of course a good thing, but also deprives us of things like wall space. And if you're a decorating simpleton, a nice square room with lots of walls may be boring, but it's easy.

What to do? I sort of found the sofa of my dreams, but I can't tell if it will overpower the room it will be in, or if that's exactly the sort of thing that will work. I've made enough mistakes to be paralyzed by doubt when these big purchases come along. I've always wanted to find someone who could just tell me what to do, but I'm way too cheap for a full-on decorator. And for the most part those store decorators don't seem to have the chops.

Arg! This is  another example of the skills I assumed I would naturally acquire as my skin got wrinkled, and yet . . . ideas? I'd love some.

NaNoBloPoMo!

Phew! So I'm finally done with NaNoBloPoMo. Not familiar? Why, it's National No Blog Posting Month. It was quite the challenge, but I've done it! No posts for one whole month.

Okay, okay. I was just completely burned out writing every single day. It was horrible! At least for me—I hope any readers did not suffer as I did. So, back to some sort of moderation. Maybe once a week? Twice a week? Any suggestions? Do you self-impose deadlines? I realized that I'm not so disciplined without deadlines.

Anyway, it's August. It's not as hot and miserable as July. I'm feeling hopeful that this whole "middle-ground" thing is going to work for me.

Limits

Well, phew. NaBloPoMo is finally over for me. How did it go? Well, I gave up a bit at the end and thought of this great story that RadioLab did about limits. RadioLab is one of my favorite shows on public radio (you can download podcasts on iTunes). Anyway, this particular episode talked about the limits of the human body and mind, and focused on the story of Julie Moss, a college student who decided to try the Ironman Triathlon in 1982, one of its first years. She, quite unbelievably, with no real training, found herself in the lead and close to the finish when her body gave out. That's right. Gave out. She dragged herself across the finish line in a fashion that embodies the persistence of the human spirit. Watch:

Yes, that's right. She's pooped her pants in front of all those spectators and DRAGGED herself across the line. She actually went on to compete in even more Ironman traithlons.

Why am I talking about this? Because I thought about her last night when my fingers were paralyzed above the keys seemingly unable to come up with a single sentence that was worth posting. And a voice in my head said you don't have to do this you know. And, well, I didn't. Sort of felt okay, I guess, at the time, but it did make me wonder why I decided to fail (a little bit) at the seemingly simple task of just posting every day for a month instead of pushing myself to FINISH. But I'm back tonight to finish up, and part of me thought "well, just pretend like last night's non-post never happened." But that's not right either. Instead, I'll say that it was worthwhile to try, and for the most part succeed, with all those posts that led up to yesterday and try to see what I learned during June. So, here goes:

I did like having a goal and a deadline each night. It helped. But, I also stumbled a bit under the pressure and, as I noticed a few times, I'm more stubborn than I would have thought. What am I afraid of? Hard to say, but I think it's a general fear of a blank page (not uncommon) and a lack of focus. My next goal is to sharpen the focus of my blog a bit, look for what's working and what's not and come back in a week a few days (see, I'm trying!) a little stronger with a renewed vigor. (Please feel free to give me your two cents.)

Thanks for indulging me this month, and supporting me with your comments, and I hope you'll all keep visiting!

The Monday Joke

A man walks into a bar and asks the bartender, "If I show you a really good trick, will you give me a free drink?" The bartender considers it, then agrees. The man reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tiny rat. He reaches into his other pocket and pulls out a tiny piano. The rat stretches, cracks his knuckles, and proceeds to play the blues.

After the man finished his drink, he asked the bartender, "If I show you an even better trick, will you give me free drinks for the rest of the evening?" The bartender agrees, thinking that no trick could possibly be better than the first. The man reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tiny rat. He reaches into his other pocket and pulls out a tiny piano. The rat stretches, cracks his knuckles, and proceeds to play the blues. The man reaches into another pocket and pulls out a small bullfrog, who begins to sing along with the rat's music.

While the man is enjoying his beverages, a stranger confronts him and offers him $100,000.00 for the bullfrog. "Sorry," the man replies, "he's not for sale." The stranger increases the offer to $250,000.00 cash up front. "No," he insists, "he's not for sale." The stranger again increases the offer, this time to $500,000.00 cash. The man finally agrees, and turns the frog over to the stranger in exchange for the money.

"Are you insane?" the bartender demanded. "That frog could have been worth millions to you, and you let him go for a mere $500,000!" "Don't worry about it." the man answered. "The frog was really nothing special. You see, the rat's a ventriloquist."