I live my life a quarter mile at a time
and for those ten seconds or less, I'm free 💭
As I’m writing this, the city is being absolutely pummeled by rain. NY Metro Weather gave us our first 0/10 rating and like, he’s not wrong. But some of my coworkers rightfully said that the weather could certainly be worse. And it could; it could be a hurricane or a freakin monsoon or some shit. And so today’s newsletter title is a quote from the indomitable Vin Diesel reminding us to live in the moment and not always worry about what “could be.”
I thought about this as I was reflecting on the last week as everyone at work asked me how my trip to Vegas was. Spending 5 days with family is hard and I found myself actually excited to get home, but I didn’t want to share family drama with coworkers so I dug deeper and remembered that I actually did have a lot of good moments. In fact, I captured a lot of those moments in a little Substack Note I made last week in lieu of a newsletter post. Before this newsletter, I was in a pretty bad funk, so I posted monthly Instagrams highlighting the good stuff that happened during the month. It is very easy for me to spiral and sometimes I need to retrain my brain into not just latching onto the bad stuff.
So let’s all take a lesson from Dom and live in the moment. The past is past and the future is uncertain so all we really have is right now. Even if it is a 0/10 weather day, at least it’s a day that I’m here and drinking tea and snuggling with cats.
1. Noshing 😋
Before I left for Vegas I received this text from a friend that I simply could not say no to:
So instead of spending the night being responsible and packing for my trip, I took a bus to Clinton Hill and had an amazing fucking meal. Please excuse the terrible photos that will follow, I was much more focused on eating the food than worrying about aesthetics.
Theodora specializes in Mediterranean wood-fired food and follows the ever increasing trend of restaurants that offer small, medium, and large plates vs classifying things as entrees, mains, etc. Sometimes this makes me mad because I don’t know how to order and it makes me feel like I’m overpaying somehow. When the server tells me I need to order 10 plates, I can’t help but feel like I’m about to get fucked over financially. Theodora definitely didn’t solve this problem for me, but somehow everything worked out well enough that I was satisfied at the end of the meal and I felt like I’d paid a reasonable price for what I ate.
We started with the whipped ricotta sourdough and the second I took a bite of that, I had a good feeling about the meal. I’m a very on-the-fence about ricotta type person; it’s often chunkier and cheesier than I want it to be, which might just mean that I don’t actually like ricotta because that’s what it is. This ricotta, though, was so fucking fluffy and had the absolute perfect balance of tang and some sweetness from honey. I savored my personal serving of this toast (they cut it into 4 pieces for each of us and I appreciated that!) and it’s probably the thing I’d be most excited to eat again.
Of the medium-ish plates, we got the broccolini, which came covered in manchego cheese and tossed in a basil-dill dressing. I’ve learned that Lorenzo will eat broccolini as long as it’s covered in enough sauce and cheese, so that’s honestly progress. We also got the Octopus, which was cooked fucking perfectly. It came swimming (teehee) in a really tasty citrus sauce. The Black Cod was incredibly tender and was a table favorite and, surprise surprise, came with a delicious shallot beurre blanc. Honestly, most of the dishes here benefitted from the amazing sauces they were served with and if anyone from Theodora is reading this, I think you should provide tables with a complimentary pita basket so we can sop up all of the sauces. Just give us the bread.
If it were up to me, I would have ordered the large Lamb dish on the menu, but the table opted for the Half Chicken and honestly, I wasn’t mad. There was the thinnest layer of crisp on each piece of chicken and, once again, it came swimming in a green sauce that was garlicky and tangy and sweet and delicious. The chicken was also pre-cut into 4 big pieces which made sharing super easy!
While all of the portions looked small when they came out, they were each so rich and full of flavor that by the end of the meal I was pretty full. And when the check arrived, I wasn’t mad at the amount we paid! I did of course leave some room for dessert, so we walked over to Emack and Bolio’s where Lorenzo and I shared a scoop of their S’Moreo flavor. There is always room for dessert.
2. Watching🍿
I watched a total of 5 movies on my flights to/from Las Vegas last week because I am nothing if not efficient. I watched The Holdovers (excellent), Talk to Me (not as good as I’d hoped), Freaky (looked bad, expectations met), Call Me by Your Name (mostly good), and Fast X (good bad). I’ll likely write about a couple of these in coming posts, but today I want to write about Fast X.
The Fast and the Furious franchise can be a bit divisive at times and I’ll admit I didn’t give it much thought until I learned that Lorenzo loves the Fast movies. We would routinely rewatch the series, but generally stopped at Fast 5 each time because the movies after that sort of blur together as the story quality declines and the cast becomes bloated. Fast 5 is also where the series seemed to jump the shark for me until I learned that the safe heist scene was done largely practically 🤯 Seriously, read that article and watch the video. It completely changed how I view the series, and the 5th movie in particular. I do maintain that the movies degrade after Fast 5 as they veer more into action/superhero movie territory and less into street racing/heists, but Fast 5 is now the pinnacle for me rather than the downfall.
I mention Fast 5 because Fast X opens on that safe heist scene! We get to see that scene play out, but from the heistee’s perspective instead of the heisters. We learn that Jason Momoa was in one of the cars the whole time and he’s now dedicated his life to getting revenge on Dom for killing his father (tale as old as time).
This whole movie really feels like Vin Diesel’s swan song - it is nostalgic for itself. There are a lot of overly sentimental monologues and talk of “family.” I completely forgot that Vin Diesel had a kid in a past movie, somewhere between flying a plane and jumping a car between skyscrapers. So now this movie follows that classic formula of “bad guy destroys good guy’s family to make him suffer.” It is perhaps my least favorite movie cliche, but despite that I did mostly enjoy this movie.
The story was garbage, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re watching the Fast movies for the story, you’re doing it wrong. Watch them for the crazy car stuff and stay for the EDM music/booty shots that I can only assume are contractually obligated to be in every movie.
At some point a character says this line in the movie: “Everyone becomes family. It’s like a cult with cars.” And I think perhaps nothing has ever described this franchise so succinctly. We don’t watch the Fast movies because we want to, we watch them because we must. One day we were just watching for the silly races and now we’re enthralled and must learn which supposedly normal human being has somehow come back from the dead (a couple characters return in this movie!).
The movie ends on a cliffhanger bigger than Vin Diesel’s muscles and yet another line that could not be said in any other movie is uttered by Dom that somehow makes perfect goddam sense here:
You made one mistake - you never took my car.
3. What’s Good 😎
There’s a solar eclipse coming up on April 8! NYC is near the path of totality, which means we’ll see most of the sun blocked between 3:15-3:30pm that day. But don’t be a dummy and look directly into the sun because you’ll burn your eyes out, kid! You can pick up free eclipse glasses at a few different locations for safe viewing!
April is Earth Month and this year’s theme is “Planet vs Plastics.” I’ve scheduled a bunch of activities for my employees based around that theme and one thing I was surprised to learn was that our clothes leech a ton of microplastics - who knew! If you simply must have a new shirt for the summer though, why not attend a clothing swap? You’ll get something new-to-you and you’ll be supporting circular fashion; I love that for you. Zero Waste is hosting a Sip and Swap on April 18 and NYC Drawing Room is hosting a Clothing and Book Swap on April 7. I’ll be at Drawing Room’s swap this weekend - please bring some excellent black clothing that I can take off your hands.
I’ll be going on a Cherry Blossom walk this weekend with Wowza and the Central Park Conservancy and I hope my Cherry Blossom Guide has been serving you well! But let’s not forget that there are lots of other beautiful trees and flowers to be seen. Check out this map of Blooms in NY to see what else is popping off right now.
I met my friend Andy when we were volunteering for the Dessert Goals festival pre-pandemmy and I have yet to meet anyone else whose love for desserts runs as deep as his. He’s teamed up with Hadley Go Lucky and Lazy Sundaes to present an open mic night on April 20. Share your latest poetry, your musings, your writings of any kind. And be sure to preorder one of the banana brulee cookies because they sound amazing.
My favorite little plant shop, Little Shop of Soil, is hosting a coffee popup on April 7. One of the special brews involves kumquat syrup and coconut-pandan foam and I have never been more angry at my stomach for refusing to let me enjoy coffee.
I feel like there’s been an explosion of art cafes opening up in NYC and I am absolutely not mad about it. Brooklyn Renaissance joins the lineup with their grand opening on April 6 in Williamsburg. I can’t wait to visit!
And finally, mark your mothafuckin calendars for the reopening of Lady Moo Moo in Bed-Stuy! They are truly the most charming little ice cream window and they’re reopening on April 6.
4. Learning 🧠
My absolute favorite Christian tradition is when y’all hide rabbit eggs around your homes for Easter. I don’t claim to understand your traditions, but it’s one my family participated in for years and I’m honestly bitter that no one hides eggs for me anymore. However, there’s another Easter tradition that I’ve yet to experience: The Easter Bonnet Parade! It looks like such a silly goofy time and I’ve gone down an internet clickhole to learn more about it.
The NYC Easter Parade started as a spontaneous event in the 1870s and became increasingly popular into the early 1900s. In 1947, it apparently drew over a million people, though much less participate nowadays because we’re too busy mining for bitcoin or whatever. This parade is sort of unique in that it is only kinda sorta religious and its primary purpose seems to be to celebrate hats, bonnets, and headdresses of all kinds. The bigger and fancier, the better.
Apparently this all sort of began when churches would create elaborate Easter displays; for a time, Easter was about as big a commercial holiday as Christmas! This encouraged women to wear increasingly colorful attire to church and somehow spiraled into a full on bonnet parade down the streets of New York. After church services on Easter, folks would take to the streets and flaunt their fancy hats. Dress makers would attend and sketch whatever appeared to be in fashion so that they could replicate it themselves.
Wearing fancy clothes and simply walking around was cool before hipsters in Williamsburg did it though - it’s basically the whole reason The Mall in Central Park exists. And while paraders were generally wealthy folks who could afford fancy clothes, anyone could participate in the Bonnet Parade since it was never really organized by any one person or company.
While the Bonnet Parade is a rather goofy concept, it actually managed to elicit some legit protests and social change. The marching of people in fancy attire was seen as gross extravagance during the Great Depression and folks who were unemployed marched in raggedy clothing and carried banners drawing attention to the lack of compassion towards their cause. One banner “compared the cost of a single ladies’ gown to a year's worth of welfare relief for a job seeker and his family.”
Another strange “protest” that took place was in 1929 as Edward Bernays paid women to smoke cigarettes - or "torches of freedom" - in the parade. At that time, women were only permitted to smoke in the privacy of their own homes, so to see women smoking in public surely got folks’ knickers in a bunch. This actually caused cigarette sales among women to steadily increase for years and finally peak in 1977. Really interesting marketing strategy here.
Today, the parade is less an excuse to show off one’s wealth and more an excuse to showcase color, creativity, and humor through fashion. It’s a very strange little tradition that has persisted in NY and a couple other cities around the US!
5. Exploring 🛼
I’ve lived in NYC for over a decade now and have never gone on an art gallery crawl. I’ve been to numerous “official” museums in NYC, but I generally don’t stop in the little art galleries that dot the city. And it’s a shame because there’s a ton of them and if you’re lucky to be walking around on a nice day, it’s a lot of fun to dart in and out and explore something new. Over the weekend I met up with a Wowza group and we embarked on a Chelsea Gallery Art Crawl - it was fun!
We began our journey at David Zwirner, probably one of the more well known galleries in the area. I didn’t look up anything about the artists currently on view and was delightfully surprised to see some cool stuff inside. We entered into the Steven Shearer: Profaned Travelers exhibition which featured huge photograph-like images of people sleeping. I’m generally someone who likes context with my art, but this particular exhibition had none - no little plaques, no description, nothing. I think that might have been the point though? We were walking around and being privy to a very vulnerable moment in the subjects’ lives, made all the more apparent by how large they were and how small we were in comparison. They couldn’t hide their gaping mouths and their limp, sleepy bodies because they were so blatantly on display; it was the ultimate voyeur experience. Anyways, that was how I interpreted the exhibition, but you can watch this video to learn more from the actual gallery organizer.
We were about to go to the next gallery on our suggested Wowza list, but instead opted to go into a mystery gallery that looked cute and friends, this is what an art gallery crawl is all about! A Hug From The Art World called to us, and we answered. This gallery contained the cutest paintings and sculptures from an exhibition called SOCKO: Eye to Eye. Most of the work featured a character named Dough, whose wide-eyes can’t help but evoke a youthful innocence and nostalgic joy. Though most of the settings depicted in the art are fantastical, some of them draw from the real world - like the Rink at Rockefeller Center. And as a welcome bonus - this gallery had a lovely bathroom that we all used because we had been drinking boba tea for the last hour.
My first gallery crawl was an absolute delight and I emerged with some learnings that I hope will make your experience even better:
Know where your bathrooms are. Got2GoNYC’s bathroom map is an invaluable resource. This is really just a general rule of life.
One of my Wowza buddies told us about Thirsty Gallerina - an Instagram account that has roundups of all gallery openings happening that are serving dranks! Enjoy some wine while looking at art and meeting the artists. And then refer back to tip #1.
Go in with a plan, but be prepared to detour. I looked up the recommended galleries that Wowza sent and noticed that one had recently switched to appointment only. It was nice to have a solid starting point, but don’t be afraid to go off plan.
