You know that New Yorker cartoon by Steinberg, “View of the World,” where most of the frame is taken up by a view west from Manhattan toward the Hudson, and the rest of the globe — New Jersey, Kansas City, Los Angeles, followed by the Pacific, with Russia, China and Japan floating in the distance — is relatively tiny?
That’s me.
Well, I’m not writing from 9th Avenue. It’s a picnic table on a veranda under the plane trees in back of an Airbnb apartment on West 69th Street on which my laptop is set up.
I was on vacation last week, first in a hotel in graffiti-covered but boho-fascinating Soho, and then in beautiful — steamy, warm, green — western New York state, in the Finger Lakes town of Geneva, for the glorious wedding of Eagle Rocker Theresa Kelley and Dillon Buckley, her Amherst classmate, now married after a decade together. He’s the talented winemaker at Hermann Wiemer, and she works at that great estate too, and I am here to report that the only decent side effect of global warming is that nowadays it’s not just good rieslings that can be made in a northern clime — it’s extraordinary cabernet francs, too.
Wild and wonderful and elegant wedding — the celebrations stretched over days. The Thursday rehearsal dinner at the Buckleys’ Lake House on the shores of Seneca, the biggest of the glacial lakes, 600 feet deep and 38 miles long. The wiffle ball game in a park Friday evening after a repast of grilled white hots — think skinny bratwurst — that pitted West Coasters vs. East Coasters on Team Theresa vs. Team Dillon. Theresa led her squad from the pitcher’s mound. A softball legend as hurler for the Lady Dukes in college, she also has a mean overhand. Her father, Martin, my dear friend since elementary school in Altadena, led the team cheer when they needed some pep: “West Coast, best coast, no one gets hurt!”
The players were warned that they had to not, please, break a leg, as they were needed on the dance floor at the Cracker Factory reception after the nuptials.
More than 150 celebrants shook those legs at the party. Dinner scrumptious. Wines out of this middle-class world, as our colleague Patt Diroll so charmingly says whenever she’s at a good party. (Welcome, back, Patt — now that people are gathering again, her social column resumes in these pages.) And when the mother of the bride is the brilliant cook and cookbook author Jeanne Kelley, the cakes were quite simply the best wedding cakes ever — olive oil cakes, with raspberry frosting. Wedding cake you actually want to eat!
Then, when the Amtrak folks messed up our return train tickets, they made up for it by putting Phoebe and me in a sleeper car for the return to the city through the Hudson Valley. Not that we slept. But the peace and quiet was good, and lunch wasn’t bad, and seeing as I was on the clock, it was a fine room with a view of the big river in which to write and edit newspaper copy.
As an Austin cousin of mine says of laptops, they just put us working stiffs on longer leashes. But what a kick to be able to travel again, and I don’t mind the work. Masked up when we’re on the town? Yeah, we’re masked up — and vaccinated. Restaurants here are now doing the vaccine-passport thing. Great by me. And home follows me everywhere. Just went into the Trader Joe’s at 72nd and Broadway, and of course I had to tell the clerk the origin story. He had no idea Joe was a real person. When I mentioned he had recently died, the kid gave the lie to the notion of New York indifference: “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. Sweet. Alice, I’m spreading the word, 3,000 miles from home.
Wednesday at random
Brookside Golf Course honcho Dave Sams tracked me down here on the West Side — well, he texted me; again, the wonders of technology: “I have a great story. The lowest tournament score ever posted at our course was by a 12-year-old over the weekend. She shot 19 under par over 54 holes to win the Pasadena Women’s Golf Championship. I mean, the lowest score for any professional or amateur, men’s or women’s, in Brookside’s 96-year history.” I got a peek at the scorecard for Alice Zhao of Irvine — 63, 72, 67 — and as someone who plays the tough course weekly, I remain in disbelief. “She should quit middle school and join the LPGA,” a friend wrote. Well, no. She should keep killing it through college and then turn pro. But you heard her name here first.
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.
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New York diary: I’ll take Manhattan, and the Finger Lakes, too. Plus: Alice Zhao at 19 under - The Pasadena Star-News
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