White Sunday,
Waiting.

Where is my
Jamie?

The city was changing me… At some point, I began to believe in extreme wealth or extreme poverty. It was as if New York were a third world country complicit in its own military dictatorship. While people were ambitious, they accepted their fate in the hierarchy just so they could watch the truly rich make fools of themselves in the “Post”…God, where was my place?

I am one of six ladies featured in yesterday’s “Fashion Week Daily” Blogger Pajama Party photo spread. Just to fill y’all in a bit, “FWD” is one of the bibles of fashion big wigs and well dressed New Yorkers during the Big Apple’s Fashion Week. The mag also just happens to be the in-house hot read at Conde Nast’s 4 Times Square building—home to such fabulous magazines as “Vogue,” the “New Yorker,” “Gourmet,” “Vanity Fair,” “Glamour” and “Esquire”…just to name a few.

While my picture is absolutely horrendous (I’ll placate my wounded ego by posting a nicer picture here), the shoot was a fabulous foray into a New York City that had heretofore only existed in my dreams. Champagne, room service, handsome fashion photogs–who couldn’t get used to that?!

In the article, we divulge such little tidbits as why we began blogging, what we nibble on while typing away our thoughts, the perks we’ve received (ooh la la… ummm, actually, no perks at all) as a result of our Z-list celebrity and where we like to kick back, unwind and have a glass of over-priced bubbly (I’ll take a “Cipriani’s” bellini any day of the week).

Thank you to my wonderful audience, for caring and reading about this Southern gal’s misadventures in the big city!

What really happens when you settle down? Certainly, the champagne and caviar can’t last forever… Come on, tell me the truth. If y’all don’t, well… My single girlfriends are dwindling, my sisters are married—I’m afraid no one will tell me the essentials, the things I don’t want to hear but must. Everyone gives me a different story: good and lovely or nasty and ugly, uplifting or gut-wrenching, complete or broken, unbearable or joyous. In vino veritas? Fine, I’ll send each of you a bottle or two of wine, just please tell me what goes on behind the dense, seemingly impassable, mahogany doors of matrimony.

I want to know the truth about looking at your partner and feeling complete, turning on your side at night and not wanting them to touch you, catching a glimpse of them across the room at a crowded party and wondering how the dear Lord bestowed you with so many blessings, kissing them goodbye at the subway platform and wishing they would never come home… Is it really that good? Do things actually get that bad?

You make me so sad sometimes. Love should never be sad… Tragic, maybe, but never sad.

“What do you want to do for the rest of your life?” I ask him, taking a long sip of Nebbiolo. I’m digesting the delicious creature in front of me as well as his dinner.

“Cook for you,” he responds without hesitation.

“Come on, what do you really want to do? Head a 5-star kitchen? Be a Food Network Star? Do an Anthony Bourdain and travel the world in search of the perfect meal?”

“Why don’t I fix you the perfect meal? Hmm?” he says leaning back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. “I’d do something fresh and unpretentious and, well, PERFECT. It’d be me on a plate.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Wanna know the best part? The next time, we’d do it together. We’d recreate the passion and flavors—”

“—honey,” I say, rubbing the back of my neck, feeling my cheeks flush.

“Uhhum,” he clears his throat impatiently like he does when he’s onto something, “Like I was saying, we’d recreate the passion and flavors, then write it all down, bind it between two hard covers…”

“Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world…”

“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought; “anything at all…” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”

Last night, I crossed that same bridge, marveled at the beauty and remembered that I left behind a warm kitchen, the love of my life, my mother’s quiet tears over our loss. Back to business as usual. Wild promise, mystery and beauty beckon…