The Lunch Report

Happy Halloween from a Scary Single Female

2011-10-31T14:23:00.000-07:00

Like most single women over 40, I don’t need to dress up for Halloween because my existence frightens people enough as is. Most people dress single women up in a variety of stereotypes that are far scarier than stock Halloween costumes for women. Who’s scarier, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction or a haggard old witch on a broom? Now you see my point.

Every day is Halloween (without the candy), as others invent identities for us that bear little relationship to reality: the ultimate third wheel; the crazy aunt; the obsessed career chick; the frustrated spinster . . .

Having always dreamed of achieving exceptional levels of social and cultural conformity, I find the limited roles available to me troubling. The fact is, society has designed very few characters for an older single female that I am eager to play.

The Third Sexual Wheel. Sometimes marital boredom becomes such that one is pressed to invite others into the fold, to stir a pot a bit that they have difficulty stirring with their own teaspoons (no, I swear that’s just a metaphor). Yep, I have been “invited” (if you call a friend’s husband showing up unannounced and nude in your bedroom an “invitation”) to a threesome under the auspices of a leisurely golf weekend in the country. Unfortunately, threesome is not a game I play.

Crazy Aunt. I think my nieces and nephews genuinely like me, at times, but they have also been raised to recognize that my life is somehow wrong. When I was 36, my 6-year old nephew declared gleefully that I was an old maid. When I turned 40, my 8 year old niece thoughtfully suggested that I was ugly as a witch and should have my nose fixed—you know you can’t take any company for granted when your own niece tells you that you need plastic surgery. I still wonder whether she would have reached the same conclusion were I married and there were someone out there who had managed to like me in a long-term sort of way, despite my unfortunate appearance.

The Husband Stealer. As spinsters, we must be decidedly lonely. Therefore, my married female contemporaries, we must be after your husbands. If my alleged fascination with your husband makes him seem more attractive to you, then great, but, truth be known, I have no designs on him.

Desperate for a Divorcé. He’s a bit broken from a prior marriage and age has tarnished the single girl’s eligibility. So, then, what better a pairing for the 40+ single female than a divorcé looking for a second wind. We may be tabula rasa when it comes to marriage but we weren’t born yesterday. I would rather reread last Sunday’s paper than spend an evening with one of those divorcés who drones on wistfully about his ex-wife, what a great husband he was, and most appallingly, how no wife has ever been more sexually satisfied. Putting aside the crudeness of broaching the subject of physical intimacy on a first date, if a guy has to tell that to a near stranger, could he even possibly believe it himself? Sadly, that too was a true story.

Mrs. Cougar Robinson. As a woman of a certain age, I am not prohibited from speaking with 30 year olds of the male species but there are implications . . . Cougar is the label if you speak with a man 10 years younger than you, even if just to ask the time of day. More than 10 years? Then they start singing “Mrs. Robinson,” even when ironically, you're not married. At this age, the presumption is that I have no, and have never had, any maternal instincts. Mrs. Cougar Robinson is just an unsated animal on the prowl.

Frustrated Nun. Single at this point means you’re either uptight and moralistic or abnormal (and perhaps all of the above). I confess I’ve joked about becoming a nun, but, then I saw the movie Doubt. Now that I appreciate that male priests can indulge in wine and other pleasures every evening while nuns are not permitted to advance beyond skimmed milk, I’m no longer willing to don a habit.

Obsessed Career Psycho. Ms. Career Psycho can be satisfied only through financial and competitive achievement. Even modern cinema still casts her as the ball-buster who can love only her resume and her bank account, like the Chief Risk Officer (played by Demi Moore) of the thinly disguised Lehman Brothers in the recent movie Margin Call. As the aging CEO Jeremy Irons explains her severance arrangement and the fact that hers is the head that must roll before the bank dumps a ton of toxic assets into the market place, she toys with the ring on her finger, her right hand finger. It couldn’t be the left because women like this do not marry or experience the same range on the emotional spectrum as her male counterparts.

At the end of the day, we’re really not that scary or extreme. We’re not trying to seduce your husbands, we don’t bite, and we don’t eat our young (or your young for that matter, because we may not have any). We’re a lot more like you than you think: sometimes we’re happy and sometimes we’re not. We get tired, hungry, lonely, silly, etc, just like you. So just remember, when you see all those ghoulish characters out and about this Halloween, they are probably far scarier than a single female over 40.

The "C" Word

2011-03-27T13:42:00.000-07:00

It’s been a few months now that I’ve been wrestling with the “c” word. Every now and then it surfaces in my mind and I shudder. Such an awful word. Such horrible images.

To avoid ambiguity (or innuendo), I am not referring to anything that rhymes with “hunt” . . . The “c” word rhymes with “dancer.”

No sooner had a friend’s father passed away from cancer than my friend Priscilla Worthington* announced she too had cancer. I wish she had given me a heads up—I was somewhat hung over from a Saturday outing when she confided the news at Sunday brunch. I can understand why she was taken aback when I asked if it was malignant (in my muddled state, I had insensitively confused the concepts of “tumor” and “cancer,” which really are profoundly different).

Fortunately, by the end of brunch, like truly hardened NYers, we managed to laugh—hard—about the “c” word. First, most obviously, was the fact that the whole process would lead to weight loss, the obvious goal of any NYC woman. I was envious. Then we analyzed other angles, including the time I would have to take off from work to care for her post-surgery (translate: go to kick-ass resorts in the South or on the West Coast to ensure an optimal climate and maximum pampering for her recuperation).

Of course, I was assuming that (a) anyone in corporate America would give a damn that a colleague’s friend had cancer and (b) she didn’t really have cancer. Wrong on both accounts.

Last week I tried hard to escape the office to visit her in the hospital only to remain trapped in a partner’s office running in circles over something he was too lazy to think through on his own for what must be the firm’s tiniest and most clueless client.

Trapped again the next day, I announced that I had a hard stop, because I was visiting a friend in the hospital who had cancer. He must’ve thought I was playing the “c” card because he immediately countered with the sympathy card (or was that empathy he was aiming for?). He digressed for all of 10 seconds about a family friend who had had cancer before trapping me for another few hours so he could resolve a matter before he left for vacation, thereby eliminating any possibility of my going to the hospital.

He may be a chump who earns little respect at the firm but he’s still senior to me so even the least valuable of his clients and his vacation will always be a priority over any friend or relative of mine with cancer. Ah, the warmth and support of corporate America.

Corporate America cares. It throws money at the problem, buying tables at benefits. It doesn’t matter if it’s solely because of the competitive instinct it incites,* companies support these efforts and they are to be lauded, don’t get me wrong. It’s just a shame that so few support giving time rather than money, which not everyone has to give in the first place.

It’s not until you spend some time up close that you begin to have a sense of what the “c” word is about anyway. You have no idea how fragile and complicated our carcasses can be until you see one that’s wounded and ailing. For example, I thought laughter might help, but post-op, even a slight giggle might upset the flesh that’s been torn apart and sewn back together. Laughter, like many other things, will have to wait.

What shouldn’t have to wait, however, is making the time to sit still and talk, which despite this being one of the most social cities in the world, is something we don’t do as well as we think.

And so, after Priscilla had left the hospital, I spent one evening at her beside. Fortunately, not even nine hours of surgery and a bottle of percocet could make her forget the importance of a glass of pinot grigio—there was a glass of wine in my hands within minutes of my arrival.

To pass the time and distract her, together with her family who were visiting, we reviewed and analyzed exhaustively the most noteworthy dating episodes and incidents from the past six months of our lives, inevitably concluding that NYC-based men are truly a troubled and troublesome breed.

By the time I left Priscilla’s, it was late, past dinnertime. So I slipped into a neighborhood pub on my way home to grab a bite and review the draft of a short story a friend was writing before heading to bed.

I wound up sitting at the bar, stuck between Duane, who kept telling me he loved me because I had agreed to edit a friend’s story (with such a low emotional threshold, I imagine he falls in love at least 4 times a week—how exhausting) and George, who was desperate to tell me about how he’d recently been dissed by a potential suitor. Was he looking for sympathy or did he think this was the best way to recommend himself? I kept my mouth full so I would be excused from any obligation to respond.

Although the sight of Priscilla’s fragility and the signs of the obvious pain she was in (before she slipped another valium) made me flinch, I’d take an evening chatting with her and her family, completely isolated from the hustle and bustle and general chaos outside, over the company of NYC men anytime.
Notes
*Some of you will remember Priscilla from an earlier post: http://penelopefrost.blogspot.com/2010/11/case-of-priscilla-worthington.html

*If you’ve ever attended a benefit with a corporate group, you know the first thing every one does when they sit down at their $15-20,000 table is open the program and figure out which organizations gave more.

Of Mice and Men . . . and Invisible Suitcases

2011-03-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

As I wait for winter to end and for life to begin, I keep returning to the same topic: Why am I still single?

As a girlfriend observed, until I’ve bagged a man, I’ll have no one to kill mice in my apartment. Hmm, not my immediate concern (nor necessarily my measure of a man), but I do appreciate her unusual perspective.

I’m not deluded enough to believe winter would be less depressing if I had someone special. Chances are someone “special” would exacerbate my cabin fever, compete for the remote control, and desecrate the toothpaste tube. Yet these aggravations seem like inconveniences I should be experiencing at this point in life.

Did I miss a turn? Am I wandering along the wrong life path? It’s fine if my path is “less traveled,” but what if my path is deserted and leads to a dark cave inhabited exclusively by trolls and other social pariah?

Despite many promising starts in 2010 (remember: 2.25 boyfriends!), 2011 has disappointed so far. As I approach the end of Q1, I am at a loss to explain Penelope’s poor results. The company’s fundamentals are still quite solid: reasonable looks; athletic; sense of humor; employed, etc. I’ve seen companies with far weaker fundamentals attract strategic partners and double their growth in just a two year period. But I guess I'm not a company listed on the NY Stock Exchange.

There was that one promising encounter in mid-January . . . I was approached by a handsome young man (yes, I still think 45 is “young”) at my local pub. Five minutes of conversation yielded an unprecedented number of coincidences: a former member of my golf club; friends with my college squash buddies; and resident in an apartment across the street from me.

Before long, I was basking in his attention. The late night emails following our impromptu drink didn’t hurt either (“That’s the best time I’ve had in a long time;” “I think you’re beautiful and sweet;” and, “Can I take you to dinner?”).

At last, I had incontrovertible proof that a man was interested in me. And he was a scratch golfer. It seemed too good to be true. And so it was . . .

There was no follow up, despite my accepting his dinner invitation. The acceptance hung out there awkwardly as a testament to our uneven expectations: his, a diversion to perk up his nightcap; and mine, an exciting new beginning to something/anything, which might even culminate in the first real date of 2011.

Most who have analyzed the incident have concluded that Scratch Golfer was not ambivalent about his level of interest in me but was probably married. Married? Only a dog would send emails like that if he had a wife at home! I’m not fool enough to believe men stop being dogs when they marry, but I thought they respected the borders of their marital kennels with a bit more subtlety. Apparently not . . .

With my one lead for 2011 gone, I pondered how I would avoid another decade of eating alone.

At this point in life (long in the tooth but not totally out for the count), people tend to form bonds based on their baggage. I don’t mean by whining over what’s flawed in their past, but by tactfully comparing select life-transforming experiences that felt gut-wrenchingly awful while being experienced.

By way of illustration . . . : a few years ago I invited a girlfriend to join me for drinks with a handsome Swede I’d been spending time with recently. Within three sips, I morphed from the object of his focus to an unnecessary third wheel, as he and my girlfriend swapped notes over their respective divorces. As they discussed the division of marital assets, their eyes lit up in shared understanding. I knew by the way they regaled each other with tales of ceding furniture to their ex-spouses that they were already imagining sharing certain assets with each other. I had nothing to contribute to this exchange. My baggage looked nothing like theirs and was clearly not worthy of discussion.

But what is Penelope’s baggage anyway? I see obtuse career decisions and some low grade anxieties, but that's the stuff of petite French handbags and silk evening purses, nothing like the large suitcases most of my contemporaries are carrying. No divorces, no ex-spouses, no stints in rehab, not even a stalker in my past. Have I been living under a rock?

The thing about baggage is that while we can easily identify others’, our own remains invisible to us. How can I make sure my baggage is neatly tucked underneath the seat (as baggage should be) if I don't even know what mine is?

Whether I like it or not, 20+ years living solitary—while others married, divorced, remarried, became felons or joined a cult—has probably left some scars that others can see and that I’ve never noticed.

Maybe my baggage is not as grand as it should be, but with some luck, maybe I have just enough baggage to meet a kind-hearted man with a large invisible suitcase and a good golf swing.

Being Dumped, On Television

2011-02-02T15:27:00.000-08:00

I looked out my window last Saturday and decided it was get-in-touch-with-ex-boyfriends season. I’m not sure whether it was the cloud cover or the temperature that tipped me off, but somehow I just knew.

So, I started to work my way down the list alphabetically. I was striking out. All of the ones in A through C were married with children so getting in touch would be awkward, and probably highly inappropriate from their wives’ perspective. I needed to respect the cardinal rule of intergender friendship for single female adults of this age: thou shalt not remain friends with ex-boyfriends unless they are also single and/or gay (which leads to interpretive challenges when they are heterosexually married AND gay).

A few letters later in the alphabet, I stumbled on the Evil Englishman. We had dated sometime in the 1870s, or so it seems, and he remains single, so he is safe (possibly too safe). Some of you will recall that I had an unremarkable lunch with him a year ago, a lunch that surprised me by how little we had to say to each other.* But, a year later, maybe he had become more interesting, or I had become far less interesting so he would seem more interesting in comparison.

So, I lobbed over a short email to his work address politely asking how 2011 was treating him so far. I immediately received a “Mailer Daemon” message. I scrutinized the error message for signs of obvious falsification. Truth be known, I have drafted false email error messages in the past rather than respond to someone with whom I no longer wished to be in contact. Cowardly? Yes, yet surprisingly effective.

The error message appeared legitimate. But how could he have left the bank he’d been at for 20 years? That bank was his life and he loved those trading screens like they were his next of kin (if he could have married an algorithm, he would have, but I suspect he would’ve been disappointed with their sex life). Only an assassination could explain this, although I recognize that fixed income derivatives traders are so rarely the subject of assassination attempts these days.

I launched a formal investigation and reached out to a friend with a Bloomberg account so she could sleuth discreetly on my behalf. Bloomberg is like Facebook for traders, except that it’s essentially mandatory for those living in “real time,” like traders (lawyers tend to live in “unreal time” where they tell a client they will send a document “shortly,” only to produce it days later . . .).

If the Evil Englishman weren’t on Bloomberg then clearly the assassination theory, no matter how far-fetched, was valid. My friend typed, searched, and found . . . some odd news. Within minutes she was able to pull up a story, which had appeared just 20 minutes earlier, confirming not only that he had left his senior post but that he had learned of his own departure the day prior thereto while listening to a “breaking news” segment on CNBC. Ouch!

We’ve all heard friends’ horror stories about being dumped by voicemail or email, which stings, but being dumped on public television must be devastating, not to mention uncivilized. As far as I know, only Matt Damon has dumped someone on national television (Minnie Driver).

Guys can break up in any medium because, well, they can. They incur no legal liability in doing so. There are no laws that govern these types of transactions. It’s generally a bit tougher for banks to do this, even if an employee is “at will,” because there are reputational concerns at stake as well as potential liabilities to address.

His bank was walking away from a 20 year commitment and couldn’t even muster the decency to alert him in advance. Isn’t this something HR could have done? Maybe that’s why guys tend to break up over email and voicemail nowadays—they have no HR department to do the “in-person” job for them.

Later in the day, a spokesperson for the bank denied the story, but “Business Insider” explained that it would keep the story posted because it had been communicated to them by a “friend from work” of the Evil Englishman, which introduced a new level of indecency. Which is worse, the fact that your employer allows your termination to leak to public television through its own sloppiness before telling you, or the fact that your “work buddy” (who has inevitably been described as “collegial” and a “team player” in his 360 degree review) chose to share this delightful anecdote with the press ? What a swell friend. Left me wondering about my good friends in the corporate world, or is there such a thing . . .

How implausible that a white shoe firm that prided itself on its elitist standards for over 75 years should discard of top talent in such a crass manner. Then I recalled the Evil Englishman confiding in me a decade ago that he thought his bank was “headed to the shitter” (which sounds far less vulgar with a British accent). Had culture in corporate America, even in white shoe firms, decayed so dramatically in just a decade? Were their white shoes now muddied by greed for a quick profit, or had their shoes always been filthy but it was easier to hide a decade ago, when the Internet was still in its infancy and Wall Street press was easier to control?

Notes

* http://penelopefrost.blogspot.com/2009/11/lunch-report-x-lunch.html

Survey of Winter Blues Management Techniques

2011-01-21T10:05:00.000-08:00

Penelope has been somewhat reticent lately (hence the infrequent Lunch Reports)* as she struggles with the increasingly groundhog-day-esque feel of her day-to-day existence. Wake up, dress (yet who cares what wear this time of year), work, lunch (always within the $3 limit), sunset (gone already? Geez), 5 mile run, more work, feed cats, dinner, inhale glass of wine (or several), watch Golf Channel, sleep . . .

Every year, about this time of year, winter stands tall before me, a menacing presence that promises to impose itself for an unbearably long time. It doesn’t matter whether it's 60 degrees out or -6 degrees, because there's still over 8 weeks to go and during that time the weather is sure to fluctuate and frustrate beyond all reason.

And each year I explore new ways to push back the winter and maintain a convincing smile in the dead of winter.*

One year I ran through the winter, in complete denial of the cold and its effects on me. I wound up with walking bronchitis, but, thanks to all those endorphins sloshing around and working themselves into a happy lather, I also got through the winter with cheer and was absurdly fit when spring arrived.

I’ve never understood folks who extol the change of the seasons. I don’t need winter to appreciate summer. The contrast does nothing for me. Summer could last all year long, although I don’t mind the fall and spring stuff that nature tosses in like an annual bonus.

There was the year I golfed my way through winter, booking a trip south every other weekend. My handicap went from a 24 to a 12 but my savings were cut in half as well. By March 1st, I realized I could no longer afford Seasonal Affective Disorder, or my means of coping with it.

The very next year, I dated my way through winter, with the assistance of the Internet, of course (who has a deep enough bench of friends that they can field a new set-up once a week without some cyber assistance??). This was the winter of my real discontent. It produced myriad enduring stories but not a single male who endured beyond a first date.

Yet another year I entertained a scientific approach, enhancing my daily exposure to natural light by leaving my bedroom curtain open.* It helped, until the open curtain introduced my feline roommate to the pigeons perching outside my window at dawn each morning, in turn prompting him to hurl himself at the pigeons to kill them and protect his master from the wicked birds defecating indiscriminately.

No matter how many times he repeated the exercise, sadly, he couldn’t understand that a double window separated him from his prey. Convinced he might suffer brain damage as a result of blunt windowpane trauma, I eventually closed the curtain and returned to the dark.

I continue to explore new techniques for blues management but what should Winter 2011’s project be? What can I entertain, or what can entertain me, so that I forget winter has arrived and won't loosen its grip on me anytime soon?

I’ve already solicited advice from select friends, whose suggestions range from becoming a Christian Scientist (it may make more sense to attend my own church more frequently before switching religions altogether) to rekindling my stale passion for skiing (why pay to be cold when I can stay in NYC and freeze for free?). Now I’d like to put the question to a broader audience.

What can I do to confront those recalcitrant moods and make them yield more gracefully, if not effortlessly? Even the treadmill has become tired of the unrealistic expectations I invest in it each time I step on for another run.

And how will I know if I am successful? Each day I fight harder, but am less certain of any discernible progress. Perhaps my standards are too high, because when I asked a close friend whether I was winning the fight against the blues, she assured me that if I was alive and still able to ask the question, I was winning . . .

So, Penelope is inviting her readers to write in with suggestions for managing the winter blues and to share success stories of overcoming the demons that rule many of our winters.

Penelope

Notes
*For those new to The Lunch Report, please see http://penelopefrost.blogspot.com for back issues.

*See “Happy Meals for Sad People,” http://penelopefrost.blogspot.com/2009/10/lunch-report-happy-meals-for-sad-people.html

*Exposure to natural light is just one of many techniques recommended for managing Seasonal Affective Disorder. See, Avery, DH; Kizer, D; Bolte, MA; Hellekson, C, “Bright Light Therapy of Subsyndromal Seasonal Affective Disorder in the Workplace: Morning vs Afternoon Exposure,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica (2001)

Christmas at Canyon Ranch

2010-12-26T15:00:00.000-08:00

As a result of a variety of recent stresses, including a bout of bronchitis, I opted for a solo Christmas this year at Canyon Ranch in Miami Beach, Florida.

I was so excited at the heightened sense of well being waiting for me in Miami that on the day of my departure I moved my flight up from 7pm to 4pm.

Upon arrival I couldn't ignore my disappointment. The other Ranchers looked suspiciously like me, average and aging. I was anticipating spectacularly fit folks who would shame me into taking better care of myself. Determined to make this a life-altering experience, however, I pushed the negative thoughts away. Tomorrow I would attend all sorts of soul-transforming classes, including yoga, pilates and something called Buff Ballet Booty.

I woke up the next day eager to start my new life. I sauntered down to breakfast and ordered some banana bread. The micro-serving was quickly obscured by a sugar (organic) wrapper I'd discarded, so I politely summoned my waiter to ask when my bread would arrive. He pointed out that my bread was in fact there, all 160 calories of it. Wow, that's breakfast? No time to fuss-mustn't be late for pilates.

Having taken a pilates class only once before, I am no expert but it certainly didn't leave me with any hope that I was firming the amorphous zone of flesh that had gathered around my midriff in the last few years.

As I left my pilates class and passed the pool, I overheard a teenager asking an instructor whether he knew any Burdenko* instructors in St. Louis. A light went off. This is a paradise for those who aren't already spoiled by NYC, which has one of the most diverse proliferation of "fusion" classes in the world. You want Yogilates with a Capoeira* influence taught in an Bikram* temperature studio? You can find it in NYC.

After pilates, I tried Vinyhasa yoga. I've long been fascinated with the tyrannical influence of yoga in America, forcing shame on anyone who can't touch their right toe to their left ear. I wasn't sure I saw the point but I dutifully did my warrior pose, the downward facing dog and the half moon. I disobeyed my instructor's command to heighten my sense of self-awareness, instead staring at the ocean, wondering with which children the Dr. Seuss books I had donated had wound up (would Green Eggs and Ham change their life as it had changed mine?).

We closed with "namaste".* I was supposed to feel enlightened but I was depressed I could no longer wrap my left leg around my right ear like I one could.

After I stopped in the grill room for a "proper lunch" of seared scallops and salad. According to the menu, which meticulously lists calorie and protein content for each dish, this was a 170 calorie lunch, roughly 10 calories per dollar.

I was so satisfied that I put my fork down, fled the compound to the nearest grocers and bought some cheddar cheese, rice krispy treats and diet coke. Finally, I was beginning to feel that rush of "elevation" yoga was meant to evoke. With a blissful buzz from the diet coke working its toxins into my body, I cuddled up in a chair under the sun with Andre Agassi. I had picked up his autobiography (finally available in paperback for non-Kindle folk), "Open," in the airport and we'd been inseparable since JFK.

Slowly, I was changing my Type A game plan. I had planned a spiritual boot camp for myself only to realize I could do this in NYC even more easily. What I could not do in NYC was read on the beach or run up a tab at The Delano Hotel.

And so, on Christmas day, I implemented Plan B. It was beginning to feel a lot like Christmas . . .

I spent the entire morning in bed with Agassi, rapt and inspired. When I was too hungry to read about the dissolution of Andre's marriage to Brooke Shields, I headed straight for the nearest Cuban restaurant and ordered something called "Sazon Ruedas de Serruco," fried filet of kingfish. Calories? Too many to count. Cost? About one third of what I was paying for lettuce leaves back at the Ranch.

Later I went for a run. What a change of scenery. The endless blue and green Ocean. Feral cats darting in front of me, breaking my stride. Carts of empty soda cans being pushed by cheery homeless men who, strangely, looked more fulfilled than most of my fellow Ranchers. It was welcome chaos after the excessive order of The Ranch.

By 8pm, I was ready for The Delano. Off with the spa pants and on with the Levis . . . It was time to really "be present."

Each person shapes his or her own path to spiritual satisfaction. As it turns out, my path does not involve denial, counting calories or focusing on my self. It involves festive Cuban restaurants dripping with grease and cheer, making small talk with strangers at The Delano, downing oversized gin and tonics poolside and making drunken calls to friends and family.

Merry Christmas and Happy Boxing Day

Penelope

Notes

*Burdenko is a water workout designed by Igor Burdenko that emphasizes balance, coordination, flexibility, endurance, speed and strength. What happened to just jumping in and splashing around?

*Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian art form that combines elements of martial arts, music and dance.

*Bikram is a style of yoga practiced in a heated studio.

*Namaste, typically said while bowing, derives from the Hindi for "let there be a salutation to you." It is typically pronounced by both the instructor and student at the end of a yoga session, often to the complete befuddlement of a yoga neophyte.

The Joy of Being Dumped

2010-12-01T10:19:00.000-08:00

It’s not winter yet but, for single people, socially, winter is already here. Winter for a single person has nothing to do with temperature and snow, although the lack of sun light can certainly aggravate the harsh climate.

Winter is that hopelessly long stretch of weeks (which feels like 70+ weeks, even if the calendar claims it’s shorter) when the days end early, drinking begins early and the absence of a significant other is felt so much more acutely.

No one with whom to share the burden of social “opportunity”—the endless string of holiday parties at which you pretend to be upbeat (must be polite, for the sake of your hosts) as it becomes painfully obvious that you will spend another New Year’s eve, another Martin Luther King weekend, and another Presidents’ Day weekend by yourself.

My readers may have noticed that this time last week I was not single. That’s right, Penelope was dumped, just in time for the holiday season. Excellent timing.

The phases of recovery from a break up generally parallel those following a death, although I would never pretend it is a loss of the same dimension. Based on what I’ve read, the stages involve denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

This is a daunting agenda, and based on past experiences I recognize I excel at depression but fall short when it comes to anger and/or acceptance. But I guess I better get to it unless I want to spend the rest of my life with a leopardcat who can’t stop urinating on the couch.

I once read The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale so am hoping that if I manage the process effectively, there could even be significant benefits, including:

*Workaholism. An excessive focus on work is a common outlet for someone experiencing a romantic rupture. Having just experienced my lowest billable year ever, this sounds like a win-win for me. Let us just pray there is enough work to feed the sense of workaholism I hope to nurture in the coming months. I do notice that drafting documents and handling conference calls have seemed much more rewarding than sleeping or eating in the last 24 hours, so this is promising.

*Weight Loss. Clearly this is the season of weight gain. Yet, by timing my being dumped as judicially as I have, hopefully I will have created the perfect counterforce to weight gain—if I can just milk it long enough so I remain as depressed and uninterested in food as I have been in the last 36 hours. Based on my estimates, I should be able to lose all the weight I gained hanging out drinking and eating with the Naked Man, and maybe even more by New Year’s, which I will obviously be spending with the leopardcat dreaming of a different life.

*Financial Savings. One of the upsides of the depression that ensues from being dumped is that you’re far less likely to exceed your budget. This is because (1) you have no desire to go out and socialize, hence the restaurant and taxi bills goes way down and (2) you feel crappy about yourself so the last thing you’re going to do is go out and buy clothing—better to hide behind the frumpy look of your existing rags.

*Kitty Litter Replacement. One of the first tasks that seems to fall by the wayside when Penelope is happy and frivolous is changing the kitty litter. Now that there is no wind left in her sails, Penelope will have all the time in the world to focus on changing the kitty litter. In fact, maybe if she can combine this activity with the spirit of the first item above, she will become obsessive enough that she’ll arrive at work by 7am (having changed the kitty litter once already) and then run home at lunch to change the kitty litter again.

*Lower Golf Handicap. You may have discerned a thread in Penelope’s earlier communications, maybe not. She would very much like to be a better golfer but certain frivolities have distracted her from a greater calling. Now that the same question has been asked and answered for the umpteen millionth time (Question: Can I meet a guy interested in having a long term relationship with me? Answer: No), there’s not much sense in wasting time asking the question again. Time would be better spent focusing on things for which Penelope demonstrates less incompetence, not competence mind you, but less incompetence than in the interpersonal sphere. Far more rewarding would be an hour spent chipping than an hour spent showing kindness to someone who is likely to slap you in the face.

As I reassess the various net benefits of being dumped, I can’t understand why not everyone is writing Santa begging to be dumped for Christmas.

Happy Holidays.

Penelope

The Case of Priscilla Worthington

2010-11-27T10:17:00.000-08:00

I would like to share with you a recent NYC-based dating episode involving a good friend of Penelope’s (not a disguise for Penelope, I swear). This case study is based on the last five months in the dating life of Priscilla Worthington, a good friend of Penelope’s.

I met Priscilla’s new “man” (just wait, you'll see why I question his manhood) a couple of months into their relationship. Let’s call him Mr. Private Equity. He hails from a posh ‘hood in Newport, Rhode Island and collected a degree from HBS along the way (the mention of which, ten years ago, would have impressed me, but now comes across like an admission of HIV+ status).

So, I met Mr. Private Equity randomly when he showed up to collect Priscilla from an impromptu soiree we were enjoying with the Naked Man and another friend at Smith & Wollensky’s, the capitol of steak and testosterone in NYC. Private Equity seemed ill at ease in the environment and hid a bit behind Priscilla’s skirt. I didn’t want to tell her my initial impressions but I suspected Private Equity would have to break up with himself first before he could date anyone seriously, much less Priscilla, a tall Eastern European head turner with a wicked long drive on the golf course.

I held my tongue, recognizing that Penelope is not exactly a role model for healthy or long-term relationships (unless two months counts as “long term,” which sadly it may in NYC, the city of transient emotions and commitments).

I watched and I listened. The courtship progressed. Although he did not golf, he was an avid runner so he was at least health-oriented. Plus, they shared a love of the theater and they had already booked a New Year’s vacation to the Dominican Republic (before any incidence of cholera had been reported).

But then there was the evening we met for a shopping session at Bergdorf’s so she could shop for a “break up dress.” Some of you may be unfamiliar with the term, but a break up dress is the classy yet sexy dress one wears when one suspects one may be on the precipice of a break up. The theory is that he will see what he thinks he is about to discard, begin to drool, lose all sense of reason, be overwhelmed with torrid images of removing the dress and invite her away for a romantic weekend instead of breaking up with her. The ability of a female to cloud a man’s judgment has long been one of the most significant factors in the perpetuation of the human species, trust me.

Then there were more troubling signs: the weekend he disappeared to Alaska for a funeral, followed a few days later by another trip out West for a memorial service during which he remained incommunicado throughout; and his inability to hold his liquor (actually, any liquor). What was emerging was a stark pattern of incompatibility.

Yet it was still a surprise when at the tail end of a girls’ weekend in Palm Beach Mr. Private Equity and Priscilla broke up.

First there was the abrupt email. He sent her a scathingly critical email as we sat at a bar waiting to board our flight back to NYC. I was so stunned when she relayed the contents that I forgot to pay the bill. Fortunately, ten minutes after boarding, JetBlue re-opened the closed gate, delayed our departure and encouraged me to deplane so I could pay the bill (I really hope that $12 in revenue keeps that bar afloat).

One of the many complaints Private Equity leveled was that Priscilla had not given sufficient prior notice of our intended plans to grab a burger at our favorite burger joint upon returning from FL that evening. Not only was he horrified and appalled by the blatant spontaneity of the burger scheme, but he was truly disgusted by her suggestion that she would then meet up with him post-burger and post-wine. “Priscilla,” he responded “that sounds like a booty call.”

Wait, isn’t every American guy’s dream to have some chick call him up for a booty call? Am I missing something?

Despite his behavior, Ms. Worthington remained open-minded and agreed to meet up with Private Equity for dinner the following evening to sort out their misunderstandings. She planned her outfit carefully. Having worn the break up dress one too many times, she deliberately wore pants for this meeting—the denial of calves and flesh, the ultimate insult. I didn’t want to tell her, but she had been wearing the pants all the time, and had been the only one wearing pants.

It’s awful to be dumped, but to be dumped by a guy who is likely gay and constantly has relatives dying in Alaska is particularly harsh.

In retrospect the compromises Ms. Worthington made were too great, but when do we know where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable compromises? How do we navigate the grey area? None of us want to grow old alone so compromise seems like an obvious path forward, no? Maybe the fact he did not play golf was not grounds for immediate romantic dismissal, but short of non-negotiable behavior, like physical violence, how does one decide what is grounds for dismissal?

Penelope

Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T10:15:00.000-08:00

I'm sure you all noticed last week's Wall Street Journal article on the correlation between happiness and gratitude. Grateful people are happier people.

So, when I woke up this morning I immediately set to counting my blessings:

Today I am thankful for :

• The company and friendship of the Naked Man,

• A job in a challenging and fickle economy,

• A family in good health,

• A leopardcat that pees on the floor only in one part of the apartment but not every part,

• The fact that my house guest didn't think anything of the fact that I was too tired (arguably a euphemism for inebriated) to make it to my bed last night so slept fully clothed (with shoes on) on the pull out couch next to her,

• The country-wide insider trading investigation (which, frankly, is like Christmas arriving early for hedge fund lawyers), and

• All of Penelope's supporters and their comical and insightful responses to my "private blog"

Happy Thanksgiving from the Entire Editorial Staff of The Lunch Report

Penelope Frost, Editor in Chief

Naked Man Report: The Naked Muse?

2010-11-17T10:15:00.000-08:00

I don't want to bore you with my tales of the Naked Man, but . . .

As it turns out, the Naked Man is also a muse, in the most unconventional sense. When we think about a muse, we usually think about a female sylph wandering around the moonlit woods at night, surfacing occasionally in a transparent pink gauze nightie with a pale cherub-like smile on her face.

My muse is not so easily marketable. He (yeah, that’s the first problem--they're always supposed to be “shes”, no?) would really put people off if I dressed him in a gauze nightie, no matter what the color. My muse wears a size large golf shirt, drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney (although he swears this won't carry over to 2011).

How could anyone be inspired by such a booze muse? I'll tell you how. This muse defies every stereotype that has guided my bigoted existence for the last 20+ years.

The Naked Smoking Muse has the affection of a kitten (although he abhors cats, not pussy, just cats). The NSM worships Glenn Beck and his compatriots but will still show enough consideration to tear out an article on our Democratic Senator Gillibrand from the NY Post and pass it my way, even if he SOO disapproves of her.

The NSM will condemn 501(c)(3) organizations in general and their borderline fraudulent tax schemes, and then he'll bring you to a benefit for anal canine cancer in Bridgeport, CT, where the host of the benefit welcomes you to “God’s Country.” (Bridgeport, CT? Really? Makes that stable where Jesus was born look a little bit like the newest induction to the Small Luxury Hotel Collection).

My only regret is the same regret that anyone has about a muse. The muse remains an idea and an inspiration, but the muse is never a living, breathing or present human being who wants to keep you company. A muse materializes and disappears at opportune and inopportune moments, the disappearance always being the most powerful aspect of his or her existence. The muse is, and remains, an idea.

A naked muse? Why the question mark? Clearly there’s something great about the Naked Smoking Muse, but clearly, he doesn’t want to be a boyfriend or fill any similar conventional role. So Penelope has been searching for a place where NSM might feel comfortable and thrive. Let’s see:

1. Good friend? Yawn. My Siamese cat is a good friend. I can’t kiss a good friend (although I confess I have tried to kiss the Siamese when tipsy and she clawed my lips)—just won't work for Penelope and I suspect not for NSM.

2. FWB? Never, no, no, no, and no analysis needed.

3. Brother figure? Please see the response to 1.

4. Father figure? (A) Fathers don’t generally have children at age 11 and (B) please see response to question number 1.

5. Occasional Trysting. Guys fantasy. Chicks undoing/nightmare. I’ll pass.

6. Girlfriend/Boyfriend. Could work but there are serious perception issues. “Boyfriend” is perceived by the man not as a resting state, but as a transitional state before the chick nails him down, makes her pregnant and wrests all freedom, spontaneity and fun from his life. If that were my perception, trust me, I would run faster than he would (and not just because he has a bad knee). So, unless there’s some sort of marketing campaign launched to undo the distorted image of these roles, this won’t work either.

So, sigh, maybe this is why muses are transient presences in our lives, meant to peak for a few months, leave us crest fallen and then be replaced by a brand new muse (BNM). No BNM has surfaced so I am going to try hard to see what can be harvested from the NSM. I just can’t bear foregoing the Naked Muse altogether, not just yet. No, no, no.

Muses are creatures defined by their transiency. They leave. It’s the memory—and not the muse—that inspires, if not distracts us. There are no live in muses—as soon as they move in, they lose their muse-like inspirational powers as they overwhelm and bore use with their utterly trite permanence.
Penelope

Naked Man Report: Romancing The Philistine

2010-11-06T10:12:00.000-07:00

Some of you will recall Penelope’s encounter with the Naked Man over a month ago.* By way of an update, Penelope and the Naked Man continue to share grilled cheese and pinot grigio from time to time.

Despite exemplary character traits such as opening doors, pulling out chairs and placing ice cubes in his white wine,* the Naked Man is a self-proclaimed philistine, a Naked Philistine.

How does a brash Ivy League brat who gets a high from deconstructionism and other literary theories date a philistine?

Dating a philistine means Penelope needs to find someone else with whom to see Swan Lake at City Center (which, as you well know, runs through November 7th). Why? Because all male dancers are gay and no heterosexual man wants to watch gay men flaunt their packages in sheer tights midtown on the West side, or so the Naked Philistine posits.

Dating a philistine means Proustian analogies are to be avoided and no mention of a madeleine should be made, even a trite reference used to describe some maudlin flash of nostalgia. Literary references should be limited to the NY Post and The Drudge Report. If it ain’t in one of those publications, then it’s not worth talking about (and who cares if you end a sentence with a preposition anyway).

What intrigues me though is why the Naked Philistine so adamantly and proudly claims the philistine title. Was this so I would be surprised and seduced by his sense of literary modesty when he quoted Shakespeare to me while downing sirloin at Smith & Wollensky? And by the way, does a true philistine even know the word philistine?!

Was this so I would be stripped (figuratively, please) of any respect associated with having achieved, at least on paper, an education and be made to understand that a girl who works at Hooters is on a level playing field with me from the perspective of the Naked Philistine? Actually, she's probably on a higher plane than I am, because at least she knows how to market herself, which may be critical from the Naked Philistine's perspective—the ability to translate talent into cash or some other equally laudable commodity.

What's the great shame with liking books and art, if not preferring them most of the time to the drudge of corporate achievement? Is it that it can’t be quantified (except, of course, by certain hedge fund managers who frequent Christies and Sothebys)?* Perhaps naively, I thought the best in life could not be quantified: a warm smile on a gray day, a well-timed hug, a joke that jolts you from a depressive torpor.

The Naked Philistine devours newspapers, as many as possible, every morning, often as early as 4:50am. Maybe he chooses this uncivilized hour in an effort to hide his thirst for knowledge and his fascination with politics from the light of day.

Who knows why he holds the arts in such disdain. Maybe he scorns the false superiority of those who aspire to “intellect.” But that’s conflating two important notions. Enjoying the arts is radically different from pretending to some form of artistic expertise and judging others for a supposed lack of it, both of which Penelope abhors.

As disappointed as Penelope is that the Naked Philistine doesn't want to see Swan Lake (“ballet no way,” he said—at least he rhymed), she remains open to what she can learn from the Naked Philistine on topics and techniques of which she is completely ignorant. Maybe it’s all part of the opposites attract or complement each other theory.

In any event, at least for the present, and based on an application of a broad selection of psycho-social-emotional theories, Penelope has decided that philistinism is not in fact a tragic flaw (with apologies to the reference to Greek dramaturgy). He may well have fatal flaws—maybe she will discover one tonight—but this is not the one.

Notes

*See “Beware the Naked Man,” http://penelopefrost.blogspot.com/2010/10/beware-naked-man.html

*I respect people who thumb their noses at extraneous etiquette. There are so many good reasons to put ice in your white wine, not the least of which is that I can drink as slowly as I like and it will remain chilled.

*Although some dispute whether hedge fund managers drive the prices at auctions houses, hedge fund managers Kenneth Griffin and Steven Cohen have been among the top 10 art buyers in the last year. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a91lHt5PmIQ8&refer=muse

Beware the Naked Man

2010-10-13T02:42:00.000-07:00

Below is an instructional anecdote that forms part of Penelope’s multi-series publication on dating for grown ups.

Anyone who finds himself or herself still dating after age 40 is probably suffering from an excess of guidance, often unsolicited, on the rules of dating and, its kissing cousin, mating.

There are so many rules to bear in mind: don’t kiss him on the first date; don’t accept a Friday date unless he calls by Tuesday; don’t sleep with someone unless you’ve been seeing each other at least twice a week for three weeks . . .

Even if you could manage to keep all these directives straight in your mind, for each of those rules, you undoubtedly know someone who represents the exception to the rule. The friend who kissed him on the first date, canceled her Friday plans to meet him and suffered absolutely no adverse relationship consequences as a result. In fact she may even be living happily with him now (or at least successfully projecting the image of a happy existence, which for some is just as important).

Despite all of these guidelines and their myriad exceptions, I have remained completely confident about certain core truths. For example, a guy that invites himself to your place and then immediately, without invitation, disrobes is definitely bad news (a.k.a. a dog who wants one thing, and one thing only) . . . or is he?

Penelope found herself in an untoward situation a bit over a month ago. Having stayed very late at a party in Westchester, she was running up against her Cinderella-Takes-Metro-North deadline. The last train back to NYC was leaving in 40 minutes.

Faced with the prospect of asking a drunken friend to drive her to the train station and missing one of the most stunning displays of amateur DJ-ing mixed with middle-aged break-dancing she’d ever seen (or did he just fall and stumble?), Penelope accepted an alternative arrangement proposed by her “date” for that evening.*

Penelope would stay in the room my date had reserved, and he would stay at a hotel nearby. She was reassured by the offer so decided to relax, have multiple nightcaps and take in the music and company.

Not long thereafter, Penelope could be seen wearing an orange tablecloth as a burka and refusing any offers for additional cocktails because, as she pointed out, it was still Ramadan and she should not be drinking.*

What followed should be one big bold “Don’t” for any dating adult. Aware that her date probably should not be driving and persuaded by a female acquaintance that he was a very respectable guy and should not be banished to a cheap hotel, Penelope permitted inter-gender sharing of personal space after midnight. After all, she rationalized, there were two beds in an uncommonly large room.

No sooner had she entered the room with her date than he stripped off every piece of clothing, offering only “We’re both adults” as explanation for his behavior.

As you can imagine, after a furtive glance at some rather exceptional features (not all men are created equal), Penelope immediately averted her eyes and contemplated the true horror of her situation.

If she didn’t like him or want to share mixed-gender time with him again, then the blatant nudity was a heinous and offensive gesture. If she did anticipate seeing him again, then surely his nudist display was insulting proof that he would never share the same instinct and was simply a randy man on the prowl in Westchester (much like the coyote population that has been migrating from CT to Westchester in recent years). Tails Penelope lost and head he won.

Responding to her confused instincts, Penelope did what any self-respecting woman would do. She grabbed the closest object within reach and hurled it at him, successfully shattering a wine glass along the way. With a threatening barrier of glass shards between them, Penelope would be protected until she had gotten some shut eye and sobered up enough to address the situation with aplomb.

That was over a month ago. Dare I say that Penelope could be wrong? The rogue nudist has in fact behaved like a male lion protecting his mate, hunting down valued resources for her late at night (such as grilled cheese and pinot grigio). Maybe this is an extended project of deception that could be carried off only by a sly NYC fox. Maybe Penelope has slipped into another Pollyanna delusion about some mortal male with nothing but exceedingly terrestrial and banal instincts for her. In any event, you can be sure she will let you know, one way or the other.

Notes
* Note that dates may sometimes be identified only in retrospect and Penelope was unaware that evening that this mixed-gender sharing of time was in fact a date until so informed the next day by a third party observer.

* Silly Penelope. If she would take the time to educate herself about religion, she would know that Islam prohibits the consumption of alcohol at any time and not just during its holiest month of fasting, Ramadan

Welcome to Penelope's Cult

2010-09-23T09:48:00.000-07:00

Literary critics who have focused on the role of The Lunch Report in post-post-modern American literature have focused primarily on Penelope’s sense of job dissatisfaction and related social disassociation.

It’s true, my sense of job satisfaction has been well below 100% and often well below 30%. So much so that I have been considering joining a cult to give myself a clearer sense of purpose.

I used to think people who joined cults were troubled people with problematic relationships with authority. But as I look back, I know that once upon a time I had secretly hoped that corporate law would become my cult and give me a sense of identity and acceptance. Now that I realize that corporate law is more likely to rob me of my identity, joining a cult has resurfaced as a viable option.

I abruptly mentioned the idea to a friend over lunch the other day. No sooner had we sat down for lunch then I blurted out “I’m going to join a cult.” Without a pause, he pointed out that I could never join someone else’s cult. For the same reason that I find the culture of a corporate law firm stifling, he explained, I would feel just as stymied in someone else’s cult. He reasoned that I’m just not a follower. Instead he suggested I found my own cult.

Brilliant! Of course he was right. No wonder I’ve been frustrated. I was too busy looking for the perfect corporate cult to join when I should have been creating my own. I had even been urged by a self-proclaimed corporate law cult-leader when I joined my last job that I needed to create a following and solicit worshippers (yup, he used that word) among associates who worked with me.

So many legends in the corporate world have succeeded as a result of cult images they’d developed and perpetuated: PIMCO, the mutual fund cult founded by Bill Gross;* KKR, the leveraged buyout cult, originally founded by Jerry Kohlberg before he was ousted by his own follower, Henry Kravis; and of course there was the Greenspan cult, which lasted long after Alan's reign at The US Treasury. I would be remiss not to mention the Madoff Cult, which ended tragically in a Jonestown-style financial massacre, but I prefer to focus on the more successful examples.

I was inspired with a new sense of purpose and immediately set to designing my cult.

First, I would need a name—the Cult of Penelope. No, “Penelope’s Cult” (sounds much more possessive). Maybe not that savvy from a marketing perspective but it’s simple and easy to remember.

Next, I knew I’d need some sort of totemic symbol. How about a large stuffed leopard? A stuffed animal may make my cult seem less serious (and may even introduce a “plushie” innuendo* that I’d rather avoid), but I certainly don’t want a live one. I've never understood why cults so often unnecessarily harm animals in their rituals.

My supplicants would be invited to deposit their offerings before The Leopard. In exchange they would be offered pinot grigio, saltines and my acceptance and approval (no cash value, but it’s always nice to know someone’s out there rooting for you, no?).

Next, I would need an official clothing line for my cult. Something more modern and secular than Hare Krishna’s orange togas. Got it: Lily Pulitzer, a lifestyle brand for a lifestyle cult that believes in redemption through golf, swimming and tennis.

At this point, I realized I had a handle on the aesthetics of my cult but still needed to get down to the core substance of my cult. I did some extra research. The hallmarks of a cult are:

• Adulation of a charismatic leader;

• Use of coercive persuasion or brainwashing to recruit members; and

• The “inculcation of deep-seated dependency on the group and its leader.”

According to the Cultic Studies Journal, a cult is

[A] group or movement exhibiting a great excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (eg. isolation from former friends and family . . .) designed to advance the goals of the group’s leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families or their community.”*

Goodness. Upon reflection I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with the concepts of dependency, anxiety and coercion. I see far too much of this fostered by “managing directors” and “partners” (huge misnomers, no?) among their corporate employees to believe it can lead to any good.

What a shame. I was so excited by this project, but once I discarded things like thought control and dependency, I realized all I had left was “adulation of a charismatic leader.” Maybe what I wanted wasn’t really a cult. After all, the thought of distributing brochures in airports, launching an internet marketing campaign and tweeting the word of Penelope was seriously unappealing. Maybe what I wanted was just a little bit of attention and respect (okay, occasional adulation would be nice too).

I don’t need to create my own cult just for that, do I?

Notes
*The Pacific Investment Management Company, LLC runs the Total Return Fund, the world’s largest mutual fund.

*A "plushie" is someone affected by “Plushophilia,” a sexual fetish involving stuffed animals. Although plushies once practiced in relative anonymity, a 2001 article in Vanity Fair made their practices more widely known. See “Pleasures of the Fur,” http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2001/03/furries200103; see also “Who Are the Furries?” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8355287.stm

*William Chambers, Michael Langone, Arthur Dole & James Grice, “The Group Psychological Abuse Scale: A Measure of the Variety of Cultic Abuse,” Cultic Studies Journal 11(1), 1194.

Penelope Is Out of the Office

2010-08-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

Penelope will be out-of-the office from August 20, 2010 to August 30, 2011.

Maybe it started with an innocent typo that threw everyone off and made us forever paranoid about implementing an automatic out-of-the-office email reply. It’s unclear why but, somewhere along the way, the automatic out-of-the-office reply fell into disfavor in corporate America.

I suspect it derives from a sense of class consciousness—everyone knows that only functionaries use the out-of-office reply message. Those with seriously important jobs cannot afford the luxury of absence and would never be so gauche as to announce their absence in such a forthright manner. But still, why did it become obsolete?

On the one hand, a client should know we are unavailable so that the lack of an immediate response is not misconstrued as a brush off. On the other hand, consider the horrors that an out-of-office message can spawn.

For obvious reasons, an out-of-office message suggests that you’re not there. Not being there can really be a problem in a service profession. It signals an interruption in service.

In the corporate world*, “serving” requires a reversion to serfdom whereby telling your vassal that you are unavailable is an option considered only in contemplation of death. By definition, “service” means that a family member’s birthday or an anniversary takes back seat to your master’s moods and professional aspirations.

And what if you forget to tell each and every client that you won’t be there. There’s never a good time to explain to the client that, at the end of the day, your personal life really is more important than what your client believes, once again, to be the most pivotal moment in their career and in your service provider-client relationship. It’s awkward to work that into a conference call, no? Yet, alerting them in advance is preferable to their being surprised by an abrupt two line message that you’re abandoning them for five consecutive business days.

Perhaps the greatest fear that dissuades a corporate person to shun the out-of-office message is a fear of poaching. In your absence, the client may seek out advice from a colleague, encouraging a colleague to encroach on the territory you’ve been grooming to generate more business that will in turn be attributed to you and not to your predatory colleague. Better to secure your territory than let wild animals roam free in your absence.

Faced with the horrors described above, nowadays many will feign presence rather than publicly concede absence (the corporate term for vacation) with an automatic out-of-office email reply. Rather than confess the need for a personal life (which, to have, already suggests a certain lack of professional dedication), they fake their presence with the help of technology.

Calls are taken remotely, in an effort to suggest to clients that you’re not on vacation but simply calling “from the road” during a business trip* or ripping yourself away from a meeting out of the office. Laptops enable us to log on and deliver excel spreadsheets, powerpoints, and other token symbols of corporate productivity.

Hand in hand with the feigning presence strategy is the failure to announce a vacation in advance to our colleagues. Vacation days are kept on the down low with perhaps a covert email sent only to an assistant indicating that although you will be out of the office, no one is to know this, including colleagues.

This helps perpetuate the fiction that no vacation is occurring. If there was no pre-vacation announcement and you managed to respond to clients reasonably promptly, then in the eyes of the corporate world no vacation has occurred and your Protestant work ethic remains unsullied.

Today, we’re never out of the office. Instead we circumnavigate the office, via cell, Blackberry, fax or text. Unfortunately, if we’re never out of the office that means we’re never really anywhere else either. So when we’re in Bali vacationing with a significant other, chances are we’re not enjoying the sunset but instead scheming of ways to sneak into an unoccupied room and have a torrid threesome with a cell phone and Blackberry (if you must, use protection and close the door).

A word of caution to those who fake their presence from afar though. Naïve is the client who does not notice a change in your communicational pattern—the lengthy and thorough emails suddenly supplanted by truncated messages delivered in a different font at unusual hours. You’re deluding yourself that you can be just as professionally “present” by Blackberry while sitting on a beach.

Despite the success of the “Be Present”* clothing line that has accomplished great notoriety among yoga circles in America, fewer and fewer of us are present anywhere anymore.

Notes
*Clearly the quandary of whether to enable the out-of-office reply is not unique to America. The crisis and the debate have reached international dimensions as well. See “Out-of the-office reply: got the message,” Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/17e32334-69e5-11df-a978-00144feab49a.html

*Although business trips have become anachronistic for many of us, there are still some pockets of civilization that see value in meeting a client face-to-face and having a live discussion. There’s also the amusement of snickering at how your client dresses when you meet them in person.

*Be Present is a clothing line especially designed for Yoga that has achieve great commercial success in recent years.

The Changing of the Guard

2010-08-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

Witnessing a generational shift can be inspiring. But, if you’re part of the generation that’s being shifted or superseded and new stars are beginning to outshine you, then it can also be stressful.

As I slurped up my soup today at lunch (which, with the saltines and soda, came to $1.90, just within my new lunch budget) I reviewed the events of the last two weeks. I’ve been a bystander to all sorts of epic changes yet realized it only once I found myself in the contemplative company of some chicken noodle soup.

Although most of these cataclysmic shifts occurred right at my own golf club, the ramifications are in no way localized to a Westchester country club.

When I reached the 16th hole at my golf club last Sunday, I surveyed the Hudson River for the usual assortment of sail boats. I saw an unusually shaped barge floating towards NYC that I almost mistook for an aircraft carrier, until I realized that aircraft carriers rarely cruise up the Hudson. Only days later did I learn that the barge was carrying a new bridge, one that would replace the existing Willis Avenue bridge, in what journalists described as an “insta bridge” event. Out with the old and in with the new, all in one day.

Little did I know that at the same time I was trying to make sense of the aircraft carrier on the river, the pillars of my society were foundering. Tiger Woods was at that moment finishing 18 over, a career worst. More importantly, however, a younger couple defeated one of the most senior and celebrated golf couples at our club.

When you live in the present, it’s always too early to tell whether you're living a one-off aberrant incident or you’re witnessing history. I may not remember any of the details in 5 years but I'll remember that it happened. I’ll remember that there was a weekend—a moment—when it all crystallized and we knew were witnessing a changing of the guard—the new Willis Avenue Bridge replacing the old, Tiger’s plummeting status in the world golf arena, and the crowning of new husband-wife champions at my club.

This younger couple will become the new inspiration of the annual husband-wife championship (as well as undoubtedly other golf tournaments) with their names etched in wood in the grill room for generations to admire and emulate.

And maybe 20 years from now, having seen these names engraved often enough to incite envy, their own children and their children’s contemporaries will be gunning for it—first hoping, just once, to be listed alongside their idols* and then once listed, eventually gaining enough confidence and generating enough of a track record to erase those records altogether and replace them with their own.

As I scraped up the remains of my soup and transitioned to dessert (saltines, yum), I realized that my contemporaries and I are already at an age when we’re beginning to develop legacies.

All of this left me curious about how society at large might see my history to date, my nascent legacy. So, like the accomplished narcissist that I am, I Googled myself (don't pretend you haven’t done it).

1st Hit: my position at my law firm. Yawn.

2nd-4th Hits: articles I’ve written about the hedge fund industry. Double yawn.

5th Hit: A testament to my paltry support of The Morgan Library and some random Democrats. Proof that I’m not exactly a financial powerhouse.

6th Hit: A reference to being Ivy League Player of the Year, which would almost be impressive were it not for the fact that the sport was gymnastics and everyone knows that college gymnastics is hardly as competitive as what occurs pre-college. I had a foot in the gymnast’s grave and was competing against other athletes well past their prime. Big deal.

As I looked at the hits, I knew that this was not the stuff of legacies—these were more like accidental appearances in the game called life. I don’t know what my legacy will be yet but even single people have legacies, whether they like it or not. I suspect creating some form of legacy will involve less time drinking and arm wrestling* in the grill room and more time being productive, like chipping and putting.

Notes
*Although I am told there are few moments as joyful in the parenting process as when a child excels beyond a parent, I'm not convinced my fragile golf ego could handle the experience.

*Despite having started doing push-ups in earnest a year ago, I was defeated almost immediately.

Penelope's Dating Guide for Grown Ups

2010-08-05T14:15:00.000-07:00

The advice that follows below emerges from a series of conversations with women who forgot to meet a significant other when they were younger and remain chronically single.

Lest you doubt Penelope’s expertise on, and understanding of, prolonged singlehood, I provide a brief outline of her credentials:

Few people are as good at spending time alone as Penelope. If there were a handicap system for solitude (as there is for golf), Penelope would be a scratch loner. And that’s why it phases me only occasionally that I have spent the last 15 years largely alone. Not lonely, but alone, single, unmarried and whatever other boxes I have to check on tax returns, doctors’ forms, etc.

Being single means my schedule is very easily adjusted. I don't want to get up early on Saturday? Decision-made—I sleep. I can change my mind about what I’m going to eat for dinner seven times and it generates no friction—no one cares how many times I change my mind about these things.

Being single means I’m a better listener than a speaker, because I go to cafes by myself and I eavesdrop.

Being single means I am subjected to less small talk at work. You see, there are fewer safe topics when you are single and work in an environment where you are meant to have grown a spouse at least 10 years ago (if, for no other reason, than to make corporate America easier to run with obvious targets of small talk and networking connections, like kids and schools).

Being single means I haven’t had a proper boyfriend in 15 years, although I will admit to some highly inappropriate situations that I tried stubbornly to fit into the “boyfriend” category, like an obstinate child slamming the circular peg into the square hole insisting the circular peg can be transformed through sheer will.

At this age, boyfriends do not arrive in the neat and tidy packages they used to show up in, with a youthful smile, a promising job and future, and only one ex-girlfriend who was “great” but just came along too soon. Instead, they usually show up bald, with children, ex-spouse(s), maybe even current spouses, addictions, doubts, and even criminal records.

This is why Penelope believes it critical to offer guidance for NYC women who forgot to meet someone when they were young and naïve. Maybe you were too busy climbing a corporate ladder. Maybe it took you 15+ years to heal a wounded heart. Maybe you thought the proper ordering of a life was to try to become president first and THEN find a significant other. Whatever your story, following is some NYC-based advice for women “of a certain age.”

· The Kind Advice of Others. Unless he or she got married in the last 3 years, do NOT listen to the well-intentioned advice of married friends. Chances are they met their spouses/significant others 10+ years ago and any advice they have is just plain stale. Meeting someone at 25 has little to nothing to do with meeting someone when you’re 40+.

Example: A girlfriend told me that if I meet a guy I should pretend he’s the only guy for whom I’ve ever had romantic feelings. Sorry, but if you’re 40 and you tell a guy that, he's going to assume that either you’re a convicted felon who’s just completed a lengthy prison sentence or that you’re an unusually damaged catholic who has been fighting an urge to join a convent the last two decades. He won’t walk away, he will run, very fast (even if his hips have been replaced already).

· Nothing Has Changed. It seems like everything has changed at this point, your waist included. However, nothing has changed. Men are still men and women are still women. Many of the Men Are From Mars principles still apply. He’s probably still a hunter and you, still a gatherer. This may seem inconsistent with the point immediately above—embrace the contradiction.

· Be flexible. After 10+ years of solitude, even an ex-gymnast like Penelope can be inflexible. You’ve probably developed some laudable lifestyles, like daily yoga, no eating after 10pm and no more than two drinks. Be a little flexible, go out and get tipsy one night rather than spending extra time at the gym. He would probably prefer to spend that time with you rather than you spending it fine-tuning your washboard abs. If you’re still hanging out with him in three years, he’ll probably be encouraging you to spend more time hanging on to the remnants of your six pack, so enjoy the time with him now

· Let Him Pay for Dinner. Unless you’re 21 (in which case, why are you reading this?) and he’s a 45+ year old business man, chances are he’s not trying to subjugate you by paying for dinner. He’s trying to be a gentleman, whatever that means in this day and age. Mind you, I said “let him pay,” not “make him pay,” or judge him for not paying. Make a polite gesture to get your wallet from your purse. And if he calls your bluff and let’s you pay, fergodsakes you better have your wallet with you.

· Talking About Money. This is a tough topic and should be approached with great caution. Maybe it was easier 20 years ago when neither of you had any. Or maybe you’re a trust fund brat (TFB) so you knew that until you had 15 years of therapy under your belt, the topic would be off-limits. Money can be deeply symbolic in different ways for different people so tread lightly. Try not to be visibly disappointed when you learn he has no private jet—that just smacks of gold digging. And if you suspect you earn more than he does, don’t insist on paying for everything, unless your real goal is to castrate him.

· Put Snarky Girl Away. It was with pride that I once joined an online chat group called “I speak sarcasm fluently”. Yet, a constant barrage of acerbic wit and well crafted sarcasm, while welcomed in a bar of male colleagues, probably won’t win you many points if you meet a real keeper. It has no doubt behooved you in the workplace to toughen up and show some moxie, but this is not the place to show how tough you are.

· Getting Good At It. At this point you’ve probably been working a while or, if you’re a TFB, you’ve gotten better at working a room or speaking at benefits. In other words, at this point you’ve gotten used to being good at something. Dating is not something one gets “good at” (notable exceptions include Elizabeth Taylor). The goal is not to become an expert but to get good enough to get lucky (no, not that kind of lucky—that’s called “hooking up”)—lucky enough to get to know someone with whom you could spend a meaningful chunk of your life.

This is just the beginning of a multi-part series that Penelope expects to publish over the coming months. Penelope urges you to write in with your comments and questions, either by email (penelope.frost@yahoo.com), on Facebook or on her blog (http://penelopefrost.blogspot.com).

Px

Confessions of a Financial Bulimic

2010-08-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

I was first diagnosed with financial bulimia as a college freshman in 1985.

I had just been given my first checking account. As soon as my parents deposited the initial sum in my account, I knew I would have to change my ways. I needed to protect this modest amount from the financial threats of extravagance and waste. So I abandoned my daily post-study ritual of buying a 3 cent piece of Bazooka bubble gum. Already, I felt more in control of my spending.

I then bought one of my first adult cocktail dresses for $250 (not an inconsiderable sum for a party dress in the mid ‘80s). I had sacrificed my afternoon bubble gum so surely I had earned the cocktail dress—even if this wasn’t a perfect dollar-for-dollar offset.

Some of my loyal readers will recognize these same behavioral patterns in the pages of the Lunch Report. The Lunch Report began as a testament to Penelope’s ability to lunch on no more than $3 a day (measured on a strict per diem basis, and not cumulatively).

Penelope is prone to sitting at her desk savoring saltines while reflecting on the injustices inflicted on single women in corporate America.* But Penelope is also prone to spending a weekend at The Breakers in Palm Beach, as she stoically battles the winter blues on some of Florida’s best golf courses (while, of course, pilfering hotel shampoo).*

But let’s go back again so we can understand the origins of her financial disorder. By 1990, Penelope had learned to live in the south of France on a weekly food budget of 60FF (pre-Euro, about $10). Every scrap of food was maximized for value and usage: stale bread dutifully dipped in oil, sautéed and consumed. Cheese rinds never discarded but also fried and eaten and grocery store samples scarfed down obligatorily as amuse-bouches.

When I moved back to NYC in 1992, I resisted this city's hallmark indulgence: ordering in dinner. Instead, I continued my discipline of making my own dinner. I did loosen the purse strings slightly, however, and let myself add a half glass of wine from a bottle whose cost never exceeded $7.

Shortly thereafter, the parade of excuses marched in, stomping all over my Calvinist budget. I developed increasingly fanciful rationalizations for spending: “you're only young once, go out and live it up” and “hey, if you want to meet someone, you gotta travel, do a Hamptons share, and buy some new clothes.”

And, the ultimate excuse: “you know you get more work done in cafés than at home, so why not take your documents out for dinner, every night.”

And so, I evolved from one of the most financially disciplined creatures in NYC to a full blown financial bulimic. Living in NYC made it easy to hide my disease. After all, NYC is inhabited primarily by financial enablers—those dedicated to encouraging you to spend $ you don't have (friends convincing you “you deserve it” and banks issuing easy credit)—and their co-conspirators, the financial predators—those who actually extract the $, restaurants, shops, etc. NYC would not be what it is were it not for the evolutionary force of these two breeds.

As I struggled to understand my nefarious urges, I found myself flipping through the pages of Money, A Memoir: Women, Emotions and Cash, which explores the complex emotional relationship between modern women and money--their own and others’.* What did money represent to me anyway? Financial or emotional security?

By 2000, having failed in my quest for a sugar daddy, I learned to become my own sugar mama. In December, with great longing, a girlfriend and I watched doting husbands stand on line at Tiffany’s eager to bejewel their wives for Christmas. It then dawned on us that we could buy our own jewelry. And so we did. We each bought a pair of pearl earrings with a tasteful sprinkling of diamonds.

Recently, I reread Money, A Memoir. As interesting a reread as it was, I realized the book mischaracterized the subject as a gender issue and, in so doing, trivialized centuries of male pride, ambivalence and embarrassment associated with earning and spending money.

Understanding the rapport between money and emotions has universal appeal but may be all the more difficult to fathom in the capital of materiality, NYC. As I sift through nearly two decades of anecdotes, the men stand out as much as the women:

•The senior Morgan Stanley managing director who refused to eat in any restaurant where the cutlery has already been placed on the table because that meant the price of an entree would be too high. Yet he offered to buy me a new winter coat one night rather than wait on a lengthy coat check line.

•The senior partner at a very white shoe firm who saved the miniature gins and vodkas from every business flight he took so he could populate the bars in his 5 homes with these mini-tributes to his frugality.

•The jobless girlfriend who fretted continuously over her financial security, yet found fast solace in a $600 Botox treatment.

Why do we do these things? As I've learned, we all suffer from varying degrees of a financial consumption disorder. So, don't be ashamed. You're part of a well known financially bulimic demographic. The rest of us are here to support and sympathize with you, so write in and share your stories of financial excess and economic ambivalence.

Editorial Staff Note: Shortly before publication, Penelope suffered a relapse and bought a sweater because her office was over air-conditioned. She will be implementing a strict $2 limit on lunch until the excess amount spent on the sweater has been recouped. Please send food donations to The Lunch Report, P.O Box 777, NY, NY, 10021 and they will be redirected accordingly.

Notes

*“Eating Single in America,”

http://penelopefrost.blogspot.com/2010/03/eating-single-in-america.html

*“Lunch at The Breakers, Recession-Style,” http://penelopefrost.blogspot.com/2009/12/lunch-report-lunch-at-breakers.html.

“Correction and Addendum”

http://penelopefrost.blogspot.com/2009/12/lunch-report-correction-and-addendum-to.html

*Money, A Memoir: Women, Emotions and Cash, Liz Perle (Picador, December 2006).

Babes in Bandon

2010-07-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

Penelope has just returned from a golf expedition out West to Bandon Dunes, an obligatory pilgrimage for any self-respecting golfaholic. For the non-golfers amongst you, Bandon Dunes is one of the most revered golf destinations in the world, with five challenging links-style courses. Historically, a male-only golf destination, more recently the resort has built a lodge in order to characterize itself a resort.*

The Bandon challenge begins with reaching the resort, situated 30 minutes away from one of Oregon’s most cosmopolitan hubs, North Bend, Oregon (which boasts numerous strip clubs and strip malls). Perhaps the more noteworthy landmark near Bandon Dunes is America’s largest wild animal petting park, just 8 miles from the resort. In order to distract visitors from the gorilla that zealously repeats the exact same sequence of chest beating, jumping, thumping and howling (a repetitive sequence disturbingly typical of wild animals in captivity), the zoo offers visitors the opportunity to pet and hold baby tiger and lion cubs.

Like other golf junkies, my golf buddies and I have been reading about this resort and its breathtaking views of the Pacific ever since it edged out Pebble Beach as the number one resort golf course in Golfweek’s rankings. But before the Crisis pressured golf resorts to offer more affordable golf packages, Bandon was off limits financially.* Thanks to the Crisis, Bandon's lodging prices are finally within grasp (assuming some form of short term financing is available).

There I was at the best golf resort in the West with my own clubs, my lucky bobcat five-wood headcover, new grips on my irons and my favorite golf buddy. I should have been in my element, but instead I was overwhelmed by other elements . . .

First there was the wind. The 335 mph wind blew right through me, despite the solid defense I mounted with four layers of clothing.

Then there was the rugged terrain. The layout of their newest course, Old MacDonald, left me dazed, confused and exhausted. Too much walking, too many hills. Too open a layout to know where I was going (and my caddy, who confessed he had only walked the course once, wasn't much help).

The noise of the wind precluded any conversation, so I was alone in my struggle against the elements. Just like a character in a Jack London story, soldiering on in the bitter cold tundra with no gloves (except that I had a golf glove on either hand) and worn shoes (except that I wore brand new golf shoes with sparkling white shoe laces). I am confident Jack London would have written a story about Bandon Dunes had he been a golfer.

Then there were the men, whose behavior was every bit as rugged and unmanicured as the links-style golf courses. A unique mixture of West Coast baba cool (think pony tails), red neck hill billy and golf die hard, the culture is a male-centric one. Shaving is either optional or discouraged, it wasn’t clear, and the look golfers aspired to clearly involved a toothpick hanging from the jaw.

My traveling buddy's thwarted quest for a feminine hygiene product confirmed my suspicions--we were squarely within anti-chick territory. No feminine products sold here. No spa either. The existence of a spa would run the risk of drawing women to the resort, a risk apparently not worth running so there are no plans afoot to build one. Yes, we had discovered where men who used to go to Myrtle Beach go once they've packed their wallets with a bit more financial security. We were surrounded by Myrtle Beach alums (circa Class of 1965).

After 36 holes on Old MacDonald one day, we wandered into McKee's pub to refuel before retiring to our bare boned pre-fab A-frame unit for which we paid $600 a night (no bathrobes and, no, the shampoo was not worth stealing).

We passed 8 men slouching over their table, the way they would never slump at their home club or with their wives present. They straightened up as we walked by and the leering campaign began. From the safe distance of our table (which we chose because it was at the opposite end of the room from them), the hungry wolves licking their chops staring down their vulnerable prey seemed safe, and comical.

They voiced compliments on my bright blue and white argyle golf pants (John Daly would be proud). If only I had known that my gender alone would attract far too much attention to begin with, I would never have been so bold as to wander around the Bandon jungle flaunting such audacious patterns on my legs.

Our driver, a transplant from Bucharest, fleshed out for us the stereotypical male golfer who visits Bandon Dunes. The typical male Bandon golfer will place a call to his wife en route to the resort from the airport, letting her know he has arrived safely and that he loves her. Then he will shut off the cell, tuck it away in his pocket and request to be driven to the nearest strip club.

Our driver recounted with lighthearted disgust one adventure in particular (imagine a thick Romanian accent here): “This one guy. I bring him to the strip club and what does he do? He hooks up with the ugliest chick in there. I swear he was desperate. He wanted me to bring the girls back to the resort but I don’t do that stuff. She asked if I wanted anything. No way.”

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is. Maybe you need to spend too much money away from home just to realize how much you love your home course and the golfers who inhabit it. So, was it worth it? Absolutely.

*http:///www.bandondunesgolf.com/pages/history/64.php

*Sea Island and The Breakers, two resorts that once proudly charged in excess of $1000 a night (excluding golf) not send postcards begging people to come stay for $250-$350 a night with golf included.

Corporate Lawyer/Part Time Nun

2010-06-20T15:43:00.000-07:00

After two years of wondering when and if I would ever be blessed enough that my clients would harass me on evenings, weekends and vacation, I suddenly realize I am, once again, the chosen.

At nights my blackberry is no longer just a search engine to help me while away lonely evenings on Google or Facebook. The blinking red light elicits all the promise that the shining green light of East Egg once held for Gatsby.* I see the red light and I know a client needs me. An adrenaline rush ripples throughout me and I am ready to serve. This must be my calling. I am a born again lawyer. Or a nun, with a more secular focus.

I had forgotten how uplifting it can be to analyze and draft for 10 hours straight. The mental stimulation stirs me. I no longer need an alarm clock. I check messages at 4am, nap and am up at 7am. It's an opportunity to become mentally stronger and physically sturdier (because lawyering in NYC is as much, if not more, a physical sport as a mental or professional endeavor).

I am now drawn to my clients and their documents more than food or sleep. I want to perfect the art of responsiveness—the articulate and thoughtful email that arrives on a holiday weekend only minutes after a client's panicked and disheveled query.

It's not just the satisfaction of providing top notch service to a demanding client. There is a sense of strength that comes from denial. While I serve, I strengthen myself. I deny myself social and physical indulgence, whether it be conversation or sleep. I insist this does not make me servile but better at serving. The more I serve the more I benefit and the more my clients must benefit. I am struck by the parallels between my life and that of a nun’s.

A corporate lawyer and a nun?! An incongruous pairing of greed and aggression with purity and denial? Not really. Nuns and corporate lawyers are far more similar than you might suspect. Female corporate lawyers and catholic nuns even more so.

Of course, there are many superficial distinctions to be made between the female corporate lawyer and the catholic nun, most notably:

· Dress Code—There’s no denying that dress codes for nuns are generally stricter than for corporate lawyers. Although I know of no top law firm that officially sanctions Ally McBeal-style way-above-the-knee skirts (although management committees at most of these firms secretly fantasize about them), Sister McBeal is loathe to flaunt even her ankles.
· Wine Consumption—After 5pm Ally McBeal could often be found in a local watering hole downing white wine. Even after vespers are over, Sister McBeal will never be found openly sipping a pinot grigio, although she might tuck a mini Jack Daniels into her habit or the folds of her robes to savor in her room later on.

Otherwise their lifestyles are more aligned than their wardrobes and drinking habits might suggest. Female corporate lawyers deny themselves many creature comforts, including family (either existing families or potential families), because otherwise they would not be taken as seriously. Or they deny themselves their own style as they indoctrinate themselves with the style of those, mostly men, who have preceded and negotiated before them.

It’s true that there are far more female leaders in the legal profession than female leaders in the catholic church. However, that's hardly surprising when you consider that nuns are not allowed to serve as "leaders" in the catholic church.

Fourteenth century nuns convinced themselves they were getting closer to God by denying themselves food.* They got closer to the neurochemical distortion that results from prolonged bouts of anorexia nervosa, but, given their current rank in the church, they may not have gotten closer to God (then again, I could be wrong and the meek (skinny and hungry) may still inherit the earth). On the other hand, all the denial that female corporate lawyers have embraced may not have advanced the ball that far either (but may have advanced other balls).*

Sometimes the process interferes and competes with the purpose. In A Nun’s Story, the 1959 film about a proud nun torn between her devotion to God and her professional aspirations as a nurse, Sister Luke (Audrey Hepburn) rises at dawn for morning prayer, a model of discipline and devotion. She eventually leaves the convent, resigning herself to the realization that she was driven less by a love of God and more by a love of the nursing process and her superiority in this discipline to all other nuns in the convent.

Not to put Sister Luke to shame, but the female corporate lawyer retrains herself to rise well before dawn—preferably waking every 2-3 hours to check on her wayward corporate souls in need of securities law advice. The process becomes addictive and appeals to the perfectionist instinct. Ultimately though she may become torn between the vows she took as an officer of the court to represent her client zealously and her personal aspiration to advance within the corporate Egg structure, the latter often being at direct odds with the former.

Notes
*Nick Carraway, the narrator or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby, spends a summer in West Egg, a guise for the post-WWI new money community of Great Neck, L.I., while becoming fascinated with his second cousin’s lifestyle and residence in East Egg, a thinly-disguised Manhasset, L.I.

*"The Plight of the Female Partner, By the Numbers,” April 29, 2010; “Women Lawyers Struggle to Attain and Keep Partner Positions,” Forbes Blog, April 30, 2010; “Female Partners: What the Law Firms Are Hiding,” David Yas, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, March 8, 2010.

*Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) is one of the most famous of the fasting saints and throughout the medieval period extreme fasting was critical to the concept of female holiness. Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia, Joan Jacobs Brumberg (1988).

Just Buy It!

2010-04-19T17:33:00.000-07:00

In NYC, there's only one thing a single woman spends more time searching for than an eligible man: a suitable place to live, an apartment of her own (once you're over 30 you really need more than a room of your own).

Penelope has been searching in earnest for an apartment to buy but the more she searches the more obstinate she becomes about returning to her one bedroom rental in Lenox Hill, the one with the perfect entryway, western exposures and coveted herringbone floors.

At this point I've logged even more hours on Streeteasy.com than I ever did on Match.com in my quest for a man. I would spend entire days logged on to match.com, inputting the sought after features (male, NYC, likes pets, Christian, at least a B.A in education), and scanning the results. Often I’d return to the same profile repeatedly because I’d forgotten why I'd rejected a potential suitor. I'd pull it up and spot the tragic flaw: he was 4'3"; he was 74 years old; or he was a devout Jehovah's witness . . .

Occasionally, I would stumble on a profile that was in perfect harmony with my search criteria. I couldn't meet him soon enough. And when I did, there was usually a comical mismatch between my expectation (or his profile) and who sat across from me. Either that or his behavior was not to be believed, like the fellow who started out by telling me my face was less angular than in my photo, then explained that he didn’t vacation because it disrupted his sense of routine and exposed him to too much sunlight. I couldn’t run away soon enough.

It won't surprise you that real estate is full of the same deceptions as internet dating. I try not to get my hopes up but it's difficult to be positive and open-minded without accidentally believing that Apartment 10E is "the one". Look at the trim on that building―how could I not live happily ever after there?

One morning I saw a promising pre-war in Carnegie Hill, just one block from the park. Not only did its profile boast herringbone floors, but an atrium and outdoor terrace. The description did note "waiting for someone with vision." What it required was willful blindness: too dark to discern any herringbone, and the "atrium" was on the inside of the building surrounded by brick walls. Perfect for cultivating mushrooms and breeding bats, but nothing else.

Then there was the perfect Park-Lex apartment with the generous living room, and not a single closet . . .

I spoke with the friend who had tipped me off to Streeteasy.com. She admitted you have to kiss a few frogs before you find the right apartment. At this point my lips were chapped but I wasn’t ready to concede spending my retirement in a rental so I kept at it.

I saw a 2BR in Beekman with multiple walk-in closets (never did I imagine that the initials "W.I.C." would literally send shivers of excitement down my spine). No herring bone floors. I let on to the agent my secret obsession with herringbone. At home, I stare at the Escheresque floor pattern for hours and the frustrations of my workday magically dissolve. He suggested I have someone paint a herringbone pattern on the floors. I didn’t laugh.

One of my owning friends (everyone in NYC knows your friends fall into two categories: owning and renting) advised me that you can't expect one apartment to meet all your needs and that I may not find one with western exposure, herringbone floors, WICs, and large rooms in a pet friendly doorman building within my price range and neighborhood.

What was she saying? Was she recommending I just "buy it"?! It reminded me of Lori Gottlieb's book "Just Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough" and all the controversy the message of "settling" for a guy that's "good enough" stirred up among single women.

At this age, it's unlikely I will ever marry, so finding a womancave of my own is critical. I haven't settled for just any guy and I won't settle for just any apartment. Couldn't she see that?

Then again, maybe my analogy wasn't perfect. You can change apartments a bit more easily than men. There isn't quite the same societal disapproval for selling your apartment as there is for divorcing your spouse. In fact, many people purchase apartments with a keen eye on resale value and have no shame in discussing it. Discussing resale value (aka the prenup) when husband shopping, on the other hand, is usually handled with far less transparency and primarily by attorneys.

So maybe she was right, maybe I should just buy it. Maybe. I think I'll stare at the herringbone some more as I think it over.

Penelope

The Lunch Report: Partying with Penelope's Parents

2010-04-13T14:44:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I hosted a party, the first one I’ve hosted in years. I had forgotten what a taxing undertaking hosting a party can be.

It didn’t take a village but it did take a family, my extended family. I enlisted a girlfriend Whitney who, conveniently, has turned herself into a chef since we first met 25 years ago. I also asked one of my brothers to help and make sure Beauford the Bobcat was properly mounted on the wall.* There’s nothing like a bobcat falling off the wall to ruin a good party.

Whitney prepped the food and I prepped my brother on the invitees. I told him who had dated whom, who should be cut off after two drinks, and which women he was and was not allowed to pursue.

Once guests arrived, I found myself pointing out my favorite objects: “This beautiful Mahogany dining room table is circa 1730. The leaves are folded so you can’t see, but it’s in amazing shape.” I had to stop myself from saying “Oh, and to the right are my parents, both circa 1936. They’re also in excellent shape.”

Sometimes I slip into a juvenile habit of regarding my parents as an integral part of the background, whose roles are somehow confined to supervising. So, I was strangely flattered that so many of my guests had such kind things to say about my parents. I’m not sure why I was surprised. After all, they’re independent individuals with independent interests and their existence as “my parents” may not be their only noteworthy attributes.

I forget how unique my mother's path has been: born in New York; spent a few years in China; had a short stint in a convent (her reward for graduating early from boarding school); "came out"* at the Debutante Assembly and the New Year’s Ball in New York in 1955; dumped Charles the race car driver thereafter; and married my dad in 1961. Now an accomplished alpine gardener, her expertise in penstemons* is discussed in hushed tones in elite gardening circles in New York City.*

I forget that my father grew up just outside of NYC with several siblings as blonde as he (when he still had hair), had an adman dad who may have been the archetype for Don Draper, started out in the Manhattan D.A.'s office, transitioned to Dutchess County where he had his own firm, two horses, a dog, several cats (one of which peed on his documents one evening, which was entirely my fault), chickens that laid Dr. Seuss-like green eggs* and four children who orchestrated simultaneous attendance at college in an effort to challenge his capacity as a provider.

I don't know if any of these details figured among what intrigued my guests, but I did want to pause and reflect. They're not just a series of anecdotes or facts. They're my parents. They didn't just bring the extra bottles of vodka and wine (but thank goodness they did). They brought themselves.

Thanks, Mom and Dad. You done Penelope proud.

Notes

*Although Beauford had already passed to bobcat heaven long before I secured him on eBay, I recognize my acts may be construed as condoning the slaughter of pretty kitties. For this, I am truly contrite. When I look at Beauford, I hear my dead grandfather’s voice: “I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything.”

*No, she’s not a lesbian. “Coming out” refers to the tradition of a young lady or “débutante” being introduced to society.

*Technically, a Penstemon is a large genus of North American plant from the Scrophulariaceae family. Untechnically, they’re all frilly and girlish.

*Active in the North American Rock Garden Society (NARGS) since 1984, she is one of their most highly recommended lecturers. She has taught at the New York Botanical Garden, is past president of the Berkshire Chapter of NARGS and has taught Master Gardener classes as well. See “The Low Down on Gardening Low Down,” New England Wild Flower Society. http://www.newfs.org/learn/catalog/sym0901

*Of Chilean descent, Araucana chickens lay naturally blue, pink and green eggs.

Important Post Script: FEMA workers have now completed the post-party clean up. Among the objects found include two cell phones, one "Sycuan casino" water bottle, one fuschia feather boa, and one hand grenade. Please email penelope.frost@yahoo.com if any of these objects belong to you.

This Little Piggy Went To Market

2010-04-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

I've had nothing to say for weeks. I blame that on the person who told me if I wanted to be heard, I had to "market" myself. My stomach turned.

I've always been suspicious of marketing. It transforms people into who they are not. Isn't this how so many of us came to believe Tiger Woods was not just a golf star but a star at large? Yet one of the most successful marketing projects ever degenerated into a nightmare. Image witchdoctors the world round are still trying to sever the image of a pathological philanderer from the products he advertises.

It's unlikely I would face the same issues as Tiger, at least not right away, but I was still ambivalent. How would I market? The "f" word immediately came to mind.

There are now over 400 million Facebook (FB) users. Even God has a FB page* so it may well be the marketing medium of choice.*

FB is revealing, as much because of what people write or post as because of what they do not. The person who posts what he had for breakfast may be more opaque about his political views. FB creates an illusion of social and communicational transparency.

And if statistics are to be trusted, FB isn’t just for kids anymore. For adults, Facebooking may not be like breathing, as it is for most under 24, but it's still an adult preoccupation.

Some adapt to FB frighteningly well, posting items as care freely as teenagers. Others go through a honeymoon phase of reconnecting with long lost friends before fading into voyeurism, snickering at friends' posts and accusing them of PWI (Posting While Intoxicated). Still others, like Penelope, marvel at the promise of the FB paradigm, but break into a cold sweat at the mere thought of posting something on their own wall. What would it mean?

How can one ever decipher the implicit rules and the secret language of FB? “Friending” someone may have little to do with friendship in the traditional sense. P'lo gets that. They may be friend junkies inviting others to see how many friends they have (hoarding friends in order to win the unannounced competition for the most friends).

Who can imagine translating the implications of intergender FB gestures? "He friended me" may resonate with some girls as "He wants to date me" while it smacks of "Great, I'm just a buddy . . ." to others.

All of this said (posted) and despite her deep-seated fears of FB and becoming a networking tramp, after several cocktails and a flickering of an epiphany, Penelope resolved to market herself and create her own FB page.

The background info was easy (although maybe this is not a place for candor but another marketing opportunity? Who cares who Penelope IS—who SHOULD she be?) but then she hit "The Wall." Did Pink Floyd ever imagine "The Wall" would be an internet venue for sharing the minutiae of our daily lives?

Penelope was speechless (postless).* Are people who update their walls numerous times a day really lucky enough to have friends who care what they ate for lunch?
Or are they pumping their profiles for the News Feed?

The more one updates one's page, the more one's profile will appear in the FB Newsfeed (the CNBC ticker of your own social life) when your "friends" (in the most inclusive sense: random acquaintances; frenemies; ex-husbands; estranged relatives . . .) log on to FB. It doesn't matter what you think of them, but how often you think of them.

Despite all this, Penelope wants to "friend" you. Her motive is not impure—she really wants to know what you think and have to say and believes FB will facilitate this. If FB isn't for you, she understands, but she still wishes you would check out her blog, comment, criticize or just post an emoticon.

If you’re shy, need to protect your identity, or work for the CIA, please consider adopting an anonymous persona. After all, one of the reasons the Internet and blogging have become such robust and blissfully transparent fora for the swapping of ideas is the anonymity they allow.*

Looking forward to hearing from you (and your friends).

Yours truly—P’lo

NOTES
* See http://www.facebook.com/pages/God/10141208299?v=info. He is very Christian about accepting new friends.

* See proliferation of evolving citations to articles posted on the Internet about the power and necessity of marketing via FB. Seriously, between the time Penelope writes this and you read this, anything Penelope could cite would have become stale—that’s how many articles are being written about FB and marketing.

*At this point, you may be wondering why I am referring to myself as "Penelope" in the third person. Well, I hired a bespoke marketing agency (too elite to identify here) that, together with a psychoanalyst, specializes in blogging. They immediately recommended that I switch from the first person to the third person. The shift is intended to create a sense of disembodiment and self-alienation that enables Penelope to do and say things that I certainly never would. The shift also creates intrigue for Penelope's audience (previously known as "you"!).

*For a thought provoking analysis on transparency and the Internet, please see the four part series posted by Paris-based sociologist qua marketer, Minter Dial: http://themyndset.com/tag/transparency/

The Lunch Report: Twelve Angry Women

2010-03-11T12:05:00.000-08:00

Someone strides into my office and blurts out “What is this? I don’t understand it,” shaking a document in my face. His lack of comprehension must be my fault.

While discussing an ambiguous agreement with another one of my mild-mannered colleagues, he lurches back in his chair and yells “So what if there’s language missing. Everyone knows what we mean.” I can’t recall the “everyone-knows-what-we-mean” explanation ever persuading a client or a jury, but something tells me I ought to nod emphatically in agreement.

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but I’m a lawyer at a top corporate law firm in NYC. Ever since I’ve been at this firm I’ve struggled with cultural issues. It’s an American firm. I’m American. It’s a New York-centric firm. I’m from New York.

The cultural issues I wrestle with are not as subtle as issues of national or metropolitan identity. I wrestle with emotional identity. With few exceptions, everyone around me speaks a foreign emotional language. But like any foreign language, we usually marvel at the elegant inflections and unique sounds before we realize we cannot understand a word being said.

In a group meeting forming part of my interview three years ago, I witnessed a freedom of expression that seduced me. No awkward pauses or three minute cautionary prefaces—everyone chimed in freely with random observations, so much so that they forgot they had directed questions at me. It was suggestive of the liberation I would taste if I joined this firm. Soon I would be able to express enthusiasm without shocking my colleagues. I might even use exclamations!, BOLD ALL CAPs and emoticons ;-)

So I joined the firm.

It never occurred to me my colleagues would be just as uninhibited when exploring other parts of the emotional spectrum, namely anger. Or, what I call “anger,” because therein lies the cultural rub.

I see crass and immature displays of anger; my colleagues see people “taking charge” and “showing interest.” So, until I raise my voice, interrupt others and make my nostrils flare on command, no one will believe I am truly engaged or on top of my game.

Forget the bestseller "Getting Past No: Negotiating Your Way from Confrontation to Cooperation"* that was distributed as mandatory reading when I was a junior associate. The books I need now are "Getting Past Rationality: Screaming Your Way to Success" and "Verbally Bitchslapping Your Colleague Into Agreement: The Power of Monosyllabic Epithets." As long as I live in their world, I must speak their language, right?

Actually the American Psychiatric Association doesn’t see it that way. The APA’s efforts to demarcate the norms of emotional expression in American culture mean certain forms of anger constitute “mental illness.”* The offspring of Intermittent Explosion Disorder,* Temper Dysregulation Disorder (TDD), promises to make its way into DSM-V:*

n. A disorder characterized by severe recurrent temper outbursts in response to common stressors. Usage: “Because he suffered from TDD, he lashed out at everyone when he was diagnosed with ED and realized he would never experience a two hour erection without medication.”*

Could it be that most of my colleagues are mentally ill? Possibly, but, gosh, for mentally ill folks they sure generate a lot of revenue and rack up a lot of legal accolades every year. If their temporal lobes, where anger resides, were “cleaned up” (a lobotomy being one form of cleansing), they might not be as successful. Recipes for success are always highly individualized.

At my prior firm, I was accused of being a “guy” at the office. I don’t grab my crotch while speaking or use football analogies, but I don’t sugar coat my criticism either. I don’t soften statements by turning them into questions through a pseudo-English inflection? I say it like it is.

Yet, despite leaving the sugar, spice and everything nice at home, I’m just not angry enough. Anger just isn’t my style. So why the title “Twelve Angry Women” then? It’s hard enough to find twelve senior women at my office, much less twelve angry women.

The original “Twelve Angry Men” (1954) was premised on the frictions and frustrations of twelve male jurors trying to overcome cultural prejudice to reach a consensus. There were no women jurors in the script. Was it unimaginable that women might also get angry in the same context or is it that the writer just couldn’t figure out a single adjective that would capture the emotion of a mixed gender group striving for agreement?

She calls it anger; he calls it enthusiasm; the APA calls it illness. Isn’t it just style? The demands on rationality and analysis implicit in the lawyering process should pave a wide common ground between the genders, pushing objectivity to the fore and emotions—which always exacerbate the gender divide—to the back. Not here. I must be in left field.*

Notes
*William Ury (1991).

*See “When Anger Is an Illness,” Wall Street Journal, D1, March 9, 2010.

*IED was recognized by the psychiatric profession as early as 1980.

*DSM V stands for the fifth edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, expected to be published in 2013. Considered the bible in America for mental disorders, DSM V is also expected to introduce Negativistic Personality Disorder and Sluggish Cognitive Tempo. Sounds like a must read!

*Advertisements for erectile dysfunction (ED) medications warning of erections lasting more than four hours would appear to suggest that erections of shorter duration, say three hours, are perfectly normal.

*Originally written in 1954 by Reginald Rose, the teleplay was made into a film in 1957, starring Henry Fonda and remade in 1997 with Jack Lemmon.

*”Twelve Angry Women” was adapted from the original play by Sherman Sergel in 2004. There were no male jurors in the script.

*“Hey, you’re in left field!” Act I, p. 14, Twelve Angry Men.

The Lunch Report: Flying with the Freaks

2010-03-05T14:35:00.000-08:00

When I had my lunch today it was -58 degrees F out, yet I was as toasty as can be. Even at 39,000 feet, my client's Gulfstream 450* (not the latest model, but good enough for Penelope) had impeccable heating and surprisingly moist air (maybe I would arrive with that coveted skin condition, dewy skin?). This was my first flight in a private jet and I was predisposed to love it.

Once in my seat, the only one on my side of the aisle, I stretched my limbs to full extension then retracted them into my favorite position, an expansive Indian-style (sorry, are we still allowed to say that?) position.

By two hours after wheels should have been up, the thrill of flying private was fading. As it turns out, private jets are not immune from the same delays and mechanical malfunctions as commercial planes. As mechanics surrounded the plane and poked at it, we all settled into conversations or reading materials.

On a commercial flight, you can depart and arrive and never exchange words with anyone, which is typically what I do (and if you need tips on how to escape conversation with your flightmate, just email me).

Unfortunately, on a private plane, whether host or guest, you cannot avoid some level of conversation with your fellow travelers. As a corporate lawyer, I am generally blessed with an ever ready excuse—the tyranny of work. Being a corporate lawyer means never having to say you’re sorry;* it’s never your fault. It’s work that makes you cancel and retreat into a blissfully solitary cave when you’re not feeling social. But after two hours, even I could not in good faith pretend to be engrossed by the two page document laid out on the table in front of me.

The children traveling with us were far more patient than the adults (of course the adults lacked the assistance of one Spanish-speaking nanny per person to whip out computer games and snacks at the slightest hint of boredom).

We deplaned so the mechanics could fuss more invasively with the plane. Sadly, the terminals for private jets only prolong social obligations. Terminals for private jets are generally small with no shops to visit. They nurture small communities of people with both passengers and flight support staff who can easily remember you. Maybe transitioning from commercial to private flying is how I imagine I would feel if I left NYC to be smothered in the smallness of the suburbs, seeing the same folks over and over.

Eventually we switched to a G-V (G-IVs are so 90s anyway). And we were off.
Lunch—baked chicken and vegetables—was served buffet style with drinks of our choice. Although I usually reach for a white wine in flight (the only time I drink Sutter Home or Turning Leaf, I swear), I was too comfortable to need to anesthetize myself to my surroundings.

Will I really always fly private for now on? Probably not. Private flights lack the "freak" factor I secretly enjoy when traveling amongst hundreds of people I’ll never see again—like the teenager seated next to me with so many body piercings that I was dying to ask her if they hurt when she sneezed but was afraid to speak to her. Or the woman seated next to me on one recent flight who scratched her head obsessively during a three hour flight as I pretended not to notice the scabs she liberated from her scalp throughout the flight. Repulsive? Absolutely, yet also somewhat intriguing.

I might also miss the anonymity of flying commercial. In Up In The Air, George Clooney's character Ryan Bingham claims he travels 320 out of 365 days of the air and happily remains free from attachments and community, traveling with an "empty knapsack," the symbol of his freedom from personal relationships.

Despite his disdain for the communities and close relationships formed at ground level, he unwittingly creates a pseudo-community of dysfunctionality 35,000 feet in the air through his "elite" traveler status which, ironically, ensures name recognition when he checks in at airports and strips him of the privilege of anonymity. I am not there yet so can hold fast to my anonymity, for now.

We complain about them, maliciously and vehemently. We devote substantial television time and internet space to criticizing commercial airlines. Yet, those dreaded commercial flights form a transient bridge to people we will never know—the untouchables for those who fly commercial but the unseeable and unobservable for those who fly private.

I thought flying private would be the ultimate travel privilege but, at least for me, flying with the freaks while retaining some measure of anonymity are much greater privileges (and, well, much cheaper). Oh, my flight is boarding now. Must go.

Notes
*The Gulfstream 450 is a modification of the G-IV, a part of a family of jets produced by Gulfstream Aerospace, a General Dynamics company based in Savannah, Georgia. The G-IV has been superseded by the improved G-V model.

*A modest perversion of Ali MacGraw’s famous line in the 1970 film A Love Story: "Love means never having to say you’re sorry."

The Lunch Report: My Magentic Lunch

2010-02-19T14:45:00.000-08:00

We're all getting older, some of us more visibly than others.

I remember when "getting older" was a clichéd joke that I would hear "adults" use in a quasi-self-deprecating way.

I say “quasi” because Americans are generally bad at self-deprecation. A woman’s “I’m sooo old” usually comes off not as humorous self-indictment but as hopeless sincerity borne of extreme self-consciousness, begging to be rebuffed with a "don't be absurd, you're not old" from a caring friend. Meanwhile the caring friend diverts her eyes away from the crow's feet that seem to have mysteriously overtaken her friend’s entire face.

I guess I should have realized sooner that I was old. There have been so many clues, all of which I’ve willfully ignored or misinterpreted.

Maybe I should have realized it last weekend, when I stayed in a hotel in South Beach, Miami that manages to charge top Euro (now that only Europeans can afford America’s better hotels, “top dollar” is considered anachronistic) for mediocre rooms just because they house a decent contemporary art collection. The “contemporary artists” were 10-15 years younger than I. I always think of contemporary artists as 10 years older than I am. Maybe it was intended to be a collection of child-artists . . .

But today I finally realized I am old, and this is how I found out. . .

Today my shoulder and I had our first MRI in 18 years.* Eighteen years ago, we volunteered for an MRI, as part of an experiment, but today we needed an MRI. Last October I fell down the stairs and landed on my shoulder. First there was excruciating pain and then a series of doctors. I used to jump down flights of stairs for fun—since when did such a slight tumble require medical attention? Since when had the sturdy bones and cartilage that make up this invulnerable “me” become so fragile?

When I arrived at the imaging center, I was impressed by how much MRI culture had evolved. Of course there’s still the infamous clanging, but it has been muted with certain creature comforts.

MRI centers now offer music. My underage (under which age, I’m not sure) technician offered me a headset and asked whether I would like to listen to "80s" music. It wasn’t a good guess of my age—she had the patient info sheet and knew exactly what I would have been listening to in college.

As she slid me into the massive cylinder that would host the magnetic resonance session, I was looking forward to a light nap accompanied by New Order or Simple Minds. OMD’s “If You Leave” would certainly help me ignore the clanging. Instead, I was jolted awake somewhat by the sound of John Denver’s “Sunshine on My Shoulders.” At first I thought it must be a mistake but next came Captain & Tenille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” followed by Elton John’s “Bennie & The Jets.” I still remember listening to this 45 on my sister’s record player when I was 7 years old.

Without realizing there was any distinction to be made among the various pre-1990s genres of music, what she had actually put on were, as you surely recognize, 70s tunes. For her, 70s and 80s music was all part of a single prehistoric musical era that pre-dated CDs and iPods.

Yet, couldn’t she hear the difference? Couldn’t ANYONE with ears hear the difference? Maybe not—it wasn’t hyper-techno and there were no rap lyrics. To her ears, it was all a part of that uniform world of sound that preceded her musical consciousness. And I must be part of that uniform world of “older” people who would listen to such music. After all, what distinction is to be made between 42 years of existence and 52 years of existence—both represent a really long time.

And what do I have to say about this long long time I’ve been hanging out and existing? What did I have to show for it? Just as I felt a panicky midlife crisis moment coming on, it gave way to a midday epiphany.

One of the advantages of getting older is seeing the nuances that you could not appreciate when you were 19 or 20. Sure, maybe some wrinkles and grey hair come along with those nuances and subtleties, but, all in all, I think I’d rather be able to appreciate the finer distinctions I glossed over at age 20 (even if it means I have to color my hair to hide the grey) than actually be 20 again.

So today for lunch, I ate a little pride but gained a sense of peace.

Notes
*I was a subject of an experiment conducted by a friend who has since become an expert in studying the brain through magnetic resonance imaging. Dr. Fahmeed Hyder is a doctor passionate about his work and the only boyfriend I've ever had who gave me a picture of my brain for my birthday (and, for any ex-boyfriends reading this, not only do I in fact have a brain, but the MRI did not reveal any missing portions or general deformities).

The Lunch Report: Leaving Who Dat Nation

2010-02-01T14:15:00.000-08:00

Apologies for taking so long to share my lunch experience with you. Usually I like to write about my lunch when all the flavors and tastes are still fresh on my tongue. The tastes from recent lunches were so overwhelming that it's taken me two weeks to make sense of them.

I spent the last two weekends lunching in Who Dat Nation. No, I am not mocking anyone's speech patterns. "Who Dat Nation"* is a legitimate reference to the community of New Orleans Saints fans, a community that has had good reason to celebrate lately.

Unruly and unbridled passion—my own or others—has always scared me. Yet, passion was exactly what I was hoping to find down there. I found passion, someone else's passion—another city's passion—but not my own.

This was not for lack of effort. On January 16th, I attended the Saints game against the Arizona Cardinals, my first NFL game ever. For goodness sakes, I wore a body length gold lamé unitard with a Drew Brees jersey on top and screamed myself horse in the New Orleans Super Dome. I even participated in Bobby Hebert's* live post-game radio program held at Deanie's Seafood Restaurant. To my surprise, the experience far exceeded my expectations.

So I prolonged the effort. I spent a second weekend in New Orleans and even hosted a Saints party at a suite in one of the French Quarter’s historic hotels (a bit redundant considering you can’t spit in the French Quarter without hitting an historical landmark). I watched the Saints defeat the Vikings in over time while dining on fried chicken and sharing shots with my new best friends, most of whom I’d never met.

They weren’t all strangers. A male friend hosted the party with me. Even well before the 5:40pm kick-off, he had been transformed by Who Dat delirium. Throughout the game he was a black and gold storm of energy leaping from one room to another, opening beers, hugging male friends and glaring at the TV, daring the Vikings to try to take his team down. The only time he sat still was when Hartley prepared for the final kick that made the whole Who Dat fantasy real.

Then the craziness really began. All the NYTimes' accounts of the revelry that followed the Saints' victory against the Vikings on January 24th are true. City-wide high fives, an early Mardi Gras celebration on Bourbon Street, and the Who Dat chant* reverberating throughout the Quarter. I wished I could have immersed myself in it but it turned out not to be my style.

A part of me wouldn’t let myself be swept away by their joy. If I were the protagonist in my own life—and sadly I usually am not—my inability to cede to passion would be my tragic flaw. I wanted to know what it felt like to want or need to hug strangers.

Maybe I knew deep down that there is always a dark side to every passion. Like when your male friend—the Southern gentleman who allegedly has nothing but the utmost respect for all his female acquaintances—begins pawing a tired bar tendress at 2am, tells her she's the most beautiful waitress he's ever seen, and then shoots an icy stare at you and snaps "Don't be jealous."

Yes, despite all of the bohemian freedoms of the Crescent City,* where even the water meter covers boast "Love, Faith & Strength,"* they still try to tell you what you should feel and lash out at you when they think you're feeling the wrong thing. Ironically, I was not jealous at all—I was perversely intrigued by how properly inspired "passion" can manifest itself as recklessness, thoughtlessness and immaturity, the dark side of passion.

Maybe I'm just a spoil sport. After all, I saw two of the most exciting football games in NFL history. I witnessed firsthand a tangible surge in New Orleanians’ morale, as the entire nation focused its attention on their city and their team.

Despite all of that, I felt sad, inadequate and irritated. Sad and inadequate because I did not want to run down Bourbon Street, hug strangers or kiss the ground. Sad and irritated because even a "good" friend thinks excitement is a fair excuse for insulting behavior. Maybe I just digest things differently. I'm beginning to think I like reading about Who Dat Nation in the NYTimes much better than I do spending time among its citizens. Maybe it's time to leave Who Dat Nation and revoke my citizenship. Maybe. I’ll watch one more game this weekend and then decide . . .

Notes
*See http://www.whodatnation.com; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Dat%3F

*Bobby Hebert, Jr. is a retired quarterback for the New Orleans Saints who works now as a sportscaster. The "Cajun Canon," as he is known, holds a live radio show after each Saints game at Deanie’s seafood restaurant and responds to questions called in to the program or, in my case, delivered live at the restaurant on the mike. Granted, I could have come up with a more probing question rather than throwing Bobbie a curve ball (sorry to mix sports metaphors) and ask whether Reggie Bush was single. If I took the time to read Page Six more often, I would have known that he has an on and off thing with Kim Kardashian.

*New Orleans is also known as The Crescent City because of the way the Mississippi flows through it, creating the shape of a crescent.

*The water meter covers in New Orleans are so artistically noteworthy that people would steal them as souvenirs. Many souvenir shops in the Quarter now make pendants and rings featuring the water meter cover, its stars and "Love, Faith & Strength" motto in the hopes that people will purchase the souvenirs and leave in tact the few water meter covers that remain.

*Who Dat chant refers to the Saints’ cheer: "Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?" I wish I could provide an audio link to the entire Super Dome chanting this. Without that, it’s difficult to appreciate this cheer.

The Lunch Report: The Happiest Lunch Is NOT in Louisiana

2009-12-18T14:21:00.000-08:00

Today is clearly one of the coldest days of the year (it better be, because I can't withstand temperatures much lower than this).

Bitter cold can be a source of grave misery. It ravages the skin, stirs up the static (try walking into a meeting with hair standing on end, makes quite an impression) and serves as too easy an excuse to hit the bottle before dusk (even now when the sun sets by 5pm).

Nonetheless, I was prepared to ignore the cold today. I was going to put my nose to the grindstone and get down to the business of being happy, NYC-style, by being extraordinarily efficient, vigorously checking things off my “to do” list, immersing myself in work and indulging in all the superlatives that NYC has to offer (best shopping, best theatre selection, best gyms, etc). By the end of the day I would be incapacitated with a sense of satisfaction.

And then I opened the newspaper and logged on to the Web:* there it was, we in NY are the unhappiest folks in all the land, 51st out of 50 (they even included Puerto Rico).

And the happiest state? Louisiana. Really? At first I was defensive. Maybe if we had their climate, we’d be happy too.

Besides, people forget the many advantages of unhappiness:

+ In NY, we have free license to complain. Happy people aren't allowed to complain and will elicit no sympathy when doing so. In NY we can complain about the budget, the disproportionate effect that the financial crisis has had on our state, the weather, etc. This may be why we're never lacking for conversation in NY.

+ In NY we're more productive. Angst and depression can be tremendous sources of inspiration, both in finance and the arts. In fact, probably the only reason folks in Louisiana are happy is because of the financial tools invented by NYers, the magazine written by NYers and the clothes designed by NYers. Our productivity is subsidizing their happiness. Maybe we should be getting some sort of a tax credit for this?

And then I looked a bit closer at the criteria for the study and realized the problem with the study. In all their scientific wisdom, the scientists were measuring happiness by asking people if they were happy, a fatal flaw in the study’s design that flies right in the face of the Heisenberg Principle.*

In Louisiana, they don’t actually know what happiness is. How could they? In NY we have more psychiatrists per person and the average literacy rate is much higher.* What with the dearth of psychiatrists in LA and the comparatively low literacy rate, how could they even know if they are happy or not?

Being Southern and all, they were undoubtedly motivated by a sense of politeness in their responses. If you’re Southern, it’s better to confirm your happiness than burden a complete stranger with emotional confessions, especially when the stranger is simply trying to conduct a scientific study for which he or she has already decided the conclusion well in advance of initiating the study.

And then I really got it. The study and its results are part of an elaborate marketing campaign designed to stop the constant flow of people into NY and the potential dilution of our per capita happiness. People in NY are the happiest in America but we rely on studies such as these to ensure the secrecy of our happiness.* Similarly, people in Louisiana need polls like this to persuade them of their sense of contentment (although with the literacy rate in LA what it is, a study published in the Journal of Science may not be the most effective way to spread the message there).

Come to think of it, we're so damned happy that we turn to those sad gits in Louisiana when we need some depressing literature to bring us down a notch (Tennessee Williams comes to mind . . .).. I once had a friend who saw two Tennessee Williams plays in one day. She was so depressed I had to bring her to the ER. Thank goodness we also have some of the best medical care in the nation in New York.

Happy Holidays to everyone in America, no matter what state you inhabit.

Penelope Frost

p.s. I was so happy today that I forgot to have lunch. Cost: $0.

Notes
*The Wall Street Journal, p.1; http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20091217/sc_livescience/happieststatesrevealedbynewresearch

*The popularized version of this principle posits that the act of observing something changes the object of observation.

Another fatal flaw, the study concedes, is that the LA interviews took place before Hurricane Katrina. To be fair, though, the stunning and unexpected victories racked up by the New Orleans Saints in 2009 could very well counter much of the continued emotional effects of Katrina.

*The literacy rate in LA is 28% compared with 50% in NY. This could mean we’re either twice as happy or twice as screwed up but I’m still working on the equation and related algorithms to demonstrate this.*As it turns out, the study was financed largely by capital sourced in NY.

The Lunch Report: Correction and Addendum to The Breakers

2009-12-17T11:14:00.000-08:00

I wanted to share with you all what I learned today in my follow up conversation with Mr. James Augustine Ponce, The Breakers’ official historian and Palm Beach’s only designated living landmark.

Hey, when a 92-year old Palm Beach scholar takes time out of his day to call NYC and educate some corporate lawyer about The Breakers, I think it’s noteworthy.

Italian Inspiration for The Breakers. Because of the conflicting explanations I encountered when researching the architectural inspiration for The Breakers, I omitted this detail from The Lunch Report. The inspiration for The Breakers was in fact the Villa de Medici in Rome. Admit it, you all thought The Breakers in RI was the original inspiration.

That Curious Fountain Out Front. I was misguided by the staff at The Breakers. The fountain featuring the questionable acts among cherubs, alligators and pelicans (they look like swans, I swear) was not inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It began as a replica of a fountain in the Boboli Gardens in Florence. The animals were then changed to alligators and pelicans to add a southern Floridian touch. Also, the cherubs are “wrestling with,” and not “choking,” the animals. I apologize for my inflammatory suggestion that violence against animals was involved. Obviously, the cherubs (dumbasses that they are) are playing with the alligators (as one does in FL) and not trying to hurt them.

Hotel Nacional in Havana. Based on a recent trip to Havana, Mr. Ponce was able to confirm that Hotel Nacional bears a striking resemblance to The Breakers, from the outside at least. Once inside, he explained, all resemblance stops. We’ll see . . . Mr. Ponce also confirmed my suspicions that the Embargo is the “silliest thing” ever.

Please see the attached link for a fascinating tribute to The Breakers and Mr. Ponce:http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/node/304524

The Lunch Report: Lunch at The Breakers, Recession-style

2009-12-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

I remember the first time I visited The Breakers (Palm Beach, FL). The castle-like facade overwhelmed me. Royalty must dwell inside, I thought. I didn’t even understand it was a hotel.

As I approached the main entrance, the perfectly parallel palm trees spaced apart with mathematical precision made me feel self-conscious about the symmetry of my gait. Rolls Royces pulled up and tuxedo-ed men and Dior-clad women spilled out. The display of wealth was obvious yet, strangely, not ostentatious—wealth was apparently expected here.

Most are too distracted by the grandeur of The Breakers’ entrance to notice the curious fountain out front. It’s encircled by eight demonically gleeful cherubs choking swans and strangling alligators*—a strange touch, perhaps intended to presage violence or decadence lurking within the castle. I was told it was inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I recall Persephone being raped in Metamorphoses but I don’t recall anything as disturbing as violence against alligators, do you?

F. Scott Fitzgerald would have felt at home here—as soon you step inside, you know you’re entering some golden age, even if it’s not the 20s. That is, until recently, when the “bargain” was introduced.

I was there the day the “bargain” was posted on The Breakers’ website. Half-price rooms and unlimited golf (no greens fees). It was the same day I saw an employee post a sign for half-price drinks during the Tapestry Bar “happy hour,” where cocktail hour had never been called “happy hour.” I swear I saw him cringe.

The Tapestry Bar, which houses a collection of 16th-18th century tapestries,* is where one has a warm up drink (or three) before heading to dinner or one of the many benefits the hotel may be hosting.

This week was my first time back in a while and the “bargain” has been in full swing for months now.

Last night I showed up for my pre-prandial cocktail in well-fitted slacks and a tunic top with a soupcon of sequins around the neck and cuffs. My sequins almost fell off when we entered the 33-foot-ceilinged room. We were accosted by denim and polyester, rather than welcomed by the silks and cashmeres we’d been accustomed to seeing here. Shirts weren’t tucked in and belt loops hung listlessly, beltless. We even saw flip flops—nothing but a thin slab of rubber separating feet from carpet.

I wandered out, disappointed, and headed towards the Seafood Bar. On the way, I caught Henry Flagler’s* eye, his look decidedly more severe than usual. Even he was horrified by the “bargain.”

Today I woke with fresh resolve to admire The Breakers. A day of golf at Breakers West, my golf Brigadoon, is usually my favorite part of any Breakers visit. Just 10 miles west of the main Breakers palace, Breakers West offers nothing but golf and tennis, a haven of purity compared to the baroque materialism that permeates the main palace, where Worth Avenue* peddlers, such as Ralph Lauren and Burberry’s, line the halls.

The pro’s eyes lit up when I walked into the pro shop. He’s always glad when I visit but there was a certain desperation to his greeting today. After a short conversation about the new “clientele” the bargain had ushered in, I understood why. Tears came to his eyes as he described the divots and ball marks these bargain hunters were leaving in their wake. Apparently Breakers West was under siege as well.

He explained that my presence was a reminder to him of another era (ironic when you consider how much hotel shampoo I’ve pilfered over the years). He saw in me a golfer who would treat the course with tenderness and respect. I may steal shampoo but, for God’s sakes, I repair my ball marks and replace my divots!

My usual lunch routine here is to grab some complimentary pastries at the pro shop so I can play golf all day without stopping for lunch. There were no pastries in the pro shop. Were they that expensive to provide or did they fear guests might break into a fist fight over the pastry? The latter, no doubt.

Fortunately, with the help of my friends in the pro shop and the grill room, I was able to create a sanctuary overlooking the 9th green. Today I had for lunch:

*One BLT on toast with an abundance of mayonnaise.
*One diet coke
*Saltine crackers

Cost: $0. The lunch was on the house (probably in recognition of my loyalty—they knew it wasn’t the “bargain” that lured me here and no matter how much I have to scrimp to spend another weekend at The Breakers (post-“bargain”), I will do it).

It may be a while until The Breakers has been fully restored and the bargains hunters have dispersed. In fact, for now I may have more luck recapturing The Breakers I miss at Hotel Nacional in Havana.*

__________________________________________
*The tapestries were a gift by Dr. Owen Kenan, Mrs. Flagler’s (see below) cousin. Dr. Kenan boarded RMS Lusitania in 1915 to rescue his art collection (including the tapestries) from his apartment in Paris. As legend has it, Kenan survived thanks to a life jacket provided by the valet to Alfred Vanderbilt, who sank with the ship.

*Henry Flagler Morrison (1830-1913), photos of whom populate the East Wing, is credited with the development of south east Florida. He had The Palm Beach Inn built in 1895. By 1901 it had tripled in size and had been renamed The Breakers. It would burn to the ground twice before being resurrected in its current form designed by Leonard Schulz, also The Waldorf-Astoria’s architect.

*Worth Avenue, the Rodeo Drive of Florida, features Cartier, Valentino and Hermes, among other luxury goods stores.

*Hotel Nacional, a McKim Mead and White creation, was designed as a replica of The Breakers.

The Lunch Report: My Lunch with Tiger Woods

2009-12-08T15:45:00.000-08:00

Given the continued coverage of Tiger Woods’ non-golfing activities, I thought I should come clean with my readership. I had lunch with Tiger Woods.

It all took place at Sawgrass in 2003.* Elin and he were not married at the time so, technically, it wasn’t a "transgression." I was a guest speaker at a conference hosted by UBS, which was also sponsoring the PGA event taking place at the same time, and so was generously provided with courtesy tickets to the golf tournament.

Tiger’s and my meeting was completely accidental and perhaps a result of a breach in Tiger’s security protocol and my innate disrespect for boundaries. I remain bound by various confidentiality agreements and cannot elaborate much on our meeting. Suffice it to say, he extended a very private lunch invitation.

Given our age difference, I suppose it was more of a cougar-cub thing than anything else (although at 27 Tiger was an aging cub and I, at 35, was just a baby cougar, if even).*

So why aren’t I one of the Tiger Tramps* named by the media in Tiger-gate? I think you know why. If there is a Tiger tramp, she must be a busty model of Amazonian height with the finest features this side of the Atlantic (or the Pacific, given Tiger's birthplace in CA)—not a bespectacled corporate lawyer of modest bosom and height with a quirky nose, like Penelope Frost.

Real stories about real relationships are complicated, messy and not easily summed up in 3-word titles with pithy 4-word subtitles and borderline porn photos. Reality is in fact much more nuanced and requires many more words and much more time to adequately discuss, which is exactly why most of us don’t want to read about it.

There's been a lot of talk about Tiger being "human" in the news coverage but in fact the media has taken Tiger's alleged escapades well beyond "human" and well into the realm of super human. If there were infidelity, surely it would not have been any ordinary indiscretion. Tiger must have broken a record.

At this point we're all tired of the coverage and amateur analogies and metaphors cropping up, including the "the fairways of his life," how many "birdies" (women) he "scored" (bedded) on "the back nine" and triple-entendred references to his "swing" (sorry, Yahoo internet policies prevent me from translating these last two).

But there is no longer any point in asking "Who cares?" Apparently everyone does and no one believes he is human, even if he is. I’m afraid we can expect the media to ride the Tiger* a bit longer as Tiger’s closeted tendency to "be human" takes on more epic and outlandish proportions every day.

Penelope

P.S. As I am sure you have divined by now (and if you have not, The Lunch Report is probably over your head and you may want to stick with the NY Post), I did not in fact have lunch, or anything else, with Tiger Woods. Don't think I haven't contemplated it—what female hasn't contemplated it, at least once, as she watches Tiger stride up the 18th fairway on a Sunday afternoon with a double digit lead—it’s only "human."

Notes____________
*The Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass (Jacksonville, FL) is the site of an annual PGA event.

*According to the New York Times, cubs range in age from 23-31 and cougars range in age from 35-56. See "In Cougar Territory, Cubs Take the Lead," New York Times, November 14, 2009.

*"N. ‘ty-gur tramp. Any of the comely participants involved in the extraordinary romps of the formerly inscrutable golf superstar Tiger Woods. Usage: As news of the Tiger Woods scandal spread, one "other woman" after another emerged with a love story to tell or sell. Within a week, more than ten Tiger tramps had revealed themselves, and it became clear that the taciturn, no-show golf pro had set himself quite a tiger trap." Source: http://wordbirds.tumblr.com/

*"V. ryd thu ty-gur. To report or to track the evolving Tiger Woods scandal as zestfully, tenaciously, and as often as possible. Usage: Journalists on every news station rode the Tiger all week long, rushing to communicate every bit of gossip or scandal to their viewers as soon as it emerged, as if they were reporting on a war, flood, earthquake, or other issue of unquestioned human relevance." Source: http://wordbirds.tumblr.com.

The Lunch Report: Lunch in Little WASP Town

2009-12-04T15:20:00.000-08:00

Today I accidentally lunched at The River Club, tucked inconspicuously at the eastern most extremity of the Beekman neighborhood, 447 East 52nd. I say "accidentally" because I had forgotten that the club is practically "in" the East River, a good two miles east of my office, an impossibly long walk in heels and simply uncab-able during midday midtown traffic.

The River Club distinguishes itself among its “peer” clubs, such as the Links and the Knick, by its original aspiration to serve as both a country club as well as a living cooperative (through its neighboring River House). Housing its own pool, tennis and squash courts, some say it succeeded.

Chartered in 1930, members could moor their yachts at the club's strictly private, block-long pier and enter the club without ever sullying their shoes on 52nd street. Perhaps the unfettered water access was intended to simulate the experience of stepping off a gondola in Venice straight into a palazzo (albeit an Art Deco one).

Like many UES cooperatives, the River Club maintained its cultural integrity (ie, WASPs only, not even Mackerel Snappers* allowed originally) until unseemly financial needs supposedly forced it to modify its admissions policy—financial needs have often prompted a love of diversity. At lunch I was told the club now, proudly, admits Jews. Looking around, I suspected this might be a rumor circulated by politically correct members ashamed of the club’s historic associations with anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathizing.* According to one source, no Jews were admitted until the mid 50s.

I was struck by my fellow lunchers’ ethnic uniformity (or lack of “ethnicity,” because in America, WASPs (or WASCs*) are not ethnic). I could size them up immediately by their teeth. Many of these teeth summer on Fisher's,* I'm sure. These teeth are not the fluorescent white teeth one sees nowadays on the finance crowd and their well-heeled spouses. At the River Club, people know that glow-in-the-dark teeth mean you and your teeth are trying too hard. No orthodontic excesses here, just good genes and the faintest hint of ochre that occurs naturally with age.

The food was appropriately bland, as club food should be—exotic tastes are a creature comfort of the nouveau cultured—their taste buds so finely tuned that they can no longer appreciate the elegant simplicity of a grilled cheese sandwich or chicken noodle soup—American staples that may soon disappear amidst “fusion cuisine,” whereby the fusion of two unrelated cuisines (think Japanese-Mexican) is meant to be superior to either individually, yet often results in gustatory discord.

Cost: $0 (like all good clubs, one pays with a membership number, to avoid the vulgarity of cash or credit cards)

I know I was supposed to hate this lunch and feel stifled by this club, yet, with great shame, I admit that I was relieved to spend 90 minutes in a strangely familiar atmosphere where I did not need to explain anything about my background or why I enjoyed squash—you’d think I told people I beat disabled Mexican children with polo mallets when I see the reaction to this “confession.”

I am as big a fan of diversity as the next person. I’ve visited Little Italy, Little India, and Little Brazil, none of which would have been created were it not for some Italians, Indians and Brazilians wanting to create a cultural enclave within a bigger culture. I’ve indulged in so much diversity that I may have forgotten what really feels like home to me and forgotten that there is no shame in feeling at home.

So, as I lift my gin and tonic this evening and reflect on my lunch, I would like to toast all of the cultural enclaves of NYC, including Little WASP Town at Beekman Place.*

Cheers,

Penelope
_______________________________________________
*”Mackerel Snapper,” which refers to the pre-Vatican II custom of Friday abstinence from meat, is a derogatory term for Roman Catholics which became popular in the 1800s as a means of distinguishing Catholics from Protestants in America.

*The club’s members included, most famously, Charles Lindbergh, long accused of Nazi anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies.

*Let’s not forget that prior to Hank’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his subsequent separation from the Church of Rome in 1533, Catholics were very much establishment creatures.

*Fisher’s Island (named Visher’s in 1614), has been a popular summer destination for well established and old money families since the turn of the 20th century. Situated approximately 7 miles southeast of New London, CT and 11 miles north of Long Island, Fisher’s is part of Suffolk County, New York.

*Ironically, Beekman Place passed through a slum phase after the wealthy Beekman family left the area in 1854 and before its revival by the Morgan banking family in the early 1920s.

The Lunch Report: The X Lunch

2009-11-24T15:45:00.000-08:00

Today I lunched with my romantic past. Yup, I lunched with an ex-boyfriend (“X”), and not even one who had been particularly kind (there’s a reason I nicknamed him the “Evil Englishman”). Feminists across NYC are sighing in disappointment.

The most daring aspect is that I chose to lunch with him when I was not only NOT on top of my game , but well below it (no prospects sniffing around AND I had a bad hair cut last week). I have seen several issues of Cosmopolitan magazine warning against such reckless behavior, but curiosity got the better of me.*

By way of prologue, X and I dated 14 years ago and not for very long (yet still too long). We weren’t very good at the whole moving on thing. So, for at least 10 years, we teased, tortured, and gently manipulated each other when it suited our lonely, malicious, and ambivalent instincts. We acted out anger, projected fantasies and deliberately created discomfort in each other. All in all, it was far more effective than 10 years with any NYC psychiatrist could have been, and it cost less.

During that decade, I limped through various stages of romantic withdrawal and recovery, including fantasizing about his untimely death, daydreaming about our eventual reunion, declaring stoically, if not melodramatically, my acceptance of our inability to ever communicate again, and imagining the award-winning prose that all of the foregoing would inspire. In retrospect, there wasn’t sufficient material for a made-for-TV program.

It has been three years since X and I last lunched. Since then I've “lateraled” to a new firm (particularly apt here, as the change feels more like random sidewise motion than the upward career movement I’d intended) and the Crisis has thwarted his determined ascent to the pinnacle of the Morgan Stanley management hierarchy.*

Would he show up with a ring on his finger? Would he make a pass at me? Would I want him to? As it turns out, no, no and another no.

When organizing lunch, I’d anticipated a cataclysmic encounter—a lunch that would immediately illuminate for me what a dysfunctional person I’d grown to be, galvanize me from my underachieving stupor and prompt me to make something of myself. Or a lunch that would remind me with brutally fresh evidence what a malevolent ne'er do well he had always been.

I must have ordered the wrong thing on the menu, either today or 14 years ago, because I got none of that. I had a pleasant lunch with an agreeable Englishman. I basked slightly in X’s compliments, but there was no drama, not even an inkling of dramatic tension.

With mild irony I realized that X, the same quietly ambitious guy who lectured me 14 years ago that a man defines himself exclusively through his career achievements, was now telling me that he was not where he wanted to be professionally, this was okay, and one should never assess oneself solely from the narrow perspective of career success. By his account, X is in a good relationship, which has either matured his perspective or dulled his ambition (I used to think the two were the same).

After his conversational effort—a marked improvement from the grunts of 14 years ago (with the British accent, the grunts sounded melodic back then)—I obediently chattered about myself. We debated whether I should pour all my energy into furthering my career/ financial provider status and whether I could ever have borne a full time schedule of "domestic shit" (his sarcastic parlance for being a wife and mother). Apparently he didn’t see many other life possibilities.

We agreed I could never have done the domestic shit full time, nor could I have been fulfilled squeezing my entire identity into a provider role. Based on various hopelessly tangible criteria (current job, past schooling, golf handicap and weight) he insisted my life was great. I protested. There had to be something much more than the tasks and interactions that defined my current life. He agreed. We decided we would have drinks again in 10 years (no compelling need, from my perspective, to meet any sooner).

I pray by then I have found much more, and that by then my portfolio of ex- (or current) boyfriends reflects a bit more imagination and insight.

Cost: $0. When learning I earned approximately one fifth of what X earns in a year, X could not bear making the working poor contribute a dime. What a great guy.

Notes
*I also ignored the myriad websites offering guidance on what to wear when seeing an ex-boyfriend. See, eg, What to Wear to See Your Ex-Boyfriend, http://www.marieclaire.com/fashion/tips/what-to-wear/fashion-ex

*Although senior managing director for a decade hardly suggests a stalled career, it’s not enough if you are eyeing John Mack’s job. Like X, Mack (president and CEO at various points in MS’s history) started as a bond trader.

The Lunch Report: My Kingdom for a Saltine

2009-11-18T15:30:00.000-08:00

Rarely is the Editor in Chief requested to cover a specific topic, but a number of you have questioned the significance and symbolism of the saltine cracker in The Lunch Report. Together with despair and redemption, the saltine is a recurring theme in TLR. So, because you asked, today I share the story of the saltine.

As a child, I developed a special relationship with saltines. Born with a fragile constitution, I was often subjected to a recovery regime consisting of time home from school, my favorite books, abundant maternal attention, flat ginger ale, and saltines.

For years, the saltine remained as emotionally charged for me as the madeleine was for Proust. Yet by college I had learned to look down on saltines. By the time I passed the bar, it had been years since I’d sunk my teeth into a dry salty wafer. By then, I was too sophisticated to be caught ripping open plastic packets and nibbling on saltines.

As I look back over the years though, I realize the saltine was always there, albeit in disguised forms. In Paris it was the crust of the bread I craved. In England, plain toast filled the void. On safari in Africa I developed a hankering for dry rusks.

Although I took basic health precautions when traveling (including anti-malarial medication that left me with visions of tie-dyed kudu salsa-dancing while vervet monkeys sipped scotch nearby),* I wasn’t too fussed about water or food. I horrified one travel buddy in Harare by purchasing an apple on the street and eating it after only a cursory rubdown (I wanted to wash it properly, but his criticism of my purchasing street fruit prompted me to defy his cautions). Sure, I suffered a bit, but 3 pounds later and 2 doses of high octane antibiotics, I was fine.

In 2000, I embarked on my fifth safari. Neither I nor any part of my delicate intestinal system was prepared for whatever was lurking in the tap water at a certain high-end safari camp in the Sabi Sand Reserve in South Africa. Although I had stuck to bottled water, I accidentally used tap water when brushing my teeth.

Upon returning to Jo’burg, my temporary home then, I noticed nothing. This could be because I was suffering so acutely from tick bite fever that my entire focus was on the crippling pain in my joints, which eventually made walking difficult. Another course of antibiotics, a few days of dizzy spells and vomiting and the fever was extinguished and the pain in my joints gone.

The tick bite episode had distracted me enough that when I returned to the United States, I didn’t immediately realize that I had brought home a friend with me, an intestinal parasite. He had as much difficulty with the repatriation process as I did (of course it would be a "he"—“he” and conflict often go together).

I enlisted one of the best infectious disease specialists in NYC to kill my parasite. The doctor explained that his prescribed treatment worked in 80-90% of cases. I have always wanted to be in the top percentile, and, once again, I was. When it comes down to it, they don't know their African parasites in NYC like they do in London or Jo’burg, and the antibiotics available here are downright lame.

American medicine had let me down, so I was left to my own to figure out things that both my parasite and I could eat. We had a tough time negotiating a resolution at first. I got thinner and weaker in the struggle as he made it clear that red wine, Reese’s cups (my sole source of protein throughout law school) and other cornerstones of my diet were no longer on the menu.

And then, purely by chance, I reached deep into my past and pulled out some saltines. Finally, we had reached a digestive détente.

We were all fine in the end. The Park Avenue doctor, who of course accepted no form of insurance, was paid handsomely for not curing me. My parasite came to love pinot grigio and saltines and today even allows me the occasional fried goody or piece of meat in gratitude. And I remain deeply indebted to the thousands of saltines that have helped me arbitrate a successful cohabitation arrangement with my parasite (who seems to sleep more peacefully every year).

So, in their honor, today I had a variety of saltine preparations for lunch:

*Saltines with olive oil and sundried tomatoes for an amuse bouche
*Saltines with gruyere cheese and marmite for my main course
*Saltines with grapes, strawberries and whipped cream for dessert

Notes
*According to wafer lore, saltines originated in 1876 in Missouri. Although the word “saltine” was originally a registered trademark of Nabisco, Nabisco lost its protection and today “saltine” refers generically to various brands of soda crackers.

*Although no longer as frequently prescribed, Mefloquine has historically been prescribed as an anti-malarial. First developed during the Vietnam War for American troops, Mefloquine (marketed as “Lariam”) boasts many side effects, including hallucinations.

The Lunch Report: Women Who Stare at Goat Cheese

2009-11-11T15:40:00.000-08:00

Around 11:30am today, I was distracted by hunger pangs. Given that I’d be on conference calls through 1pm, I had too long to anticipate lunch.

By 12:40pm my stomach had settled on the perfect lunch: a salade de chevre chaude prepared by that petit bistro on rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile on Ile St. Louis in Paris. The goat cheese patty would be dusted with bread crumbs and herbs before being sautéed in brown butter just long enough for the bread and butter to form a thin crust around the warm and softened cheese. I would wash it down with a petit chablis and top it off with Maison de Berthillon* cinnamon ice cream.

I had had this lunch before and it had cheered me on a rainy day in Paris right after a brutal negotiation session. By 12:55pm I knew that no other lunch could satisfy me. Tough realization when you're on the 23rd floor of an office building in NYC, 3600+ miles from Ile St. Louis, and so low down in the corporate ranks that you don't even have access to a private plane.

Goat cheese salad is a staple in many NYC restaurants, but why order one here? The cheese—probably Alouette "cheese product" whose consistency can’t withstand sautéeing—would remind me how superior goat cheese is in Paris. That Parisian lunch and its lingering memory had spoiled me.

Permit me a fairly abrupt and gratuitous tangent, but all of this made me consider the frustrations of any long distance relationship ("LDR") whether with food, people or climates (trust me, I have LDR experiences spanning England, Portugal, France, various African countries and certain of the United States—I know my stuff).

Modern technology—email, IM, texts, Bloombergs, tweets—has the power to transform an LDR into a seemingly present relationship. Yet just as often, even in the most well-intentioned LDR, all that texting begets no more than additional texting. So query whether the R in LDR is real, virtual or imaginary.

*Your LDR is only as good as your last email. If it was a bad email, or the sarcasm didn’t translate (like light refracted through water, sarcasm never comes out the same on the other side), life will be flatter until a better email comes along.

*An LDR steals you away from your present and carries you to a promised land, where life could be or was (at least the last time you were together) better, but possibly never will be again—“The Past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”*

*Being casual is not an option in an LDR. Casually texting, sure, but casually stopping by Boston? I don’t think so.

*An LDR infects your own city with memories of the object of the LDR, like that restaurant that you shared. If you're lucky, you'll go back and forget how much fun you had together giggling at the waiter's open fly or savoring the plat du jour. But maybe you won't. Maybe when you return, even if you order a different dish from a different waiter, your present will compete with the past or an illusory future, and lose.

By the time I followed this tangent to exhaustion, I was even hungrier, yet strangely wiser (studies have shown that fasting can sharpen concentration). Fixating on my goat cheese salad was a capitulation to the grim and pessimistic conclusion that life insists on a preferred path to fulfillment.*

That just can’t be. So, in the spirit of “love the one you're with,” I put the goat cheese salad right out of my head, marched myself to a local diner and ordered something that NYC does better than any Parisian bistro: a grilled cheese,* followed by a diet coke chaser (aspartame, yum!) and saltines (manna).

Ironically, a slim, distinguished and altogether delicious gentleman was seated in the booth next to me. An obvious melancholy clouded his eyes as he gazed at his gyros. Maybe there was a Greek lover he couldn’t shake? Poor thing. He probably should have ordered a peanut butter and jelly and sat with me, but maybe he wasn't ready yet.
Penelope Frost

Notes
*As Parisophiles amongst us know, Maison Berthillon ice cream is made only on Ile St. Louis, although, as a result of certain corruptions in its distribution system, it is now offered “hors île” (off the island) in other parts of Paris.

*The opening sentence of Leslie Poles Hartley’s most famous work, The Go-Between (1953).

*Note that I am far too PC to suggest that happiness or fulfillment should be a life goal. For a compelling discussion of the tyranny of happiness in modern American culture, please see Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009).

*Critics would be misguided to compare the grilled cheese with the Croque Monsieur, also a byproduct of cheese mating with bread, which is more properly placed within the toasted (and not grilled) cheese genus.

The Lunch Report: Take Me Out to the Ball Park and Shut Up

2009-11-04T15:30:00.000-08:00

The "season" is upon us. Not quite “the season”* the Vanderbilts and Astors once enjoyed but rather the NFL season and the MLB’s post season tail. Men of all ages develop a spiritual relationship with couches and barstools across the city, transformed into wide-eyed little boys in a trance-like state in front of gargantuan TVs.

Even if you're fortunate enough not to have one of these boys on your couch with a death grip on the remote, every girl is forced to contemplate her status in society during The Season.

So what if we comprise 40% of the MLB fan base and are the primary consumers in the majority of American households, the commercials are still going to be for beer and men’s cologne, neither of which I typically consume.

Who can’t appreciate a 92 mph curve ball that miraculously finds the sweet spot on Damon’s bat? You don’t need testosterone to get an adrenaline rush. Granted, I may not have the same appreciation for all the crotch-fiddling that goes on during these games, but hopefully that’s not why my male friends watch either.

I don’t need facial hair to appreciate the excitement that comes with knowing your team may become the 2009 MLB World Series Champions.

Yet even if we watch enthusiastically in the local pub, no one wants us to talk about it. We’re just necessary décor so that macho men spending several days a week hugging each other in a dark bar are not accused of closeted homosexuality. We’re to be seen (preferably in something resembling a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader outfit) but not heard, even if (maybe especially if) we knows what we’re talking about (yep, some of us know what the infield fly rule is).

Usurping the language of punts, bunts, passes and bases is either an unwelcome invasion of a man’s world or proof that a gal is trying way too hard to be one of the guys. Rest assured, I’m not going to jump on a conference call tomorrow and open up by discussing Girardi’s choice to start Pettitte, no matter what happens tonight.*

Nor am I going to redesign my analogies to incorporate football references: “It’s like when the Giants went down to the Superdome* in New Orleans . . .” Yup, took about one day after the Saints crushed the Giants for this analogy to work its way into NYC corporate speak.

Although the colleague who’d said this hadn’t actually watched the game, the client was easily persuaded by the analogy between the defeat and our current negotiation posture. No matter how confidently I’d uttered the same words, it wouldn’t have worked. Everyone would rather listen to the clichéd and tired language that men use to describe their sports.

I’m not going to try to speak their language. Instead I am going to watch the game my way,* think of it my way and speak about it (or not) my way, even if absolutely no one listens, even you.

In the absence of any socially acceptable custom for a lady to discuss the game and wish her city’s baseball team luck, today I honored the Yankees by savoring the following for lunch:

—One hot dog frosted with a thick layer of French’s mustard and blanketed in a toasted wonder bread hotdog roll.

—One Coors Light® which I smuggled into work (not sure why it was in my fridge though—probably a guy left it there while watching a game Chez Penelope)

—Some cracker jacks (Halloween leftovers)

Cost: $1.20

Notes
*The Season is that period of the year during which the social “elite” hold debutante balls, dinner parties and charity events. In NYC, the “kick off” for The Season is considered to be the opening of the Metropolitan Opera in September. Among other fall events is the Central Park Conservancy’s annual Halloween Benefit Ball in October, at which The Editor-in-Chief of the Lunch Report was photographed while attending: http://www.studiofourb.com/Events/HalloweenBall09/10066919_ynMXg#695474601_6bRRm

*I will not hold back, however, from sharing my impressions of Mr. Girardi, whose sculpted face bears a disturbingly close resemblance to a hairless cat (see for yourself: http://bestiarumvocabulum.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/hairless_cat.jpg).

*As the largest fixed dome structure in the world, the New Orleans Superdome has hosted more Super Bowls than any other stadium. *A few years ago I brought some clients to a Yankees game. They were visibly shaken when I whipped out a pair of opera glasses to sneak a closer peek of Jeter. So what, I did get a close look.

The Lunch Report: Happy Meals for Sad People

2009-10-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

Every year around this time life becomes decidedly sadder. The sunlight dissipates more quickly. Even though daylight hours have been dwindling steadily since June 21st, the longest and happiest day of the year, it seems much more pronounced when Daylight Saving’s Time rolls around (total misnomer—no one is saving daylight, they’re just moving those precious few hours to fill other hours of the day, most of which I sleep through anyway).

Clothes become heavier and more cumbersome, yet no matter how much the layers multiply, I am still cold. As I tuck my chin into my coat to avoid the wind and cold, my focus is shifted down towards the ground and I lose sight of the buildings and people around me. I take less interest in the tidiness of my "home" (ironic that we learn to call 750 square feet or fewer a home in NYC).

I don’t expect any of this elicits much sympathy; Seasonal Affective Disorder rarely does. After all, I could go out and buy a SAD lamp, move to a latitude that guarantees more sunlight or simply pull up my socks and stop being such a wimp. These are among the facile solutions that have historically been offered to those suffering from SAD (and some might even take issue with the participle "suffering" here).

How does one sympathize with SAD people when there are so many others who are far more entitled to sadness (don’t forget: the right to be sad is something we must earn in society). Even putting aside the big name tragedies such as death and divorce, there’s always someone who has more frayed relationships or finances and whose career path is even more dismal than your own. Look at the folks in Iceland for crying out loud. Not only do they have a fraction of the daylight we have this time of year (just try searching on weather.com for the time of sunrise in Reykjavik, you’ll find "N/A" on Dec. 20), but now they don’t even have Happy Meals anymore.*

I have a job; therefore, it’s self-absorbed and inconsiderate of me to even consider experiencing sadness—just take that emotion off the menu altogether. I once told a male friend (one whose work also guarantees certain excesses of solitude) that I often became sad and lonely in my office. He said "That’s crazy." As you can imagine, that cheered me right up. I was practically skipping after that!

We are most partial to sadness only once someone has risen above his or her depressive state (or genes, depending on which theories of depression you accept) and done something great. Look at all the great depressed American writers: William Styron, Sylvia Plath, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc. Their writings once comforted me because they convinced me that my crippling blues were a sign I was destined for greatness. But what is depression when not a sign of latent creative genius? It’s just pedestrian, inconvenient and unattractive (unless you’re careful to closet your sadness and stay in your apartment from Thanksgiving straight through Easter so no one can be dragged down by your heavy moods).

Today I was determined to create and consume my own Happy Meal and so I did what any sensible sad person would do. I left work (not that work makes me sad, but sometimes sad people need extra doses of happiness and sunshine before hunkering down for winter) and headed to Westchester to play golf and take one last look at the vibrant leaves before the cooling temperatures and winds pull them right of the trees. My lunch consisted of:

Multiple uplifting views of the Hudson River
Four Pars
Silly banter with the caddie master
One high five with the assistant pro

Notes:
*Forced to concede that the costs of operating in Iceland have become prohibitive, McDonalds will no longer be offering Happy Meals, or any other meals, in Iceland

The Lunch Report: Lunch with JP Morgan

2009-10-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

Today I had lunch with JP Morgan. Not "at" JP Morgan, mind you, but "with" JP Morgan, in the real House of Morgan* (Let’s call him "JP" and pretend we're on nickname bases).

What I am trying to say is that I lunched at The Morgan Library and Museum, my favorite NYC institution.

Lunching in the Dining Room at The Morgan is a rare and coveted benefit of being a Fellow of the Morgan (and, fortunately, gals can be "fellows" as well in the House of Morgan).

Today's lunch consisted of:

Two sips of sherry
Broiled salmon nestled on a bed of quinoa and spinach
Apple raisin cake with a fig glaze
A splash of Bordeaux

Cost: $0, unless you figure in my annual contribution to maintain my Fellowette status, then it was almost 1000 times my daily limit, which I can ill afford).

Typically, I miss these quarterly lunches because either work interferes or I am overcome with ambivalence as to why I should attend. I am not likely to gather any clients there and even less likely to gather some eligible men (Maybe my standards are too high, but I am not yet willing to consider the 65+ age set when it comes to dating). So why is this gal a Fellow?

As the youngest of my class of Fellows (Yes, Fellows have "classes" although I am still not certain what happens when we graduate. Do we get to take home one of our favorite works from the museum?), my participation is unusual, if not odd. I do not have an extensive collection. In fact, I don't really have any collection at all, unless you count the William Kentridge* drypoint hanging proudly above my mantelpiece, the intricate crocodile drawings from an emerging (aka affordable) Brooklyn-based artist and a random assortment of hand me downs and prints that are a cut above those I had in college but do not justify an independent visit to my apartment.

My absence of a collection was a source of grave embarrassment at lunch. I was seated next to the head of the library who, after introducing himself, asked me what I collected. I quickly stuffed some salmon into my mouth to gain time before responding and then washed it down with a swig of Bordeaux (yum, not bad, did that also come from JP’s collection?). I suppose as a Fellow, I am meant to have been hording art works over the last 10 years which some day can be harvested into treasures worthy of The Morgan, instead of pouring my paychecks straight into the coffers of golf resorts (who, by the way, really need the money now, just as badly as museums).

Because my lunch companion had become the Head Morganite after I had been elevated to “Fellow” status, he probably had not read my sponsor's application for my candidacy, which stated quite clearly that I collected men, not art (although query which costs more in the end—it’s just as difficult to buy low, sell high and generate capital gains).

As I formulated my response (pronounced so meekly that Mr. Head of Morgan probably convinced himself I’d said I collected “Caravaggio” rather than “Kentridge”), I suddenly felt very small in the big House of Morgan, especially after having walked through the three story atriumesque Gilbert Court (thanks, Renzo*, well done) to reach the Fellow’s Dining Room.

At this point in life I have come to terms with the fact that I am unlikely to establish a bank of international repute (I’m having enough difficulty at home with the Bank of Frost and its anemic reserves), stave off a liquidity crisis, as JP did in 1907,* or pull together a collection that rivals the diversity of JP's (gotta love a collection that houses Babar the Elephant, William Blake, lyrics of Bob Dylan and some Gutenberg Bibles)..

But still, it all made me think, what is my legacy, to The Morgan, or to anyone else for that matter? Will anyone know I was here when I am gone? There will probably be no children to whom I can pass on my little Kentridge.. (I could give it to The Morgan, if they’ll have it . . .) You will likely never see "Gift from the Penelope Frost Collection” under a work hanging on one of JP's walls.

Maybe my contribution to The Morgan is not as easily measured as others. Yet, hopefully, JP (if not other Morganites) can appreciate my less tangible form of support through the friends I drag to The Morgan in the hopes they may also make a small contribution, triggering some form of never-ending self-reproduction of contributions.

I haven’t decided whether this intangible contribution is enough and I don't even know what I would want my legacy to be if I had the power to shape it. Maybe when I do know, I will be ready to graduate as a Fellow.. Until then, I urge you all to stop by The Morgan, especially following November 4th when a new exhibition opens—“A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy”—which promises to surpass all the rest.

Please also visit: http://www.themorgan.org

Notes
*Not to be confused with Ron Chernow’s book of the same name which brilliantly chronicles the Morgan family’s financial dynasty through the splintering created by the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act into J.P. Morgan & Co. (later Morgan Guaranty Trust), Morgan Stanley and Morgan Grenfell and up until Morgan Stanley’s merger with Dean Witter. The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (© 1990 Ron Chernow).

*William Kentridge (1962-) is a prominent South African artist best known for his animated films created from drawings and erasures. One of these drawings now sits in the Penelope Frost Collection in NYC.

*The Morgan’s most recent renovation and expansion, designed by world renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano, was completed in 2006.

*JP purportedly resolved the Panic of 1907 by locking his fellow bankers in his library at The Morgan until they reached a resolution. Apparently Secretary Geithner and others have attempted to implement this same crisis resolution technique, but have been unable to agree upon the appropriate library in which to lock in all the bankers.

The Lunch Report: A Writer's Lunch

2009-10-14T15:15:00.000-07:00

I am not a writer, just a lawyer. But today I had the honor to lunch with a writer imported to NYC for a few days from NOLA. NOLA is short for New Orleans, Louisiana for those who've never hung out "in the Quarter." I can barely describe how different this lunch was from my daily lunch at the office, which is typically spent in the company of crisp, clean and symmetrically stacked documents and people.

Today’s lunch consisted of:

*Some Old Fashioneds (the tricky thing about daytime cocktails—at least for me—is that after half a glass, they defy quantification)

*Several bites of the writer’s no-egg-yolk omelet. What a joy to find a lunch companion who isn't conscious of the conventional boundaries that imprison our daily lives—such as the borders of one's own plate.

*Cost: I don't recall who paid so, in my financially disturbed mind, that means the lunch was free, or at least well in compliance with my $3 lunch limit.

The food was not remarkable but the "focus" or lack thereof left an extraordinary aftertaste. A real writer (or, as I idolize them) lives (and eats) to create dialogue and consume a novel thought for lunch. A real writer is daring enough to eat up a new experience without fear that it may take months to properly digest it and may ultimately defy articulate description.

To be clear, I am aware that writers are in no way a uniform "type" or "breed" who practice a single lunch style or technique. It would be just as easy to lunch with a writer whose anxiety level rivals that of a bond trader than it would be to lunch with a writer who exudes Rastafarian-levels of relaxation. But I got lucky. The writer with whom I lunched conformed to all of the stereotypes of writers we hold dear: charismatic; dissolute; eccentric; intellectual; irreverent; passionate; sensitive; and original. The contrast with my lawyerly lunches was delicious..

Trained and compensated to anticipate and analyze clients’ risks 24/7, the lawyer is at times overpowered by his or her own analytical and risk averse tendencies. They seep into almost every facet of life, inside and outside the office, sometimes leading to a dizzying inward spiral of overanalysis and anxiety.* This must be why lawyers and other professionals have historically been fairly strong supporters of writers and artists—not only does their work inspire us in ways that are refreshingly different from our own discipline, but we really want to BE them.

I look at “them”—those hopelessly creative types who can’t help but spew out original phrases on a daily basis—with great envy. Writers seem liberated from schedule and concern—they eat, drink, write and sleep whenever. They spend as much time as they choose (it’s not like they’re billing by the hour) fondling words, toying with life changing ideas and exploring new people like spelunkers. Very few meetings and no dress code (in fact, clothing optional). Nirvana. I would so like to trade some of my “estoppels,” habeas corpus (corpii?)” and “theretos” for some “bandersnatch,” “contumely,” “peroration” and other words I never get to use at the office.

But instead, I content myself, for now, by being a financial provider of sorts (of increasingly modest sorts) for those brave enough to trade the illusion of financial security for creative latitude. Yes, financial providers and creative types seem to complement each other terribly well.

In fact, so well do we complement each other that the financial provider-artist pairing is considered indispensable to the success of any NYC liberal’s dinner party (assuming, of course, a lesbian is already present). Only the pairing of a Goldman Sachs partner, the uber-financial-provider-figure, and his kindergarten school teacher wife (before she stopped working, obviously), the gold standard for the maternal-nurturing-figure, ranks higher than the lawyer-artist pairing.

In these uncertain times, though, the classic symbiotic relationship between artists and their providers is strained. Traditional providers, much like some banks, are failing to provide. They may still look to the arts for inspiration, but the outflow from their wallets has not been particularly inspired, at least where the arts are concerned.**

In a great twist of financial irony, some of society’s traditional providers—lawyers and bankers (and their hedge fund managing cousins)—are now struggling with the financial uncertainties that many writers have wrestled with, yet taken for granted as an occupational hazard, for ages.

What a great character-building exercise awaits us as financial uncertainty sharpens our resolve to design better laws, build better banks and stabilize our economy so we can continue to provide. And, gosh, if none of that works and I still lose my job and can’t pay my rent, maybe the writer from NOLA will let me squat at his place and drink Old Fashioneds with him at lunch? Here’s hoping . . .

Penelope Frost

Notes
*To be fair to lawyers, there is tremendous social and intellectual creativity involved in the lawyering process as we attempt to make parties with widely disparate interests reach agreement. Unfortunately, not a single merger agreement—not even from legendary mergers such as Time Warner-AOL or RJR-Nabisco—has made it on to the NYTimes best sellers’ list. We humbly leave the glory to the writers and artists.

**Charitable donations generally fell by almost 6% in 2008 alone, the sharpest drop in 53 years, with the arts suffering a decline of between 9 and 10%. The Chronicle of Philanthropy, June 9, 2009.

The Lunch Report: A Snow Leopard Lunch

2009-10-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

For the tech geeks amongst you, the following Lunch Report in no way relates to the next generation Mac upgrade (sorry) but I suggest you read on anyway.

Today’s lunch consisted of:

One small Manhattan chicken chowder (leave it to my cafeteria to get creative with leftovers)
One diet coke
Several saltine crackers
One Snow Leopard (Panthera Uncia for the Latin scholars amongst us)

Cost: $12.20 (Yes, I exceeded my daily budget but there were extenuating Panthera-uncia circumstances)

No, no, no, I did not EAT a snow leopard for lunch. For goodness sakes, they’ve been on the endangered species list for quite a while now. Today, my soup and I slipped out of the office and parked ourselves before the Snow Leopard Exhibit at the Central Park Zoo (entry to which accounts for $10 of my lunch).

This is not the first time my lunch and I have done this. We’ve have been having secret rendez-vous with Bo, the male snow leopard, since last June when he first took up residence in the zoo. However, this is the first time the leopard showed up for one of our dates. Yep, no sooner had he established residence on the UES, then he realized that showing up on a date is actually optional for men in NYC (just ask how often your single female friends have been stood up on a date-the statistic is astounding), even when you're the one paying . . .

Apparently though, the male leopard is far more sensitive to the opposite gender in his native Central Asia. In Tibet, for example, male leopards often show up with fresh kill before thrusting themselves onto a female leopard to mate.* This is in sharp contrast with men in NYC who, while they wouldn't even think of paying the tab when dining with a lady, will lick their chops over their after-dinner drink in full anticipation of being more fully satisfied by their dinner companion later on in the evening. Much like the typical NYC man, after mating, the male leopard plays no other role in the cub rearing process.

I'm not sure what I did different this time to merit the leopard’s attention. In the past I have gone to great lengths to lure him, showing up with scraps of wild boar, marmots, mice and other of his favorite treats (all of which can easily be secured online from FreshDirect.com—just click on meats and then look for the "leopard treats" button). I even once threw some markhor meat (whose odor is often described as Chanel No 5 for leopards) into the front of his cage hoping the smell would draw him near so I could savor his spots and piercing eyes. Nothing.

This time I had no expectations. I had long given up expecting to see him. Instead I sat on a bench engrossed in my chowder--it didn't offer the same thrill as the elusive leopard, but it was reliable and warming me up on this cool fall day. Just as I was on the verge of resolving whether green beans are in fact traditional chowder fare, there he was, staring me down, almost angry that I was ignoring him. His presence may not have been obvious to the untrained eye because of his superior ability to camouflage himself (much like NYC gentlemen—although I have never met one, friends tell me they're ubiquitous and I just haven't learned how to identify them).

My panther's appearance may seem insignificant to my readers but I attribute deep symbolic significance to the fact that he appeared today, of all days. Why? Last night I bumped into a male friend, sort of a scotch-drinking nocturnal leopard himself. For many years, despite myriad devoted girlfriends, he has eluded commitment as successfully as the snow leopard escapes the naked eye. Just when I thought I would have to spend another evening turning a deaf ear to why he wasn't sure whether his current girlfriend--despite her stunning looks, exceptional talent, profound intelligence and obvious adoration for my male leopard-like friend--was "the one", he surprised me by pointing out an engagement ring sitting comfortably on her finger. And it was far more sparkly than the fresh kill that leopards bring their female mates in Tibet. I almost spat out my fourth glass of wine, so stunned was I.

A committed bachelor has decided to make the leap to coupledom. An elusive leopard emerges after months of hide and seek. These cannot be coincidences. There is a message in all of this, a message of hope: A leopard may never change his spots, but maybe as he matures he can learn to use them differently.

*Note, however, that the female leopard must first alert the male leopard that it is mating season (you'd think he could figure that one out on his own), which she does by peeing over nearby rocks and other protruding objects.

Eating Single in America

2009-09-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

As many of you may already know, this week is National Unmarried and Single Americans Week (NUSAW). (1) I celebrated by lunching alone and reflecting on singlehood in America. Today’s lunch consisted of:

One small soup
5 packs of saltines (for obvious reasons, I resent the fact that they are packaged in pairs)
One diet coke
Cost: $1.90. How can I afford more when I have no tax deductions?

While sipping my soup, I did some research on life and lunch in America as a single person. As it turns out, NUSAW has inspired so much more than my solitary lunch time thoughts. NUSAW's recognition that singles in America now compose the majority of American households has been accompanied by a comprehensive agenda for singles reform, vaguely reminiscent of The New Deal. Because discussion of these reforms was deleted from the G-20 agenda (as a result of critics’ claims that the G-20 was not the proper forum for singles issues), the Editorial Staff of TLR would like to describe these initiatives for you below. In the interests of disclosure, I note that several of the editorial staff of TLR are in fact single and unmarried.—Editor in Chief of TLR

Health Care for Singles. Proposed health care reforms include insurance programs that permit single/unmarried individuals to share their employer-sponsored medical benefits with domestic dependent pets (if your shitzapoo is earning his own wages, however, he would be ineligible under the program, even if he lives with you full time).

Single Tax Deductions. Proposed tax reforms include the Single Tax Deduction (referred to as "STD," until a more appropriate acronym has been agreed upon) whereby single persons deduct from their AGI the amount of taxes they have paid for public schooling and other taxpayer-supported programs from which they have derived no benefit because of their singlehood.

Affirmative Action for Singles. Singles rarely have a legitimate excuse to decline work, while their coupled counterparts enjoy a permanent get-out-of-jail (or office)-for-free card, in the form of a spouse. To decline work, married folk need only whine "Sorry, I’m committed to a dinner my wife arranged," and the excuse is respectfully accepted. If singles decline a project (few would be brazen enough to offer a reason), they are said to "lack dedication." Lack of dedication? Singles have for so long been dedicated to picking up the slack for colleagues saddled with "spousal obligations," that they haven’t even taken the time to develop any impediments to work, such as a spouse. Who lacks the dedication now? Affirmative action for singles programs will guarantee paid dating leave, regardless of age.

Restaurant Reform. Most noteworthy and of greatest relevance to TLR are the sweeping restaurant reforms contemplated:

*Swiss restaurants will offer Fondue for One.

*Italian restaurants will serve credible "pizzas for one," rather than large and expensive flying tomato and cheese saucers that can be completed only by one large football player and financed only through at least two contributing bank accounts.

*Food traditions will be reworked. Do I really need another diner by my side to grab hold of one end of a wishbone and break it in two just to determine who gets the wish? Why can't I be both the one who gets the wish and the one who does not? Sort of like a self-contained yin and yang thing.

*Restaurants will allow advance reservations for single people only, while groups and couples can show up and wait for a seat until singles finish their meals.

*Foods will be sold and marketed in single portions while portions for two or more will bear a surcharge. So long, economies of scale—it’s all about economies for singles.

No longer will singles sulk in the corner in that dimly lit section where waiters force them to hide. We/you singles are the majority and it's high time the rest of society caught up with our evolved lifestyles and moved beyond the multi-party paradigm that dominates our dining world.

This week, we urge all singles to take back the restaurants. Go forth and stare down those feeble "group" eaters who can dine only in herds. Cast them a pitying glance and say in a not-so-hushed voice: "Poor things, they can't just sit alone and enjoy a glass of wine.... They have to bring a reluctant spouse and pretend to be amused by their obligatory meal-time conversation.” And, most importantly, don't be afraid to drink alone. If statistics are to be believed, more than half the country is already drinking alone.

The Editorial Staff of The Lunch Report

Notes
(1) http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS131290+21-Sep-2009+BW20090921

The Lunchentach Report: The Meaning of Lunch

2009-09-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have noticed that your lunch was different yesterday. Something was missing? Maybe you were craving a Lunch Report that failed to deliver? Like opening the refrigerator in the vain hope that there may be a goody waiting, even though no one in your family (domestic system, whatever) has gone grocery shopping in ages and you know you devoured any goodies in the fridge just the night before?

Well, the Editor of TLR was so deep in thought yesterday that, shamefully, she forgot about lunch altogether. Ironically, what made her forget lunch were her reflective thoughts about lunch itself and what it means to us as individuals, communities, men, women, professionals, non-professionals, and, most importantly, as Americans.

As some of you may already know, "lunch" is an abbreviated form of “Lunchentach,” which, according to an 1850 definition in the OED, meant a meal that was “inserted” between two more substantial meals. For those without an 1850 edition of the OED, Wikipedia’s elucidation of lunch is just as enlightening: “originally intended as a vehicle in which working classes could escape their jobs and purchase alcoholic beverages;” “employees and schools usually provide a lunch break in the middle of the day;” “lunch can function as a form of entertainment . . .” So, according to the authorities, lunch is primarily a “break” or a “diversion” from the rest of the day (even cricket test matches—hardly a form of labor—provide for prolonged lunch breaks).

Yet in most parts of America, lunch (or “Zmittag” as Swiss-Germans like Federer might say), like vacation, is a dying art form. The corporate ranks (memorialized in the movie Wall Street with the line “lunch is for wimps”) are in large part to blame but others have contributed as well. Have you contributed?

Today, I had for lunch:

**A footlong hoagie stuffed with remorse and peppered with shame, because I know I always scurry to the cafeteria, nab my budget meal and run back to my desk without so much as looking up from my environmentally friendly cardboard tray.

**A glass of carbonated regret (I let it sit out a little bit so the regretting bubbles would not give me the hiccups) for every time a colleague or friend has suggested lunch and I have declined in order for a conference call, hair cut or visit to the gym to take priority.

Cost: my pride, which well exceeds my daily $3 budget for lunch.

We're all to blame for the loss of lunch ("LoL" (not to be confused with "LOL," a puerile email or text acronym that boasts an offensive use of ALL CAPS)) in America. Every time you give priority to that meeting , that errand, that hair appointment, that asocial instinct, etc, instead of breaking bread (or sneaking alcohol) with your fellow humankind, you have contributed to LoL in America. Despite government's efforts (let's leave this as a bipartisan issue and not bring up Obama's school lunch plan) to legislate lunch, lunch starts within, within each one of us.

Labor Day weekend is fast approaching. On Labor Day we take a break from labor and reflect on work, this year both the presence and, for a great many, the absence, of work. But maybe every day, even if just for an hour, can be Labor Day (Labor Hour?) and offer the same opportunity to separate ourselves from the rhythym of our labor and work, break bread with friends and maybe even sneak some hooch.

The Editor and Staff of TLR would like to wish you all a wonderful Labor Day weekend filled with long leisurely lunchentachs.