Staycation
I've been crazy lucky to have an annual cat sitting gig in Paris for several years, and longtime readers expect a Paris issue of the newsletter about now. This year, surprise surprise, I'm home with my own cats (with whom I now sympathize as perpetually on lockdown, since they're indoor cats). So I don't have any romantic stories to share about early morning walks and drool-worthy pastry cases. I'm healthy, though, and still on the credit side of the sanity ledger. How about you? If you get a minute, let me know how you're doing and your strategy for keeping your life together during the pandemic. Take care! As always, keep in touch at angela at angelamsanders dot com and find me here on Facebook and at angela.m.sanders on Instagram.
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Vintage Dress of the Month
Okay, say I was in Paris instead of gazing out my office window at the crows soaking pizza crusts (where the heck do they get them?) in my birdbath. Maybe I'd wear this cotton sateen dress with comfortable sandals.
I see a pink lipstick with it--the dark pink of fist-sized French tulips--and a charm bracelet. I'd need a small purse with a shoulder strap and an outside pocket for my metro ticket.
And I would walk, walk, walk and look at everything and fill up my imagination's gas tank to overflow.
This dress is from the heavenly Xtabay, model for Tallulah's Closet in my Vintage Clothing mystery series.
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The Latest
Floating in the pandemic ocean of uncertainty and restlessness, it's been my daily index cards of tasks and the September 1st deadline for Seven-Year Witch that keep me afloat.
Seven-Year Witch's final act has been giving me problems, but I finally worked them out. (You writers out there will recognize the moment when you realize you've known the solution the whole time but never knew you knew it.) Once I send it off, I'll turn to plotting witch librarian #3, tentatively called Witch and Famous (I still crack up at that).
The next vintage clothing mystery will involve the Théâtre de la Mode, a 1940s collection of couture-dressed dolls that once traveled the world and is now housed at the Maryhill Museum in the Washington desert.
Also, I'm proposing to teach a zoom class at Clark College this fall called "This is the Year You Write Your Novel," and I'm presenting at the brand new Columbia River Sisters in Crime chapter in August about the pros and cons of being a "hybrid" writer--that is, someone who publishes both traditionally and independently.
Click links for more about my Joanna Hayworth vintage clothing mystery series, the Booster Club Capers, and my alter ego Clover Tate's Kite Shop mysteries. To subscribe to this newsletter, hop over to my website, angelamsanders.com.
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Zsa Zsa's Fashion Advice
From her 1970 How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man:
"A lot of adults get what the young people call 'uptight' about unisex clothes. They see a boy and a girl going down the street together both with long hair and both dressed alike and they say, 'It's terrible! You can't tell the difference between them.' I say don't worry, they can tell the difference.
"Unisex, as long as it is in clothes, I don't mind. [...] Recently I was in Denver for the opening of my cosmetic line and they had a big fashion show where Oleg Cassini and Pierre Cardin had their showings. Oleg, whom I adore, brought out a male and a female model identically dressed in green velvet tuxedos. Of course, the girl looked even better in the suit than the boy, because if a girl has the right figure for it, it is not unisex, au contraire, it is very sexy. I speak now about the very young, because I can't see Mrs & Mrs. De Gaulle going around dressed like that."
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Cocktail: the Hanky Panky
Ada Coleman, a barmaid at the Savoy in the 1910s, created this cocktail for a discerning customer, who instantly dubbed it the "real hanky panky." To me, it's refreshing but old fashioned, like wearing a spritz of Acqua di Parma Profumo, a chypre perfume Marlene Dietrich might have craved.
1 jigger gin
1 jigger sweet vermouth
2 dashes Fernet Branca
Shake with ice, strain into a coupe, and garnish with an orange twist. Try it a bit drier (more gin, less vermouth), too, if you'd like. Now that you have a bottle of Fernet Branca, a teaspoon in a tall glass of ice and seltzer water with a spring of mint is a great way to cool off in the summer without worrying about getting tipsy.
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Pandemic Entertainment, British Style
Last night I was talking about pandemic brain with a friend who's a literary critic, and she said, "Are you having trouble reading?" Not me, I told her. While she's ploughing through dense literary offerings, I'm gulping down genre fiction like it's life-giving water. I'm also catching up on gentle, happy TV. Here are some of my recent favorites:
Marple: I stumbled upon this old television take on Agatha Christie's novels through my library. (Don't confuse it with the Miss Marple TV series, which I don't think is as good.) Geraldine McEwan, who plays Miss Marple, gives off a nurturing intelligence perfect for the role.
Agatha Raisin: More TV from the library. The plots aren't a good in these (in my opinion), but the characters are terrific, starting with Agatha, a tough, smart, rude, and tenderhearted heroine. My kind of mental cupcake. (The novels don't engross me as much.)
Emma.: Autumn de Wilde's film interpretation of this Jane Austen classic is so beautiful you don't even need the sound playing to feel satisfied. She monkeys with the story's very end, but somehow it seems even more Austen than Austen's original. Pure gorgeous comfort.
The Eustace Diamonds, Anthony Trollope: These days are perfect for a Victorian soap opera laced with human truth. A reread of The Barchester Towers is up next.
Angela Thirkell's novels: Thirkell wrote dozens of domestic comedy-dramas during the 1930s and '40s, and they go down like ice cream sandwiches. Reading one set during WWII, I had a real appreciation for the uncertainty the British lived. Thinking of it, our uncertainty seems a lot easier to endure.
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