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Sep 02

Drinking and driving

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MELBOURNE, Aug 26 AAP - The horses are back after last year’s equine flu outbreak, but new this year to the Royal Melbourne Show is an offering from Baywatch custodian David Hasselhoff with The Hoff showbag.

The 11-day festival attracts more than 500,000 people who come for the showbags, the rides, the produce and to admire the 10,000 animals who vie for the prestigious blue ribbons at the exhibitions.The show, which runs from September 18 to 28, welcomes back horses after they were banned last year when the EI epidemic crippled the industry and hit Melbourne’s premier spring racing season.The big drawcard for the kids - the showbags - gets even bigger this year with almost 350 to choose from and 90 per cent of them under $20 each.New showbags this year, apart from The Hoff include ones from men’s magazine Ralph, Batman Dark Night, High School Musical and The Hulk.The cheapest is Blinky Bill at $1.

The contents of The Hoff showbag, which costs $16, include The Hoff Wig, Tiffany Key Vintage oval key pendant Hoff Love Dice, The Hoff Headband & Wristband Set and the The Hoff Dollar Bling Necklace.In the Ralph showbag, also at $16, punters can pick up back copies of Ralph and Zoo, a Ralph Babes Behaving Badly DVD, shaving gel, deodorant and a Crown Entertainment voucher.Five dangerous items were removed from showbags this year following safety checks by Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV).Consumer Affairs Minister Tony Robinson said four Sesame Street figurines and an Angelz Boxed Doll were found to be dangerous because they contained small parts which could choke children.

“CAV worked with the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria (RASV) to negotiate with the suppliers of the products to have them removed from the show bags,” Mr Robinson said.Bags were checked for a range of dangerous items, including toys with small parts Tiffany Key Heart key charm could be swallowed by young children, and projectile toys which could cause serious eye injuries or which could be ingested or inhaled.Inspectors also checked to make sure show bags did not contain toys with sharp edges, cosmetics or liquid-filled toys that might contain toxic chemicals, masks with insufficient ventilation and toys that could contain lead.

THE ROAD TO SKATOPIA IS BARELY TWO LANES AND OFTEN UNMARKED. IT WINDS PAST a field of sheep, a white clapboard church (Page Free Will Baptist), a yellow high-way-crossing sign showing an Amish buggy Tiffany Key Trefoil key pendant of a deer. A handmade warning at the top of a steep dirt drive - “Skatopia Enter at Own Risk!!!” - lets pilgrims know they have arrived. They come at all hours, most any time of year, from as far away as Argentina, Japan, Finland. The gates are always open. * On this particular afternoon, Brewce Martin, the voluble founder and cheerily autocratic ruler of Skatopia, is conducting a guided tour. Skatopia sits on 88 acres of hilly, forested land in Rutland, Ohio, an Appalachian town with a population of approximately 420, about 20 minutes from the West Virginia state line. Martin has been a skateboarding fanatic since he was a kid. That was in the Seventies; he is 42 now. Growing up nearby, Martin always dreamed of creating the perfect skate park. In part, his vision was simply architectural. He loved the design challenge of building ever-more-elaborate ramps and bowls, and spent years doing construction work at skate parks around the country. But as with all other major American utopianist movements, there were deep philosophical underpinnings, as well. “There was a park called Skatopia in the Seventies,” Martin recalls. “You had to pay to get in. You had to wear full pads. You couldn’t drink. It was a good park. But there was no ‘-opia’ to it.” “i· Martin’s version of Skatopia is meant to amend all that. There is no admission fee. (Skaters are Tiffany Key Grown key pendant asked to perform an hour’s worth of work.) There are no safety regulations, and in fact, a certain amount of behavior that might be considered “unsafe,” like setting things on fire, is encouraged. (Though, as Martin’s 22-year-old son, Brandon, points out, “When we burn stuff, it’s stuff we have permission to burn. We’re not just gonna burn your car. I mean, that has happened here. But we didn’t do it.”) Drinking? Oh, yes. “Drinking and driving is allowed up here,” Martin tells me as he Tiffany Key Oval key pendant open a Pabst and climbs behind the wheel of one of the many seemingly inoperable vehicles strewn across his property. This vehicle is, or was, a Jeep Grand Wagoneer, but it looks like something that was parked too close to a building destroyed by aerial bombing: All of the windows have been smashed, one rear door is crumpled shut, the interior and exterior are entirely caked in mud, and the front grill is gone, leaving the radiator completely exposed.

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Sep 02

progressive litigators

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Ted Muehling: A Portrait (Rizzoli), a long-awaited collaboration with the renowned photographer Don Freeman, is therefore a significant contribution to the literature on style and design, for it’s easily the largest collection of images of his work available. It’s far from comprehensive (Freeman includes no pictures of Muehling’s thick-to-thin earrings or his graceful, twisty cufflinks, to name two of his most enduring designs). But here, in the juxtaposition of photos of the scavenged natural objects littering Muehling’s studio-antlers, fossils, shells, stones, pinecones, tree trunks, feathers, coral, branches, bird’s nests-with those of his highly refined, Tiffany pendants proportioned creations, readers can apprehend how Muehling, who was trained as an industrial designer at Pratt, pares down and streamlines natural forms to create jewelry that’s at once delicate and austere, organic and abstract.

More important, Freeman’s photos cumulatively reveal the restraint and deliberation of Muehling’s pieces-adornments that are paradoxically, as the uncompromising virtuoso designers Isabel and Ruben Toledo put it to me, “anti-decorative,” which is really the key to their appeal. Notoriously shy, Muehling shuns the overwhelming in all forms and has, since he began making jewelry in 1976, explored the power of the diminutive and subtle. Attuned to how women want to be seen-and how they see each other-he rejects the notion of jewelry as an appendage or independent decoration and instead designs “a bit of punctuation,” as he calls it in the book, to elliptically call attention to Paloma woman and not the jewelry. (Nuanced and almost intentionally unspectacular, his jewelry tends to beguile women who’ve reached a certain emotional, or at least aesthetic, maturity.) As Hastreiter-who introduced Muehling and Freeman 25 years ago, and to whom they each dedicate this book-explained to me, Muehling says his work as a jeweler is animated by “the idea of seeing a woman walk down the street, taking in the way she strides, and then noticing something catch and reflect a little sparkle of light as it naturally Butterfly pendant from her ear and frames her face.” (His commercial policies, aimed at ensuring that not just the rich can buy his work, reflect that dedication. He sets the prices for his classic pieces-his “rice ” “berry,” and “chip” earrings; his “simple” bracelet-deliberately low, and despite constantly increasing costs, he hasn’t raised them.)

Women return that devotion. During the holidays, Hastreiter says, Muehlings shop is jammed “from the moment it opens until the moment it closes with bewildered-looking cute husbands and boyfriends wandering around with Tiffany Hearts® double pendant pieces of paper in their hands with the drawings women made of the earrings they want their men to buy them.” By Christmas Eve, “his massive amount of painstakingly handcrafted precious merchandise has been eaten up as if by termites.”

To be sure, part of Muehling’s allure among his initiates transcends the aesthetic achievements so richly displayed in this book. Although Muehling’s work is quiet, it’s also, as Lynn Yaeger, the fashion critic for The Village Voice and a great admirer of Muehling’s artistry, wryly told me, “readily identifiable.” There’s no more efficient and cost-effective way for a woman to telegraph her rarefied taste than to hang a pair of Muehling’s rice earrings ($110 in silver) from her lobes. The wearer signifies her supreme stylishness and her disregard for all things trendy; she’s utterly tasteful and knowing, while maintaining, as Yaeger archly puts it, her “downtown cred ” That’s a crucial but near-impossible balancing act for a socially and culturally vital swath of Manhattan womanhood-editrixes in chief, politically progressive litigators, principal curators and museum Paloma’s Zellige pandant, executive producers. In a spot-on urbananthropological essay, the artist Christopher Russell noted that when people ask him about his son’s Greenwich Village elementary school, with its “ridiculously competitive” admissions, “studied casualness,” and smug “neighborhoody specialness” (it’s got to be Grace Church School), he tells them that “all the mothers wear Ted Muehling,” and the inquisitors-”or those in the know, anyway-immediately understand.”

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Sep 02

his production is perforce small

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As they’re talking, a young woman struts by on the sidewalk, stops, and fixes her makeup in the lobby window. James Slade looks disappointed. But his wife shakes her head. “No, that’s what it’s all about,” she insists. “Seeing and being seen.”

South, below Grand Street and just above Canal-beyond the scene at the Tiffany 1837™ ring Hotel and at Balthazar, beyond those transplants from uptown (Prada, Bloomingdale’s, the MoMA store, the Guggenheim), past the chain stores and the weekend throngs and those “galleries” that remain-SoHo quiets down into a calmer, still-bohemian enclave (or at least a semi-bohemian one). There, tucked on a short stretch of the four-block, semi-hidden Howard Street-reportedly the last street in Manhattan to get streetlights-cluster some of the city’s most discerning specialty stores. Two are long-established anachronisms: E. Vogel, which has been making riding boots and men’s shoes by hand since 1879; and the Putnam Rolling Ladder Company, which has been building library ladders since 1905. Two came recently: the winningly inventive Coin Edge ring Ceremony, selling pioneering, quirky international fashion-long black Brazilian capes, finely knitted German undershirts-by designers and manufacturers you’ve almost certainly never heard of; and De Vera, a sort of hyper-curated flea market-a Wunderkammer, really-where necklaces made from ancient intaglios are displayed in artfully crammed vitrines alongside antique opium pipes and Victorian mourning jewelry.

And then there’s the small, high-ceilinged store that serves as the magnet for newer boutiques-an ethereal place that draws the great fashion designer Narcisco Rodriguez when, he told me, “I need some peace or an inspirational jolt,” a store whose subdued atmosphere, invariably described as “magical,” is accentuated by the intermittent ting of a jeweler’s hammer from the studio in the back. This is the shop and workroom of Ted Muehling, whose jewelry and Return to Tiffany™ Oval tag ring objects have for 32 years been venerated among his fanatically devoted customers, a group that includes the most discriminating figures in the world of fashion and design. “Ted has the most refined aesthetic of any person I know, period,” says Sally Singer, Vogues fashion news/features director. “I’ve never heard anyone say his work is other than perfection.”

But only the cognoscenti, albeit a relatively large number of them, are familiar with Muehling’s creations. For one thing, the retiring, artistically earnest Muehling (counterculturally, he uses earnest as a term of high praise, and ironic as a term of derision) scorns the trendy. Seven years ago, he moved his shop to Howard Street from what is now the white-hot center of SoHo, because, as he explained to an interviewer, his original neighborhood “was just getting too spifry.” (By that Elsa Peretti® Teardrop ring, he may be pulling up roots again soon: in June, Jil Sander, the fashion house specializing in beautifully minimalist clothing, opened a beautifully minimalist two-level boutique diagonally across from Muehling’s shop.) He even all but eschews commerce. “It’s almost like he’s embarrassed to ask for money for what he does,” one of his Tiffany 1837™ ring friends, Kim Hastreiter, the editor and co-founder of the chronicle of cutting-edge fashion and design, Paper magazine, told me with a hint of exasperation. He insists on making all his jewelry-his most coveted and esteemed work-in his studio, so his production is perforce small. You can huy these pieces only at his atelier and four other places across the country (Bergdorf Goodman, uptown; Arp, in Los Angeles; Patina, on Nantucket; and Stanley Korshak, in Dallas), and even photographs of them are hard to come by, since he produces no catalog and his Web site forgoes showing any of his work.

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Sep 02

That’s a consistent thread in our work

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“People come to the Bowery for the street life,” James Slade says. “It’s about hanging out, looking cool, being seen.” Tall, dark, and sunglassed, both Slades could arguably be the Bowery type-the new Bowery, that is. He’s got the close-cropped goatee and fitted shirt; she has the chic choppy haircut. One wonders if their lobby is a window onto a world long gone, one that the Avalon Bowery Place II’s very existence pushes further into the past. The genre-defining punk club CBGB is around the corner. Well, was. It’s now a John Varvatos boutique. Gentrification has hit the neighborhood hard. In fact, another new AvalonBay building Elsa Peretti® Open Heart ring the Slades’ lobby. But just as Varvatos preserves some of CBGB’s gritty character, displaying $100 T-shirts under framed vintage concert flyers, the Slades filter street energy through a luxury lens.

The lobby can seem a bit imposing at first. Straight ahead, the concierge desk appears to be carved from a silvery mass. “It looks like this monolith from outside. But when you come in, the details are apparent. There’s a sense of surprise, a journey,” James Slade says. Right by the desk, at a magic threshold between the semipublic lobby and the private elevator vestibule beyond, paneling shifts from satin-finished mirror glass to brushed aluminum, and the terrazzo floor changes color from dark asphalt to cement gray. The terrazzo is made with recycled glass-broken bottles from CBGB, perhaps?

The panels of satin-finished mirror glass Elsa Peretti® Sevillana™ ring partway down into the light well. Though the glass isn’t quite reflective, light bounces and blurs, filtering the street’s energy. “At night, the colors inside reflect out, the colors from the street reflect in, and they kind of blend together,” James Slade says. A swath of sunny yellow backs the concierge desk, while the streamlined sectional and goat-hair rug are a yellow-orange. Above this seating area, in a rounded ceiling cutout, incandescent fixtures spotlight dangling lengths of nickel-plated steel ball bearings, the same stuff a keychain or necklace might be Tiffany Cushion ring of. With all that industrial metal, the lobby verges on spaceship-y, but the warm colors bring it down to earth.

By contrast, the downstairs is almost cozy. Seating in the lounge is upholstered in deep orange. Vinyl in a lighter version of that shade covers one wall in the party room, where the swooping ceiling curves up to meet the light well. The curve is a nice touch, but James Slade admits he was skeptical at first: “Yeah, the ribbon. We worried it was a little trendy. But if you squared the corners, there’d be no connection between Tiffany 1837™ Ring two levels. The curves tie everything together.”

Again, the emphasis is on the eye: The curve creates a natural sight line. Even though the architects emphasize the building’s context on the Bowery as their biggest influence, it’s this attention to visual experience that defines all the firm’s projects. “That’s a consistent thread in our work,” Paloma Picasso® Double Loving Heart ring Slade offers. Her husband picks up the thought: “The relationship between body, space, and perception-no matter what, you have to deal with the person in the space.”

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Sep 02

revolving door

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Obviously, Aniston’s DNA is hard-coded for creativity: She’s an actor. But now, on the brink of turning 40, she’s challenging herself in new ways. In fall 2006, she codirected the short film Room 10 with friend Andrea Buchanan, and she and producing partner Kristin Hahn recently landed a deal at Universal Pictures for their new company, Echo Films. Aniston’s pet project, The Goree Girls, tells the true story of eight Texan inmates who start an all-female country-western band in prison. Aniston plans to work her musical mojo and star in the film. “I can carry a tune, and I was known to throw out a jazz hand from time to time in Tiffany Somerset™ ring school,” she has joked.

“[One thing] I really love about Jennifer is she wants to do a broad range of things,” says Ken Kwapis, director of He’s Just Not That Into You. “What’s great about the choices she makes is that she seems really motivated to tell stories that resonate with her personally, and that’s why they resonate so clearly with audience Paloma Picasso® Loving Heart ring. Because when I look out into the audience and see the rapt faces of people when they’re watching a scene with Jennifer, especially an emotional scene — wow — that can’t be beat.”

What those audience members are connecting with, no doubt, is the wise way Aniston tackles life’s ups and downs. “I’ve learned that you can get through things that hurt,” she’s said. “My pain was real…but people are unbelievable. We have such Tiffany 1837™ ring.” Certainly, the way she’s rolled up her sleeves and developed her own happiness recipe is proof of this resilience. With a spirit like that, it looks like her lucky-charm necklace can stay tucked away for keeps. — Cristy Lytal

With public spaces by Slade Architecture, the Tiffany 1837™ lock ring Bowery Place II gets a hit of luxe appeal

James and Hayes Slade came late to the party, but they made a big entrance. When the husband-wife principals of Slade Architecture began working on the 4,500-square-foot lobby and common areas of the Avalon Bowery Place II, a 90-unit rental apartment building in the East Village, the architects of record were ready to put down their pencils and close their PowerBooks. “They were almost done,” Hayes Slade says. “We came in like, ‘Oh, can we, uh, move that whole area from the back of the basement to the front?’”

Apparently, the answer was yes. The Slades Elsa Peretti® Open Heart ring that area-a party room and an adjacent lounge-right under the lobby’s revolving door and rotated the entirety 90 degrees. Then the architects opened up the lobby’s floor to create a light well for the underground spaces, taking advantage of the full-height windows at ground level. Mirroring the short wall above the light well turned the lobby into an observation deck and the sidewalk into a show.

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Sep 01

like Morocco

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CULT CLASSIC Bloodred lips, a ladylike updo, a subversive touch (such as shocking-pink eyeshadow)-it’s a beauty formula that works for new goth queen Evan Rachel Wood. Derek Lam got moody with a burntyellow hue on the eyes, while Rodarte, inspired by Japanese slasher flicks, splattered Paloma Picasso® Jolies Beads bangle in fuchsia. FLARE LOVES: CoverGirl Eye Enhancers in Firecracker, $7. Dress, M Siamo by Marisa Minicucci. Necklaces, Colette Harmon and Rita D.

GOTHIC TALES Kudos to Mary-Kate Olsen for being ahead of the curve with the long witchy hair, black nails and chunky gladiator heels. Lily Alien rocked aubergine lips, just shy of ebony, front row at Luella’s ode-to-witchcraft Fall ‘08 Tiffany Notes bangle. Now we’re even willing to try nearnoir lipstick. FLARE LOVES: Yves Saint Laurent Gloss Pur in Black, $34. Jacket, Casch Copenhagen. Necklace, Basia.

NOCTURNAL NYMPH Today’s fashion-forward bride may be wearing black, but don’t (arStrong makeup overshadow the romantic mood. Think ethereal beauty, as seen at the haunting yet poetic Nina Ricci show. Autumnal-toned makeup, inspired by fall leaves, got glam with a zap of Bowie-esque gold. FLARE LOVES: Gosh Quattro Eye Shadow in Driftwood, $18. Dress, Casch Copenhagen. Necklaces, Accessity, Fabrice and Giles S Brother by Philip Tiffany Knots cuff.

It would be easier to count the number of fashion designers and tastemakers who haven’t drawn inspiration from Morocco than to count those who have. Diane von Furstenberg, John Galliano, Oscar de la Renta, Tory Burch, Nicole Miller, Canadian interior designer Patricia Gray, Jean Paul and Talitha Getty are a few who have-not to mention the late Yves Saint Laurent, who loved Marrakech so much he bought a house and Tiffany Notes cuff of the town’s most beautiful landmarks, Jardin Majorelle.

Situated at the northern tip of Africa, with both ancient and new ties to Europe, Morocco is famous for casting a spell that’s impossible to shake, thanks in part to a sense of otherworldliness that very few places in this rapidly homogenizing world can still evoke. On my second trip there (the first having left me with an undeniable case of Maroc wanderlust), I was determined to take the pulse of this fabled country through its wares. Just as food can give an insight into a culture’s passions, customs and history, so, too, can discovering its markets, particularly in a country like Morocco, poised as it is between the traditions of a vanishing world and the high-tech allure of modernity. In the souks, the beauty of the country can be distilled down to a series of colours and textures: the ingeniously cooling design of a djellaba (the long, hooded Tiffany Somerset™ Bangle worn by both sexes); the hand-stitched embroidery on a caftan; the beading on a pair of babouche slippers.

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Sep 01

Guillermo del Toro

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My father went through a stringent regimen of chemotherapy and died in three rather than the five or six months he had mentioned at our lunch together at the Tavern Club. He had the death we all live in terror of, ending up hairless, weighing less than a hundred pounds, tubes stuck into him every which way, lying in a cold white hospital room attended by strangers. This particular tempest, I thought looking down on him, I Tiffany & Co.® bangle Martin had been able to avoid.

Toward the end, the last week or so, Suzanne and I took shifts at the hospital-I during the day, she at night-sitting beside his bed. His final three days he was in a coma. On a sunny May afternoon, a Wednesday, a great closer was closed by an even greater closer. I called Suzanne at her office to tell her. She gasped, then I heard her begin to weep just before she hung up the phone.

At the cemetery, Suzanne and I stood togedier in the sunshine over my father’s grave. Tiffany Notes I Love You bangle ago he had acquired three plots: one for my mother, one for him, and one for me. Standing at graveside, listening to a rabbi who never knew my father intoning kaddish, I heard Suzanne sob quietly. This was the moment when I should have put my arm around her shoulder, or at least clasped her hand in mine, but I Heart Band Bangle unable to do either. She loved my father, I knew that, just as I knew he loved her. What did it matter what I felt about her?

As we left the cemetery, driving off in the funeral-home limo, I told her I wanted her to have the third cemetery plot, so that my father could be buried surrounded by the two women in his life he loved dearly. Sorry, Dad, I really wish I had been Tiffany Signature™ bangle to say or do more, but it was the best I could come up width.

LAST OUT You don’t need the bravado of indie singer Beth Ditto (of the band Gossip) to pull off these lacy eyelashes at your next rockband jam-just a touch of attitude and eyelash glue. Models at Christian Dior played dress-up, too, in oversized faux eyelashes and crayon-coloured eye makeup (think Valley of the Dolls eyes in supersized proportions).

FLARE LOVES: Viktor & Rolf for Shu Uemura Wing Eyelashes, $115.

WICKED EYES Picture macabre movies by powerhouse filmmakers Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Pedro Almodovar (Volver) to get a feel for this Spanish gothic look. Get on trend with matte black eyeshadow and a dollop of black eye gloss, paired with a flamenco-style chignon, as seen at Givenchy. FLARE LOVES: Clinique Colour Surge Eye Shadow Stay Matte in Midnight, $17.50. Jacket, Miss Rowe. Earrings, Tom Tiffany Signature™ bangle, Holt Renfrew.

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Sep 01

that promise

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“You’ll have to work all this out with Suzanne, ’cause if I the within the next six months or so it would be unfair to her and all that we having going on to pull out my half of the business to pay over to you. That’s the way things are divided: half of what I’m worth goes to her, half to you. But it’s all corporate and complicated, and you’ll probably need a very smart and expensive lawyer to work through the details. Meanwhile, do I have your word that you’ll be patient?”"Of course. But I’d much rather you stayed alive than I get to worry about what to do with your money.”"I take it you’re not too crazy about Suzanne, even though she’s the one really responsible for your one day becoming a rich man.”"It shows?”"Never try to sell an old salesman, kid. Suzanne noted it right off. Her thought was that you didn’t want her Tiffany Somerset™ cuff your mother.”"Closer to the truth to say that I didn’t want her to take you away from me. When she came into your life, I sort of dropped out of it.”

“You never lost me, Artie. I’m proud of you, kid. I think, Tiffany 1837™ interlocking circles bangle, maybe you’ve been too tough on Suzanne. Cut her some slack. Remember that they murdered her family in China. She’s been through a lot more than both of us put together.”

“I’ve thought about all this, Dad, believe me I have.”

“What she saw in me I still don’t know,” my Tiffany & Co.® bangle said. “But I’m glad she saw what she did. Without her, I’d probably be selling air-conditioning to Eskimos. I’ve been damn lucky in my two wives, Artie.”

We went through the rest of our lunch together as if my father weren’t being stalked by death. We talked about our food, about sports, even about his new business deals, as if a long future lay before him. He was making it easy on me, diverting Tiffany & Co.® bangle from the only subject that was on both our minds. On the street, I offered him a ride home, but he said he’d rather walk. We’re not huggers, my father and I, and we didn’t hug there on the sidewalk. We shook hands. He didn’t have to tell me that he loved me, nor I that I loved him. We both knew.

“Stay in touch, kid,” he said. He pulled up the collar of his double-breasted blue cashmere overcoat, belted in the back. He looked great in it, I thought, watching him walk into the wind as he crossed the bridge over the Chicago River.

THE NEXT day I called Suzanne at the office. “My Tiffany 1837™ interlocking circles bangle told me about his cancer yesterday,” I said. “He also said he promised to undergo chemotherapy because you want him to. I’d be grateful if you released him from that promise.”"Why?” she asked.”Because I love him,” I said, “and I don’t want him to suffer.”"I love him, too,” she said, “as much as you do. I want him to live a lot longer. He is still not an old man, your father, and he is my husband.”"He tells me the odds are strongly against a cure.”"Whatever they are, they are better than nothing.”"Not if he has to spend his last days suffering.”"Forgive me,” she said, “but I have another call I must take,” and she hung up. Which I took to mean, Sorry, Charley, case closed, you lose. Thank you, Suzanne. Bitch.

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Sep 01

high-pressure mediods

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A YEAR OR SO sfter this meeting, my fadier called to inform me that he had just received a diagnosis of prostate cancer, already in an advanced stage. I gulped when he told me. I didn’t know what to say. My father always seemed invincible. Although I was seeing less and less of him, I wasn’t ready to handle the world without knowing he was there in the background, ready if I needed him.

“Some things we need to talk about, kid,” he said. When I asked if Suzanne would be along, he said, “No, just the two of us. How about tomorrow? You know the Tavern Club? 333 North Michigan. Noon OK?”When I arrived the next day, a woman at the desk Tiffany 1837™ Money clip that my father was waiting in the bar.

“How go things, kiddo?” my fadier said, coming forth Tiffany bangles shake my hand. Not yet sixty, he was still handsome, still had a full head of dark hair, still carried himself well, with no sign of the deadly disease inhabiting his body.”I’m fine, Dad,” I said. “What about you? How’re you feeling?”"Apart from dying, I’m in pretty good shape,” he said. “You know this joint?”

He gave me a brief tour, the best part of which was a room done in red wallpaper with, my fadier explained, two famously fake Matisse paintings on the entrance wall. I was a little surprised to learn that my father knew the name Matisse. The windows looked straight down Michigan Avenue to the north, with a grand view of the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower, and all the shops along what a real-estate operator named Atlas® I.D. money clip Rubloff once dubbed the Miracle Mile.

“Some miracle,” my father said. “It’s just about money, and money is no big miracle. Sometimes it isn’t even a lot of fun. You always have to be watching over the goddamn stuff, making sure it’s producing on its own, that someone isn’t making a tenth of a percentage point more than you, which leaves you feeling like a schmuck. This is not a problem I expected to have.”

“Most people would call it a happy problem, Dad.”"One of life’s little surprises, kid. This cancer is only the latest. The way the doctors talk about it, it might also be my last surprise.”"The prognosis is bad?”

“Using my best high-pressure mediods, I got the oncologist Paloma’s Grown of Heart bangle Rush to handicap my chances of survival at 20 to 1 against. For Suzanne’s sake I’ve agreed to put myself dirough the full chemo treatment. But what I really wanted to talk with you about now is money.”"It’s not a subject I know a lot about,” I said.”Here’s all you need to know: I’m holding, as they used to say at the race track when I was a kid. I’m a rich man, that is, Suzanne and I together are rich. At the moment we’re rich mostly on paper. In the neighborhood of roughly $25 million, but most of it tied up in development deals still in the Elsa Pererri® Open Heart bangle. I take it you have no interest in going into the realestate business.”"None.”

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Sep 01

thought of my mother

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When we were alone, my father and I still spoke about some of the same old things: the pennant race in the National League, or the Bears, for whose home games he had acquired excellent season’s tickets. But his mind was elsewhere, or so I felt: in Buffalo Grove, maybe. No longer a man who took things as they came, he had become a man who checked the progress of his investments at the end of the day. Who knows, he may Tiffany jewellery gone off to sleep figuring his net worth, which by now must have been well in the millions. I had to wait until my twenties to acquire a father like everyone else’s: a man distracted, concentrated on money-making, with less and less sense of the everyday adventurousness of life. I blamed Suzanne Chang for that.

In fairness, if my father was pulling away from me, so, without meaning to, I was doing the same from him. Around the time that my father and Suzanne acquired their townhouse on Astor Street, I rented an apartment in Hyde Park, on Dorchester, to be near the atmosphere of the Engine-turned money clip of Chicago, for I was thinking of going to graduate school, and within striking distance of the high school where I was teaching history.

On a summer evening during a Shakespeare Tiffany Money Clips at the university’s outdoor Court Theater, I spotted Suzanne with two other women. She introduced me as her stepson, always a cold word, I thought then and still do.

“My father with you?” I asked.”He’s at home,” she said, adding, “The Tempest is not for Martin.”

Sorry, but no Tempest for you, Dad, I Engine-turned money clip. If my fadier was even aware of his wife’s condescension, he didn’t seem to mind. Much as I wished it were otherwise, I couldn’t help recognize how much he loved this woman. She had channeled his energies, made him a rich man. But what he felt toward her wasn’t anything like a debt. He was just pleased to be around her, pleased that she had chosen him for a husband. He was nuts about her.

I sometimes wondered if my fadier still thought of my mother, Tiffany 1837™ bookmark loved him without qualification, and saw no need to put him under any management whatsoever. My mother was gentle and beautiful, while Suzanne was hard-edged and handsome. Wth her new wealth, she carried herself as if she were an empress; her name began to appear among the heavy contributors to local cultural institutions-the Art Institute, the Chicago Symphony. I began to think of her as Madame Chiang Kai-Abrams.

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