Gotham Gal

Where is all the help?

Summer help has always been hard to come by but it seems harder and harder every year.  I had dinner with a group of friends last night and the restaurant did not have enough staff to cover everyone if it was filled to capacity.  So we began the discussion of why this is happening.

When I grew up, during our college years, we worked as a counselor, retail, waitress, babysitter, manual labor, etc.  Enjoyed the summer, put some money in our pocket, and went back to college in the Fall.  Now life has changed. 

Kids are getting internships starting in High School.  It is tough to land a really great summer job that will look good on the resume.  As much as I admire the drive of each of these kids to get all their ducks in a row to insure the killer job when they graduate, or the one that goes on the resume to get you into the college of your choice, I do wonder what happened to enjoying one's youth. 

There was always a new sense of community and camaraderie with summer jobs.  New people you meet for a few months and work the grunt job with.  Nothing too cerebral.  That was saved for the school year.  Instead, the pressure to compete harder.  If you don't play the game, you are screwed.  Who is brave enough to just not play by the new rules and sling hash all summer instead?

As each summer goes by, it gets harder and harder.  You look around and wonder, where is all the help?

Doing the right thing

When we decorated our home in the village we purchased a variety of antiques (all modern).  Fast forward a few years and we decide to sell our home and downscale.  Generally when you move into new place, the old furniture doesn't exactly work in the new place.  You need a couch but you don't need a six foot couch, you need a 5 foot couch.  After many discussions, we decided to sell some of our antiques at auction with the Wright Gallery in Chicago, who were fantastic. 

Wright did research on all of our pieces to make sure that they were what we said they were.  Totally understood and of course I had no reason to believe that each piece didn't have the providence that was told to us when we purchased the piece.  Wrong. 

We had purchased a piece from Newel Gallery in New York that was supposedly a Gio Ponte.  Not only did Wright Gallery say it wasn't a Gio Ponte, so did Sotheby's and someone else that I know.  Loved the piece and if it wasn't for the fact that we were moving, I would have kept the piece for years never knowing it was not a Gio Ponte.  I didn't care it wasn't a Gio Ponte because we loved it but the price we paid for it was not right.

I contacted Newel Gallery and talked them.  At this point, Newel Gallery had exchanged hands and was purchased by Lewis Baer.  I told him of the problem.  We are talking about a considerable amount of cash.  We decided that we put the piece up for auction and see what market would bear.  He would then pay me the delta.

Unfortunately, the market was not interested in this piece and there were no offers yet we sold every other piece that we put up for auction.  Lewis, a man of his word, gave me the entire amount that we had bought the piece for 7 years ago.  Although he obviously inherited this problem, he did the right thing.  The reputation at Newell is the most important thing and he wants to stand behind his products.  Commendable is one word that comes to mind.  These days, not everybody does the right thing.  Lewis Baer did the right thing.  I would do business with Newell anytime.  I would send people there too.  He couldn't have been more pleasant to deal with.  In a world where you wonder if anybody ever sticks to their word, Lewis put my faith back in the system of good business and more importantly, good people. 

BTW, Lewis writes a blog. 

Goodbye to Brooke Astor

  Brooke Astor was the quintessential New Yorker.  She passed away yesterday at the age of 105.  That alone is an accomplishment.  Her finest achievements were really leaving NYC a better place.  She gave millions of dollars away to the art institutions throughout NYC such as the MOMA, Met, Botanical Garden and the Public Library to name a few.

In 1999, I was asked to lunch at a club on the Upper East Side.  At that point I was chairing MOUSE and was doing a lot of schmoozing.  I don't recall the name of the club but it was something I had never experienced before. 

After entering the club, I was a bit early, so I wandered into a grand room, grabbed a magazine and took a seat.  Within seconds, a gentlemen dressed in a black/white waiters uniform came over to me and told me that I had to leave that room because it was a men's only room.  I remember saying to him, "you are kidding, right"?  Unfortunately he was not.  I moved into room number two.  Seconds later my dining companion came and we were seated to lunch.

During our lunch, Brooke Astor enters the room.  She is a small woman wearing white gloves and a beautiful brimmed ham with someone wearing a staff outfit ( I presumed she worked for her ) guiding her through the room over to a table for lunch.  She sat next to our table.  Her help left and she sat and had her lunch with a friend. 

I was in awe.  I felt like I was in the presence of a rock star.  I so wanted to say to her, "please tell me a story about the life you have lived, the people you have met, and by the way, it is incredible how philanthropic you are, so impressive" but I didn't say a word.  Brooke Astor came from a different era.  One where you dress up for lunch, you have certain manners, you treat everyone with respect.  Reminds me of a saying my Grandmother used to say "better overdressed than under dressed".  Brooke Astor is one of the last of the originals from a time period that has faded into the past.   

Today the MOMA hung the flag at half mast.  Truth is, all of New York City should be hanging the flag at half mast for a helluva of a lady. 

Freedom Writers

Last night I watched the Freedom Writers with Josh and his friend.  I had read the book when it first came out while I was in the phase of reading books on education and inner cities.  The book stuck with me.

Translating a diary of kids from Long Beach into a movie isn't easy but you certainly get the idea.  What struck me after seeing the movie with Josh and his friend was more about the stark differences between my kids and the kids in the movie.  Believe me, this is not an awakening for me but just made me think. 

If you aren't familiar with the movie or book, I will give you the gist.  First time teacher teaches Freshman English in a Long Beach, CA school that was a top school a few years back.  Takes places around 1995. A law is passed in CA and people can choose their schools. Fast forward 3 years and all the top students are gone and the majority of the school is now filled with gangs from the street.  Gangs that are African-American, Korean, Chinese, Mexican, etc.  All of these kids have basically been fighting a war on the streets.  Their families are a mess, they have seen friends sent to jail, gunned down in the street, etc.  They are just in school because they are supposed to be.  The teacher, who happens to be a total diamond in the rough, gets these kids to want to come to her class daily and learn.  It transforms their lives and hers. 

The book which is more detailed gave me a much better understanding about each kids life.  The film gives a bit of insight into the horrors these kids have witnessed. 

As I have been living the life of leisure on the East End of Long Island this summer, the movie really makes me think.  I read about the atrocities in Newark and other inner cities.  The past 7 years of policy has created an even wider divide among the rich and the poor.  The middle class gets smaller daily.  What is happening in Newark is similar to the atrocities that happened in Long Beach at least what the kids wrote about in the book through their eyes.  Parents that can't deal, have low paying jobs if jobs at all, fighting for their turf on the streets, having no regard for human life and wondering what is the point of making a life for myself when my role models have not one success to show.  Success being a job, self esteem, a roof over their heads, a sense of community. 

My kids are lucky that the world is their oyster.  The kids in Newark, are lucky if they can get out alive.  We are spending billions of dollars fighting a war in Iraq which looks as though nothing good will come out of it as we are basically treading water at this point.  Why don't we ever turn our capital and attention to the families in our own backyard who need social support systems and the kids that are living in a war on the streets of the US?  If all the money we spent on a worthless war that basically just created a bad situation to get worse, think of the impact we could have made on educating our kids which would create new economies and better lives for us all. 

It is time to channel the money we spend abroad and look in our own backyard.  Stop the endless cycle.  Help these families and kids look forward to better lives.  The teacher in the Freedom Writers made an impact on a handful of kids.  Each of those kids who were walking a very thin line ended up graduating from HS and some went on to college.  We need to see more of these stories that are funded by the Federal Government.   This story was funded mostly by the teacher holding down extra jobs to pay for the supplies she needed.

I have been carrying around a line written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in my wallet since May 1999.  It says, "to laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.  This is to have succeeded."  The teacher in the Freedom Writer Diaries has made more than one life breath easier.  For that she should not only be commended but an inspiration to us all. 

70 Things to Be Thankful For...

We celebrated my Mom's birthday this weekend.  The hardest part of the event was the pre-planning, of course, and what to get as a gift.  It was a big idea, not mine, and the 3 of us (me, my brother and sister) signed off on it.  We created a scrapbook.  70 pages.  Each page was a page of her life.  Every one in the family had to make their own page (we provided the paper), there were pages of each decade, hairdos, movies/museums, vacations, college, growing up, etc.  It was quite the undertaking.  Some of the pages were coordinated with a gift.  For instance the page on Berkeley (where my Mom went to school), she got a Berkeley sweatshirt.  The page that was museums/theater we gave her subscriptions to three museums and a season of tickets to Second Stage Theater.  The book is in the picture above.  The front said, 70 things to be thankful for.

The event took place in a private room at BLT Steak.  There were 12 of us, and the size and intimacy of the room couldn't have been more perfect.  All the food was served family style too. 

We began with rose champagne (my Mom loves rose), shrimp cocktail and small rectangular pieces of bread with melted Gruyere cheese and a spot of truffle oil.  They were absolutely delicious.  Our first course kicked off with the signature popovers that the restaurant serves.  Be wary, these popovers are so delicious and incredibly filling.  You can't help but continue to pick away until your popover is complete and then perhaps start on another one.  Then came the tuna tartare which is excellent.  A square shaped 1 1/2 inch chopped piece of raw tuna sitting over about 1/4 inch of chopped avocado sitting in a soy based sauce.  Really good.  We also had a Caesar salad and a roasted beet, goat cheese melted over small pieces of sliced banquettes and spicy walnuts.  I thought all the salads were quite good.

The main course was steak.  Not the best steak I have ever had but everyone enjoyed it.  The sides are your standard and of course some shined above the rest.  The creamed spinach is beyond rich with a hint of truffle and delicious, big beautiful onion rings that are worth the indulgence, french fries, grilled asparagus which was not that interesting and sauteed wood mushrooms that were nothing interesting either. 

Dessert was delicious.  A chocolate mouse served in a round shaped layered in with bananas and a crispy wafer.  Really good.  Also, a peach raspberry crisp.  The fruit of the moment. 

The celebration was really nice and the book was worth all the effort.  Although we divided up the pages equally the final coordination was major.  My brother and sister probably did more for it than I did at that point and the end finale was fantastic.  Happy Birthday Mom...

Good companies and bad companies

There is the saying "shit flows downstream" which is an easy way to describe companies.  Top management creates the culture of the company.  Policy making, customer relations all come from above and so the saying goes "shit flows downstream".  I have had my share of dealing with 3 huge international corporations the past few days.  I talked to some companies several times others just once.  Some of them have been terrific while others have amazed me on how their internal operations are run.

The three companies are American Express, UPS and Starwood Hotels.  Here is the story.  I swear, you can't make this stuff up.

We are staying at the Grand Bretagne in Athens.  Emily leaves two of her summer dresses in the closet.  I usually check but it was early, we had different rooms and they are old enough to give the room a once over...right?  Wrong.  She realize this the minute we get to Santorini.  No problem.  I call the Grand Bretagne and tell them the situation. I also email them as a second back up.  As a third back up I tell the concierge at the Vedema Hotel where we are staying in Santorini because both hotels are part of the Starwood Hotels organization.  I love Greece but sense of urgency is just not in their nature or vocabulary. 

The next day, no dresses.  I ask the concierge at the Vedema, I call the hotel in Athens.  Oh yes, they know about the dresses but the courier didn't show up yesterday.  You are kidding me right?  A huge hotel like that an UPS doesn't come daily to drop stuff off? 

At this point, we have a bit of a glitch in our plans.  We might leave Santorini and fly to Paris for the last two days.  Long story not worth repeating.  So, I tell the hotel in Athens to send the dresses to a hotel in Paris because that is where we will be.  The dresses now go.  Now we aren't going to Paris, we are going to stay in Santorini.  The dresses arrive in Paris the next day. 

I call the hotel in Paris and ask them to please send the dresses to Hotel Vedema, express over night so I can have them the next day.  Sure.  They are pretty efficient in Paris.  The dresses go out.  I ask the Hotel Vedema to get me a tracking number.  They do but can't call UPS because they are not open.  Have they ever thought about going online to look?  So, I do.

The package gets to Greece over night as promised.  Then the package bounces around the island for two days now four.  The people at the Vedema have no sense that I actually need the dresses before I go back to the US and that is certainly not from my inability to convey that we want the dresses. We end up going home without the dresses.

I am now tracking the dresses on UPS.  They are still yet to be delivered to the Vedema because they need a contact number in Santorini even though the address is a hotel. Don't have to be that clever to figure that one out and the island is not exactly big.  Everyone on the island knows of the hotel but I guess UPS.

I call UPS, a multi national company.  They are worthless. I called them two days in a row.  Same answer.  Even though they are a multi national company, the domestic company in the US doesn't have a way to talk with the international area of UPS.  They give me a number in Greece to call.  Although I can track the package on line, I can't get them the phone number  that they possibly need to deliver the package to the Vedema or tell them to reroute the package because their computers don't talk to one another.  Someone at UPS actually told me it was about customs but it isn't.  Love people who give you bullshit answers on the phone when truth is they have no idea what they are talking about.  Calling Greece is impossible because of the 7 hour time difference and I woke up too late to get to talk to them today.  UPS says both times, even after talking to a supervisor, sorry but we can't help you.  Honestly, I always thought UPS was a great company.  Wrong.

I come up with an idea.  I call the Starwood Hotel company and ask immediately for a supervisor in the consumer relations area.  Shannon is my gal.  I give her the saga.  She gets it all.  I have dealt with this group before when the Vedema only read every other email with my credit card info on it and after 3 days I just called Starwood and they took care of everything.  She is getting the Vedema to call UPS (she wrote this to the person who runs the hotel) and have them release the package.  Then she is making sure I get the dresses by Friday. 

My guess is she will actually make this happen. I doubt we will see the dresses by Friday but probably sometime next week. 

Oh on the American Express front.  When we were going to go to Paris, American Express, who I use for travel, screwed everything up.  I usually use the same guy but because of the time difference I used someone else because I needed to get things done.  When we realize that we aren't going to do it, they had already canceled all of our flights in the system for getting back to the states.  American Express rose to the occasion, re-booked us on new flights and picked up the cost for everything.  The problem with AMEX is they are so big that sometimes you get someone fantastic on the other end of the phone and other times you get someone who isn't up to speed.  Also, I hate their website. 

Frankly I am exhausted and can hardly wait to see the dresses.  Through this process I might never use UPS again, I am a fan of Starwood Hotels and AMEX gets the nod for standing up for their mistakes. 

Back in the USA

Coming back is was exhausting.  We got through customs and finally left the airport around 10pm.  Got the car and drove straight out to the Hamptons.  Needless to say, I am a bit wacked out today.

Although there were a few places that we had read about going to, such as 1800, we passed on.  We checked out the menu and decided it just wasn't that interesting.  We'd rather stick with the local tavernas. 

A total small world story.  Believe it or not, I had to get our dog out to the beach with us.  You can't take him on the train or on the bus.  I really did not want to drive back in the city to get him so I found a dog taxi service.  Swear.  Probably only in NYC, right?  The guy meets me at long term parking, Howard Beach stop, with the dog.  I had called him when I landed and he had already picked him up in the city.  I found the whole thing comical.  Jessica and I got off the airbus at the Howard Beach stop, and there is this guy and our dog, Lucky.   It ends up that the taxi driver lived in Santorini for four years.  We start talking.  He knows all the places and the owners of the places we had been to.  He also knew the ceramist that I bought the piece from.  Not surprising since he lived in an island that has very few people on it during the off season, for four years.  When I told him that we decided in the end not to go to the top rated places like 1800 he completely agreed.  He said, "hey you live in NYC, you aren't going to get better food anywhere else". 

So, in the end, we went local.  Based on Lucky's taxi driver, we made the right call. 

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

I read about the story when it is actually happening and thought to myself, "damn, I should have done that".  So, when I saw the book sitting there in paperback, I couldn't help but pick it up. 

Julie is an Austin, Texas girl.  She has never had much of a palette.  She orders in, with her husband, jalapeno/bacon pizza from Dominos.  That sort of sums it up for me.  She is floundering.  She is about to turn 30.  She is basically a temp/secretary pretending to become an actress in NYC but rarely going to auditions.  In order to pay off some debt she has sold her eggs to couples doing in-vitro through an agency, of course.  She laments to her husband, High School sweetheart, also a Texan, about what she should do with her life.  He recommends blogging.  Gotta love that.

So Julie starts a blog and her content is going to be about her cooking every recipe from Julia Child's cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Booking, Vol. 1.  She is a hilarious writer.  My guess is that she writes as she speaks.  Her friends are quite the crew.  She is completely disorganized and truly has not spent that much time in the kitchen.  Dinners start after work and sometimes they can't sit down until 11pm at night to eat them because it takes her so long to organize her self.  Cleaning is not high on her list either.

I laughed through the entire book.  I give her tremendous credit for undertaking an entire book of recipes from the beloved Julia Child who didn't start cooking until she was 36. 

If you are a foodie, Julie and Julia, is worth the read.  Sometimes frustrating but downright hilarious.  Julie is now sitting at home trying to crank out another book.  It will be interesting to see what she comes up with.  She is one of the handful of people who have found careers that they didn't realize were calling out for them through the world of the Internet and blogging.  As a blogger, I gotta love that. 

Nicole Krauss

When I read Everything is Illuminated, it wasn't so much that I liked the book, I found Jonathan Safran Foer to be an incredible writer.  The book is intriguing not only from the story line but also that the author is young and this is a pretty big book on many levels.  An amazing debut but all I could think about when I finished the book is the future books he will write.  Everything is Illuminated was a tough read.

In the meantime, I decided to read Nicole Krauss.  Her second book is called The History of Love.  I really enjoyed this book for a variety of reasons. The characters are fascinating as they are woven together through the book which goes back and forth from present day and WWII Eastern Europe.  A true love story.  After finishing the book, I have been thinking about reading her first novel for some time.  I really enjoy reading first novels and then following the authors work.  For anyone who has ever read my blog, classics are not my thing.

After reading The History of Love, Jonathan Safran Foer came out with his second novel called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  Figuring that he was older and less verbose and more focused for his second novel, I was really looking forward to it.  I loved the book.  It is a post 9/11 story of a boy who loses his father in the towers and over the course of many months (maybe it was a year) goes through the process of healing through an endless journey of finding answers to what happened to his father.  He hunts from one end of the city to the other.  Throughout this book there are also characters that are woven together through stories of the past with stories of the present that in the end, all come together.  Similar to Krauss.  What is interesting is that Krauss and Foer are married.

Whenever I recommend these two books, I always say to read them back to back.  I find couples or partners fascinating.  Ones that have known each other long enough that they finish each other sentences.  I wonder if Krauss and Foer sit in their Brooklyn home and discuss what they have written or are thinking of writing.  There writing is similar in some regards.  The weaving of the past and present.  The Jewish characters mostly from Eastern Europe that were tainted from Hitlers reign. 

I finally picked up Nicole Krauss's first novel, Man Walks Into A Room.  I was taken in after the first page.  She certainly has an incredible imagination and gift for writing beautiful prose.  The premise is a man ( 36 years old ) is found wandering through the Nevada desert, he has no idea who he is.  It ends up that he is married and is a professor at Columbia University.  He has a small brain tumor that is pressing on a part of his brain.  Once it is removed he has lost all memory from 12 years old an onward.  How he deals with that or does he care?  It is an interesting journey of how his life changes and the interest he has in getting his memories back.  Very clever and insightful.

Such a pleasure finding two young novelists who write so well, with intriguing tales wonderfully written knowing that they hopefully have many novels yet to come. 

Perivolos Beach

Perivolos is quite the beach.  The strip runs pretty far from Perivolos to Perissa which are two beaches next to each other.  Our hotel had an area there so do a variety of other places.  Driving through that area is comical.  A game of chance. 

Volleyball is big.  There was definitely some type of tournament going on that Josh and Fred watched for awhile.  Josh has become our resident photographer, he took the photo of the guy serving.

Each beach area has a different name.  They each have wooden walkways with thatched umbrellas.  Black sand is soo hot.  The picture below is of Josh and Fred running back to save their feet. 

The kids also took a 10 minute boat ride, something like a banana boat but more like a big blown up chair that is pulled across the water.  We were discussing it on the way back in the car.  The cost is ridiculously over priced so they are not that busy.  If they dropped the rates in half they'd probably have 4 times as many customers and make more money but it isn't the Greek way.  They'd rather lounge and have one customer that over pays.  That customer would be us. An interesting lesson for the kids.  The way of life here is so different than anywhere they have ever been.  Thailand beaches have tons of entrepreneurs, Brazilian beaches to do and Greece has a few but in general, the attitude is much more laissez-faire.  It is important to get into the island mentality when you get here. 

I never traveled as kid.  I didn't really travel until I got into college.  I spent my Junior year abroad and the world changed for me.  I have been taken in by the travel bug ever since.  It is obviously a tremendous luxury to travel and believe me, I realize that and so do our kids.  The captain of our boat was talking about his son and how he traveled all over the world for a year and that is where he really got his education.  I know exactly what he is talking about.  Although our kids certainly see their fair share of life living in NYC, traveling has opened their minds to the world in a completely different way.  That is one of the greatest joys of raising children. Watching the world through their eyes, listening to their perceptions, thoughts and ideas about the world at large.  The world is their oyster and they are taking it all in.