Bess Abell was Lyndon Johnson’s Social Secretary. The daughter of Earle Clements, a man who served Kentucky as both its governor and senator, she has lived her entire life around politics, and is currently the dean of the former social secretaries sorority. I love being around Bess. In addition to having some of the best social secretary stories of all time, she is a gifted raconteur, and always draws roars of laughter with her tales of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was […]
This post may not be wildly relevant to everyone, but it has a wider application: we all find ourselves introducing mutual friends from time to time, and often with a certain amount of anxiety. Will they like each other? Will they each make an effort to be friendly and find some commonality of interests? These are all things that a hostess needs to take into account when seating a dinner party. There is protocol in every dinner. It may not […]
I keep a list of food holidays on my desk, both because it’s inspiration for this blog, and because it gives me an excuse to make something like a chocolate milkshake in the middle of the day for no apparent reason. Today is National Chocolate Milkshake Day, as you probably surmise. After I take food photos, which is a bit of a frantic process when it involves something melty like ice cream or a cocktail, the food remains, waiting to […]
That searing day and the jittery months that followed are marked in time for each of us. We should strive to remember and honor the lives that were lost. It’s important, I think, to express our profound gratitude to those Americans who are fighting this vicious war. We are in uncharted territory – finding a way to protect ourselves while clinging tightly to the basic freedoms of the American ideal. It takes integrity, and vigilance, and an unshakeable commitment to the core values that […]
If I ever write a children’s book, I’m going to call it Vineyard Tales. I have so many happy memories from growing up on a grape farm, and now that we’ve come to grape-picking season, they rise in my mind like the syrupy fragrance of ripe Concord grapes. Every fall when the grapes were ripe, I would race out to the vineyards after school. The weather was still sunny, but you could feel autumn coming in the crisp breeze that […]
