In the musical version of “Grey Gardens” a very young Jackie (and Lee) Bouvier make an appearance. (Gore Vidal was also somehow, maybe distantly, related, but they couldn’t squeeze him in.)

“Pitter patter/Pitter patter/You stole my heart/What does it matter...”

I wish he’d go by his middle name, like many old-money people do. His middle name is Floyd.

Do you have the Duchess of Devonshire’s cookbook?

In a nutshell, the German economic roller coaster: ca. 1890 to ca. 1955. No country has been more whipsawed economically than the Germans. German history is also useful if you want to study planned economies, because a lot of the minutiae of the Third Reich survives in archives.

Skip to about 6:55. Sleep well, happy dreams!

When I was studying in Germany I had lots of free time so I took it upon myself to learn Sütterlin, which is the cursive handwriting that was taught in German schools up until sometime in the Third Reich (Hitler considered it old-fashioned and wanted a more modern cursive to better reflect the modern Germany.) I…

Apparently these cognitive diseases work in very strange ways. I know some people forget how to read, even, and they get an answer to a question and they ask it again almost immediately, but for this woman the written word kind of became the thing. The dark shape in the corner was very mysterious, could be anything,…

The trick is the T has to be in a brassy gold.

It would have been better if “Hello! My Name Is FunnyMonkey!” was on the pocket.

I once visited the elderly relative of a friend and someone had used one of those label generators to label lots of things in her house, because the elder was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. So the refrigerator said “refrigerator,” the TV said “TV”, etc. Apparently this helped the woman out quite a bit.

Eons ago someone from Britain gave me a...I don’t know its name, but it’s a very old instrument that they still make. You heat up some sealing wax, make a little puddle on the back of your envelope, and then press in this metallic circle or any shape I guess with your monogram inside it. People sometimes also used…

My first thought. And I went to college during the crest of the preppy phenomenon, when all kinds of things were monogrammed, sheets, pillowcases, sweaters, skirts, shorts, backpacks, tote bags, monogram charms on charm bracelets, but it is to the Kitchenette thermos story that I always return when I hear the word…

Not just towns. Apparently I am paying for hospice care for the City of Buffalo:

From three decades’ worth of personal observation: One of the joys of living in NYC used to be you barely even knew who the Governor was (including Andrew’s father, Mario) and we were more or less left blissfully unmolested by Albany shenanigans. With Cuomo the Lesser bigfooting it all around the city on various and…

I know that the entire time I was reading Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (and it took me two months) I was obsessed with finding out more about this famously private author. Like, did s/he know Mason and Dixon personally and is s/he almost 300 years old? Is (he) a defrocked French Jesuit priest? What, if any, are…

Here in New York, where we are beyond redemption and practicing New York values, you can get free condoms. They’re not ubiquitous, like they were in gay bars in the 1980/90s (bowls of them helpfully placed by the exit, free for the taking) but they do exist.

Won’t the condom coat knockoff be at Zara in about two weeks? Just in time for Halloween!

Oh, you’re right! I actually have an old paperback copy of “Fear and Loathing” somewhere in my “library”/hoarder’s-book-stash somewhere. I read it, and I remember Hunter was especially vicious about George McGovern. Maybe I’ll reread it the weekend preceding the election.

In 1972, which was not all that long ago, George Wallace was campaigning in Maryland when he was shot. Following this assassination attempt he went on to win the Michigan and Maryland Democratic primaries. McGovern went on to become the Democratic nominee and lost every state in the union except Massachusetts (and the…