How the other half lives...and drinks.

The terrace of the Esquire House, with a view as far as the ocean, an infinity pool with a $100,000 fountain, and a wall of fire.

So there you are on the terrace of an $18.9 million dollar bachelor pad at the top of the Hollywood Hills watching the sun sink slowly into the west, with a dram of 40-year-old Scotch in your hand. The bachelor's dream place is the Esquire Magazine House, with every room decorated by a different designer, and the Scotch is Glenfiddich, which retails for $3,000 a bottle, one of only 60 bottles made a year.

The question: Are you happy because this is a once in a lifetime opportunity? Or are you sad because you have to go back to your two-bedroom apartment in Lancaster?

I guess it depends on whether you are a glass half-empty or glass half-full person. Me, I was rather appalled that the mythic bachelor the house was designed for had a master closet bigger than my living room and dining area put together.

Can you fit 10 people into YOUR walk-in closet? I didn't think so.

The occasion was a media event to celebrate the multi-million dollar launch of a new ad campaign for the august distillery: One Day You Will. Fitting, I suppose. You could say "one day you will" be a broke-ass journalist who gets to drink expensive liquor and eat ahi tuna and citrus shrimp appetizers in a beyond-comprehension dwelling worthy of "Entourage."

There were lots of jokes going around about the "Saudi prince" we imagined would swoop in and buy the place, but totally not appreciate it. From what I've seen of Saudi princes, they like their interior decoration gaudy and their women pneumatic. So, yeah, I imagine he wouldn't get how amazing the place is.

The unlit glass-bottomed fireplace and the central sitting area in the Great Room.

In the Great Room, a waist-high case displays antique swords lying on a bed of sand. Above it on the wall is an original Basquiat. The entire front of the house is glass, so you can see the incomparable view from the kitchen, dining room, living room and bar.

While cooking in the kitchen, your guests can entertain themselves with a fun feature by Lufthansa. You stand in front of a screen, in a corner made to look like the inside of a passenger plane, and put your arms out. Something reads your body language and when you tilt, it looks like you are turning the airplane. Step forward and it looks like you are going faster, take a step back to slow down.

The Lufthansa sponsored area across from the food prep counter.

The master bedroom was done by Ferragamo, and Carrie Bradshaw would have orgasmed right on the spot. A little corner behind the bed had a small closet area for our bachelor's female guests, and it had amazing shoes and clothes in it.

Fabulous Ferragamos in the tiny lady's closet.

We went on a tour of the house, and in every room we drank a different "expression" of Glenfiddich Scotch. Yeah, I don't know what that exactly means either; in practical terms, it meant how old the bottle was. We tasted 12-year-old in the Great Room bar, 18-year-old in the recording studio lounge, 30-year-old in the media room, and 40-year old on the terrace at sunset.

Interestingly, I liked the 30-year better than the 40. I suppose that you should like something that rare better, but the whisky gets very dense and dark the longer it is aged. They didn't tell us what we were drinking until after the 30-year, and the majority preferred the 18-year.

A row of Scotch tasting glasses. The eyedroppers are for adding just a drop of water, which many say improves and "opens up" the taste.

The master bedroom, with a fur bedspread, but inexplicably, a queen size bed.

Amid all of the modern interior design, we found a fabulous steampunk clock in the master bedroom.

The super-cool thing was drinking 40-year old Scotch with the man who actually makes it. Glenfiddich flew Brian Kinsman, their "master blender," over from Dufftown, Scotland. Kinsman admitted he rarely gets out of the lab. He is on the young side, and plans to make Glenfiddich his life's work. Actually, it sounds like many do: there have only been six master blenders in the company's 124 years, the original being Glenfiddich's founder, William Grant.

You can see a video of Brian explaining how to "nose" Scotch here.

It seemed like the lads from William Grant & Sons were having as great a time exploring the house as we were. Kinsman and Caspar MacRae, William Grant's Marketing Director were asking me if I could live in the "ultimate bachelor pad." Caspar pointed out that there "wasn't a floral print" to be had in the place. Actually, the color palette of autumn colors is right up my street, as the Brits say, and I moved on from Laura Ashley decades ago.

Caspar was an "equerry" for a senior member of the British royal family while in the British Army. When asked how he got that gig, he replied that the royals "come from old money, and they know how to hang on it. Instead of hiring assistants and secretaries, they just ring up the army and have people posted to the palace."

He said that something happens to people when they've been working too long in the palace among the royal family. They start referring to themselves in the third person, as in "One wouldn't like that." Caspar made us laugh imitating them, then saying, "Really? One? Don't you mean 'you' wouldn't like that?"

So, all in all, it was great evening, and I didn't even mind going back to my place which doesn't have bathtubs with a killer view of Los Angeles. I don't have 40-year old Glenfiddich, either, but I do have a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label that my lovely friends bought us for a wedding gift, and I regularly drink 12-year-old Scotch, so I'm pretty content.

Sid and the Vicious Circle

When I think of New York, I first think "Sesame Street," Woody Allen, old black and white movies about Broadway, and Edith Wharton, not necessarily in that order. But I mostly think about writers.

New York City is really a writer's city, in much the way that Paris is a painter's city, and when we made honeymoon plans, there were two places I especially wanted to see: the Hotel Chelsea and the Algonquin Hotel.

The Hotel Chelsea doesn't exactly celebrate the seedier aspects of its history, but this painting of Sid Vicious hangs in the lobby, and they will helpfully tell you he killed Nancy Spungen in Room 100.

The Chelsea, 222 W. 23rd St, was built in 1884 as co-op apartments, but became a hotel in 1905. It now has 125 hotel rooms, and 101 residential units. Coincidentally, the Associated Press reported only this morning that the landmark is up for sale. The Chelsea is almost as famous for who died there, as it is for its former residents. Dylan Thomas collapsed from alcohol poisoning there in 1953, and died. And in 1978, Sex Pistols guitarist Sid Vicious brutally murdered his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in Room 100.

I'm always up for a good murder scene, but the real draw for me was the authors, poets and playwrights who have lived here over the years. One of my favorite authors, Thomas Wolfe, lived here in the last years of his life. That's the author of "Look Homeward Angel," not Tom Wolfe, he of the ice cream suits who always matches his shirts to his socks, although I love him too. A bronze plaque outside commemorates Wolfe and others such as Brendan Behan, Leonard Cohen, New York School poet James Schuyler, and most impressive to my husband, Arthur C. Clarke wrote "2001: A Space Oddysey" while living there.

The Chelsea lobby is full of art, like these paper mache figures. and the mixed media below.


The lobby is homey, bohemian, and filled with art in a variety of mediums. The desk clerk was helpful in a laconic way, and it seemed like a place I would love to stay if it hadn't been for the loud "artist" in the lobby with a painted face, haranguing an East Indian couple in such a pretentious way I wanted to tell him to put a sock in it.

We looked around, then set off for the Algonquin Hotel, home to the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, publishers, actors and wits who met there every day for lunch. I am always fascinated by groups of artistic people who crop up, find one another and gather for inspiration and companionship.

I read Susan Cheever's "American Bloomsbury" and was shocked to find that Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson lived within walking distance of each other in Concord, Mass. Thoreau and Emerson I knew about, since Emerson's wife was doing Thoreau's laundry while he was living on Walden Pond. (And cooking him dinner, by the way. Self-sufficency, my eye!)

The Algonquin group weren't on the same level as those literary heavyweights, but they were witty, and fed off of one another's energy. Possible best remembered of the "Vicious Circle" is author and poet Dorothy Parker, who coined such bon mots as "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses." (Oh, yeah, Dottie? I beg to differ.)

My daughter Allison drinking a $20 martini in the lobby of the fabled Algonquin Hotel.

The Rose Room, where the group had their table, no longer exists thanks to a remodel of the hotel's lobby in 1998. The owners had a replica of the table made, and it sits in a place of honor under a portrait of the group.

The lobby is beautiful, and made the perfect place for a cocktail on a cloudy day. Even if we had wanted to get drunk, we couldn't afford it. Bombay Sapphire martinis were a cool $20, and two martinis, a beer and a cheese plate set us back $86. You won't be surprised to learn we ate hotdogs from a street vendor for lunch.

A replica of the storied Algonquin Round Table sits under a portrait of the members of the luncheon group.



"A Vicious Circle" by Natalie Ascencios, shows members of the Round Table, such as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Robert E. Sherwood, and Alexander Woollcott.

On our way to Rockefeller Center to go ice skating, we passed Charles Scribner's Sons, a legendary publishing house, who published Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. The bottom floor is now a Sephora, but the side of the building still sports their sign.

Charles Scribner's Sons on Fifth Ave., publisher of such literary luminaries as Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton and Kurt Vonnegut.

Next week: Ice skating is not as easy as it looks....

New York with a brogue

The view many of our ancestors had upon arrival at Ellis Island.

I hadn’t meant for our New York City honeymoon to turn into an Irish heritage tour; it just happened.

The first day we took the ferry to Liberty Island to see the statue and Ellis Island. You wait in a manageable queue at Castle Clinton in Battery Park to buy your tickets, but when you line up to get on the ferry, you find that the line of people snakes through the park. We couldn’t even see the dock from where we were.

I wanted to get a sense of what happened when my ancestors immigrated, but I really didn’t need to recreate the complete experience. We were herded like cattle onto the ferry, shoulder to shoulder and contained inside metal fences, then off again at Liberty Island, and the whole process started again to get to Ellis Island.

We were like better-smelling refugees. Our ancestors lined up to get deloused and get physical exams; we waited forever to get through the security checkpoint.

The terrorists have won, by the way, when we have bomb-sniffing dogs and guards with machine guns making us take off every scrap of metal to go through the scanner. For the first time, I had to take off even my wire-rimmed glasses to pass.

The new ferry building on Ellis Island, an Art Deco wonder built in the 1930s.

The trip to Ellis was inspiring and educational. The xenophobia we are experiencing today in this country is nothing new, and some of the displays depict anti-immigrant rallies (with torches, no doubt), and relics of the Ku Klux Klan. It seems every generation of immigrants wants the door to America slammed shut as soon as they arrive.

The Great Hall on Ellis Island.

The Great Hall was where hopeful soon-to-be-Americans were processed: given medical exams and housed until they could be certified healthy enough to enter the country. Now there are wonderful exhibits that illustrate the gender, ethnic background, and country of origin of the immigrants.

The Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park. This is the side that faces the water.

After Ellis Island, we walked Battery Park up to the Irish Hunger Memorial, which is very close to Ground Zero. It is a very moving monument to the time of the 1846 to 1850 Potato Famine in Ireland, when 1.5 million people starved to death.

The memorial is a half-acre of serenity in the madness of Manhattan, with a roofless stone cottage imported from Ireland, and a garden featuring native plants, flowers and grasses imported from Auld Sod. There are 32 rocks engraved with the name of the Irish county they came from.

The tunnel to the rest of the memorial has first-person accounts of the Potato Famine on light-up strips along the walls.

After you pass through the hallway with strips of text about the hunger, you come into the cottage. Beyond those imported stone walls are places where you can block out the city entirely and it seems like you are back in Ireland. The reason the memorial is on a half-acre is symbolic: the Poor Laws stated that anyone with a half-acre of land couldn't apply for relief, so people were walking away from their land rather than starve to death.

The inside of the Irish Hunger Memorial features a rebuilt stone hut, plants native to Ireland, and large stones from each of the counties.

The next day we hit Central Park in search of the Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Anderson statues. As we walked through the park, I heard a lilting Irish brogue wafting on the breeze — a horse carriage driver explaining the sights of Central Park. I decided that I had to have an Irish driver, too.

Talk about racial profiling.... I wasn't sure how to go about finding one when we stumbled across carriages lined up near Columbus Circle. We sashayed down the line, pretending to be interested in the horses and buggies, but I was really listening intently.

As we passed three drivers talking on the street-corner, I heard what I had been searching for, a beautiful brogue. I stood there like an idiot, trying to find some good way to ask: which one was he? One of the drivers approached us, but his accent was pure Noo Yawrk.

Molly the horse, me, and our Irish carriage driver, who was from Tipperary.

"You want a carriage ride?" he said.
"Actually, we're looking for an Irish driver," my husband said, and the three men laughed uproariously.
"Drunk? Or sober?" they asked.
It turns out that two of the three were Irish; and furthermore, that Irish cab drivers are not in short supply.

What?? It was our honeymoon; we had to have a carriage ride in Central Park!

The day was glorious, but I underestimated how conspicuous one is when riding in a horse-drawn carriage, especially on city streets used to get in and out of the park.

I used my smart phone to find us a place to eat, and twice it returned Irish pubs. So I drank Harp on tap, and my favorite pub food: shepherd's pie. In fact, I ate it three nights out of the five we were there: at Mulligan's, O'Reilly's, and Muldoon's.

I called it research into the perfect pie, but it actually was just fattening. I can't wait to go back and do it again.

Next week: New York: the literary tour

Steampunk deluxe!

The first wedding on the BLVD! We kiss in front of Vijay Patel's 41 Pontiac the night of the wedding. Photo by www.littleblueworldphoto.com

I plopped the filthy wedding dress on the counter of the dry cleaners and smiled sheepishly.

"I hope you can get this out," I said sweetly, pointing out the hem. "It's motor oil."

The look on her face was priceless. She stared at me incredulously and sighed in a disgusted manner. I shrugged, saying "I got married in a parking lot."

Which was the truth in a sense, but how could I explain to her the wonderland that the Lemon Leaf Lot became the night of my wedding?

I found the magical transformation difficult to believe myself.

A few days before the wedding I was getting mysterious phone calls from my friend Maria Elena, the owner of the Lemon Leaf, where she would enthuse about how awesome my wedding was going to be. She never provided any details; she would just gush and say, "I can't wait until Saturday!"

Little did I know that she was watching my friends Barbara Letson and Dan Venturoli creating the elements of a steampunk wonderland in the Leaf Room, next to the parking lot.

A detail of the amazing decorations at the wedding. The wedding couple's initials and a candelabra are wrapped with wire and a variety of gears in steampunk fashion.Photo by www.littleblueworldphoto.com

There were brass lanterns atop vines twinkling with tiny lights in the middle of each table. Everything was swathed in chocolate brown taffeta, gold sparkly tulle, ivory linens, brown tulle, and lit with a profusion of candles. Each place had a tiny wooden steamer trunk filled with dark-chocolate covered expresso beans.

All the steampunk iconography was there: huge clocks, gears, brass, and copper. Everything but the goggles. Our friend Tim Kirk brought his, just in case we'd like to have the officiant wear them. Tim and his wife Linda Lee added to the ambience by bringing in a case of wine they had relabeled with a custom "Steampunk Merlot" label which featured a caricature of Jim and me.

A detail from the wine label done by artist and friend Tim Kirk. He and his wife Linda pasted the labels on a case of wine and transformed it into Steampunk Merlot with our caricatures on it.

The napkin rings were lengths of wire wrapped around the napkins, and hung with tiny gears. Guests were turning them into bracelets and wearing them.

The ceremony itself was drama-free. I hesitated dropping my gown's train onto the cement of the lot, but it had to be done, so I tried to not think about what was becoming of it. That taffeta confection cost more than my hand-me-down Saturn is worth; I hated dragging it around.

The flower girls made it down the aisle under their own steam, presumably. I couldn't see them. Poor flower girl Tori — she had practiced strewing silk autumn leaves in my path, then was told to hold Charlotte's hand instead.

So, ultimately, no one threw leaves; the flower girls held hands on one side, and carried their baskets in the other hand. By all accounts, Charlotte clambered up on the stage all by herself. She made up for her good behavior by refusing to pose for photos on the girl's side of the stage, because she wanted her daddy.

I was rather glad I had bought her dress, when I say the state of it the next day. Charlotte took more than one face plant that night, and the front of the gown was filthy.

Valerie Estrada, of Little Blue World Photography was our wedding photographer and she grabbed Jim and me and took us out on the BLVD to pose for pictures. She had spotted Vijay Patel's 1941 Pontiac at the curb, and thought it would make a great backdrop, and it did.

My crazy sister thought we had hired Vijay's car for the evening, and sometime during the reception started filling the back seat with balloons. Eventually, she figured it out, and instead tied balloons to the luggage rack of the MG, and wired an empty can of Mike's Hard Lemonade underneath.

That was a particularly cruel joke to play on the owner of a classic car. When Jim and I made our getaway, I heard that god-awful noise and thought I was dragging my muffler. Again.

Crap is always falling off that car; who knew?

I'm still piecing the details of wedding, Rashomon-like, now that a week has passed. But so far it looks like everyone had a good time. My friend Ed Harbour did an amazing job as a DJ, and he kept the floor filled by playing 1980s New Wave.

Jim and I got to show off our hours of ballroom dancing practice, even though the tango was a little difficult with that much dress between us.

I will show more photos when I get them, but now I have to pack for my honeymoon to New York City, and I'm falling asleep. Sorry, there are no Charlotte photos. You'll have to wait until next week.

Those dance lessons with Iris really paid off. The groom is treading on my gown, but how could he not? There's so much of it. Photo by www.littleblueworldphoto.com

Getting to the altar

By the time you read this, I will be a married woman.

We’re praying that the rain, thunder, and lightning give Lancaster a pass, but one never knows.

The wedding venue has undergone considerable weather-related adjustment, because the open sky lit by hundreds of lights envisioned by our hostess, Maria Elena, is threatened by the unseasonable storm.

We already gave up the dance floor, because we couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t get rained on.

I read in the paper that this is a down year for weddings, that because of the recession, people are forgoing tying the knot. Leave it to me to buck a trend, any trend.

We have been running our own private economic stimulus program for about a year now. I wanted to postpone until things picked up, but my beloved was so anxious to close the deal, he convinced me.

At first, we wanted to get married at Union Station, in the long-shuttered Fred Harvey restaurant. Its marriage of art deco and Southwest décor, along with its unique layout would have been perfect.

The now-closed Fred Harvey restaurant at Union Station, taken during an L.A. Conservancy tour.

We are L.A. Conservancy members and the idea of getting married in the romantic old train station that has been seen in so many movies was irresistible. I pictured myself walking down the staircase on my wedding day. Alas, the cost was prohibitive.

The company wanted $5,000 for the restaurant alone.

That was for four walls and a security guard to keep out wedding crashers. No chairs, decorations, food, nothing.

Still, I clung to this idea for a long time. Then, we decided that the important thing was to throw a really fun party for our family and friends, and that five grand could be put to better use buying beer, so why not Oktoberfest?

Sure, we could hire the oompah band Anton Schnitzel and the Merry Makers to be our wedding singers, get multiple kegs of beer, and blue checkered tablecloths, but about the time my German friend Barbara (aka the Mad Psychic) started talking about dirndls and lederhosen, I got cold feet.

Those ideas rather clashed with the elegant wedding gown and suave tux I had in my head. I’m all for kitsch, but on my wedding day? Not so much.

So, sitting in the Lemon Leaf with the owner, Maria Elena, the beer-bash turned into an elegant wedding under an October sky and strings of fairy lights. Which morphed again, when I decided to have a steampunk themed wedding.

Every wedding has to have a theme which drives the color palette, decorations, and favors. It can be as simple as a spring garden wedding, or, like my daughter’s February nuptials: a winter wonderland.

I started with autumn leaves, Which frankly, was boring. I liked the colors, but it didn’t reflect my rather flamboyant personality. Then I ordered a steampunk necklace from etsy.com, where artists sell their handmade works.

Steampunk is the marriage of Victoriana and science fiction: think of the future as imagined by Jules Verne, or the old 60s television series "Wild, Wild West." The iconography is brass, copper, goggles, dirigibles, clocks, keys, exposed gears, and advanced technology powered by steam, instead of solid state circuits.

My necklace had gears, airships and keys on it, and I seized on that as my theme. I found steampunk jewelry on etsy for my attendants, and arranged to have a custom necklace made for me.

But when it came to dressing steampunk, it started all falling apart. Extending the theme to your wedding clothes is impossible to do without having it look like a costume. And I was resigned to making my dress: a Victorian gown with a removable bustle. But getting bridesmaid's dresses was proving difficult, and I didn't have time to make them all.

In the end, we went with touches of steampunk and traditional taffeta dresses. The only sewing I did was for the older flowergirl. I had intended to make both dresses, hers and Charlotte's, but I ran out of time.

I was trying to teach, grade papers for four classes, plan a wedding, stain 100 little wooden boxes for favors, and sew. Something had to give, and it was C's dress. I bought it from that adorable cart in the mall.

This is the ridiculously messy state of my tiny living room while I was sewing the flower girl dress.

This is the front and back of the flower girl dress I made in my ridiculously messy living room.

There were times when it felt like we were never going to get it all done. We were still working on the boxes of chocolate-covered expresso beans the day of the wedding. But eventually, we crossed the finish line. Next week, I will tell story of the wedding itself, and how my friends turned a parking lot next to the Lemon Leaf into a steampunk wonderland.

This is a gratuitous photo of Charlotte, just because she's so damn cute! Next week, you will see her in her flower girl dress.