I can tell my grand love affair with this natural brown-grey hair color is over, oooover, we-need-a-new-word-for-over* because yesterday at the beach I caught myself squeezing lemon after lemon on my hair to “lighten it just the tiniest bit.” Bring in the big-gun chemical blonde STAT, please; I’m over looking like the earnest, granola-baking, leftist bumpersticker-sporting Cambridge mothers of my 1970s childhood. (Hey, I warned you re: shallow.)
*yep, to make matters worse, I am quoting Sex and the City Season 3 here.
People ask me what I do when I get up so early (between 5 and 5:30 most days). They assume I am doing something earnest—meditating or writing or channeling my spirit guides. The truth is sometimes I do those things, but rarely before my coffee. Mostly in the wee hours I luxuriate in secret time, found time—a quiet unpunctuated by beeps and whistles and honks. The barely blue hours are when I feel the glamour of solitude most keenly: flowers cut like I like them, bulletin boards scrawled with my big ideas, feet and permakitten propped on the table, fingers painted an unlikely yellow, coffee cup resting without a coaster, and absolutely no media or people blaring. (My house growing up was quite loud.) I may be 46, but inside me a 6-year-old is crowing with great glee and satisfaction: IT’S MY HOUSE AND I CAN DO WHAT I WANT.
Fashion journalist Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni’s memoir, After Andy, would be a gas even if it didn’t dish on the life and times of Andy Warhol. I use the term “gas” because the whole book crackles with English, French, and American twentieth-century slang and spoonerisms in the most delightfully gassy way. To hear Fraser-Cavassoni tell it – and she’s a truth-teller even when the truth paints her as a daft bird – her whole life has been quite a gas. Born in 1963 to best-selling author Lady Antonia Frasier and politician Sir Hugh Frasier, her stepfather was Nobel Laureate winner Harold Pinter and family friends included Caroline Kennedy, Lucian Freud, and Jean Rhys. When she was seventeen, Natasha began an affair with Mick Jagger, whom she met on a luxury yacht. She also met pretty much everyone else worth meeting in seventies, eighties, and nineties London, New York, and Los Angeles during her reign as an international “it girl” who worked as a model, actress, agent, and general gadfly. In short, she was Paris Hilton before Paris Hilton, with three key exceptions. Natasha had a sense of humor. Natasha could write. And Natasha served as the last of Andy Warhol’s “English muffins” – the term for the succession of well-bred English girls who worked in the Factory, Warhol’s legendary creative studio and business center.