Get to Know Lisa Rosman Through Her Various Works

The Longest Sentence, the Creature Comforts

Five Ruby Intuition readings today and now I’m sprawled in a grateful slump across my divan with a certain permakitten’s limbs akimbo, watching Soderbergh’s sunshine noir The Limey while mawing my favorite secret single meal– a blue bowl of fettuccine with home-made mint-ramp-basil-parsley pesto, zest lemon, and greenmarket pea shoots, romaine, and spinach with melted mozzarella, grated parmesan, and fancy Fairway tuna shared, of course, with Grace.

Do not ask me why the bowl has to be blue but my delight plummets when it is not. And tonight I require creature-comfort delight because I’m not feeling great. A member of my family died this week, I’m making big changes behind the curtain I rarely draw back on this platform, and my body is registering all these shifts. Complaining, if you want to know the truth.

So I’m just taking it easy, basking in Terrence Stamp’s cockney rhyming slang and my pregnantladypalate. And of course the sweet soft stripes of Grace’s supermodel paws. The sky is steel, the wind too. Even Soderbergh’s Stamp is melancholy steel. But here in this moment my familiar and I are happily ensconced if not exactly happy.

And thus kicks off what promises to be one of the most oddbot Memorial Day Weekends ever. Not unpleasant, I’m guessing. Just: oddbot. Fitting for a middle-aged medium poised at the beginning of the end.

Also the end of the beginning.

Astro PSA: Moon in Gemini

Did you hear? Tomorrow at 9:36 am EST, we’ll be graced by a new moon in Chatty Cathy Gemini. Since the Sun and Venus is also in this sign, cue communication galore. Gemini can seem ungrounded but that’s only because, governed by Mercury, she’s all about delivery systems. Rest assured that, while the moon is trining retrograded Saturn, she’s as grounded as can be; a trine is a happy, productive connection between two planets and Saturn aims to stabilize us above all else. Still, expect tons of extra information in all areas of life. While most of us are sheltering in place, this can be dizzying but also super-fun. Think pranks, wordplay, new ideas, and declarations of love and ambition. So take a little time between now and tomorrow morning to list what you most want to express–and to whom. I guarantee this new moon will facilitate the most delightful exchanges!

To schedule a reading for yourself or a loved one, book here.

My Queendom for Your Ragu

All day long my downstairs neighbor–a 78-year-old woman from Campania–has been cooking an indescribably delicious-smelling tomato sauce. Mikey and Paulie, my Muppet critic pals from the coffee shop, call this woman one of the “black stockings” of our East Williamsburg neighborhood where they have lived since birth. By this they mean she is one of the older Italian (not Italian-American) women who scream at their philandering husbands all day, every day, in between cooking delicious-smelling tomato sauces and attending Mass not once a week but twice a day. On this point my Muppet critic friends are right as they so often are.

(The only times they are wrong is when they insist on my need for a bicycle, I mean a man. Yes I am the fish in this equation.)

It makes me laugh to see my downstairs neighbor all demure in the hallway, given that those daily fights with her philandering husband are so loud my intuition clients can hear them in our Zoom sessions. I reported him when he made moves on me, so she refuses to share her delicious cooking even when there is not a raging pandemic. Long ago I accepted this as fair exchange for not having to play nice with a sex offender, but today that sauce is torturing me. All I want is to sit at someone else’s table and eat a big bowl of home-cooked pasta and cheese and tomato sauce that magically appears in front of me. I want gnocchi, lasagna, ravioli, penne, fettuccine. Marinara, ragu, puttanesca, carbonara. Focaccia. Broccoli rabe. Arugula. Spicy olives. Polenta. Arancini di riso. I want to wash it all down with a big glass of red. And I do not want to wash the damn dishes.

Essentially I want an Italian mother–or an Italian wife.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy