Ellen Azorin: 1st Life - Advertising Creative Director, 2nd Life – Music Booking Agent

This woman can really move to the beat in more ways than one!

Looking For A Good Read? Look No Further Than Canada.

Caryl lists 7 Best Books from 2013--all with a surprising connection

Five-time  Agatha award winner Louise Penny may be reading one of her mysteries.  Who knows?
Maybe Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. 

With Thanksgiving behind us and Christmas gaining on us, we need a moment to relax, unwind, catch our collective breath. And what better way to return to our calmer selves than settling in with a good book. But what to read? Lately, I’ve become addicted to author Louise Penny (pictured above). She’s a mystery writer who sets her stories in the remote outreaches of Quebec.  Surprisingly, I have never read this genre before, and geography doesn't ordinarily influence my book choices (okay, occasionally India) but I’m smitten. Actually, another Canadian author is my book club's selection for December. Next Monday, we will be discussing Dear Life, the latest and reportedly last book by a “shy housewife” who began writing short stories in the 1960s at her kitchen table in Western Canada while her three daughters napped or were at school. This year, Alice Munro, now 82 and with 14  short-story collections behind her, won the Nobel Prize for literature. Another Canadian-born writer 54 years her junior, just snagged the Man-Booker prize for her second novel.

What’s the story with these Canadian women who have stealthily entered our literary canon? I found the answer at Publishers Weekly where associate reviews editor (and coincidentally—ha!—my daughter) Annie Coreno considers her own conspiracy theory in (if I do say so) a brilliant post.

Second Chances, Happy Endings and Free Stuff

Caryl adds: Plus everything you need to know about creative aging in 10 steps! 

Frieda is the leading lady (one might say diva dog) in Jon Kat'z  new book Second Chance Dog: A Love Story 

This is a dog story. It’s not my dog story. Mine is tragic. When my children were small, they campaigned for a dog. After much consideration and a written plea by my older daughter listing reasons why our family needed a dog and what kind of breed would meet her parents’ criteria—not too big, not too small, doesn’t shed etc.-- my husband and I gave in. Friday, a medium-size, non-shedding—(we forgot to mention no baying at the moon!) beagle with floppy ears, soulful eyes and a tail that stood up like a flag on the back of a bicycle, came to live with us. Fast forward a few years: my husband decides to take a job in Prague, and I am left with two children, a demanding job and an animal menagerie: a cat (Fritz), two birds (Feather and Sunshine), a hampster (Petey) and Friday, a dog that needed to be walked on the mean streets of New York late at night. I admit with shame, remorse and some embarrassment, I couldn’t handle it by myself. I couldn't leave my children alone to walk a dog no matter how persuasive were those soulful eyes. So Friday went to live with my in-laws in Cleveland where she enjoyed a fenced-in back yard, home-cooked meals and the adoration of empty-nesters.

But that’s not the dog story I am here to tell you.  The dog story I want to share is a happy one—and it’s about Frieda, the dog pictured above, and how she brought together two Second Lifers who learned about the resilience of love from a four-legged outcast who ran wild in the Adirondacks until she was rescued.

Three Women Sculptors - True Artists with Some Engineering Expertise on the Side

Maryl marvels at the magnitude of their sculptures

Nathalie Decoster                                     Carol Friedmann                                    Carolyn Palmer 

So do these three women look like engineers to you?  I had the occasion to experience eye-opening work of two female sculptors on my recent trip to France and a similar encounter with another in our own neck of the woods. Nathalie Decoster who works in Paris sculpts figures in bronze - although she is beginning to work with other materials – that represent man confronting time and nature. Gloria Friedmann, originally from Germany who also works in France, is a sculptor, painter, photographer and videographer who interprets man against nature, culture and humanity. Carolyn Palmer is a New York portrait artist who creates life-size bronze busts and statues. As I walked around and admired their art pieces it occurred to me that these are also engineering feats and that artists need to know some sciences along with their arts. You may remember the media frenzy Lawrence Summers, then President of Harvard, set off when inferring that innate differences between the genders may be the reason so few women scientists make it to the top.  I'm not looking to open up that debate but maybe we're not measuring female aptitude in the right places.  Anyway, just take a look at these sculptures for yourselves and enjoy their magnitude and beauty. 

Joni Mitchell: On Life, Loss and Missing Out on Woodstock

Caryl shares an exclusive playlist from Joni Mitchell's 70th birthday concert

The last time I saw Joni was in Toronto in June of 2013. The occasion that brought her back on stage was a birthday happening. For two nights, performers and musicians came to together in a concert celebrating the legendary singer’s 70th birthday next November. For the past decade, Joni Mitchell has not performed because of health reasons--she has Morgellons Syndrome, a parasitic infestation some doctors claim is delusional--and a voice that with age has been reduced in range.

Joni Mitchell's extraordinary career spans 50 years and mixes together the genres of folk, jazz, blues and a bit of rock and roll. The birthday tribute show that was part of Toronto's Luminato Festival, lasted almost three hours the night I saw it.  Combining familiar and obscure songs chosen by Mitchell herself,  the concert featured performers with reputations ranging from the little known: Liam Titcomb who sang the poignant If  to the famous, Rufus Wainwright who peformed the Yeats poem Slouching Towards Bethelehem acapello reinterpreting it like “a Scottish folksong”. Wainwright told the audience how he didn't grow up with Joni's music.  His mother, the folk singer Kate McGarrigal who died last year, was kind of competitive, he said, and banned the more successful Mitchell's music from the family's home.

GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK – THEN AND NOW

Maryl revives summer days from her past, so welcome in this heat!

Then                                                                              Now

Caryl and I just spent a few days at my house at the Jersey shore mapping out some new ideas for Second Lives Club. I live a few towns north of Asbury Park, where years ago my high school friends and I would take the bus in for a day of sun and sand. That seaside community took a beating from Superstorm Sandy last October just like the rest of the surrounding beaches although Asbury Park’s past has been a bit of a roller coaster ride all along.

HOW I FINALLY MADE IT TO CANNES AND IT WASN'T A DREAM

A Short Film and A Red Carpet Screening are Maryl's Ticket to the Cannes Film Festival

Susan, Exec. Director-Eurica and Maryl

When I was starting out in the film and video business, one of my first productions was selected for a women’s festival at the Mercer Arts Center in New York. I was excited but still a novice and just wanted to make videos. Years after one of my documentaries was entered as a possible Academy Award nominee. That’s what you dream about when you’re in this industry….an Oscar or a screening at Cannes. Sometimes you get there much later and not the way you thought.

The Mother Figure

Manuel Pardo's lifetime devotion to a single subject

Mother’s Day is still a Sunday away but a recent visit to Manuel Pardo’s joyful exhibit at a Chelsea gallery makes one think about the influence mothers have on their children. Manuel Pardo, who died last November at age 60, devoted most of his artistic career to honoring his roots, in particular his mother Gladys. In l962, at age 10, Pardo was airlifted with his sister from Havana to Miami during Operation Peter Pan, a collaboration between the U.S. government and the Catholic Church that heartbreakingly separated children from their parents. Pardo struggled in foster homes until reunited with his mother four years later. Recalling their reunion, he said: "God arrived, in the form of a woman with a very long braid." (His mother, had refused to cut her hair until she rejoined her family.) 

In Pardo's 30-plus year career, in hundreds of paintings and drawings, he consistently depicted his mother as “self-possessed, cat-eyed, stylish” in fancy clothes and lavish interiors--luxuries she could never afford in America.  On Thursday, May 2,  friends and patrons, art-lovers and gallery-goers will come together to celebrate Pardo's life--and his life's work--at an opening reception and unofficial memorial at the Highline Loft. The reoccurrence of the female figure allowed Pardo to revisit and refurbish the life he left behind as a child. Said one reviewer: “Like the soothing repetition of a chant or a prayer, his work tries to will an alternate reality into existence." 

Pursuing Purpose, Passion and a Paycheck

Laura Lee Carter                                        Dana Buchman                                     Marci Alboher

Caryl recounts real stories of real women looking for the next thing

There’s a reason the word mid-life is often coupled with crisis. The years between 45 to 65 are often filled with loss—loss of a job, a marriage, a parent—but also a loss of identity. With children grown, careers stalled, relationships sometimes stagnating, as thinking women we know a fancy new sportscar or a Madmen-like affair would never be the answer. No, we are looking for something bigger, more profound, something truly life--maybe even world--changing. And, we wouldn’t mind some money too. The three women above have found purpose, passion and a paycheck in their second lives. Their stories provide inspiration, direction--and hope.

Joyce Carol Oates: Love, Loss and Just Saying Yes

Joyce Carol Oates, the prolific American author and feminist, whose new book The Accursed, which Stephen King praised as the "perhaps the world's first post-modern gothic novel", sat down with Caryl early this year for her first pre-publication interview. The conversation veered from vampires, demons and zombies to love, loss and the importance of saying yes to life. In February, 2008, after the death of her husband, the woman whose first collection of short stories came out a half century ago and whose canon includes more than 100 books and articles, found her self blocked, unable to write a single word of fiction. Raymond J. Smith, her soulmate of 35 years and her publishing partner in The Ontario Review, had died suddenly of complications from pneumonia two days after a routine visit to the ER. Oates found herself paralyzed, depressed, unable to sleep, shut down by the “ontological shock” of widowhood. What saved her was not turning her experience into a memoir –which she did eventually in A Widow’s Story but rather a simple coping strategy that could help all of us who are stalled, stunted or scared, all of us who want to move forward towards a second life, one that is not shaped by loss but informed by it, one we live fully with our eyes—and hearts-- wide open.

We interrupt this blog post to bring you The Continuous LIfe

Painting by Mark Strand

Does it sometime feel like life is repeating itself? You load the dishwasher; you unload the dishwasher. You put your makeup on in the morning; you wash it off at night. You lose your keys, your glasses, your phone; you find your keys, your glasses, your phone. You write a blog post; you write another blog post . . . Sometimes the continuous life feels like numbing monotony, other times reassuring predictability. One thing we know at Second Lives Club, it is important every so often to stop and appreciate what we have as well as figure out what we can do better. So, after a GenFab dinner with other midlife bloggers tonight –(website launching soon, bookmark this link)—Maryl and I are going to take a few days off and a hard look at what we’re doing here. How’s that for a cosmic question? But first a favorite poem from Mark Strand to sustain you while we're away.

Second Look: Amour's Emmanuelle Riva

She wowed audiences in her first move role in Hiroshima Mon Amor and thrilled moviegoers no less in her most recent in Amour. Her breakout performance, directed by Alain Renais, was in l959; fifty-one years later, Michael Haneke chose her to play Anna, a dignified music teacher and devoted wife who is mercilessly debilitated after a stroke. For that performance, Emmanuelle Riva received the Oscar nomination for Best Actress. If she wins on February 27, 2013—the night of the awards ceremony and her 86th birthday, she will be the oldest person in any competitive acting category to take home the Oscar. (For the record, Christopher Plummer, 83, won last year for his role in Beginners.) By any measures, Emmanuelle Riva, who grew up in a small village in eastern France where she worked as a seamstress before she traveled to Paris to study acting, is a star with an exceptional career but she hates both words and applies neither to herself.

Caryl pleads: "Give me a light" to see clearly in 2013

Three days into 2013 and already I am feeling like the "man who stood at the gate of the year".  Do you know what I am talking about? Can you guess who asked: "Give me a light that I may tread into the unknown"? The final months of 2012 were bleak with a devastating natural disaster here on the East Coast, unspeakable crimes at home (Newtown, Ct.) and abroad (New Delhi, India) and my own dark night of the soul. Following Superstorm Sandy, my 83-year-old friend in Cambridge, England sent me a poem made famous by George VI in his Christmas speech  in 1937 (and later in the movie "The King's Speech) . Darkness abounded that season as well. The British empire was not only on the cusp of a new year but another world war. The king, hardly a compelling speaker, quoted from a poem that his daughter, then princess Elizabeth, had given him.  The poem was titled "God Knows", and it was written by Minnie Louise Hawkins, who taught economics in the first half of the of the  20th century.

Maryl sings: The Aging Rocker Blues

Roger Daltry (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty)

Did you catch “12-12-12 The Concert for Sandy Relief” live from Madison Square Garden? I was reminded of “Live Aid”, a benefit concert in 1985 to save the starving children in Africa and the original one, “The Concert for Bangladesh”, in 1971 organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, recently deceased at 92. The 12-12-12 concert was less global and dire in the crisis it was addressing but there was some overlap with the venues and the performers.  The latter were naturally a bit weathered but still strutting their stuff. And apparently that’s what some of the Twitter buzz was about… 

Caryl appreciates: Season's Greetings

I don't send Christmas cards but I love getting them.  I especially love the family picture cards, watching the kids age each year, the settings change, the clothes no longer matching or even color-coordinated.  In our second lives, if you are like me, you are probably getting pictures of friends' grandkids now. (Thanks, Jane for the sweet picture of Eliza May and Will on their baptismal day. And, Annette, great to see three generations still hanging out with Mickey and Minnie.)  Though I am less fond of holiday letters, I loved my high school friend Mary Beth's this year. To be accurate,  it's a Christmas email, not a letter.  Nevertheless, in this year's missive, she told of the recovery of her husband Jerry who was stricken with a fightening illness affecting both his body and his mind this fall.  The email recounts his remarkable recovery that enabled him to return home for the holidays after several challenging months in rehabilitation.  "Believe in miracles," Rip (her nickname) concludes. 

But there is one card I look forward to every year with the greatest anticipation . . .

Caryl contemplates: Christmas at Hyde Park on the Hudson

If I weren’t leaving for Zanzibar (no kidding!) on Thursday. . . and having my book club and the author of The Sisters Malone over for dinner and a discussion at my apartment tomorrow night . . . if it hadn’t been the weekend of Sinterklaas’s arrival in Rhinebeck—an event that turns the village into a twinkle-lighted slice of Americana to rival “It’s a Wonderful Life”. . . I might have made it to the nearby Wilderstein river estate to see the home of Margaret “Daisy" Suckley all done up in its turn of the century (that’s 19th) holiday splendor. You’ve never heard of Daisy Suckley? Well, get ready. . . .

Caryl relives: Crazy Salad, Scribble, Scribble and Nora Ephron

The Nora Ephron I loved to read didn't hate her neck. It was her breasts that bothered her: Their non-existence.In one of the first essays she wrote for Esquire in 1972, she wrote more than "A Few Words About Breasts":

My first brassiere came from Robinson's Department Store in Beverly Hills. I went there alone, shaking, positive they would look me over and smile and tell me to come back next year. An actual fitter took me into the dressing room and stood over me while I took off my blouse and tried the first one on. The little puffs stood out on my chest. "Lean over," said the fitter. (To this day, I am not sure what fitters in bra departments do except to tell you to lean over.)

Nora Ephron died last June, and there was a flurry of tributes  ranging from Tom Hanks in Time Magazine--(who can forget his performance in 'You've Got Mail" which Ephron wrote and directed)---to Lena Durham who memorably memorialized her in the New Yorker. (Some say Durham, who is the creator and star of HBO's Girls is the heir-apparent to Ephron. The 26-year-old Durham just received a $3. 6 million advance for a book of humorous essays.)

Ephron not only captured the essence of a generation of women (mine and, I suspect, yours) but she also nailed the state of the media at the time. She wrote about the former subject in Crazy Salad, which was published originally in 1975. And, she made notes on the latter in the next book, Scribble Scribble, which came out three years later. Those two books were fixtures on my book shelf during my twenty-something years, read and reread, marked up and down, a repository for my deepest desire, my unrealizable dream:  If only I could write like that . . . .

Fall Movie Preview: What We Saw at TIFF

Ceiling of Elgin Theater, Toronto

We have just returned from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). We also visited with two women who are living their second lives and then safely escorted (not that she needed us) one of our daughters to her second year of grad school and as she put it her “last first day of school.” The six films we saw moved us as did the city, its people, its history and its hyper-growth and vitality.(There are more construction cranes there than in Dubai!)  We attended screenings in ordinary multiplexes, the recently built Bell Lightbox and the renovated Elgin Theater (it opened in 1913 for vaudeville productions)…even theaters need a second life. Here's some of what we saw and thought. 

Maryl returns: Back to and from College

My daughter Svetlana and I just returned from a little road trip this week. You can read about it below or on Huffington Post. The site's editors thought it was worth sharing with other parents of college-age students. College is a great learning experience for parents as well as the student. 

Need a summer read? Check out the Tribeca Book Club's Complete LIst

Summer reading New York City style

You asked for it, and so here it is: All the books members of the Tribeca Book Club have read since they began almost four years ago. Maryl and Caryl always encourage our readers to support
their independent book store but if you can't and want to order one of the books below from Amazon, just click on the title. Now find a hammock, a beach chair, or a room of your own and get reading. If there's one (or more) books from the list that you've  already read and loved, please leave a comment below. And, if you would kindly like us, we hope to reach 300 by summer's end.  It's almost like the New York Times Best Sellers list for us.