Caryl considers: What We Have To Look Forward To

Bel Kaufman, who is 101, is a teacher, an author --she wrote her first novel, Up the Down Staircase, at 50 and the wife of a younger man (he's 95). I came across her profile in the August issue of Vogue, my favorite issue of the year because it's "the age issue".  Consider this month's cover line:  Wonder Women from 28 to 101.  The far end of that galaxy is Bel--and here's what she has to say in her own words about this stage of life:

Maryl relearns: How to Compute, easy as Apple pie

I finally made the change. After months and months of ruminating over whether to buy a new PC or switch to a MacBook Pro with the new retina display and solidstate hard drive, I bought an Apple. Having a second life is all about making transformations – big and small. Change starts to become more difficult as we move into and through our 20s and beyond. The good news is that of the Big Five Personality Categories, openness, in particular to new experiences, seems to pick up again about age 60 according to a Scientific American report.

Second Look: Sigourney Weaver

You probably don’t remember her in her first movie role in “Annie Hall”.  (She was Woody Allen’s date standing outside the movie theatre.) You probably didn’t relate to her in “Alien” (one, two, three or four.) You probably admired her as Dian Fossey in “Gorillas in The Mist”. You probably empathized with her as the sex-seeking/sex-escaping neighbor in “Ice Storm”. You probably hated her as everywoman’s nightmare boss in “Working Girl”. Despite more than 45 movie roles over her more than 35 year-long career --her most recent film as a psychologist studying paranormal activity in “Red Lights” opened this week-- and many turns on the stage including this fall's new Christopher Durang play, she has never acted on the small screen. At least not until this Sunday when she plays Elaine Barrish Hammond, a former First Lady now Secretary of State, a stern diplomatrix in Chanel sunglasses, as one critic described her real-life inspiration.

Maryl comes back: To the House Dress

The house dress is making a comeback and its second life is not happening soon enough. The number of women running around town in their pajama bottoms and sweaty workout clothes is reaching embarrassing proportions. The slim jeans and casual Friday looks are also rendering a rather monotonous fashion statement lately. Our mothers and grandmothers had it right even if the house dress was a domestic uniform of sorts back then and not meant to be worn on the street. Wearing one today would look not just retro but positively elegant, much more so than a pair of drawstring pants and a tee shirt.

A Tale of Two Femmes, a River and a Dream

Claude Noelle Toly, an ex-pat from a tiny village in the South of
France and proprietor of Le Fanion, a French art and antiques shop in Greenwich Village, likes to ride her bike up and down the Hudson River. Her father had taught her to swim as a young child, and she briefly swam competitively at boarding school until health problems sidelined her athletic career as a pre-teen. Four decades later, in her adopted country, she would gaze at the lordly Hudson River as she rode along the bike path and wish she could swim in its flowing waters. When she learned of a race around Liberty Island to be held June 29, 2012, Claude Noelle felt the time had come to follow her dream. She would swim the 1.2K race around the Statue of Liberty—a gift to the American people from the people of France. What could be more fitting! 

Maryl factors: Sun protection into her skincare and wardrobe

It was barely a month after my husband and I had purchased a three-story Victorian house across the street from the Atlantic Ocean.  Visions of lazy, sun-filled days tanning on the beach and jumping the saltwater waves were still fresh and foremost in my mind when my doctor informed me I had melanoma. The news suddenly eclipsed my hopes and dreams for the future.  For several weeks there had been an annoying itch around the bra closure area on my back.  Caryl had noticed an irregular looking mark while applying suntan lotion and suggested that it wouldn’t hurt to see a dermatologist.  My weekends of sun and surf were interrupted with a trip to Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital.

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.

Caryl decrees: Summer reading? Forget Oprah!

I am a big reader but not much of a joiner so I had never belonged to a book club until last year. I appreciate how book clubs--mostly women's-- have helped resuscitate the publishing industry and how Oprah's stamp of selection can turn a sleepy title into a best seller overnight. To my thinking, though, Oprah usually chooses books with the same narrative arc: pain, recovery, redemption. I prefer to pick my own reading material, and I have lots of friends and evening commitments so I did not see the point of adding another one with the purpose of discussing a book not of my choosing. Then my friend Carla told me that she had read in the New York Times that ritualized social interaction is a critical contributor to happiness in our second lives.

2nd Look: Mia Farrow

                  Rosemary's Baby, 1968                                        Dark Horse, 2012                                    

Who could forget her performance in Rosemary’s Baby? Mia Farrow won the Golden Globe for new star of the year in l968 for portraying with heart and terror every pregnant woman’s nightmare: she was indeed carrying the demon child, Satan’s baby. This month she’s back on the screen in Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse, playing every modern mother’s deepest fear: her 35 year old son in the film is still living at home in his action-figure-filled childhood bedroom.

In her second life and perhaps most important role,

Maryl asks: O Father, Who Art Thou?

My question, as we approach Father’s Day, although I have been thinking about it for a while, is how well do we or did we know ours fathers? I mean not just know them as a dad but also understand them as a man. I was beginning to see my own father (that's him and me in the photo above) outside his head-of-household role and through my second life lens. But then he died on me - at age 92. You can’t quibble with that kind of longevity but it’s never enough. 

Second Look: Linda Lavin

         Linda Lavin in "Alice"                     Linda Lavin in "The Lyons"

Linda Lavin has been nominated for a Tony award for Best Actress again, this time for her portrayal as the classic overpowering silver matriarch of a dysfunctional family in The Lyons. We’ll find out tonight if she beats out Stockard Channing as the mother of yet another dysfunctional family on Broadway, Cynthia Nixon as a terminal cancer patient, Tracie Bennett as a late-in-life Judy Garland or Nina Arianda as a seductive and power-playing ingénue.

Caryl addresses: Miuccia Prada and Her 7 Elements of Style

Miuccia Prada may be the most influential designer in the world today but she readily admits her own ambivalence about fashion. At 63 with a PhD in political science, she is the ultimate fashion insiders’ outsider: smart, fearless and iconoclastic. She grew up in Milan—she still lives in her childhood apartment, though she has another one for her clothes—and reluctantly took over her grandfather’s failing luggage business at age 39. Over the last few decades, she and her husband Patricio Bertinelli have turned the company into a multi-billion dollar global brand. Prada—the label-- is currently enjoying a robust second life, like the woman who shares its name.