Miami Day Trip

Bidding Chris goodbye at the Miami airport after four months of cohabitation at the Folly dramatically increased the utility of Thom's two-seater.  He picked me up at the Tri Rail station a little after noon.

We headed to the Plaza Seafood Market in Little Santo Domingo.  I expected it to be on the scale of the Fulton Fish Market, where I spent one of the happiest mornings of my childhood with my father.

From the storefront, it appeared to be little more than a take-out restaurant.

Fortunately, the man in the coral shirt encouraged me to take a peek inside.

Thom ordered the seafood rice; I got the butterfly fish special.  Both came with fried plantains.

After lunch, we followed our sweet tooth to Azucar in Little Havana.

I pigged out on a scoop of the Girl Scout Cookies flavor.  Way more memorable than the butterfly fish.

"The Father" was playing at an Art Deco theater across the street.  I haven't bought a movie ticket since seeing "Parasite" in February 2020.

Domino Park remains closed.

But that doesn't prevent the locals from enjoying a masked game.  Life definitely goes on in South Florida.

What would I do without the New York Times?  An article last week recommended visiting the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens which occupies 83 acres in Coral Gables, a densely vegetated neighborhood just south of Miami.

If you read between the lines of the Wikipedia entry, you get the sense that the Price Waterhouse founder who established the garden in 1938 named it after a plant lover who may have been his boyfriend.  What an amazing tribute.

Frederick Law Olmsted, one of my heroes, influenced the garden's design, which emphasizes three principles:  variety, consistency and contrast.

Misters keep the rainforest content.

You'd never know orchid season already has peaked.

Butterfly gardens can be as depressing as they are beautiful.  Somehow it seems cruel to trap the winged creatures indoors.

Banana splits offer some degree of compensation.

Chihuly glass shapes and colors can't compete with Mother Nature's.

Even bled of color, plant leaves can astonish.  Polka dots!  Who knew?

I'm reading The Overstory by Richard Powers.  I'll never take trees for granted again. Misters Montgomery and Fairchild would have approved.

Truth be told, I enjoyed driving through the condo canyons of downtown Miami in a convertible as much as anything we did, even though the afternoon sun made us feel like a couple of chickens in a rotisserie oven.

A floral bike on US 1.

Our perfect day ended in Wilton Manors where we dined al fresco with Andrew & Steven. Go for the happy hour, stay for the food.

Rodham (5*)

Who knew?  A juicy fairy tale with a happy ending facilitated by an ironic Agent Orange tweet, in which he defends a female presidential candidate from accusations of sexual harrassment:

Razorgate lesbo scandal is much adieu about nothing!  Sorry it's not PC but all jr employees work there way up with tasks that are No Fun

Curtis Sittenfeld capably explores an alternate political universe in which Hilary ditches Bill to go her own way while acknowledging what may have been a powerful, lifelong physical attraction, at least for the most maligned and misunderstood woman in recent American history.  Some of the events seem more than a little preposterous as they unfold and the sex made me cringe in the same way as I would reading an explicit account of fingering while driving if my parents were in the front seat, but Sittenfeld transcends these liabilities with a thoroughly realized portrait of a single (and singular), pre-woke woman seeking power to do good. 

Even without reading the acknowledgments (every bio written by a female Senator!), it's clear that Sittenfeld has done her research.  And not for the first time, either, given her equally absorbing take on the life of Laura Bush.  If it seems slightly weird for an author to tackle the minds of two former First Ladies, Sittenfeld's insights carry her across the finish line both times.

Here she is on journalists:

It really wasn't that I loathed the press as was often reported by members of the press; it was that I profoundly distrusted them.  They were, for the most part, funny, observant, and intelligent--many had degrees from fancy universities--and I knew they were hardworking because, for much of the time, they literally kept the same schedule I did, attending the same rallies, driving between the same rallies, driving between the same small towns in Iowa or New Hampshire, flying in and out on the same early morning and late-night flights . . . But most political journalists were so childish, so distracted by shiny objects in the forms of gaffes or scoops or arbitrary details they imbued with meaning that simply wasn't there.  The journalists' desire not to be bored was palpable, but campaigning, like life, was often boring.  Thus, in their hunger for novelty, they read shifting alliances and enmities into minor personnel changes, described mindsets they guessed at based on posture or body language, competed with each other for meaningless scraps that they could present as breaking news.  They constructed elaborate narratives based on scant evidence.  They also were self-righteous and self-congratulatory; they assumed that, in other fields, they could make salaries many times what they currently earned, but they believed that journalism was a noble calling.  And yet, on a day-to-day basis, they were people who fought over electrical outlets, who were simultaneously obsessed with their--and my--campaign weight gains and with the availability of meals and snacks.  They shamelessly critiqued my appearance while, in some cases (this was true of both men and women) visibly going days at a time without washing their hair or changing their clothes.  Like children, the journalists wanted to say and write whatever they wanted about me and then for me to be glad to see the, for me to like them.  Unlike children, the journalists drank a lot and sometimes had romances with each other.

The book also explores the loneliness of female intelligence and the literal dry spells that older women endure in their love lives.  And a description of Hilary preparing for a date humanizes her so well that you wish Sittenfeld had served as her communications director instead of writing this novel.

I've run mostly hot and occasionally cold (her disastrous 2016 campaign) with Hilary ever since she broke on the political scene.  Rodham justifies my early faith that she always would have made a far better president than her husband.

2005

2016

Life Isn't Everything : Mike Nichols, As Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends (5*)

 

Starfuckers rejoice:  I doubt there ever has been a better line-up than these folks, mostly show biz, spilling the tea about their relationships with the entertainment lion, Elaine May's other half, the man with the golden touch,  the Broadway and Hollywood wunderkind and the refugee from Nazi Germanywho proved that living well is the best revenge.  Oh, and Mike Nichols bred horses, too.

In an oral history filled with terrific anecdotes, here's my favorite.  Entirely, irrevocably bald EVERYWHERE after a childhood bout of scarlet fever, Nichols wore bad hairpieces until he cast Elizabeth Taylor as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the role that won her an Oscar.  Liz insisted he consult with her Cleopatra hairdresser who created 30+ wigs for Mike, each a little longer than the previous one.  He changed them sequentially, returning to the shortest at the beginning of each month, as if he'd just gotten a haircut!  How genius is that?

If you're a fan of The Graduate, the behind-the-scenes peek at its making, is as good as it gets.  And let the truth finally be told:  Nichols broke up Simon & Garfunkel by casting Art in a starring role in Carnal Knowledge after cutting Paul from Catch 22.  

Bonnet House

It's called the Bonnet House because the owners pretended the alligators who lived on the property donned the lily pads in this water before hoisting themselves up on the veranda.

 

With a story like that, you've got to wonder how many Rang Pur lime cocktails Frederick Bartlett, his second wife, Helen Birch, and guests had imbibed beforehand. Entering the property requires crossing a wooden bridge.  A boat house door betrays the sunny color scheme to come. Yellow is to Bonnet House what blue is to the Majorelle Jardin.

There's even a desert garden, just like in Marrakesh. 

One thing's for sure, the Bartletts wintered extremely well in their unprepossessing compound, built in the "plantation" style.

Fred trained as an artist in Munich.  But no garret for him after he married Helen whose parents gave the newlyweds beachfront property in Fort Lauderdale, much of which eventually became Hugh Taylor Birch State Park.  Fred built his studio first, in 1919.  

Fred worked primarily as a muralist but smaller canvases hang throughout the house as well.

I like his painted ceiling, above the entrance to his studio, the best.

Fred and Helen amassed an early collection of Impressionists, including George Seraut's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," which they donated to the Art Institute of Chicago.  After Helen died, leaving Fred a widow for the second time, he married Evelyn Fortune, an Indianapolis divorcee.  She became an artist in her own right.

Evelyn Fortune, Self Portrait

I prefer Evelyn's work, particularly her extraordinary sense of color.

Yellow Keys (detail)

In their only collaboration, Fred and Evelyn painted this ceiling in the south loggia.  He gave her the harder part of the job:  the water and the netting.

Love this wooden statue.

But by and large, the Bartletts taste in home decor leaned towards kitsch. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

Evelyn outlived her husband by nearly half a century, dying just two months shy of her 110th birthday in 1997.  She also had a thing for monkeys.  Dozens swung from the trees of her estate which was valued at $35 million in 1983 when she bequeathed it to the state of Florida.  

Some of the monkeys look as if they belong in The Wizard of Oz.

A video includes interviews with Evelyn and gives her a posthumous opportunity to emphasizes her critical role in decoration and preservation of the Bonnet House.  It ignores what must have been interesting family dynamics after Fred's death.  For example, Helen's music room remains intact while Evelyn's works are segregated in the building where we watched the video.

Nothing inside the house has changed since its glory days.  Here's the butler's pantry.

Delft china, hand painted tiles, centaurs, beer steins and stuffed fish--not the edible kind--comprise the delirious dining room potpourri.

Fred's eye for architecture produced this trompe l'oeil corner.

Over-the-top is the only way to describe the drawing room.

Particularly this doorway.

The Bonnet House lacks Vizcaya's gorgeous grounds.  But they were large enough to require a tractor.  With a hand crank!