To report on the Do it Yourself! Natural Beauty that’s running in the May issue of Self, I had the pleasure of roadtesting about 36 homemade beauty recipes.

But it wasn’t just  baking soda face masks that were tested—I tested some friendships  too. I asked five friends to try out the recipes and they all took on the assignment with enthusiasm until one night when I got an email from a friend with the subject:  URGENT BANANA MASK EMERGENCY. I hadn’t even tried the hair recipe yet and I could only imagine her bald in her bathroom with a banana in her hand. She had slathered on the mask but then lost track of the time and left it on her hair for an hour. The mask also called for yogurt, honey, egg and lemon, she basically baked a loaf of banana bread on her head. I tried to talk her down with compassionate emails and suggested an apple rinse to dissolve the chunky mess stuck in her hair, but it was too late. She had Chiquita dreadlocks and she was not happy. Six shampoos and I don’t even know how much conditioner later she got it all out. On the bright side, her hair did have a lot of extra body. The takeaway: always whip bananas and even though these recipes seem homespun the directions are precise for a reason.

When I was in 7th grade I transferred to a private school in Oyster Bay, Long Island from my public school in my home town of Northport. My new school, East Woods, was only twenty-five minutes away from my house but its technicolor culture was as foreign to me as Dorothy’s Oz—only with a lot more pink and green. As a teenager I could ignore the big unspoken differences: my grandparents arrived in America via Ellis Island rather than the Mayflower; my father went to City College not an ivy league. I tried to fit in by watching others and making well-timed jokes. What I could not ignore were the everyday lifestyle difference. I ate tomato sauce, my friends ate tomato aspic. I wore fringed Minnetonka moccasins they wore LL Bean bluchers. My bathroom waste basket was woven from rattan theirs were tin and painted in an eye-catching prints. I remember sleeping over Edie Meyer’s  house and seeing her wastebasket and thinking, ‘God even her trash bin looks like it’s going golfing.’

Edie’s bin matched her lifestyle, her dancing lessons, her sailing trips and everyday when she threw something away I wondered if she was reminded of who she was. It was a small detail that summed up her life, where she’d like to go to college, where she’d work, who she’d marry…In the 80s at 13 years-old it was easy for me to think that her life could be predicted by one incidental accessory.

I have no idea where Edie is now, and yes, I’ve tried to find her on facebook. I’d love to catch up. But I guess I’ll have to make do with buying a similar trash bin that is on sale at One Kings Lane this week. I want to get one out of nostalgia and irony. Edie’s bin once told me so much about who I wasn’t.  I know that the whole waspy aspirational lifestyle has faded in prominence, it’s  just one of many aspirational lifestyles, and it in particular seems out of date. But even now, I can’t help but be attracted to the bright and the shiny and the promise of belonging.

Safari Monkey basket $39

Garden Gate basket, $39

Coptic Trellis basket, $39

I may live in Jersey, but I'm not Snookie!

I blogged about getting a spray tan for More.com, you can read all about it here.

While walking Chewie and Asta today I bumped into a neighbor walking his dog. We let everyone sniff everyone and everything and then he said without any conversation preceding, “You know there are a lot of really good dog foods on the market now for obese dogs.”

Excuse me? Are you saying my dog is fat? Do you see his manly, macho, king-of-the-jungle like mane?

Chewie is 13 that’s 91 to me and you. We’ve taken him off the wet food that caused him to bulk up considerably and he’s now on a vegetarian diet of sweet potato and salmon. His osteoarthritis keeps him from going on long walks now that his back knee tends to buckle under him. But I didn’t feel like explaining all this to the helpful neighbor. What I really wanted to say is, “You know there are all kind of barbers in town and you don’t have to wear your hair in that puffy, comb over way.” But I didn’t, I just nodded and said, “He’s actually really fluffy under all that fat.”

Dogeared is producing a line of jewelry for the movie Eat Pray Love. Even though the cover was beautiful, I didn’t love the book, in fact I’m pretty sure I remember throwing my copy across the room because the whole thing felt premeditated. I imagined Elizabeth Gilbert crying in the bathroom realizing she wanted to get a divorce and then realizing that getting a divorce and writing a book about traveling the world looking for love would be a lot more fun than staying married and picking out towels at Restoration Hardware. It bugged me. I’ll admit I started reading the book around the time we were house hunting and all I wanted to do was win a bidding war and shop for towels myself, so I may have taken her rejection of the suburbs a little too personally. But still there’s something that didn’t ring true.

And now there are necklaces to go with the movie version of her book. I understand the appeal of Dogeared’s line of delicate gold trifles on your neck, they are easy to layer and not expensive and their current nautical line is pretty darn cute. But the idea of fine jewelry based on a movie feels as manipulative as the toys in a Happy Meal. They are extremely seductive to a six-year old and fun for about as long as the french fries are warm. As I write this, I realize that I’m probably just too old to be their target audience. I want my jewelry to have a story about my life, not Elizabeth Gilberts’. What do you think?

Cintra Wilson’s piece about visiting the Lilly Pulitzer store made me laugh and remember my first summer on Nantucket where it was all pink and puce giraffe prints and no irony. Here’s and excerpt from her story Lilly Pulitzer: Fashion With a Colorful Narrative [NYT]

“The second floor was also home to some absolutely terrifying sport jackets for men. I imagined it was what Anita Bryant’s linen closet would have looked like after Hurricane Andrew: violent mangos, pinks and aquamarines starched into jackets of such female bedspread intensity they might cause even Ricardo Montalbán to run toward the volcano. I asked for help from Jessica Stoller, a wry minx with turquoise eyes to match her cardigan. “What kind of men buy these jackets?” I asked. “Mobsters? Gay guys? Gay mobsters? Game-show hosts?” She assured me the jackets were extremely popular and left my mind to wander about the ramifications of this for society at large.”

Full disclosure, when Conrad was too young to protest I dressed him in pink swimming trunks with green tigers. He looked like a regular at Surfside.

Naoko Yamazaki

The Cut reported that four female astronauts traveled into space on Monday with the space shuttle Discovery. Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki mentioned that the women all bring makeup on their voyages, because they want to look good when they communicate on television, which is fairly often. Eye shadow is allowed, while loose powder is not. Apparently Nasa has a list of makeup that is a approved for space travel and it’s a list I’d love to get my hands on. It also got me thinking about what a lost marketing opportunity this space mission was for beauty companies. If I were I were a beauty company I would be showering these astronauts with my top line long-lasting mascaras and super moisturizing products.

I know there’s a feminism issue here too. Bellasugar first reported that Yamazaki made news when she mentioned what makeup she was bringing, and felt the press was putting too much emphasis on her choice of concealer and not her credentials but the article they cited spent at least four paragraphs explaining her mission and why she is so well suited for the job. The makeup is not the focus, it’s more of an interesting aside that came from the astronaut herself. Frankly, when you become an astronaut I think even having to talk about feminism seems beside the point too.

So back to the makeup, beyond La Mer which was actually developed by a engineer at Nasa accidentally, at least that’s the legend, I really want to know what products they would bring to a six-month indoor mission with zero-gravity. And my other question: is living in zero gravity good for your skin? Is it like a six-month face lift where your skin is allowed to float weightless so it won’t develop any wrinkles during that time? This story feels very much under reported, I’m ready to investigate.

I think it’s official: we can put away the mittens. I never trust the sudden warm days but now that we’ve practically stumbled into a springtime heatwave I’m letting myself relax and believe that these vitamin D-rich days are here to stay.

The problem is that the first quarter of 2010 left me with post-traumatic-winter-syndrome. I tried to tell myself that I was happy to be writing in my pajamas rather than wading through slush in the city and ruining my Ugg-inspired FitFlop boots, but now that I can step outside with my bare unpedicured feet and run down our street lined with lacy floral trees to hail the ice cream man I realize that this past winter left me more shell-shocked that previous years. All through January and February and most of March, I was certain that David would stay downstairs every night playing video games while I went upstairs and overidentified with The Bell Jar.

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I was writing up a pitch about effective discipline strategies and I remembered that in addition to the wooden spoons that my mother would use to slap me on my inner thigh and the belts that snapped across my cousins behinds, throughout my childhood it was not unheard for someone to be hit with a vegetable.

The most memorable time was when my uncle chased my cousin with an zucchini. She must have done something really bad, probably cursed at him or something and he became so enraged he chased her up their spiral staircase with it in his hand. My cousins and I watched in astonishment as he double-skipped the stairs with a green vegetable big enough to win a prize at a country fair. He was a big man and they had a spiral staircase. I’m still not sure what he had planned on doing with the zucchini. Beat her with it? I doubt he even knew but grabbing the vegetable off the kitchen counter sent an indelible message: Be afraid. His anger knows no bounds.

But he can’t be singled out. Once when my brother, Andre and I were having dinner at my grandparents house, my grandfather was feeding their poodle, Truffy, broccoli from the table. He was a little hard of hearing and my grandmother kept saying, “Mike stop feeding the dog. Stop feeding the dog Mike.” But he didn’t hear her so instead she just took a head of celery and whacked on his bald head. Andre choked on his soup. We knew better to laugh but it was funny. Grandpa look up annoyed and turned to my grandmother who was still holding the celery and asked, “What you do that for?”

I was talking to my mother on the phone and I were going over these stories and she said, “Oh yeah, its nothing, don’t you remember Grandma Connie used to spank you with an ear of corn?”

Uh no.

Check out the April issue of Parents that features my latest story, Every I Learned About Being A Mom. They also ran this cute pic!