Best friends, tube tops and the hidden romance of Viking helmets

 She's going to be pissed at me for posting a photo that reveals her to be sub-5'4".*

*(I'm not a giant, though; I just hadn't given up on my shoes yet.)

Yesterday was the first anniversary of the wedding of my very best friend on earth - I hope you guys all have a friend like this. If she's a friend from college, she's the one where the entire first year you knew each other is a blur of irresponsibly late-night (and in our case, inexcusably sober, because we were both too square to drink) conversations about everything and nothing. The one with whom you have so many inside jokes that you have to remind each other where half of them originated from. Even if you haven't lived in the same place in years, she's your first phone call when you're twisting in circles over a crisis that nobody else will understand. She's the only person on earth who calls you by that appalling nickname (the only person permitted to do it, for that matter). And even if you have a partner by now, and even if that partner of yours is as steady and strong as we all dream they will be, this friend's presence in your life will always be the very definition of the phrase "having your back."

I do have a shirt on in this photo. It was a tube top.

It was not one of my better decisions.

You may have heard what they say about flat-chested girls, strapless items, and gravity.

So, a year ago yesterday she married the love of her life. All the usual things were true when they got together - after 12 or 13 years of growling at stories about asshats, I could hear the difference in the way she talked about him, and I could see the difference in the way he treated her. Unlike the asshats, he actually deserves her. He is steady and strong, and kind, but also ridiculous in a completely essential way. KT and I do not last long around people who behave like normal adults.

This is from my wedding, which was two weeks after theirs.

He is wearing a dinner napkin and a Viking hat that he stole from the photobooth. She is gazing at him adoringly.

That should really tell you everything you need to know.

Looking back, I especially love this photo of the two of us, from 2005:

We were in LA for another friend's bachelorette party, and we spent the afternoon driving at random through the Hollywood Hills. We stopped at this lookout point to admire the view, and decided to take pictures of ourselves against the backdrop. I don't even remember what cracked us up, but I love that we were laughing so hard that we totally could not pull it together for this photo. We were 26/27 and didn't have the faintest idea what would happen with the guys we were dating at the time (I married mine, a long-ass time later; she kept looking for a few more years before she met Viking Helmet), but it really didn't seem to matter all that much. Whatever did or didn't happen with the guys, we'd always have each other.

Still, I'm so deeply heart-glad that she found him. That helmet wouldn't look the same on anybody else.

Summer's Last Hurrah: Woodstock and Saugerties

I honestly can't believe it took me as long as it did. I'm a country girl, I grew up in the mountains, and yet somehow I didn't make it to the Catskills region, or the middle Hudson Valley just to the east of it, until 2008. But that, as they say, was that. I'm hooked. I'm in love. For life. Everybody else in NYC can have their Hamptons, and their Jersey Shore; I will head for the hills.

So that is where my husband and I headed, for what turned out to be a depressingly damp weekend. But a fun weekend nonetheless. Largely because our priorities, as usual, revolved around food and drink. Our first stop upon arriving Friday night was dinner at Cucina - a new spot for us, and a delicious one. We had a lovely summery dinner on the wide front porch - delightful.

Photo via Cucina Woodstock

On Saturday morning, our destination was clear: Love Bites. Love Bites, in the impossibly quaint-yet-hip riverside town of Saugerties, is one of the most delicious breakfast spots I've ever visited. Phenomenal coffee, delicious house-made sausage, bacon so flavorful you stop chewing for a moment just so you can savor the taste in your mouth. Heavenly. Here is my husband doing the ritual drink photo at Love Bites (maybe one day I will explain about our ritual drink photos):

 Then followed our usual ramble along the sleepy main drag of Saugerties, Partition Street. We bought wine and cider at the Partition Street Wine Shop:

And ogled midcentury furniture and housewares that we cannot afford at Green:

Fun bonus: online home decor mecca One Kings Lane featured my photo above, of a pile of gorgeous vintage Navajo rugs at Green, in their #FeelingFall Instagram campaign. I have been spamming them for days. And I'm obsessed with fall, so I've got lots more where that came from. Sorry, guys.

We rambled over to the Saugerties Farmers Market, where we made a new friend:

And we picked up a copy of the local arts & culture magazine, Chronogram. We are bemused yet obsessed by this cover artwork. The artist discusses her inspiration and process here, and I implore you to read the article. Internet cat memes were one of her major influences. Related: god, I love Woodstock. 

Cosmic Chrono Cat, by artist Becky Todd

Sunday, we kayaked! We rented a couple of kayaks and some matching oars and we paddled down the little inlet of the Esopus Creek and out into the Hudson. 

My husband wanted to cross to the east side of the river, and about halfway across, it hit us that we were bobbing in two tiny plastic shells right bang in the middle of the mighty Hudson - it was both awesome and slightly scary. We crossed, we crossed back, we tooled around a little, and then we took a look at the stormclouds massing over the horizon behind the Saugerties Lighthouse, and we decided it might not be our worst decision of the day to head home.

photos via the Saugerties Lighthouse

And then, it rained. And it rained and it rained and it rained. In between rainstorms we made it out to dinner at the Bear Cafe, forever sacred as our wedding spot, and then it rained some more.

 

Monday, I asked to take a drive up along the bottom of Overlook Mountain even though it looked like this, and sure enough the skies opened up again in full force:

So we gave up and came home. An anticlimactic ending to our lovely weekend. The only reason I wasn't more bummed: we're heading back next month. :)

Please keep Austin weird. ALWAYS.

Here's the thing you have to understand about me, with regard to Austin: I'm a New Yorker. I've spent over 13 years living in a city whose streets are crammed with maniacs of every conceivable stripe: artists and musicians and actors and designers and photographers and fashion whores, and all of the people who wannabe all of those things. Philosophical cabbies and homicidal bike delivery boys. Addicts. Tourists. College students with big dreams. Homeless folks with actual medical problems that affect the way they behave. Even bankers.

So when I first heard the whole "keep Austin weird" slogan, I gotta be honest, I felt a little jaded about it. I live in New York. I routinely walk past celebrities, men in drag, and people dressed up like it's their own private Halloween without sparing a second glance. I know weird.

And then I spent time there, and I got it. Austin's weird might be smaller in numbers than New York's, but it's every bit as potent. You've got equally strong contingents of creative types and dreamers, all of whom take pride in the weirdness--and you don't have as many of the corporate types as we've got here. And it all takes place in Texas, which really is what takes the whole thing to eleven as far as I'm concerned. New York as a state does not have an intrinsic personality beyond general Northeastiness, but Texas... well, you know.

My friend Erin Williamson took the photo above at Town Lake. We have conferred about whether the rainbow-pooping dog is some kind of abstract gay slur, and we think it's unlikely - "it's Austin, after all," she said. I do not know the why of this, or the how, or whether it was made by one person at once or by two, and I definitely don't know what it could possibly mean. I just know that I'd never see it in New York. This detailed rendering of a solemnly pooping dog is Austin weird, and I LOVE it.

And I'm heading back for another visit! In less than a month, I'll be back breathing that wacky air. Smells like... awesomeness.

I think fall is better than summer and I'm sticking to it.

Summer, somehow, always lets me down. Does anybody else feel like that? It has such a powerful presence in our cultural imagination: the cookouts, the al fresco meals with cocktails in dewy glasses, the hours spent with a book in the warm sand. And yet, for a garden-variety New Yorker like me, summer under-delivers. I don't have a country house or a summer rental or even so much as a balcony. All those fun-sounding, free outdoor concerts are as crowded as the 4 train at 8:35 AM. Most of my time outside during the summer is spent trailing along sidewalks rancid with the smell of overheated garbage.

Fall, though. If summer is the sexy blond cheerleader, all beachy waves and sunkissed cleavage, fall is the shy beauty in Mary Janes at the back of the classroom who knows the words to every Simon & Garfunkel song. Fall is pure magic.

I don't know if it's just a legacy of 20-odd years of back-to-school rituals, but fall has always felt like a time of possibility to me. A time of new beginnings. It's always been my favorite season, and so I have, especially in recent years, stacked it in its own favor. I've planned weekends upstate with friends and family, frolicking under maple leaves and picking apples from trees and guzzling cider in front of the fireplace. I got engaged in October and married in October, and now all of my anniversaries will be in October too, which just adds one more fun landmark to an already celebration-rich season. The onset of each fall launches me into a frenzy of baking and cooking and entertaining: pies and stews and all those rich, hearty things I am normally far too lazy to cook during the rest of the year.

But before the fall season actually hits, there's one of my favorite days of the year--the first day toward the end of summer that feels like fall. The day when, after weeks of plasma-swamp humidity and sweat-stained T-shirts, I walk outside my apartment into air that has the crisp bite of a Granny Smith apple and tastes every bit as refreshing. "Hang in there," the breeze whispers, "I'm coming back soon."

Today was that day. And it brought with it that wonderful, familiar sensation of promise. This year, fall will see me completing the edits to get my first novel ready for publication. Hard to imagine a more compelling feeling of new-beginning than that.

SOLD!

After an emotionally taxing month, during which my requests for advice on how to cope with the stress of submission kept being met with suggestions to drink heavily—and, might I add, my protests that I couldn't drink during my workday kept being met with naked derision—I am thrilled to smithereens to announce that my first novel has found a home. NAILING IT, along with a to-be-determined second novel, will be published by Ballantine Books, with the wonderful Kara Cesare editing. Publication dates are still TBD, but look likely to be spring/summer of 2015 and 2016.

So what exactly is it that you've got to look forward to? Well, the book is women’s fiction with a love story at its heart… all set against a backdrop of HGTV-style renovation-porn. It's the story of a female architect too afraid to architect her own happiness, and of all wrong plans we draw up first in our attempts to build—for ourselves—a grown-up sense of home. 

Or, in the words of the deal announcement at Publishers Marketplace,

FICTION
Debut
Brooklyn interior designer Bethany Chase's debut NAILING IT, about a young female architect in Austin, TX, happy in work and love and who thinks she's nailed the blueprint to the perfect life until a heartbreaking old flame waltzes back into town - and hires her to gut renovate his new house, to Kara Cesare at Ballantine, at auction, in a two-book deal, by Meredith Kaffel at DeFiore and Company (World).
Foreign: rkind[at]randomhouse.com
Film/TV: meredith[at]defioreandco.com

And so, in other words, friends... WATCH THIS SPACE!