I’ve been simultaneously watching the HBO version of Mildred Pierce, directed and co-written by Todd Haynes, and reading Gabrielle Hamilton’s culinary memoir, "Blood, Bones & Butter
Mildred Pierce (Kate Winslet) has her own restaurant, too. It’s called Mildred’s, and the menu consists of fried chicken, biscuits and a side of waffles or vegetables. There’s also pie, lots of it, and once Prohibition ends, as it did in Part III, there’s plenty of hard liquor as well, to wash down all that pie. Monte, Mildred’s playboy lover, calls the restaurant the pie wagon—just one example of his disdain for Mildred. Audiences may not mind, however, that Monte is a loathsome cad; after all, he’s played by Guy Pearce, a luminous presence here. The only other luminous presence in Part 3, besides Pearce’s Monte, was the dress Mildred wore to break up with him—it shimmered the way Joan Crawford’s anger and obsession shimmered in the 1945 film version directed by Michael Curtiz.
Los Angeles is a contradiction: a paradox of urbanites that crave the outdoors and yuppies that eat vegan. Fancy jeans, successful
lunatics, poor rich people, and other oxymorons splattered across
Sunset Boulevard, a street with beaches on one end and mini skyscrapers
rising up on the other end. I love LA. It satisfies my needs for
culture and nature simultaneously.
After seeing their amazing performance of “Devil Went Down to Georgia” at the Country Music Awards my wife and I became hooked on the Zac Brown Band – a group we had never heard of before that moment. Seeing talented musicians who love what they do and have a huge appreciation of all music genre’s is refreshing in this age of studio wizardry and lip sync’d concerts. A quick YouTube search of the band found many videos of them mixing classic tunes with songs from their debut album, "
", and it converted me into a full-fledged fan club maniac. My wife and I had stopped going to concerts many years ago unless a friend was performing, but this band was different and I jumped at the chance to see them in person – even if it meant a 100 mile drive to Santa Barbara. Getting the opportunity to “Eat and Greet” with the band before the show sealed the deal.
The Oscars are less than a week a way, and most people have already weighed in on their top choice for the year. So now it’s time to match your top choice with the perfect Oscar Entrée. 
There’s a certain sort of woman for whom Tina Fey is their spirit animal. In the words of Jack Donaghy of “30 Rock,”: “New York. Third wave feminist. College educated. Single and pretending to be happy about it. Over-scheduled, under-sexed. You buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover. And… Every two years you take up knitting for… a week.” Of course this is Alec Baldwin describing Liz Lemon, Tina Fey’s television alter-ego, but it could describe any number of women (that I know).