“This will make you feel awake, and healthy.” The promise made to me as I ordered a 3 day Blueprint Cleanse online recently. The healthy part I believed, but awake? How could 3 straight days of just juice and no solids make me feel anything that I aspire to feel in my waking hours, especially if I’m not even allowed coffee, or as it was gently explained to me, ‘you can have coffee, but you’ll feel better if you don’t have it.’ Marketing disguised as self-motivation proved extremely effective, and sure enough, on Day 3 of the ‘Cleanse,’ I felt extremely awake and alert (albeit short-winded) on a run up Runyon Canyon, (truthfully more of a slow jog behind my brother whose college fraternity has apparently turned him into a drill sergeant.)
But I wasn’t starving, and I wasn’t lethargic.
I am not somebody who can go without food for four hours, let alone three days. I have never been successful on a diet, if you don’t count when I was five years old and had to stop eating French Toast in order to lower my cholesterol. These days I have a genuine interest in being healthy, but not exactly a full-fledged allegiance. So the Blueprint Cleanse, a local New York company, seemed perfect for me.
I’m a looky-loo. I real estate dream shop online, a lot!!!! Late one night when my husband was safely sleeping, I forwarded a photo of a house on a lake I had found and the subject said, “Lets buy this instead of doing an addition to our house. It’s MUCH cheaper.”
Yesterday, Shannon gave me a karmic, completely unintentional, gift. He got really, really sick.
", which probably isn’t a fair (food) fight. Hamilton’s prose is as “luminous” (her word) as the parties she describes, even when she takes on the blood, bones, and hard knocks that brought her to where she is today: chef/owner of the Manhattan restaurant Prune.
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.
As we all know, one interesting by-product of the so-called 'economic crisis' is that many of us have become re-acquainted with the things that really matter in life i.e. love, comfort, safety, security, unlimited-ride Metrocards, and food.