How to Time Travel to the 18th Century Right Here in NYC!

I know I post a lot about my occasional forays into the 18th Century, and I'm sure you're all quite jealous ;) Well guess what, all? If you're going to be in New York City next month, you will all have the opportunity to join me and my lovely friends - including the extremely wonderful Lindsey of Lindsey Loves History, and the talented Eliza of Silk and Sass  - at an 18th Century Themed event for for princesses and presidents alike!

Tickets for the first annual George Washington Inaugural Ball are now available on the event's website, and it promises to be an absolutely wonderful evening. Held at the historic 19th Century Federal Hall building (which itself was built on the site of the building where Washington was sworn in as our first president - did you know NYC used to be this nation's capitol?), the event will feature period food and drink, musical performance, and both historic-style and modern-style dancing. The dress code is either black tie attire OR your 18th Century best.

Lindsey sure as heck knows how to plan a fun event, and if you can join us there, I highly encourage it. (Those who are reading this blog from California or elsewhere in the world I am sorry - but you will be able to live vicariously through me as I do plan to blog about the event if possible!)

On Sunday, on the steps of Federal Hall, a group of us (Lindsey and Eliza included, as well as the Hearts of Oak - a historical reenactment group that Eliza and her fiancee are part of) held an 18th century flash mob on the steps of Federal Hall to raise awareness for the event. I certainly hope our flash mob was successful in raising awareness - I know I told more than a few curious onlookers why we were all dressed up in our finery and frills!

(Regretfully, I do not actually own any 18th Century period clothing. Luckily, in my college years, I was heavily involved in lolita fashion, and I figured this was the next best thing to at least look a little Georgian!)

Photo by the talented James Prochnik; dress by Japanese lolita brand Innocent World

Read on for a summary (and lots of photos) of last Sundays event, and then get your butt over to the ball's website and get your tickets before they all run out!

Saying Goodbye to Momo

This morning, my cat back home in California, Momo, passed away of what was likely kidney failure.


She was a unique soul. We used to call her the "nurse cat" because whenever anyone in the house was sick or sad, she would go to their side and lay with them and let them cuddle her or cry into her soft fur or whatever they needed.

She would sit like a person, and was the type of cat that when you spoke to her, she would meow (loudly and, if I'm being honest, somewhat obnoxiously) to "talk back". She had the loudest purr I had ever heard.

She was a large, round, lazy ball of orange fur and love. I got to say good bye to her on FaceTime last night (thank the gods for modern technology), and she is going to be cremated just like her sister was.

I don't have it in me to write much more than that for now, I am afraid.

Rest in peace, Momo. I love you.
-Nym

Searching for Anne of Green Gables

I've been thinking a lot of Anne of Green Gables lately. The series has not only been my favourite for most of my life (since I was 9! Almost 19 years!), but something I come back to again and again, re-reading the books with a sense of coming home. If fernweh is real, then I feel it for L.M. Montgomery's Avonlea and have felt it for as long as I could remember. I return to Anne Shirley and Green Gables again and again, as a safe haven when my modern life and my depression become too much for me. (The author of the series, L.M. Montgomery, also suffered from depression, and sadly not even Anne's sunny nature could keep her from ultimately taking her own life.)

Lately, though, the series has been on my mind for more reasons than that. Of course, as my last entry mentioned, Sarah and I are planning a vacation to Canada, home of Anne Shirley and L.M. Montgomery, and if there are any Green Gables souvenirs available on our trip, you can bet your ass I'll be begging Sarah to let us take it home to our Brooklyn home. So that's reason number one.

Reason number two is that I've been reading the first and last books in the series at the same time in the last few weeks. The first book, I've been reading out loud, one or two chapters a night, to Sarah, who had never read the series before but wanted to know more about it as she performed Diana's song from one of the musicals based on the book for a cabaret recently. Sadly, no one filmed her singing it so here, have a video of one of the other songs she performed that day because I love Sarah so much and she's so talented:

The last book, The Blythes Are Quoted, is the only one in the series I hadn't read before. It was the last book Montgomery ever wrote - she turned in the manuscript to her publisher very shortly before her suicide - but wasn't published in full until 2009. I've wanted to read it since then, but it's incredibly difficult to find a hard copy on the book for anything under $200. Luckily, a coworker of mine gave me her old Nook after her husband got her a Kindle, and it turns out an electronic copy of the book goes for a whopping thirteen dollars, something even I can afford. So I bought it, downloaded it, and devoured it, savouring every word of Montgomery's swan song and the last book in which Anne Shirley Blythe appears, following my dear literary kindred spirit all the way up into World War II.

And yet I can see why it wasn't published in the forties when it was written. It doesn't feel like the other Anne books. It's undoubtedly Montgomery's prose, with her flowery descriptions and subtle humour, but it's much darker than the sunny and comfortable optimism that's a trademark of the first few books. It has a ton of darker themes that really reflect just how bad Montgomery's mental state had gotten by the second world war - themes of adultery, illegitimacy, despair, misogyny, revenge, bitterness, hatred, aging, death, and even murder. It's fascinating.

While I still love the first three Anne books best, as reading them feels the most like a homecoming for my soul, the completionist in me is glad I finally got to read the final book.

In diving so much back into Anne's world, both in sharing the first book with Sarah (which has been fascinating as it's like seeing it for the first time through someone else's eyes) and finally getting to read the last book, it's giving me such a longing to literally visit Anne's world. I don't just mean reading the books or watching the various movies and TV shows that have been made based on the books. I want to walk past the Violet Vale and the Lake of Shining Waters and take tea with Anne Shirley and Diana Barry and my beloved Sarah in Avonlea itself! I am impatient and don't want to wait for our Canada trip - I want to find Anne and her world right here in New York!

Tea service at Chat Noir, Rockville Centre

 But is such a thing possible?

Quick and Dirty Vegetarian Poutine

I... have been a terrible blogger lately, haven't I?

It's not that I haven't been doing anything. I've done quite a lot since my last blog entry. My mom even came to visit, and we did lots of fun things, such as seeing Billy Joel in concert and going to the restaurants of three chefs who have been judges on "Chopped". I've also gone to multiple museums with my friends, the Museum Girls, from the Louis Armstrong House Museum to the Whitney.

I've just had a lot on my mind lately, and it makes it difficult to sit down and focus on drafting a blog entry. I know that's no excuse, of course, but it's the truth. I just couldn't make myself sit down and type anything out. I've been too busy planning.

Planning what, exactly? Wellll... I suppose I can reveal the secret.

Sarah and I are planning a vacation to Canada!

It won't be for awhile (we need to get through tax season and save up first) but I'm very excited - we both are. And one of the things we're most excited for is trying Canada's most disgusting delicacy - poutine! In fact, I was so excited to try this Canadian favourite, I didn't want to wait the months and months until our vacation to roll around. So, of course, I decided I'd have to make it myself.

Unhealthy? Yes. Delicious? OH yes.

Now, I am not gonna call this a recipe. If you want a meatless poutine recipe where you make the fries and the gravy yourself, there are tons and tons of actual recipes on the internet. No, this is more like a... tutorial. For those of us who are lazy and don't want to spend the time cooking, or for those of us who are doing this after a long day at work and don't have the time to spend doing all that from scratch.

You will need...

• French fries (You can either use the freezer variety that you bake in the oven, or if you're super lazy, you can order fries from a local restaurant on Grubhub or Doordash or something)
• Cheese curds, or if you can't find curds, then fresh mozzarella cheese broken up into small chunks
• Campbell's mushroom gravy in a can
• Vinegar (I used white vinegar because I keep a lot of it around for cleaning, but apple cider vinegar would likely work as well)

Here's what you do:

1. If you're using freezer fries, bake them in the oven to your desired degree of crispiness. I would recommend making them crispy because you don't want them getting too soggy under all the gravy.

2. Mix a splash of vinegar into the gravy and heat it, either on the stove or in the microwave, depending on how lazy you're feeling. The vinegar is optional, but after much experimenting, I've found that it adds some much-needed acidity to the heavy mushroom gravy, which makes the dish taste better and feel less heavy in my sensitive stomach.

3. Assemble it on a plate! Fries first, then cheese, then gravy. OPTIONAL - plate your poutine on a red and white plate, the colours of the Canadian flag, and listen to "Canadian, Please" while you chow down!

And that's it! It's quick, it's easy, and it's delicious!

I hope you enjoy, and I promise I'll try my best to do a more substantial blog entry soon!
-Nym

"Winchester" Movie Review!

So I saw "Winchester" last night.

Now I wouldn't normally do movie reviews. I am not a movie critic. I have no professional background in film analysis.

But this is "Winchester" for crying out loud. It's a movie based on the House that I still love with all my heart, on the woman who I've long considered one of my heroes. Of course I was going to go see it. I had to. So I went with my friend and fellow former Winchester tour guide, Hannah, who you may remember as one of the former tour guides who visited Mrs. Winchester's grave in New Haven with me.

And sure, artistic liberties were taken - they always are when historical events are put to film - but did it live up to the Winchester name? Was it any good? Was it worth the $17.50 I spent on a movie ticket?

The Forgotten Hamilton

It's pretty common knowledge that Alexander Hamilton, despite all of his numerous accomplishments, considered his large family one of his most important legacies of all. He considered himself a family man and, fittingly, had an absolute army of children. There were 8 biological children in all, though the oldest and the youngest never got to meet one another:

1. Philip (born 1782)
2. Angelica (1784)
3. Alexander Jr. (1786)
4. James Alexander (1788)
5. John Church (1792)
6. William Stephen (1797)
7. Eliza (1799)
8. Philip (1802)

Now, it seems that the further we go down this list of children, the less people know about them. Everyone has heard of the first Philip, of course - he's the one who died in a duel. Angelica got her own entry on this blog, and even Alexander Jr. sometimes gets remembered for the fun piece of trivia that he represented Eliza Jumel as her divorce lawyer when she divorced Aaron Burr.  Some people know the name of child #5, John Church Hamilton (named not after John Laurens, but after Angelica Schuyler Church's husband) as the man who wrote the first biography of Alexander Hamilton, and who commissioned what a friend of mine calls "the weirdly sexy Hamilton statue in Central Park".

But what about child #8, Philip the second? It seems people only remember him as a footnote - even my tours at the Grange only mention him as the baby named after the son who died in a duel. But the guy did lead a life beyond just being a baby. 

This is what he looked like as an adult

So let's learn a little bit about Philip Hamilton number two - or, as his family called him, "Little Phil".

I'VE MOVED TO BROOKLYN!

So I have to make a confession, you guys.

I'm sure you all have noticed that I haven't exactly been the most active on this blog lately... (No, it's not just because I've been obsessively playing "Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp" since November.) The truth is, the last month or so has been one of turmoil and upheaval, for a bevy of personal reasons that I don't really feel comfortable sharing publicly. But this all ended up leading to one thing, a big piece of news that I have to share with all of you...

SARAH AND I HAVE MOVED TO BROOKLYN.

We're on the border of Flatbush and Prospect Lefferts Gardens

It hasn't exactly been the smoothest adjustment, as moving is never easy, especially in the middle of winter, but we did it and I am so proud of us.

And you know what? As my months-long depressive spell starts to lift, I'm coming to find that... I actually quite like Brooklyn.