The diner's booths were large enough to swallow a child as small as I was.
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I grew up eating simple, 1950s food. On Sundays we went to, or brought in from, deli food from Detroit delis, either Billy’s or Darby’s. My favorite was getting a large bowl of mushroom barley soup. Like Proust’s madeleine, I still search for soup as delicious as the one from my childhood. I have found none that can compare.

For birthdays, special occasions, or before going to theater downtown, there were special occasion restaurants. I have cherished memories of eating at Larko’s, a family favorite Italian restaurant. We even ran into one of my dad’s brothers and his wife on one of my birthdays after seeing Gigi, an all-around lovely evening. Fine dining meant Carl’s Chophouse, with plentiful rare roast beef.

On our wedding night, Dan and I stayed at the Hotel Pontchartrain, a very fine hotel, on our way across the Ambassador Bridge into Canada. One of my uncles paid all our expenses. Our wedding was at 1pm and only provided light food, champaign and dessert. After checking in, we went to the dining room and ordered chateaubriand, an expensive steak for two. The waiter, white napkin over his arm told us that was a “cool deal”, and it was, indeed, a memorable meal.

We married in 1974, moved to the Boston area and scraped by. Our one night out was going to Tony’s Italian Villa in Newton for family Italian food; veal parm for Dan, spaghetti for me, though I make good home-made pasta sauce myself. Still, it was nice for someone else to do the clean-up.

As the years progressed and we became more prosperous, with two other friends, we developed the routine of going out for luxurious birthday dinners, no holds barred. We lived in Boston proper and were “DINKs; “Dual Income, No Kids”. The Featured photo is on my way to my 30th birthday dinner. You can see that Dan provided me with a corsage and we are dressed to the nines. We were walking distance to the restaurant, L’Espalier, which at the time was around the corner from us on Gloucester St. It was known for very fine French food and an exquisite dining experience. It still exists, though now has moved around the corner and is inside the Mandarin Oriental Hotel; still fine and exquisite. We haven’t been in more than 30 years.

One memorable birthday dinner (the guys always did right by me) occurred a year or so earlier. I had come home, tired from work, but Dan stalled me, telling me not to get out of my suit (this was still the “dress for success” era). We lived in the Back Bay in a 5th floor walk-up and there were no cell phones, so no easy way to communicate with the ground floor. At some point, the buzzer rang, Dan hustled me down the steps. A limo awaited, with our friends inside. Also a TV! We drove to Portsmouth, NH to the chic restaurant of the day; The Blue Strawberry, but had to watch the Celtics game as we drove! I think I slept most of the way up. With Friday traffic, it was a 90 minute drive. The restaurant was small and superb. The guys had read about it and made reservations months in advance. Worth it!

When Dan retired almost 16 years ago, my cooking days came to an end as well. We are empty-nesters and eat out almost every night, but not special. Mostly at the local diner/deli, Johnny’s in Newton Center, where I took my Retrospect (and now, in person) friend Suzy, when she visited last fall. It has passable food. They know us so well they put out my water and Dan’s Diet Coke as soon as we are seated. Fine dining is limited to eating out with friends, which happens a few times a month, or when we travel. So I have come full circle, though my eating habits are better than when I was a child, I eat at similar restaurants.

I was starstruck from a very young age, and I think it was the combination of a) seeing the stars at their most glamorous, nervous and exposed; and b) experiencing vicariously the thrill of worldwide recognition that made the Oscars so irresistible.
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When some random country prints a stamp commemorating your performance, you've made an impact.
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“Everybody’s a dreamer, everybody’s a star,” sang the Kinks in their 1972 song “Celluloid Heroes.” So true. I nominate this song to be the permanent theme song of the Academy Awards show.

First movie: Sayonara. As far as I remember, this was my first movie in a theatre, although I probably saw others on television before that. My aunt Adele took me to see it at Radio City Music Hall. It was released in December 1957, so it must have been some time that winter, meaning I was six-and-a-half years old. This movie was totally inappropriate for a small child. Aunt Adele didn’t have any children of her own, and I guess it never occurred to her to think about whether the subject matter was age-appropriate. It was about an interracial (and therefore forbidden) love affair/marriage between an American GI and a Japanese woman during the Korean War. Think Madame Butterfly updated. Complete with suicides. Why the woman was Japanese and not Korean I don’t know, but that’s Hollywood. Anyway, my strongest memories are of the Rockettes doing their fabulous dance routine before the movie, and of the man sitting in front of me turning around and telling me to stop kicking his seat.

Best Picture Ever: I have to give this to Casablanca, winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1943, even though a close second in my heart would be every film starring Audrey Hepburn. This movie has everything — history, politics, a café full of people singing the Marseillaise in defiance of the Nazis (most of whom were played by Jewish refugee actors), and the powerful love story between Rick and Ilsa culminating in the indelible parting line “we’ll always have Paris.” This is a movie I can see over and over and never get tired of it.

Best Picture of 2018. I have seen almost all the nominated movies this year, most in the week between Christmas and New Year’s because I had access to the screeners sent out by the movie studios. My vote goes without question to Lady Bird. This movie is a charming and pitch-perfect portrait of a girl in her senior year of high school. Her conflicts with her mother, her best friend, various boys, and the college application process are so true that I think every woman over the age of 17 can see bits of herself in it. The fact that it is set in Sacramento, and was actually filmed here, of course makes me love it even more. I think it would still be a profound movie even if it took place somewhere else, but I must admit that seeing all the familiar landmarks on the screen was exhilerating. I was watching it at the Tower Theater (next door to where the original Tower Records was born), and when they showed the distinctive facade of that theater, everyone in the packed house absolutely screamed, cheered, and carried on. And in the scene of the mother driving around the Sacramento airport after dropping her daughter off, I was in that car driving that same route so many times with tears in my eyes.

I also feel a connection with Greta Gerwig, who wrote and directed the movie, because she is just a year older than my daughter Sabrina, and although they went to different schools, I suspect that over the years their paths crossed somewhere, possibly playing rec soccer in elementary school on opposing teams. If I ever get to meet Greta, I will ask her if she played soccer as a kid, but pretty much every kid in Sacramento does at some point, so I’d be surprised if she didn’t. I hope Lady Bird wins Best Picture on Sunday, and I hope even more fervently that Greta wins Best Director. She is only the fifth woman ever nominated, and would be the second woman to win. #itstime

My older brother and I were Disney nuts. We loved all things Disney. I skipped piano practice so I could watch the afternoon TV show as a kid. My first movie, as a four year old was Fantasia, some lovely stuff there, but some pretty scary stuff too. I don’t remember my reaction, but I’m sure I was frightened by The Night on Bald Mountain and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but charmed by rhinos and elephants dancing to Waltz of the Hours.

The movie was re-released again in 1969 and the counter-culture had discovered it. My super-straight brother and I went to see it along with all the stoners, tripping out on the lights and fantasy. My brother couldn’t understand what was going on. I thought it was very funny.

My favorite movie of all time is Shakespeare in Love, having always wanted to play Juliet. I loved the clever way Shakespearean references were woven throughout, the doomed love story, the vibrant costumes, lovely music, and it takes place during the reign of my favorite monarch, Elizabeth I. What could be better? I watch it over and over again.

Second favorite: Last of the Mohicans, a gripping adventure of love and death in the mid-1700s with a political twist. Daniel Day-Lewis never looked so good. Best screen kiss EVER! I had a chance to see it again on the big screen recently, as one of our local arthouse cinemas was doing a DD-L retrospective, given his planned retirement. After 25 years, it holds up well. It is lush, brutal and surprisingly romantic.

This year was not a bumper crop of good movies. I think the best two are Three Billboards Outside Hibbing, Missouri and The Shape of Water. One is a brutally stark, dark movie about a mother’s grief and guilt, what she does to try to find her daughter’s murderer and how she seeks salvation. The other is an odd, Cold War love story, charming and twisted in its own way. Quite different, but very interesting. I found it beautiful. Very different animals (no pun intended).

“What do you remember about Watergate?” asks this week’s prompt. I am finding it a very difficult question to answer. Right now I could tell you everything that happened from the night of the break-in at Democratic Headquarters on June 17, 1972 (two days after I graduated from college), to the resignation of Richard Nixon on August 9, 1974. But how much of it do I actually remember from when it happened and how much do I know from books and movies? It’s really hard to say.

I read the book All the President’s Men shortly after it came out in February 1974, and learned about a lot of what transpired from Woodward and Bernstein. Of course much of what we now refer to as Watergate is not even in that book. It only includes events through the revelation of the tapes by Alexander Butterfield (July ’73) and then a brief mention of the Saturday Night Massacre in a hastily-written last chapter. I have also read other books about Watergate over the years which have certainly supplemented my memories.

I do remember Archibald Cox being appointed special prosecutor in May 1973. The previous year he had been my college boyfriend’s thesis advisor. My BF and I had met in a junior tutorial on the Supreme Court (’70-’71), in which we actually read Supreme Court cases and wrote papers about them. An American Government concentrator, I had already studied the American Presidency as a sophomore, and requested a junior tutorial on either Congress or the Court. What I wanted was to learn about the Court, not take a mini-Constitutional Law course, but that was how it ended up. In truth, the best part for me was the one other student in the tutorial, a smart and handsome swimmer from Adams House who soon became my BF. The next year (’71-’72), while I wrote my thesis on the McCarthy presidential campaign, he wrote his on Congressional power under the 14th Amendment. When he went to ask Cox to be his thesis advisor, he was dubious about his chances for success, but I think Cox was intrigued by this undergraduate who could speak more knowledgeably about the law than most of his law students. My BF got a summa on the thesis, so obviously Cox did a good job of advising him. They spent a lot of time together, and I felt connected by association. A year later we were both excited by the special prosecutor appointment. By October ’73, when Cox was fired in the Saturday Night Massacre, my BF was at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, and I was still in Cambridge (the other Cambridge, as they say in England), but we wrote letters to each other about it.

During that whole period I was working for the US Department of Transportation at their Systems Center in Cambridge, and every day as I walked in I saw the big pictures of Richard Nixon and John Volpe on the wall in the lobby. The reason DOT even had a facility in Cambridge was that Volpe, Nixon’s Secretary of Transportation, had previously been Governor of Massachusetts, and he wanted this pork barrel project for his home state. Most of the people I worked with were either Republicans or apolitical, so there wasn’t much talk about Watergate at work.

I was living in a wonderful old house on Cambridge Street (shown in the featured image) with three roommates. Arlene, the roommate I was closest to, was a graduate student in sociology at BU, working on a dissertation about people who wanted to have their bodies frozen when they died. When I consulted her this week about her memories of Watergate, here’s what she said: “I remember that summer [of 1973] sooo well. I was transcribing the interviews for my dissertation all summer. I had a piece of wood across cinder blocks and an electric typewriter. The Watergate hearings were on in the background all day. I filled you in when you came home and then we watched whatever was rebroadcast on the small tv in my room. I’m pretty sure you were home from work in time to watch the evening network news. [I was.]  The tv was a portable one and couldn’t have had more than a 12 inch screen. As I recall, I had a window air conditioner and a bright orange rug, so the viewing was comfortable. That all seemed so catastrophic then, but pales now in the age of Trump. Ugh!!”

I remember being impressed with Sam Ervin, the chair of the Senate Watergate Committee. He was from North Carolina, and presented a very folksy demeanor, but was obviously smart as a whip and did a great job of running those hearings.

I also remember being impressed with Peter Rodino, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee which oversaw the impeachment proceedings. He began his investigation after the Saturday Night Massacre, and meticulously spent eight months gathering evidence. He was my congressman, in fact had represented my New Jersey district since before I was born. When I visited Washington during high school and got gallery passes to watch Congress in action, the one for the House came from Rodino, and I met him then. I voted for him in 1972 at home, and in 1974 by absentee ballot, before changing my voter registration from New Jersey to California.

Finally, I remember watching Nixon’s resignation speech on Thursday, August 8, 1974, at 9:00 p.m, again on Arlene’s little television set. The resignation was effective at noon on Friday, which I think was also my last day at DOT. So Richard Nixon and I left the federal government at the same time, although for opposite reasons — he because he had broken the law, and I because I wanted to study law.

There is much that could be said about how horrified we all were forty-four years ago, and how evil we thought Nixon was, and how he now seems positively benign compared to the present occupant of the White House. However, I will leave that to others.

Nixon's address would go down at 3:00 in the morning, London time. But this was history and we were not going to miss it.
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Watergate. The word is redolent with history, even more so now with an imperiled special prosecutor, a sitting president trying to malign real news sources, looking more corrupt by the day. We are reminded of Santayana’s quote…those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We seem poised at another Watergate moment; just searching for the “smoking gun” to surface.

The real Watergate story trickled out in dribs and drabs during my junior and senior years in college. The country was abuzz as developments proceeded. There was no 24 hour news cycle, nor as deep a partisan divide as we see today. Over spring break in 1973, my junior year, my whole family went on vacation to Virginia, first Colonial Williamsburg, then on to Virginia Beach stopping in Newport News to visit some college buddies. It would be the last time our entire family vacationed together, since I married 14 months later and left the nest. But on that family trip in 1973, I remember the excited talk over breakfast as the first tidbits about the Watergate investigation started coming to the forefront. My family, all of us liberals, wondered where this was headed.

As the weeks and the leaks progressed, we got a clearer picture. The term “Saturday Night Massacre” came into the lexicon, when Nixon insisted that his Attorney General, Ellliot Richardson, fire the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Richardson and his Deputy AG, William Ruckelshaus, resigned rather than do the deed (will the Trumpers be as principled? Most around this investigation seem to lack a spine so far. I’m looking at you, Paul Ryan, not to mention the weasel Devin Nunes). John Dean turned state’s evidence and spilled his guts. Indictments piled up. The special prosecutor learned of tapes made in the Oval Office and subpoenaed them. The Supreme Court ruled Nixon had to release them. We learned of 18 missing minutes, which Rosemary Woods, Nixon’s secretary took the blame for. I can still picture her demonstrating the lean across the desk which caused her foot to come off the recording device, she claimed.

Finally, it was clear that Nixon and his closest advisers were all guilty of ordering the break-in into the Democratic Headquarters during the 1972 election (not Russian hacking, this was bungled Republican hacking), and the subsequent cover-up and articles of impeachment were drawn up. Rather than face sure impeachment, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.

Dan and I had married seven weeks earlier. We broke out a bottle of wedding champagne to celebrate and a visiting friend snapped the Featured photo in our first apartment, as we celebrated Nixon’s fall.

Years later, Nixon decided to try to tell his side of the story and agreed to a series of televised interviews with David Frost, at the time not considered a serious journalist. Nixon thought he could get the better of him. Frost got coaching from respected historian and author James Reston, Jr to shore up his research and give him advise on how best to approach Nixon; not let Nixon out-maneuver him. In the wonderful film Frost/Nixon, the Reston role was played by Sam Rockwell, up for an Academy Award this year. Until last December, Jim Reston was my next door neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard and a more thoughtful man I never met. I reveled in our long political conversations, though we never talked about that particular moment in time. Current events provided more then enough to keep us engaged. He had a framed, signed poster from the movie hanging in his living room. I would wander over all the time and he knew that his family was welcome to use my pool without asking. I will miss his good, wise company.

In 2003, I was helping my older son’s private school with their capital campaign. I went calling on an elderly couple, George and Rebeka Richardson, who lived far from me in Nahant, an ocean-front community north of Boston. I showed up at the appointed time but no one was home. This was in flip-phone days. I called my house to ask my husband to check my day timer. Did I have the correct time? I stayed a while, but no one showed up. When I finally made contact again, she was mortified that she had forgotten our appointment, invited me to return, but this time for lunch. I again made the trek, launched into my talk about the school (not knowing she was a former member of the school’s Board of Trustees!). They were very gracious and interested.

After our discussion, she went into the kitchen to heat up soup for our lunch. They were a patrician couple. I chatted with George. He said, perhaps I had heard of his brother, Ellliot. I was flabbergasted. I felt like thanking him for his service; the man who had defied Nixon! Elliot was already deceased at by that time, but George spoke proudly of his older brother’s service to the country, and justifiably so. He was a WW II hero and had held several different cabinet positions under multiple presidents, but is most famous for defying Nixon by refusing to fire Archibald Cox and resigning instead. I hope we learn from that history lesson, which I was in the enviable position to hear about from his own brother. May Elliot Richardson’s steadfast courage be an example for those in power today.