Keeping It Juicy

I’ve always wanted to start a salon. Not the place you get your hair cut, but the old-fashioned salon in which rich women (because it was usually women, and they were usually rich enough to have leisure) invited the cultural luminaries of the day to eat, drink and discuss.

When I was in college, I read the biography of Misia Sert, who had such a salon in Paris. She hosted Renoir, Monet, Debussy, and Toulouse-Lautrec. She became the muse for artists Vuillard and Bonnard.

I wanted to grow up to be Misia Sert. But my husband’s anti-social tendencies and my own hosting anxieties meant smaller and more infrequent gatherings than Misia Sert practiced.

Still, I wanted to be able to talk to smart, funny people even beyond my own smart, funny social circle.

And, so I’ve started a podcast.

I call it Keep It Juicy! because my ideal is to take great, ripping bites out of life and let the juices run down my arms like a ripe peach. I decided to target it at over-50s because, not only am I there myself, but it seems a bit too easy to keep it juicy when you are young and ripe yourself. And I started cold-calling people I’d only read about.

And they’ve said yes.

These are people who stare down fear or grief or anxiety, and step right through. They don’t back down or, if they do, they get right back up and take a different path. I call them “Juicys.”

And, somehow, in interviewing them and in stumbling through sound editing and recording and audio publishing, I’ve found my own “juicy” in life. And I’m going to keep on taking big bites.

Check out the podcast over on my Keep It Juicy! website.

Foul

Reading coverage of a recent baseball game, I thought about America’s pastime.

No, not baseball.

I’m talking about the reflexive grabbing of our phones to take photos of everything happening around us.

At this particular baseball game, a Yankees game, a foul ball whipped into the stands at 105 miles an hour and stopped only after a shattering hit directly into the face of a little girl.

The baseball player who swung the bat was in tears. The fans surrounding the little girl can be seen in poses of shock and horror, many reaching out to help. All except one. This guy has his phone up, aimed at the injured girl. Recording, one can only assume. Snapping photos maybe.

He is not a reporter. Maybe he is a nice guy who just happened to have his phone up recording the game and swung it around without thinking. Maybe he’s one of those guys killing wildlife by dragging it from its habitat and pestering it literally to death in the name of a selfie.

I don’t know.

But, just like all of you, I stared at the reporter’s photo of the scene in horror.

Except, I was looking at the guy with the phone.