This week’s Fashionable Friend Friday is my dear friend Karen. She is an amazing wife, mother, and CHEF!!…She started bottling her Grandma Napoli’s tomato sauce secret recipe a few years ago and it sure is GRAND!!!! Recently she started having cooking demonstrations in her home, where she teaches easy recipes to help bring back the art of having family dinner together. Karen invites 3-4 ladies into her kitchen, fondly called “K’s Kitchen” and she cooks three easy weeknight dinners, having you watch all the steps along the way, so you can recreate the cullinary masterpiece for your own family. While Karen cooks, you and your friends and sit down and have a fun, casual beautifully placed and plated lunch. I have asked Karen to do a demonstration of an easier way of cutting an onion so I can bring you all into K’s Kitchen. For more information on K’s Kitchen or to buy Grandma’s Napoli’s Sauce, contact Karen HERE.
On Friday, I had the pleasure of interviewing India Hicks on my radio show, Up To The Minute with Nicole. It was such a pleasure to be able to spend a whole hour discussing her background, her family, her company and so much more. I am so in awe of India and all that she has accomplished. It was a wonderful kick off to my bday weekend!!! I had seen India’s Harbour Island home throughout the years in various shelter magazines but hearing first hand how she lives, raises her 5 children and entertains was a true treasure. I thought I would give you a glimpse of India’s home. We have a pact to share a cocktail on Harbour Island one day!!!!!. India, I hope to get there soon!!!!! Bon Weekend!!!
This week’s selection has been a difficult choice for me. I keep hearing how amazing and unlike anything ever read before, the story, A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara is, yet also how hard some parts of the story are to read. The plot goes like this….
Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement—and a great gift for its readers.
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.
In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance. (Amazon.com)
This book is sitting in my wish list on Amazon waiting to be purchased but for some reason, I cannot pull the trigger. Not sure I can handle the parts of the abuse but I am dying to read it. If anyone has read it, please leave your comments below or in the facebook comments and tell us what you thought of the book.
Since my reading stack is still sky high..I thought I would share two more incredible movies I saw recently, Aloha and Some Kind of Beautiful.
If you don’t already know, I LOVE LOVE Bradley Cooper. I can watch his movies over and over, so I was so excited when Aloha became available for home viewing. The storyline is that “a military contractor goes to Hawaii and reconnects with a lost love while falling for his Air Force watch dog”. It is such a cute movie, you will not want to miss it. You can watch it HERE.
I am so inspired by the incredible work of artist Rosie Quick. I have known Rosie and her family for many years and am just so impressed with the talent and wonderful creative things Rosie is doing. Below is her bio and examples of her fabulous work. Rosie is having an opening at Deborah Berke Partners at 220 Fifth Ave on Thursday, June 18th from 6-8 for her first Solo Show!!!, “Turn On And Tune In”. It is running until August 28th so if you are in the NY area, stop by! For more info or to inquire, please contact Rosie at http://www.rosiequickart.com.