The classics

This weekend, Blaine and Arno enjoyed the finer points of Yertle the Turtle.


Every night after supper, too, Arno has parked himself on Blaine for some quality Daddy-time.

Music town

Tokyo's Shibuya neighborhood has lots of music stores and record stores - there's still a Tower Records there (even though it's gone out of business in NYC) and lots of small shops selling vinyl records.

I went there this weekend to buy Lucinda a music stand for her new violin lessons and checked out a few stores. This one looks like guitar heaven.


I found the music stand in this store.


It also had dozens of guitars, including a shiny "Hello Kitty" number.

Ski trip

It's taken me a while to post this, but we had a fun overnight ski trip to Karuizawa, a town and ski resort that's not too far from Tokyo. Lucinda, Arno and I woke up early on a Monday morning and met our friends, Ikuyo and Celine Maeda and Laurie, Ken, Sylvan and Max Lebrun. Celine and Sylvan are in 1st grade with Lucinda at Nishimachi, and Max is in Arno's class at Willowbrook.

We crowded eight of us into six seats...


...and about 75 minutes later arrived at Karuizawa, where it was about 20 degrees colder. We could see the ski mountain from the train station.



At the mountain, I rented skis, boots, and even (thanks, Japan!) ski clothes for the kids and signed them up at the ski school run by the Ski Association of Japan. My plan didn't work so well. I hoped that Lucinda's presence in the same lesson would ease Arno's introduction to skiing, but Arno screamed his head off and refused to let go of me. Eventually someone from the ski school came to me and said, in English and with typical Japanese understatement, "If you leave, he will separate." So I left and, when I circled back to take some secret photos, he was, of course, just fine.


After lunch, I bribed Arno with chocolate to convince him to take another SAJ lesson, this time with his friend Max, even though the lesson was admittedly dull - walking up and skiing down a slope that was barely there. Meanwhile, I went skiing with Lucinda and her friends and their moms. The resort is sometimes compared to Aspen for glitz (which I didn't see), but the skiing is very mild compared to any Colorado mountain. The snow was all manmade and the runs were perfect for beginners.

Later, we all checked into the Prince Hotel and were driven to little cabins at the resort. It was basic, but cozy, with heated wooden floors, a kitchenette with green and roasted teas, and slippers by the front door.



Each cabin had two rooms with twin beds and a dining room with a TV. The other children came over to watch television. Later, we had a big Chinese dinner in the hotel and sacked out early.



The next day, a friend of Ikuyo's helped me arrange Arno's ski school and, before I knew it, I'd signed him up at the more expensive program owned by former Japanese World Cup racer Okabe Tetsuya. It was 6,000 yen (about $75) for a two-hour group lesson, twice the cost of the SAJ lesson. But we got lucky: Arno was the only student. An actual two-hour private lesson would have cost about $180!

So here's Arno with his own personal instructor. They went on lifts all over the mountain, and Arno had a wonderful time.


I went skiing again with Lucinda, who gained a lot of confidence during our two days there. The other girls had more experience, but by the end, Lucinda was following them everywhere, even on an intermediate slope.


Here we all are - even Arno - on top of the mountain.

Teacher lottery

Last October during Nishimachi's annual Food Fair, Lucinda won the teacher lottery -- that is, we bought raffle tickets and Lucinda's name was selected -- to spend a few hours with her Japanese teacher, Noriko Hayashi. Lucinda has always been impressed by Hayashi-sensei ("sensei" means teacher), who has been at Nishimachi for (I think) more than 30 years.

Hayashi-sensei is very good at origami and very precise in teaching the children how to write hiragana - and Lucinda loves doing both of those things. So we planned the lottery get-together so they could do crafts together at the Tokyo Metropolitan Children's Hall near Shibuya.

In honor of the day, Lucinda wore her favorite dress, which my mother and Lucinda made together last summer.


In the paper art section, they noticed a box of paper "sushi" and decided to make their own set. Hayashi-sensei folded some flat cardboard into a box. Then, using paper, tissue paper, and styrofoam for the rice, they made a crab roll, cucumber roll, tuna roll, tuna sushi, rice and tofu sushi, and a pair of "hashi" (chopsticks).

Lucinda was very proud of the finished project.


Lucinda carefully and neatly wrote the hiragana on the chopstick; it says "o te moto," which means "king hand formally" - which really means that Blaine and I can't figure it out.

Happy anniversary

Today is Blaine's and my 7th anniversary, and I bought a box of fancy cookies at a fancy chocolate store here so we could celebrate after dinner. (Blaine and I went to our favorite French restaurant last Saturday.) The store is "Le Chocolat de H" in Roppongi Hills. Arno, who was home sick today, wanted me to buy chocolates, but they cost 8,000 yen ($80) for a tiny box of 8 or 10 candies!

So here is our 1,500 yen box of cookies. Very fancy and, as is typical for a Japanese gift, it's elaborately and expensively wrapped (which is something of a contradiction in a country that's obsessed with reducing the amount of trash it produces).

Small glossy shopping bag:




A round silver box, wrapped in cellophane and tied with a ribbon.


Individually-wrapped treats: chocolate meringue, a walnut brownie, a chocolate madeleine, a chocolate-nut cookie, and maybe something the children grabbed that I didn't even see.


They were super-yummy. Maybe next time I'll spring for some chocolates, too.

Trying new things

Lucinda has taken her first violin lesson. The classes are after school at Nishimachi, so they're reasonably priced -- and how lucky! - she is the only student in the Tuesday class.

I thought Lucinda would continue to take hula lessons, but she'd seen and heard friends play instruments during "music sharing" days at school and wanted to give music a try. We'll see how it goes this spring.

Pastry chef

I am editing for Kateigaho magazine this week, and right now I'm working on a story about Tokyo's amazing French pastries. (Which is giving me lots of ideas for sightseeing daytrips.)

Along the way, I checked a website of a top pastry shop in France; its design is very cute, especially when you roam the home page with your cursor.

Check it out: http://fresson-chocolatier-patissier.com/

Old magazines

Very funny - I was just reading through the Jezebel blog, about celebrity and fashion, and found a long, delicious post about In Fashion magazine, where I worked from 1991 to 1993 as the managing editor and, for about six months, as executive editor when I was in my early 20s.

The conceit of In Fashion was that it was "for men and women," and so there had to be a man and a woman on the cover. For the editors, this was a nightmare: we had to choose and book two B-list stars to be in NYC or LA at the same time and to get them to look hot and bothered together on a magazine cover.

For one cover, we booked Tia Carrere and Jon Bon Jovi, but the photos were a disaster. Tia Carrere was newly married and when she arrived at the studio in LA, conveyed that her husband was the jealous type. So she insisted on wearing a serious bra - eliminating many of the trashy, sexy clothes chosen for the cover shot - and she prominently displayed her wedding-ringed hand in every photo. We had to scrap that cover and shoot another at the last minute, but I did get to interview Bon Jovi and went to one of his concerts.

There are other funny stories from the pages in that Jezebel post, too. I worked on two issues they show: the one with John Corbett and MTV's Karen Duffy on the cover, and the one with rocker Nuno Bettencourt and Vanessa Paradis.

John Corbett was stale from Northern Exposure at that stage, and I think we booked him because the exec editor thought he was cute; I think Duff happened to be available.

I was the executive editor for the Nuno/Vanessa issue; I'd never heard of Nuno before but his band, Extreme, had a hit called "More Than Words."


When I interviewed him, I was particularly pleased that I'd asked him if he had a snake - which he did. Ah, the uselessness of celebrity journalism and wasted intuition.

In Fashion - good times!