Simon Speaks

Girls Like Us

Good afternoon dear fans,

I am so very delighted that you have read some of my posts, my meanderings into the tiny tiny place that I take up on this Earth. My goodness, the size of the universe is appalling enough, but the fact that even the smartest of scientists can't fathom it.

I was wondering if any of you have read "girls like us" and what you think of it?
I've dipped into it but gingerly, like picking up a phone in your house when you know your mother and father are on the phone with the principal of the school talking about some academic issue that could get you suspended.

It was just sold for the movies! Go Sheila! I think she really did a great job with the book and I'm wondering who will play me? As a ten year old, in love with Lauren Bacall, I always prayed that I would play the part of her in a movie when I got older. I would pose in front of my mirror and try to pull my waist in thinner and thinner, as I puffed on a fake cigarette and narrowed my eyes.

Now there is the possibility that someone would play me. So weird. What do you think?
Flipper? Lassie?

I'm just watching Alanis Morissette on the View and she's saying to Barbara Walters everything I have ever said in interviews about my writing. I want to talk to her and tell her I am she. I feel the same. If anyone is in contact with her, would you tell her that Actually, she could play Lauren Bacall!!

With all that, I say, love to you today, Carly

Hot, hot, hot

Hello to you all today. Hot hot hot.
Up here, everywhere I suppose.

There are lots of hippies here. My son, Ben, has invited at least six people up for the weekend and they are all wearing long skirts and braids and earrings from Sausalito. The daisies are out and the hydrangeas just continue to be refulgent (a word my grandmother used to use all the some, meaning: in full bloom, fulsome). The frogs are making a huge rhythm section of sound in the pond and the new sheep are doing their peculiar thing that I adore.

Last night Ben had a lamb roast at his house. A huge bar=b=q, cooking along with the lamb some tuna and scallops and corn. At one point he went into his house and came out dressed in a kilt and a posh jacket from Ralph Lauren and a t-shirt and no shoes or socks or those strange things people wear with kilts. He climb up on the rock that is quite high in front of his house and sang the most outrageous song called: "shoes in the trees" which one of the wonderful people there, Jonathan, wrote. We all sang along and it was one of the most blessed out times I can remember.

Today I am cooking cream of zucchini soup, which is very easy: slice five firm zucchini and put it in a pot on the stove and cover it with enough chicken stock to kind of cover the zucchini. Then add a sliced large yellow onion to the pot and then about a teaspoon of curry powered. Let it cook on a slow heat for about forty-five minutes. When the vegetables are sort of soft (don't overcook) put in blender or cuisine a little at a time. As each batch is blended, put in another pot and when it's all blended and in the other pot, add either skim milk if you need to not use cream, or about a half a cup of cream. Warm up and add salt and pepper until it tastes like something other than dishwater. Then when it's hot, add a dollop of sour cream (or plain yogurt) and serve with chopped chives.
If you've stayed with me, you will be happy with the result. I'm going now to do it.

Have a great Sunday.
And love to you all, Carly

A cabin in the woods

Hello dear fans,

I am sitting in a very beautiful cabin in the middle of the woods and it is raining those large drops of rain that pelt against the roof and sing their own songs of sadness. I want to stay inside, though if it were seven degrees warmer, I'd want to wash my hair in it. My animals are not put off by it. My new lambs are already great friends with my pygmy fainting goats. The lambs are named Paris and Helen and my goats are named pasa and doble. The latter were named when I got them a year and a half ago after the great Spanish dance: the pasa doble. Have you ever seen the movie called: "strictly ballroom"? It came out at least a decade ago and it is on my top ten lists of all time great movies. It's an Australian film about a dance contest. It has all the elements of what make a great movie. On my new cd (or however it arrives at your ears) is trying to be like that: to be as romantic as I could ever want to be, to be as angry as I could bear to be and as sad…

Just referring to the second song on "This kind of love", called: "hold out your heart", I adore my kids as much and more and including the galaxy of history with them as I ever did. The first verse of the song is about Ben and the time he told me he was going to Jones beach (on Long Island) in a blizzard. I was severe with him in telling him "no", but he was twelve and was going with a buddy (perhaps the buddy was a but 'out there' but let's get on with the story) to the beach come hell or high water. He departed the apt where we lived in NYC and that's the last I heard from him for some of the most angst filled hours of my life. He did return and maybe that was his Siddhartha experience, or his Ulysses in nigh town need. Whatever it was, it emerged out of nowhere on this album.

So many of the songs have memories, images of childhood, dreams turning true as this rain, or the smell of the lilacs outside or the ruminations of my daughter and how I will bond with her child. Her really cute child. I know he is cute, and cute is a word I don't use. So what do I say? He is more than I ever expected.

But the second verse of that song is about Sally. It yearns. I have learned that yearning is a part of being a woman. Much more than men do, women yearn. We even count on it to cook or to write songs. The song "in my dreams" is about the safe place I have in my dream life. Thank heavens it hasn't' turned against me to nightmares. My dreams are so realistic that they do become characters and smells and sounds that are assimilated into the day after and then rotate around for perhaps a lifetime or more.

"Too soon to say goodbye" is Ben's favorite song, he said this morning. I love it too. I wrote it for my friend Art Buchwald.

This afternoon rain is making me chilly now and I'm going to get dressed and put on some big old boots and make my way over to the piano and see if the chords I wrote last night to a lyric for my friend Carrie tree to sing, is too unsubtle, too pretentious. I do love to experiment with chords. I like to see if my dreams reveal themselves in the soggy light of this rainy day.

More ramblings to follow….