Jean Zimmerman

Category: Culture

  • Pumpkin Pie Women

    Coming home from the supermarket, laden with cans of pumpkin and condensed milk, listening to the cheekily wonderful tune, Thou Swell, Thou Witty, Thou Grand, which Rodgers and Hart collaborated on in 1927. The girls are coming to my kitchen – the women, the college women, to spend an afternoon producing pumpkin pies. It’s golden…

  • House Plants on Parade

    There are certain people, and I won’t name them, who believe that house plants are boring. For the most part these are men. My Thanksgiving cactus has decided to get an early start this year, so it’s pushing out the new, light-green segments that are called “articles” with abandon, and showing off plenty of exciting…

  • Tweet or Not to Tweet

    The gloaming is coming earlier these days. The Cabin, cozy as it is, can be small. Our winter is heated by wood more than sun. Fewer outdoor adventures, unless you want to really bundle up. A dive instead back into a small pink knitting project. Oliver wants to lay down on the already-cold grass. I…

  • To Be a Ghost

    Gil is an animal of many and variegated stripes. He writes nonfiction (Aftermath, Inc., Mafia Summit) and fiction (Mockman). He is also expert at articulating the stories of others as their collaborator. I asked Gil some questions about the process. Why ghostwrite? I like to collaborate, because otherwise you’re alone in a room with a computer…

  • Mums the Word

    The kiku were fragrant, lovely to look at, cool to the touch. I had been in a mood. My foot was slower to heal than I’d like. I had a cold. I didn’t feel like working. So I got myself to The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. It was offering its annual chrysanthemum…

  • What’s the Story Morning Glory?

    As some things in the garden wither, others go full tilt. A friend of mine came over with a shovel and a Beautyberry plant earlier in the summer. I didn’t know how Callicarpa Americana would take to the Cabin. Now its purple berries are practically fluorescent, a perfect complement to the orange leaves that have…

  • A Pear Tree at Ground Zero

    I waited a long time to go. I had all sorts of excuses. The 9/11Memorial stood behind too many fences. The lines were too long. It was filled with gawking out-of-town sightseers. But then some sightseers of my own came to visit. And off we went, to the Memorial, a broad plaza studded with small…

  • I Like Your Steamed Buns

    There might be better places to get soup dumplings in New York City, but Joe’s Shanghai is irresistably close to LaGuardia if you’re carting people in from the airport around lunchtime. We had Gil’s sister and her husband coming in from the Midwest for Gil’s birthday. Time for some steamed buns. We went to the…

  • What a Wonderful House

    The walls can talk in Satchmo’s house. Literally. Standing in Louis Armstrong’s den in his longtime residence in Corona, New York, we heard his perfect rumbling tones describing his inspiration for What a Wonderful World – the children of his neighborhood in Queens. The docent had pressed a button. The effect was magic. We were visiting…

  • A Recipe for Meatballs and Longevity

    I told Gil I’d make him meatballs for his birthday. His 60th.  I assembled the beef, the pork, the eggs, the breadcrumbs. Plenty of cheese. I was making the same meatballs I always make, from the delectable recipe served at Patsy’s restaurant on 56th Street in Manhattan. Frank Sinatra’s favorite joint. That was a man…

  • Dam It All

    Friends in the audience, new and old. We met together upstairs at The Golden Notebook in Woodstock, New York. It was a warm autumn day outside, and everything had that sun-burnished appearance. In the middle was a sign that beckoned: come inside, come inside, come inside. Afterwards I wondered just what it was that made…

  • The Golden Notebook in Golden Fall

    Tomorrow will be a perfect day to take in the leaves upstate as they color up. If so much natural beauty wears thin and if you happen to be near Woodstock, New York, consider coming to The Golden Notebook for my 2:00 talk on The Orphanmaster. Signing copies, too. I know there are excellent lattes…

  • Truck Garden

    125th and Broadway, 9pm on a Tuesday night. The hush of dusk is just behind us as we pull up to a red light at the intersection. To our right, a dilapidated box truck covered with hieroglyphics of graffiti. Dirty and timeworn. The back is open, but nothing is being loaded or unloaded. Inside, we…

  • Going to the Chapel

    I needed to get a new author photo and I wanted to pose against the neat red bricks of St. Paul’s Chapel on the campus of Columbia University. It was not difficult to set up, since Maud was the photographer and this is where she went to school. When I.N. Phelps Stokes designed St. Pauls,…

  • A Victorian Evening

    There were not enough chairs. Victorian Society guests who came in late had to huddle by the door rather than join the hundred or so in the room. I was only a little distracted by all those wide eyes in the audience, drinking in the images on the screen behind me, so entranced were they…