Celebration Traveler

12/17/2023

An other-worldly illuminated garden sprinkled with fairy dust. But as a docent warned us full of prickly succulents.

10/24/2022

Chef Eric Ngo teaches at the prestigious Ferrandi Culinary school and also teaches ordinary folks the secrets of French Gastronomy. I joined three other women at the Galeries Lafayette Maison kitchen to make Canard Parmentier. Taking it a step at a time, I filled a high-edged stainless steel ring with shredded duck and topped it with a puree of the season’s fresh pumpkin. We prepared the salad but let Eric slice radishes on the sharp mandoline. Eating our completed masterpieces in the adjoining dining room was pure pleasure. I loved the added crunch of chestnuts in the pumpkin puree. During lunch I found out where to go for the best croissants. At La Maison d’Isabelle, croissants are made on-site morning and afternoon because these beauties lose their flakiness after four hours. The other serious subject was which chocolatier outranks the rest in Paris. Eric’s eyes drifted away, remembering the dark chocolate with lime and basil from Patrick Roger’s shop. He said for an intoxicating sensory experience go to Chocolat Alain Ducasse and watch the manufacturing process.

07/04/2021

Enjoying an old fashion fourth of July in the Eastern Sierra.  Happy Fourth everyone!

12/03/2020

12/03/2020

Filoli launched the holiday season with Luminous Nights. Children danced in the lights and their parents joined in. Wonder and joy returned to the faces around me. More cheer at the woodland terrace sitting at a fire pit with a glass of mulled wine. Merry and bright. --Donna
https://youtu.be/vn_6M5lTRT8

09/11/2020

“My friend the sun is lost.” My three-year-old granddaughter is heartbroken, her mother tells me.

02/11/2020

Hemingway told young writers to, “Write clear and hard about what hurts.” Cheryl Strayed ran with that advice as Dear Sugar, an online column that garnered legions of followers.

You can see for yourself what the stir is about by reading the compilation, Tiny, Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar (2012), among the decade’s 100 most important books. Better yet, see the performance now playing at San Francisco Playhouse.

Three actors portray the elation, restlessness, despair of the troubled souls who sent in letters. They confess guilt over infidelity, admit to destructive desires or unending grief.

One letter writer, signing as Living Dead Dad, lost his only child when a drunk driver crashed at full speed into his son’s bike.

“The dear boy I loved more than life itself,” he writes, “was dead before the paramedics even got to him.”

“Suicide has occurred to me.”

He goes on, telling Sugar, “your big heart moves me. No matter what you’re writing about...your words feel sacred to me. They hold me up.”

Sugar responds by sharing the painful parts of her life: promiscuous behavior after her mother’s death; dashed hopes of a connection with her father; her four-year-old daughter wearing a red dress, bought at a garage sale for $1 by a grandmother she’ll never know.

Discomfort swept through the audience as one or more of these exchanges hit close to home.

In the lobby, I chatted with a man who said his face was wet with tears over the grief of losing his mother as a teenager, which gripped him as if it happened yesterday.

After Cheryl Strayed revealed her identity as Sugar, Living Dead Dad approached her at a public event, alive and grateful.

“I’ve met all the letter writers over the years.” Strayed greeted us with a beautiful smile after the opening night performance. She signed my copy of Tiny, Beautiful Things, writing “trust your heart,” as if in answer to some undisclosed pain.

To offset the ills of life, pay attention to tiny, beautiful things. This simple advice runs like a golden thread through the play, now being staged in several U.S. theaters. It runs at San Francisco Playhouse until March 7.
https://www.sfplayhouse.org/sfph/