Just ended — American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which spanned the 1890s, with sporty Gibson girls taking style cues from Europe, through the 1930s, with screen sirens emerging as the western emblem of beauty.
According to Andrew Bolton, who curated the Metropolitan’s show with selections from the Brooklyn Museum’s costume collection, the exhibition represented more than a sartorial revolution from corsets to kimonos. As NPR summed it up in an interview with Bolton that aired last week, it depicted an evolution in attitude. “By 1940, she (the American woman) had come to represent something that would intrigue the world from then on — a physically and sexually liberated, confident human being.”
American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, May 5–August 15, 2010
Images from the American Woman installation on flicker
NPR: The Feminine Mystique, Expressed in Silks and Satins
High Style: Masterworks from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Jan Reeder
My family rules when it comes to sending care packages stuffed full of treats. Toll House bars. Walnut-studded brownies caked with chocolate frosting. Kitchen sink cookies, laden with white, milk and semi-sweet chocolate chips and laced with coconut. Or cooky bon bons, with pastel icing and a cherry or chocolate center.
For my last birthday, two of my nieces sent a quartet of enormous, moist, decadent chocolate chip cupcakes smothered in buttercream frosting, overnighted in Tupperware and surrounded by ice packs. Amazing. There’s nothing like getting luscious treats in the mail.
If you don’t happen to be a member of my family, Godiva has a plan for delivering love, or an endearing, flavorful facsimile, six times a year.
Month 1: Chocolate Ganache Layer Cake, an exuberance of Belgian milk chocolate, dark cocoa, clouds of chocolate ganache and chocolate cream frosting. They say it serves 13.
Month 2: Chocolate Chunk Brownies.
Month 3: Chocolate Cupcakes with a surprise center of Godiva chocolate ganache.
Month 4: Biscuit Gift Box. Thirty-six delicious reasons to banish those little huckster Girl Scouts.
Month 5: Chocolate Macaroons. OMG.
Month 6: More Chocolate Chunk Brownies.
In the fall, look for Godiva’s Belgian chocolate flourless cake and a dessert truffle collection that features tiramisu, cheesecake, carrot cake, lava cake, red velvet and strawberry tarte truffles. Also: chocolate-dipped madeleines.
Or if you’re the hands-on type, try the Mousse Cup Dessert Kit. Yum.
The letter T: the most commonly used consonant in the English language.
According to Yoga Nation, Marilyn Monroe was reported to have taken up yoga to “improve her legs.”
