Anglo-feeling

Lately I've been obsessing about across the pond. At work at the museum, we must get three families a week who are on vacation from London and Manchester. I've become very good at figuring out where they're from based on their accents. I can tell apart Birmingham, London, Manchester and Leeds! Wohoo!

Best Shows: Absolutely Fabulous (above), QI,  The Graham Norton Show and Doctor Who .

Royally Yours...

      You really cannot go wrong with Princess Diana. It makes me sad to think how much she would love to be around to see Prince William's wedding next week to Kate. I remember watching her funeral on television as a child. My mother was watching it on television, and I remember seeing the procession go by. 

She was a wonderful person and we were lucky to have her in the world for the short time that we did. 

Royally Yours...

In honor of the Royal Wedding coming up very soon, I thought I would start posting pictures of my favorite Princesses and Royals. Naturally, I thought the first should be the lovely Grace Kelly of Monaco. She went from an American film actress to Princess of a French-speaking Principality. Right out of a movie you would have expected her to star in. 

Pearls, Politics, and Power.

When I went to the Smithsonian in DC at the age of 14, I loved seeing Jackie Kennedy's three strand pearls right there in front of me. Years later, I read a book by the first woman Governor of Vermont, Madeline Kunin. "Pearls, Politics, and Power" was a wonderful study of women in politics, and I told Gov. Kunin that when I got to meet her when I was 17. 

Dapper Men

Mr Hudson/Complex Magazine

Mr Hudson in The Daily Mail

As a young lady surrounded by men at times who don't usually think too much about their appearance, discovering some photos of British singer Mr Hudson made me smile. Apparently, he went to Oxford and he is approved musically by Kanye West, and was featured on Jay Z's song "Young Forever".  That, and I love the music that he did on his own, and with his backing band, The Library. 

Smart-looking ladies.

I was worried last year when I found out my eyes were not as perfect as they should have been. I'm near-sighted and it was getting more and more difficult to see anything far away.
My mother used to talk about her pink cat-eye glasses. I love the pictures of her wearing them, but she always recalled how she was made fun of for them.
So, I got some thick-framed dark purple glasses by Burberry and have loved them ever since. And I added some pictures of some beauties looking smart. Marilyn played the dumb blonde, but most people didn't know that she was actually quite intelligent. A voracious reader who kept in correspondence with many of her favorite writers.

The sort of old woman I want to be...

My mother is amazing. Her grandmother, my great-grandmother, recently died at the age of 98. She was a wonderful matriarch and someone my mother idolized. 

Whenever my mother walks around New York, she loves paying attention to the tiny old women. How they walk around, layered chicly in sweaters, scarves, with their giant leather bags and their hair done perfectly every day. My mother's main goal is to live to 100. A goal I completely support. She wants to have a long and exciting life. 

Ruth Gruber in Alaska.

So, when I told her about Ruth Gruber, she was amazed. Gruber, who is around the age of 100, was the youngest person in the world to receive their doctorate at the age of 20. She became a journalist, becoming a witness to major world events, including WWII. At one point sitting VERY close to Adolf Hitler at a rally when she lied and said she was a German citizen when she was really a Jewish-American woman. She's tough, intelligent, graceful, glamourous and she's still living her life her own way. There is a documentary about her life coming out, and I am going to see it at my first chance. 

She's definitely the kind of old woman I want to be.