Waiting for Melanie on a side street

The children sat on my bed as I got dressed giving me a thumbs up or down for each outfit that I tried on. I was going with Melanie to a party that was being held for the Nantucket Comedy Festival and afterward we had been invited to see the show, “Don’t Tell Jerry Lewis” Funny Women, and it was imperative that I get the outfit right.

Melanie, of course, was dressed beautifully and we carefully made our way over the cobblestone roads in our stilettos to the party for the comedians held in one of those quintessential Nantucket buildings with a wrap around porch meant for languid evenings spent sipping cocktails while watching the people stroll by with dangling charms of lightship baskets and island emblems hanging from their necks and wrists and prints of whales and lobsters embroidered into the fabric of their clothes.

On Nantucket the word preppy gets inherited and generations of families dress in Lilly Pulitzer. It is the old world families who I love to observe the most as they drive their ancient cars around town to pick up their sugar snap peas and fresh cut flowers from the local vegetable stand and freshly caught fish from their favorite fish market.

Let me just tell you that no matter how beautiful and rich the people are in Aspen, Nantucket raises the bar on old world elegance and always where there is wealth there are long legged beauties holding the hands of men who seem to have been born with a Cuban cigar in their mouth and a yacht to play on.

I know you will have a hard time believing this but I can be very shy in social settings and in preparation for the BlogHer ’10 Conference, I am working on breaking out of my box. I have found that my camera is my best friend in these situations inducing curiosity and smiles from others. The only thing I have to be wary of are the other photographers who feel threatened by the new kid on the block but as soon as they see my Is Dis Normal card they smile and initiate me into their private club.

And who wouldn’t want to be part of Nathan’s club, shown above with Melanie. There is nothing wrong with a handsome photographer who dresses impeccably and then adds yellow hightops to the mix to make him even more appealing (his wife is just as beautiful as he is FYI).

As I worked the party I was thankful that for every lull in conversation there was somebody walking by with a deliciously cool drink on their tray and I, having abstained from the good life for far too long this past month, happily lightened their weight.

At the show our favorite comedians were Michele Balan and Robin Montague who stole the stage with their humorous observations about an island that seemed to be devoid of Jews or Blacks. “I’m keeping this secret to myself,” Robin said talking about the fully stocked guest houses that are in the back of the owners second homes. “I think I’ll hang out on their widows walk and wait for my whaler to come in,” she said to a very amused audience.

The comedians

After the show we visited 21 Federal Street’s “back bar” and mingled with Melanie’s friends and with men who felt dangerous and adventurous in a cocktail drinking, jet setting kind of way. I kept my distance which of course only made them more intrigued. I mean, I lived here during the summers and was an expert on the bar scene but that was back when I was in my twenties where the boys and the girls were all looking for the same thing, somebody to go four wheeling with and somebody to frolic with late night on the beach after a night out of dancing at 30 Acres, the Chicken Box or the muse. Anything more serious would send me running into the arms of somebody else. This scene was far more treacherous with life altering changes that could happen with one slip of the tongue, pun definitely intended, and I was way in over my head.

I sidled up to the bar to get some help from my friend Don Jullio and a man with a thick Boston accent was removing the white napkin he had wrapped around his neck to fool the bouncer into thinking that he had a collared shirt on.  “Can I get you anything from the “Ba”?” he asked me. I politely refused his offer only to find on my other side a shark who  slowly swam in when I wasn’t looking. “Hellloooo,” he said grinning at me before slowly sipping his Espresso Martini. When he found out that I was a Massachusetts girl gone Colorado he tried to convince me that he also had a quiet side, during the day, where he hung out on his farm with his horses. I blatantly flashed my ring around as I spoke and kindly asked him to remove his hand from my posterior. “You’re married but that’s okay because I’m married to,” he smoothly said and I replied by saying, “Yes, but the difference is that I am happily married,” and with that he gave me his puppy dog look and waved a wad of cash to the bartender as if that might change my constitution. I turned my back and he slipped back into the water to attack some other unsuspecting victim.

That night I text messaged Wade before I fell asleep and said, “I’m home. No jail. I’m so glad that you are my husband.” He had sent me a message earlier telling me to stay out of jail for he knows that drinking often makes me feisty.

The next morning I went on a speed walk with all of my new single girlfriends and I listened with fascination as they spoke of a fellow islander who set up her ninety year old husband to capture him in an act of infidelity so that she could get the prenuptial annulled. I guess that’s one way to get rich.

Nantucket is rich, of this we are certain, and I am having a grand ole time tapping into the scenes behind the facade but when Wade called me the next morning to check in I told him that I was the luckiest girl alive to have a man like him and I slept the day away to recover from my one night out on the town. As I slept I dreamed of playing games of cat and mouse and I woke up so thankful that I was no longer in that single world.

Plum TV interviews one of the comedians, Cory Kahaney

Melanie helps me sneak a photo of the comedian Lewis Black

Susan and Robert from 21 Federal with Melanie

Party Girl

“Island Cowboy Boot Girl,” a pair to match every outfit.

Photos by Ghinson

“Wake up,” I said to the boys on the day of the Nantucket Ozone Classic, a surf competition that was founded in honor of the late David “Ozone” Ozias who died in June of 2001 at the young age of thirty. David seems to have been one of those humble guys who was loved by many and who may have shied away from having a surf competition named after him.

I was in a hurry to get to the beach and be part of the true Nantucket scene with oiled up teens intently watching the surf and cheering in the 120 surfing competitors.

Divisions were divided up based on age, sex and board style and surfers were given a 15 minute block of time to surf and were judged by a panel of local experts.

The swell was the best they had seen in three years, albeit somewhat small, but they were tricky and the surfers had to be selective on what waves to choose to earn high scores.

Below are my photos…oh how I wish I had a longer lens.

The Lifeguards in action running to save somebody from the riptide

Melanie-Mouse

Michele dragging her son Devon for a picture

As I started to round the corner into the kitchen I heard my two sisters talking to each other on the phone, “You should have seen her last night. She went crazy binging on lettuce.” “ha, ha, ha, ha…,” I said jumping out from the shadows. “Very funny.”

You see, I may have painted a rosy picture in my previous post but the reality is that I am with my family and we all know that with family comes tears, judgment and irritation along with the love and the peeing in your pants with laughter.

My family finds it difficult to be patient with me when I obsess about anything, which at the moment happens to be my Nutritional Cleansing Program, and they most definitely want to stick their fingers down their throats if they happen to witness me jumping up and down in front of the mirror because my large breasts seem to be disappearing. I wouldn’t even think of saying to them, “I think I have the breasts I have always wanted, just a handful and nothing more,” especially if Wade is in earshot.

These glories are all mine to try my best to keep to myself lest I nauseate any of my other family members by appearing too vain or eager to lose weight or narcissistic.

All in all, I will say that the first ten days of the program were a cinch for me when on my home turf but in the ten days that I have been in Nantucket the challenge has become far greater and I am surprised and proud of myself for not falling too far off the wayside to indulge on what I have always loved the most about Nantucket, the family dinners with the  good conversation sparked by glasses of chilled white wine and accompanied by bread fresh off the racks at the bakery, Steamers dripping with melted butter, tomatoes from Bartlett Farm that taste like heaven when put together with cucumbers, goat cheese, basil and my mother’s famous Balsamic salad dressing and succulent corn on the cob topped off with the plumpest blueberries, raspberries and peaches, I’m drooling all over my keyboard just writing about it.

The reality is that where I miss the concept of depriving myself of eating or drinking whatever I want, whenever I want the frustration dissipates as soon as I put my loose fitting clothes on and I feel total elation rush through my body. You know that feeling? The feeling you get before holidays or before you are going on a getaway weekend with your husband or for me the feeling that something good is about to happen that I have always felt right before Halloween. Come to think of it, Halloween is the day that I met my husband so maybe I always knew somehow…anyway not to go off on a tangent or anything but I am loving that feeling of pure, essential happiness that I am doing something really good for myself, regardless of the obstacles.

It is as if I am metamorphosing into a rejuvenated and hopefully more refined version of what I was before and I like it. Now people are warning me to not get too thin, as if that would ever happen to me who can’t seem to make it through two entire days of cleansing without sabotaging myself at 9pm with chilled white wine to finish it off with a bang.

After day fourteen I was bored with it all, bored with the attention to myself, bored with explaining to other’s why I wasn’t eating and bored with not being able to eat the fruits of nature while on an island that I used to associate with hedonism in my teens. And so I did what I always do, I rebelled by going out to dinner with my family and having two glasses of white wine and half a dozen oysters on the half shell, and I felt marvelous, maybe a little too marvelous. My sisters and I perused the shops afterward and found a sweet Bulgarian girl who I unloaded my philosophy of life on, “You are young and beautiful and you seem so adventurous. The world is your oyster, go explore it,” and I saw her eyes widen with Shakespeare’s famous quote from his play “The Merry Wives of Windsor”. “I’m going to write that down in my journal and never forget it,” she said as I floated away on the cloud that I was on.

The next day I returned to the program and was none the worse for it and today I will have Michele take pictures of me and again in ten days when my thirty days will be over. Hopefully, I will have attained my goals before jetting off to New York City for the BlogHer ’10 Conference, which in itself is going to be a whole lotta fun to write about.

Eat ya later!