I may be on the farm, but I still have the news from Seventh Avenue. Ah, the beauty of cell phones.

Standing in the lush garden on the farm, I get a call from Park Slope. My freelance blog reporter, Wendy, who gives me lots of stories, called to say that Cinemateque on Seventh Avenue above Union is going out of business and has been selling off all their inventory. It’s just about gone and then c’est tout. That’s all. The shop will be closed forever. The owners of Cinemateque own Black Pearl Restaurant on Union Street. Anyone know the status of that restuarant, an OTBKB fave.

Then Wendy confirmed that Soundtrack is closing. She said they too are selling off all their inventory. She had the impression that they are closing for good. I asked her to ask the owner to log onto OTBKB and tell the real story. WE WANT TO KNOW.

I asked Wendy what is going on. She said rising rents, of course, rising rents. Yeesh, will there only be real estate office on  Seventh Avenue? Come on now.

Is it iTunes and Netflix that threatened the viability of these businesses? Good chance of it. That combined with crazy rents…

While Wendy and I were talking he saw Mrs. Kravitz on the Street. She handed the phone to her and we talked for a minute or two.

Talk about connected. Standing by the pool in California talking to friends in front of Tarzian.
Funny.

Yup. The flower girl at our wedding (our niece) turned 22 yesterday. And she’s a gorgeous, accomplished, and talented young woman. Interestingly, she has the same birthday as Ducky (my sister’s daughter).

Our flower girl just graduated from college and she’s gonna be a marine biologist; we always knew whatever she did, she’d be a success. She was the most adorable four-year-old on our wedding day in July 1989.

And she took her job very seriously. The woman who did the flowers gave her a white basket full of white rose petals and told her to throw the petals up in the air with abandon. She even demonstrated.

So our flower girl walked down the aisle (while my opera singer friend sang Schumann accompanied by her pianist husband) and threw the white petals up in the air with great enthusiasm just like the flower lady had told her to do.

The crowd went wild—they loved it. And maybe they laughed, too. But our little flower girl thought she’d done something wrong and she cried and cried. She cried through the ceremony until her mother felt compelled to take her out. I remember trying to listen to the rabbi while listening to our flower girl cry.

I think she still has that white basket with the dried white petals in it, a reminder of that big day.

She cheered up later and we have pictures of her dancing with relatives and having great fun during the reception. But there are a few shots of her sad, sad face during the ceremony. We tried to explain to her that the guests were laughing with her not at her. But that’s a hard concept to explain to a four year old (even a super, super smart one like she).

I wonder if she still has that basket in her childhood bedroom. I remember seeing it once on a high shelf; a poignant reminder of that July day in 1989.

But she’s on to bigger things now. Our flower girl is now an underwater scientist, who is  compassionate and smart with a great sense of humor and leadership qualities up the wazoo. We always knew whatever she did she’d be a great success. And we were right.

Rumor has it that Sound Track, a CD shop on Seventh Avenue that has been there for umpteen years, is moving to Fifth Avenue. Is this undeniable proof that iTunes is pushing CD shops out of business OR is Brooklyn real estate becoming untenable for anything other than Real Estate offices?

Probably a little of both. I am guessing that Sound Track’s landlord is raising the rent to something ridiculous. I’m under the impression that Sound Track does a good business. But no business can succeed with an enormous overhead.

Now there’s only one CD shop on Seventh Avenue: Music Matters up near 14th Street.

Fifth Avenue has a couple of CD shops. There’s Somethin’ Else, a used CD and clothing shop and another used CD and record store, the one that has boxes and boxes of old LPs on the street, on Fifth near 9th. Still, Fifth Avenue needs a conventional CD place where music lovers of all kinds can get what they need. And the great thing about Sound Track is that they can order just about anything (in any genre) and have it the next day. The shop is very happy to do that for their customers.

Sound Track has been in Park Slope FOREVER. At one time they had a shop on 9th Street and Sixth Avenue, as well as a shop in Brooklyn Heights. Their’s is clearly a business that is prepared to change with the times.

The good news is Sound Track will still be around. On Fifth. Long live the local record (CD) shop.

I’m a Vanity Fair junkie. And it’s not a guilty pleasure because it’s a damn good magazine. But its mix of high and low culture, of important reporting and silly gossip and celeb stuff could be construed as a guilty pleasure. I look at it this way: Some people like crappy television shows, others read bestsellers to relax. But me, when my Vanity Fair arrives it’s my time for myself. I take to my bedroom (with the VF) and read…

(This revelation of myself as a Vanity Fair junkie is yet something else for  people to make fun of about me. Groan).

So the new Vanity Fair is out — the one with Kate Moss on the cover posing as Marlene Dietrich (as Catherine the  II). And I wasn’t going to wait two weeks to fish it out of  our big pile of mail that’ll be waiting for us.

I wanted it. NOW. So I bought it at the mall (at the Barnes and Noble) and started reading it as soon as we got into the car.

And then I SQUEALED. Omigod: there’s an adorable picture of our neighbor, a hair stylist, on page 170. I gather that VF has a new fashion and style director and our friend and neighbor is obviously on the new team (for all I know he’s been there for years).

That means that at least three Vanity Fair contributors live between Third and Ninth Streets.

Our neighbor is pictured giving New York Red Bulls midfielder Seth Stammler a Mohawk hairdo.
For years I’ve seen him go off to work with a rolling suitcase.

I knew he was a hair stylist. But I never knew exactly what he does and for whom. I still don’t.

But I know this: there’s a picture of him on page 170 of Vanity Fair. And to a VF junkie like me, that’s big news. In last year’s September issue, my friend Marian Fontana had a long excerpt from her book and great photographs. Now this.

Stuff to like about the September Vanity Fair
–the photo of our neighbor
–Elissa Schappell’s Hot Type column (she’s a Park Slope literary luminary)
–Graydon Carter’s anti-war and anti-Bush Editor’s Letter
–Dominick Dunne’s column
–The 2006 InternationalBest-Dressed List
–Baghdadh is Burning
–The Enigma of Sofia Coppola (with pictures)
–Dubya vs. Dad: What really goes on between the Bush Presidents
–Confessions of a plastic surgery addict
–Great photography
–and more more more

Today we bought a goat to replace my mother-in-law’s (MIL) beloved goat, Flora, who died of old age a few months ago. MIL was ready to have a new goat in the fenced-in yard and shed that has hand-painted windows and big letters that say: Flora.

Time for a new goat. Maybe two.

Five of us went to a ranch where they sell goats. A thin older woman with short hair and bright orange framed sun glasses wearing a Treasure Island Las Vegas T-shirt showed us our new friend: a five-month-old black goat with white stripes on her ears. She doesn’t have horns.

Our new goat was all alone in a small pen: an effort to get her used to being separated from the other goats. We put a green collar on her and a leash. The woman told us to feed her hay, alfalfa, fruit, dried leaves. "Just about anything. She’s your new garbage dump," she said in the kindest possible way.

She also showed us the brown baby goat that will be MIL’s in October. "She’s too young to take home now because she’s being bottle fed," the goat seller told us. "And I didn’t think you wanted to bottle feed three times a day." MIL agreed

MIL gave the goat-seller a check for forty dollars and she wished us well. "Go home, put her in the back yard and let her lounge around with the family. It’ll be a good way for her to get to know all of you."

With some effort, Teen Spirit carried the squirmy new goat into MIL’s pick up and rode home with the goat on his lap. Apparently, the goat was calm as could be in Teen Spirit’s arms (see No Words_Daily Pix) during the ten minute drive.

Once home, we let the goat run loose in the backyard She didn’t seem  very uncomfortable with the idea and looked kind of sad. Then she bolted and ran out of the backyard past the swimming pool over by the driveway. "Don’t let her run into the road," Hepcat screamed. "Or fall into the swimming pool," I added.

Everyone ran after her; she was still wearing a leash. It was comic scene; something out of a silent movie. Teen Spirit finally grabbed her leash and carried her to her spacious pen.

"Why don’t you feed her some roses. Goats love roses," MIL told OSFO, who found one of MIL’s big red rose and offered it to the goat. No go. Apparently, the goat hasn’t developed a taste for roses yet. She did take a few nibbles of the dried grass and hay that are in her pen.

Then she went into her pen and whined a bit. Watching her, we tried to come up with a name. I was thinking French authors like Colette or Simone. OSFO liked Luna. Teen Spirit said, "How about black Maria?" We can call her Mariah for short." It took a minute for him to remember what a black Maria was. "It’s a van that carries prisoners or something," he said finally. "I looked it up on Wikipedia once."

MIL liked the name. "Isn’t there a song called, "They Call the Wind Mariah. It’s from Paint Your Wagon I think,"

So the goat’s got a name. Mariah. As I write this I hear her whining like a baby off in the distance; it’s her first night in a new pen. She’s never been away from home before.

Don’t worry, Mariah. You’re going to like your new home a lot. MIL will take good very care of you here.

So we’re sitting in the big living room of Hepcat’s mother’s lovely house and he shouts out, "You won’t believe what we’re missing in Brooklyn?"

We couldn’t be in a nicer spot: voluptous rose bushes outside the stained glass bay window, a pool nearby, the bluest sky imaginable, mountains in the distance…

So HC, what are we missing in Brooklyn?

The appearance of the Corpse Plant, a plant that hasn’t bloomed in 70 years. It’s been locked away in a  special room at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens for years. But now, they’ve cleared out the Bonsai room for the Corpse Plant and its taking visitors.

And it’s not called a Corpse Plant for nothing. Supposedly it smells like rotten meat or worse. It’s about five feet tall and it resembles a squash plant. Here’s what the New York Times had to say about the last time a Corpse Plant bloomed:

In 1937 and again in 1939, thousands turned out to watch bloomings
in the Bronx. According to The New York Times, the odor “almost downed”
newspaper reporters, and was described by an assistant curator at the
botanical garden there as “a cross between ammonia fumes and hydrogen
sulphide, suggestive of spoiled meat or rotting fish.” It became the
official flower of the Bronx, until 2000, and it seems the bizarre
specimen — why the heck does a flower smell like bad meat? — can still
draw a crowd. More than 10,000 people visited a blooming corpse flower
at the University of Connecticut in Storrs in 2004.

The BBG expects lots of visitors for this stinky plant. And HC is soooooooo sad he’s going to miss it.

No kidding.

My mother-in-law (MIL) is known in these parts as a cat lover. People frequently call to ask if she wants to take in a stray. She has a hard time saying ‘no.’ Recently, two white kittens showed up in her driveway. She has no idea where they came from but suspects someone just left them there.

A few weeks ago, one of my MIL’s cats was killed by a car. Pinklepurr was a very special cat; smart like no other cat she’s ever known. She mourned the loss of Pinklepurr and was thinking about getting another cat from the pound.

Then these white kittens showed up; they were very hungry and dirty. They lapped up the homemade chicken puree she makes every day for her cats. One of the kittens, the female, has a blue eye and a brown eye. The other has a large scratch on its neck. One is fluffy, one is short haired. They were very much in need of tender loving care when they got here.

They are a very active pair and love to climb trees and be around people. Since our arrival, OSFO and Teen Spirit have grown very fond of this brother and sister pair.

So there’s only one problem: we haven’t figured out what we want to name them. We want to give them the name of a famous duo or a pair of items that belong together. There’s already a Fred and Ginger here. Here’s what’s been suggested so far: Peanut Butter and Jelly, Butch Cassidy and Sundance, Frida and Diego, Queer Eye and The Straight Guy. But no name yet.

Can you help us name these adorable white kittens?