Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
Mayor Doesn’t Always Live by His Health Rules
By MICHAEL BARBARO
HE dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot.
And his snack of choice? Cheez-Its.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has become New York City’s nutritional nag, banning the use of trans fats, forcing chain restaurants to post calorie counts and exhorting diners to consume less salt. Now he is at it again, directing his wrath at sugary drinks in a new series of arresting advertisements that ask subway riders: “Are you pouring on the pounds?”
But an examination of what enters the mayoral mouth reveals that Mr. Bloomberg is an omnivore with his own glaring indulgences, many of them at odds with his own policies. And he struggles mightily to restrain his appetite.
As a billionaire in one of the dining capitals of the world, he can eat anything he wants. But he is obsessed with his weight — so much so that the sight of an unflattering photo of himself can trigger weeks of intense dieting and crankiness, according to friends and aides.
His food issues have become New York City’s. Although he has described his battle against unhealthy foods as common-sense public policy that will shed pounds (and save lives), many of his targets overlap with his own cravings.
“I like a Big Mac like everybody else,” he confessed the other day, explaining the city’s warts-and-all approach to fast food. “I just want to know how many calories are in it.”
Under his watch, the city has declared sodium an enemy, asking restaurants and food manufacturers to voluntarily cut the salt in their dishes by 20 percent or more, and encouraging diners to “shake the habit” by asking waiters for food without added salt.
But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.
Not even pizza is spared a coat of sodium. When the mayor sat down to eat a slice at Denino’s Pizzeria Tavern on Staten Island recently, this reporter spotted him applying six dashes of salt to it.
A health tip sheet from the mayor’s office tells New Yorkers to “drink smart” by choosing water, even though Mr. Bloomberg has a three- to four-cup-a-day coffee habit.
“I can count on two hands the number of times I have seen him drink water,” said one dining companion, who spoke on condition of anonymity, so as not to offend the mayor (who likes his coffee weak, and with milk).
Friends of the mayor said that, like most New Yorkers overwhelmed with food choices, he swings between two dietary poles: indulgence and abstemiousness. After a dinner loaded with fat and salt, they said, he will consume a grapefruit for breakfast, then a bowl of soup for lunch. He keeps a running calorie count in his head, and rarely exceeds 2,000 a day, they said.
Mr. Bloomberg declined to be interviewed for this article, and his aides advised at least one Manhattan restaurant owner not to speak about what’s on the mayor’s plate.
But the mayor’s press secretary, Stu Loeser, said Mr. Bloomberg “works as hard as any New Yorker at keeping off extra pounds, and he has trimmed himself down to his college weight, which isn’t at all easy for a 67-year-old.” The mayor, he said “has days when he eats more than he should.” But, he added, “unlike most of us, he has the discipline to even it out the next day.”
As for his apparent policy of salt as I say, not as I do? Friends note that the mayor smoked cigarettes for years before he banned the practice in restaurants across the city, and besides, it’s the salt in processed foods, not in shakers, that poses the greatest health risk.
Many public health officials applaud the mayor’s dietary crusades, and even pals who object to them express grudging respect for his convictions. The writer Nora Ephron, who has shared a burger with the mayor at JG Melon (“he relished it,” she said) hates the new calorie counts. “It takes the fun out of everything,” she said.
“But the mayor’s concerns,” she added, “are larger than mine.”
Food has always loomed large in Mr. Bloomberg’s life. He speaks fondly of his childhood dinner table in Medford, Mass. — which he would meticulously set himself — where the day’s news was digested alongside a steaming plate of baked chicken and vegetables. His mother was an uneager chef, who passed on a taste for basic fare.
“The food itself wasn’t that big of a deal,” he told one interviewer. “Peas were Del Monte out of a can, cooked in the sauce and the water that it came in.”
The city’s eater-in-chief dines out nearly every night of the week, deliberately popping up at restaurants across the five boroughs. And with his campaign for a third term in full swing, he eats out up to three times a day, as he solicits endorsements and meets voters.
A middle-class kid who became rich in midlife, he seems equally at ease with diner grub and haute cuisine.
In the span of a few days, he is known to eat dinner at Post House, off Madison Avenue, where the beef Wellington costs $49, and the Scobee Grill, on Northern Boulevard in Queens, where the turkey wrap, with a side, is $10.
“He orders what he wants to eat, not what he thinks he is supposed to,” said Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group owns the Union Square Cafe, Eleven Madison Park and Gramercy Tavern.
At Union Square Cafe, Mr. Bloomberg bypasses crispy duck confit in favor of safer staples, like salmon, chicken and pasta. “If we had meatloaf on the menu, I’m sure he would order that,” Mr. Meyer said. “He is not a fancy eater.”
Several weeks ago, when the mayor and a group of friends stopped at Angelina’s, an Italian restaurant on Staten Island, the chef whipped up an off-the-menu feast of bronzini, duck and steak. But Mr. Bloomberg ordered a simple tomato salad and shrimp cocktail ($15), telling the staff he was watching his waistline. (He eventually snuck a taste of the main courses.)
His tastes may be diverse, but he relishes the clubby atmosphere of several Manhattan restaurants. He is a regular at Nippon, a high-end Japanese restaurant in Midtown, where he asks for the beef negimayaki ($29), thin slices of broiled rib-eye steak, rolled with scallions in a teriyaki sauce.
At Quatorze Bis, a cozy French bistro on East 79th Street, the staff has memorized his order: half chicken with herbs, served with fries ($27). “It’s his favorite dish,” said an owner, Mark DiGiulio.
At Shun Lee Palace, where the plates are flecked with gold leaf, the mayor favors Sichuan shrimp ($23). “He likes very spicy Chinese food,” said the owner Michael Tong.
When he does not like the food, he rarely holds back. After dining at Blue Smoke, Mr. Meyer’s barbecue restaurant on East 27th Street, the mayor told Mr. Meyer, “I just don’t like it.”
Mr. Meyer tried inviting him back, but the mayor would not budge. “It never feels good when somebody tells you they don’t like your restaurant, but it’s nice when a politician does not pander,” he said, adding that the mayor has heaped praise on Union Square Cafe.
His obsession with food extends to its preparation. Unsatisfied with the performance of standard toasters, he asked the waiters at a favorite diner to find the industrial machine that produced his order of perfectly burnt bread. Then he bought a few and placed one of the units near his City Hall desk.
For New York City’s richest man, his table manners are surprisingly relaxed: he is known to grab food off the plates of aides and, occasionally, even strangers. (“Delicious,” he declared recently, after swiping a piece of fried calamari from an unsuspecting diner in Staten Island.)
Still, he hates to be fussed over, no matter how much the meal costs. One dinner companion recalled that after Mr. Bloomberg asked for the best bottle of red wine in the house, the restaurant’s manager wanted to describe the wine to the mayor, have him taste it and smell the cork.
The mayor politely interrupted. “Is this your best bottle?” he asked. The manager said yes. “O.K., then pour it,” he said.
Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
It’s August. They’re Coming for You
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
It’s August. They’re Coming for You.
By JOYCE WADLER
LIKE many hosts who give too much, Darlene Dennis, 73, traces her problems back a long way — in this case, 40 years, when she was hosting a good friend’s mother for a week. The woman’s elderly Chihuahua urinated nightly on the guest bed, and Ms. Dennis, at a loss for what to do, did nothing and held her breath, particularly when it came time to embrace the guest.
Later in life, after Ms. Dennis had become a teacher of English as a second language and settled in the San Diego area, there were additional houseguest outrages. One of the worst involved an old student and her husband, a former United States Naval officer, who were living in Brazil and called — just as Ms. Dennis was preparing to go on a three-week vacation in the Far East — to say they were moving back to San Diego and would like to stay in her home until they found an apartment.
Ms. Dennis said what all hosts who give too much say in such a situation: “Sure.”
The problems began as soon as Ms. Dennis returned. The husband, picking her up at the airport, did not have enough money to get out of the parking lot. On the way home, he complained that she had left no food in the house. She also found that her guests had brought along their pets, a caged parrot and six free-range tortoises.
“They were munching the flowers in my garden — to be fair, they also ate the weeds,” Ms. Dennis said, showing yet another sign of an oppressed host: hyper-sensitivity to another person’s point of view.
She also had a particularly vivid memory of the husband in the bathroom screaming, “I need toilet paper!”
“It took me two or three weeks to get these people out of the house,” Ms. Dennis said. “I finally lent them $200 to get an apartment. When I told them they had to leave, she went into hysterics.”
The fact that Ms. Dennis permitted such behavior for decades prompted her to write “Host or Hostage? A Guide for Surviving House Guests,” a battle plan for doormat hosts, self-published this year.
“I want to change the world for hosts,” she said. “I want them to establish boundaries and stop playing the role of victim.”
It is August, high houseguest season. Many people are treasuring wonderful guests — old friends who arrive with thoughtful gifts and help with the cooking and cleanup. But there are others who expect the host to be driver, cook, entertainer and maid, and who stay for weeks, even months.
Harrowing houseguests come in many varieties, from Clueless (often in their early 20’s) to Aggressively Exploitive, but they share one trait: an uncanny ability to find hosts willing to place the guest’s needs before their own — people who become, as Ms. Dennis put it, hostages in their own homes. Two such people interviewed for this article did so in whispers, because of guests they were unable to evict.
Sure, there are some who have the presence of mind to say to guests like these, “Terribly sorry, we’ve made plans, but once you know where you are staying tell us, and we’ll have lunch.” Or those who, faced with a guest gone rogue, can say: “Marvin, you’re an obnoxious jerk. I plain can’t stand you. Stay someplace else.” (This works only when the guest is named Marvin.)
For everyone else, some spine-stiffening stories.
The First Step: Admit You Have a Problem
A public relations executive, who begged to remain anonymous, lives in Hawaii with her husband and has always had homes on the beach. This is the equivalent of having a doctoral degree in houseguests.
“The thing about a beach house is that everybody shows up, including friends of friends that you haven’t seen for a long time,” she said. “I had a woman from Australia, a friend of a friend. What I remember was that her great house present was used paper coasters. Another person who showed up was Robert Blake. I didn’t even know until I found a picture he had signed.”
“Bumming a bed is an art form,” the executive continued. “Someone says, ‘I’m coming, may I stay?’ When they arrive and say, ‘Will you pick up me up?’ it becomes apparent they don’t have a car and it also means all meals will be at home and you’re going to cook. You drive them around and hint, ‘We need some gas,’ and they watch you pay for the gas.”
Any other horror stories?
“I once paid $130 to get rid of a guest” whose next destination was two hours away, she said. “She arrived, stayed the weekend and said to me, ‘Well, you can’t drive that far and I’m not taking a bus, so are you paying for my taxi?’ I put it on my credit card. My husband doesn’t know.”
Happily, Ms. Beach House was able to take that essential first step: she acknowledged that she was a host who gave too much. These days, the only people who stay at her house are the ones she invites.
The Young Have Been Known to Devour Their Hosts
Lori Seegers, 54, is a successful lawyer with a large New York City apartment — an 1,800-square-foot three-bedroom loft with an open floor plan. Two years ago, when her son, then 20, mentioned that a college friend who had recently graduated was going to stay for a few weeks while she looked for a job, Ms. Seegers thought that would be fine. She traveled often, sometimes staying at her small apartment in Chicago, and her son’s friend, a young woman, would be company for him. Also, it was a tough economy and Ms. Seegers was happy that she was in a position to help a young person starting out.
But the job search didn’t go as planned. Months passed.
“She gets a job that won’t really support moving, and the two of them are good company to one another,” Ms. Seegers said. “This poor girl has no money and doesn’t have the job of her dreams and is sad, and I said, ‘O.K., you can stay a few more weeks.’ ”
When her daughter came home from college, though, that would seem to have been the perfect opportunity to have told the guest to move on, Ms. Seegers is told.
“And shame on me, for at this point I should have said it.”
How long had it been?
“She’d been there from late October or November to May,” Ms. Seegers said. “But I thought, ‘She’s adorable, she’s small.’ Her joke is that she’s a mouse.”
The mouse ended up staying 17 months, sleeping on the couch when Ms. Seegers’s daughter came home during college breaks. Hints like “I really don’t like it when people are sleeping on the couch in the middle of the day” had no effect on her.
The breaking point came when Ms. Seegers’s daughter, moving back home from college for the summer, had nowhere to put her clothes because the mouse’s clothing was in her closet. When Ms. Seegers told her guest that she loved her dearly, but it was time to find her own place, the mouse reverted to what Ms. Seegers calls “severe teenage behavior,” anger and sulking. That has since been patched over, and the mouse remains a beloved family friend.
But the houseguest policy has changed.
“The rule is nobody stays more than one week,” Ms. Seegers said.
The Absolutely Foolproof Guest Test
Have coffee with a potential guest in a fancy bakery. If the guest snags five brownies from the sample tray, do not invite this person to stay in your home.
The Absolutely Foolproof Guest Test That Comes Too Late
One should be concerned about guests who arrive in a car-centric city like Orlando, Fla., or Los Angeles and ask you to pick them up at the airport. That means they are not renting a car. You will be the driver.
Joyce Spector, a New York City special effects designer, rented a vacation house in Winter Park, Fla., not far from Walt Disney World. A British couple, a chef and a filmmaker whom she and her husband knew and liked were taking a six-month vacation (a time period that should have been a red flag to the hosts) and asked if they might visit. Ms. Spector said, “Sure,” although she was a little surprised when they asked to be picked up at the airport.
“I was kind of waiting for them to reveal their plans to me, but they didn’t reveal their plans because they had no plans. They had no interest in renting a car, so here I was with these two people I formerly liked in my house, absolutely wrapped around my neck,” Ms. Spector said. “I had never discussed with them how long they were going to stay. I was thinking three to five days, a week max.”
Ms. Spector could do no work because they were sleeping in the extra room that was her office. And from what she could tell, they saw their visit as an open-ended stay that might go on ... actually, she couldn’t say. Forever? Eventually, she could take no more.
“Finally, I said to them in my most polite, delicate manner, ‘I think it’s time for you to think about leaving,’ ” Ms. Spector said. “Whereupon — this was so shocking to me — they started to pack their bags and said, ‘Take us to the motel around the corner.’ They took their suitcases out of the car before they even rented a room, and I have never seen, spoken or heard from them since.”
“They literally got out of the car, shut the door and walked away without a word,” she continued. “I never got a thank-you note, I never got a note of, ‘I’m sorry it ended that way.’ ”
This was how long ago?
“Ten years.”
Sorry, I Have To Get Off the Phone, Someone Is at the Door Giving Away Fascinating Religious Tracts
Judy Lewis, an owner of HudsonValleyWeddings.com, an online wedding planning resource, tells the story of a bride-to-be who was blindsided one day by a phone call from an out-of-town cousin.
“She proceeded to tell the bride that financial constraints meant that she would have to bring her three young children to the wedding,” Ms. Lewis wrote in an e-mail message. “Then she announced that the same economic downturn necessitated her staying at the bride’s home for a few days before, during and after the wedding. The cousin also said that since the bridal couple was going on a honeymoon immediately following the reception, she was sure the bride wouldn’t mind the family staying on when they went away.”
The bride, horrified, needed time to come up with an excuse, so she told the cousin she had to take a call. Then she e-mailed Ms. Lewis.
“I suggested that she tell the cousin that as much as she wanted them at the wedding, she simply could not put them up as houseguests,” Ms. Lewis continued. “I recommended that as an excuse, she say that there were many out-of-town guests who had requested lodging and she couldn’t say yes to one and no to another. As for staying at her home during the honeymoon, I suggested she say there were several maintenance things going on at the house which would eliminate the possibility of having guests: particularly fogging for pests, steam cleaning the carpet and painting.”
The tactic worked. Although the cousin still brought her children to the wedding.
Accept That Sometimes One Is Powerless Against One’s Guests
Houseguests come, houseguests go, but there are guests whose memory is forever fresh. Sally Billig, an 84-year-old retired psychologist now living in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Calif., recounts a story she told Ms. Dennis for her book.
“I was in my 20’s,” Ms. Billig said. “We were living in Natick, Mass. My friends gave me a call and said they were going to be in the area, probably for a conference, and could they stay with us? I said we would be away, I was terribly sorry, but I did not say they could stay at the house.”
Ms. Billig and her husband went on vacation, and when they returned, the house was exactly as they had left it. Then came a knock on the door from a neighbor, who told them that while they were away she had spotted two people — who turned out to be Ms. Billig’s old friends — climbing in the window.
“My neighbor asked them what they were doing. It was very clear they knew me,” Ms. Billig said. “I had no way of knowing when I came back that anything had gone on.”
What crazy behavior. What did these people do?
“He was a psychiatrist.”
The Obamas Have a Big Place, Too — Do You Ask Them to Let You Stay?
When a 37-year-old broker and freelance writer managed to buy a four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan several years ago, her mother warned her that everyone in the world would want to stay with her. This proved to be true, but Rachel Benjamin (her pen name, which she asked to use to avoid family tensions) was, for the most part, fine with it.
The problem turned out to be her relatives: specifically, a 21-year-old college student on her mother’s side of the family, who asked to stay during her six-week internship this summer, but arrived early and announced she would be staying three months. This cousin had made a few weekend visits — “Come to think of it, I only hear from her when she wants to stay,” Ms. Benjamin said. Her cousin contributed nothing to the household expenses, nor did she help with chores. Two and a half months into the stay, Ms. Benjamin was going crazy.
“I went to business school, so I am pulling out all my management skills,” she said. “I sat her down and said: ‘We have to renegotiate you staying here. You need to dust the floor, and when you make something smelly, you put it in a plastic bag and seal it and take it to the garbage.’ ”
There were family pressures as well.
“My mother also doesn’t want me to ruin her relationship with her brother by telling her to get out. My dad is like, ‘Get her out.’ My mother is like, ‘Ignore your father,’ ” Ms. Benjamin said. “My sister, who lives in California, said to me, ‘I don’t want you to ever do this again.’ ”
“But we put ourselves in our guest’s shoes,” she continued, “and remember what it was like when we were 20.”
Uh, oh — the dreaded habit of putting the guest’s concerns before your own. For all of Ms. Benjamin’s high-powered professional skills, she appears to be a host who gives too much.
A clinical history establishes this: Back in the days when Ms. Benjamin was living in a studio, the mother of one of her high school friends called to tell her that another daughter’s boyfriend needed a place to stay in New York for two days before heading home to Wales. Although the young man was a stranger, Ms. Benjamin agreed to let him stay with her. She was annoyed to discover, after he left, that he had run up a $30 cable porn bill.
Ms. Benjamin has agreed to host many other strangers over the years. Once, when she was talking to a Buddhist monk about why she had been lucky enough to get such a large apartment in New York City, he seemed to intuit that. “He said, ‘You’ve probably given shelter to many people,’ ” Ms. Benjamin said.
Then did he ask her if could stay there?
“That was another person he worked with, a Buddhist teacher,” she said. “A hotel would have been very, very expensive, so I had him come and stay at my house for three weeks.”
It’s August. They’re Coming for You.
By JOYCE WADLER
LIKE many hosts who give too much, Darlene Dennis, 73, traces her problems back a long way — in this case, 40 years, when she was hosting a good friend’s mother for a week. The woman’s elderly Chihuahua urinated nightly on the guest bed, and Ms. Dennis, at a loss for what to do, did nothing and held her breath, particularly when it came time to embrace the guest.
Later in life, after Ms. Dennis had become a teacher of English as a second language and settled in the San Diego area, there were additional houseguest outrages. One of the worst involved an old student and her husband, a former United States Naval officer, who were living in Brazil and called — just as Ms. Dennis was preparing to go on a three-week vacation in the Far East — to say they were moving back to San Diego and would like to stay in her home until they found an apartment.
Ms. Dennis said what all hosts who give too much say in such a situation: “Sure.”
The problems began as soon as Ms. Dennis returned. The husband, picking her up at the airport, did not have enough money to get out of the parking lot. On the way home, he complained that she had left no food in the house. She also found that her guests had brought along their pets, a caged parrot and six free-range tortoises.
“They were munching the flowers in my garden — to be fair, they also ate the weeds,” Ms. Dennis said, showing yet another sign of an oppressed host: hyper-sensitivity to another person’s point of view.
She also had a particularly vivid memory of the husband in the bathroom screaming, “I need toilet paper!”
“It took me two or three weeks to get these people out of the house,” Ms. Dennis said. “I finally lent them $200 to get an apartment. When I told them they had to leave, she went into hysterics.”
The fact that Ms. Dennis permitted such behavior for decades prompted her to write “Host or Hostage? A Guide for Surviving House Guests,” a battle plan for doormat hosts, self-published this year.
“I want to change the world for hosts,” she said. “I want them to establish boundaries and stop playing the role of victim.”
It is August, high houseguest season. Many people are treasuring wonderful guests — old friends who arrive with thoughtful gifts and help with the cooking and cleanup. But there are others who expect the host to be driver, cook, entertainer and maid, and who stay for weeks, even months.
Harrowing houseguests come in many varieties, from Clueless (often in their early 20’s) to Aggressively Exploitive, but they share one trait: an uncanny ability to find hosts willing to place the guest’s needs before their own — people who become, as Ms. Dennis put it, hostages in their own homes. Two such people interviewed for this article did so in whispers, because of guests they were unable to evict.
Sure, there are some who have the presence of mind to say to guests like these, “Terribly sorry, we’ve made plans, but once you know where you are staying tell us, and we’ll have lunch.” Or those who, faced with a guest gone rogue, can say: “Marvin, you’re an obnoxious jerk. I plain can’t stand you. Stay someplace else.” (This works only when the guest is named Marvin.)
For everyone else, some spine-stiffening stories.
The First Step: Admit You Have a Problem
A public relations executive, who begged to remain anonymous, lives in Hawaii with her husband and has always had homes on the beach. This is the equivalent of having a doctoral degree in houseguests.
“The thing about a beach house is that everybody shows up, including friends of friends that you haven’t seen for a long time,” she said. “I had a woman from Australia, a friend of a friend. What I remember was that her great house present was used paper coasters. Another person who showed up was Robert Blake. I didn’t even know until I found a picture he had signed.”
“Bumming a bed is an art form,” the executive continued. “Someone says, ‘I’m coming, may I stay?’ When they arrive and say, ‘Will you pick up me up?’ it becomes apparent they don’t have a car and it also means all meals will be at home and you’re going to cook. You drive them around and hint, ‘We need some gas,’ and they watch you pay for the gas.”
Any other horror stories?
“I once paid $130 to get rid of a guest” whose next destination was two hours away, she said. “She arrived, stayed the weekend and said to me, ‘Well, you can’t drive that far and I’m not taking a bus, so are you paying for my taxi?’ I put it on my credit card. My husband doesn’t know.”
Happily, Ms. Beach House was able to take that essential first step: she acknowledged that she was a host who gave too much. These days, the only people who stay at her house are the ones she invites.
The Young Have Been Known to Devour Their Hosts
Lori Seegers, 54, is a successful lawyer with a large New York City apartment — an 1,800-square-foot three-bedroom loft with an open floor plan. Two years ago, when her son, then 20, mentioned that a college friend who had recently graduated was going to stay for a few weeks while she looked for a job, Ms. Seegers thought that would be fine. She traveled often, sometimes staying at her small apartment in Chicago, and her son’s friend, a young woman, would be company for him. Also, it was a tough economy and Ms. Seegers was happy that she was in a position to help a young person starting out.
But the job search didn’t go as planned. Months passed.
“She gets a job that won’t really support moving, and the two of them are good company to one another,” Ms. Seegers said. “This poor girl has no money and doesn’t have the job of her dreams and is sad, and I said, ‘O.K., you can stay a few more weeks.’ ”
When her daughter came home from college, though, that would seem to have been the perfect opportunity to have told the guest to move on, Ms. Seegers is told.
“And shame on me, for at this point I should have said it.”
How long had it been?
“She’d been there from late October or November to May,” Ms. Seegers said. “But I thought, ‘She’s adorable, she’s small.’ Her joke is that she’s a mouse.”
The mouse ended up staying 17 months, sleeping on the couch when Ms. Seegers’s daughter came home during college breaks. Hints like “I really don’t like it when people are sleeping on the couch in the middle of the day” had no effect on her.
The breaking point came when Ms. Seegers’s daughter, moving back home from college for the summer, had nowhere to put her clothes because the mouse’s clothing was in her closet. When Ms. Seegers told her guest that she loved her dearly, but it was time to find her own place, the mouse reverted to what Ms. Seegers calls “severe teenage behavior,” anger and sulking. That has since been patched over, and the mouse remains a beloved family friend.
But the houseguest policy has changed.
“The rule is nobody stays more than one week,” Ms. Seegers said.
The Absolutely Foolproof Guest Test
Have coffee with a potential guest in a fancy bakery. If the guest snags five brownies from the sample tray, do not invite this person to stay in your home.
The Absolutely Foolproof Guest Test That Comes Too Late
One should be concerned about guests who arrive in a car-centric city like Orlando, Fla., or Los Angeles and ask you to pick them up at the airport. That means they are not renting a car. You will be the driver.
Joyce Spector, a New York City special effects designer, rented a vacation house in Winter Park, Fla., not far from Walt Disney World. A British couple, a chef and a filmmaker whom she and her husband knew and liked were taking a six-month vacation (a time period that should have been a red flag to the hosts) and asked if they might visit. Ms. Spector said, “Sure,” although she was a little surprised when they asked to be picked up at the airport.
“I was kind of waiting for them to reveal their plans to me, but they didn’t reveal their plans because they had no plans. They had no interest in renting a car, so here I was with these two people I formerly liked in my house, absolutely wrapped around my neck,” Ms. Spector said. “I had never discussed with them how long they were going to stay. I was thinking three to five days, a week max.”
Ms. Spector could do no work because they were sleeping in the extra room that was her office. And from what she could tell, they saw their visit as an open-ended stay that might go on ... actually, she couldn’t say. Forever? Eventually, she could take no more.
“Finally, I said to them in my most polite, delicate manner, ‘I think it’s time for you to think about leaving,’ ” Ms. Spector said. “Whereupon — this was so shocking to me — they started to pack their bags and said, ‘Take us to the motel around the corner.’ They took their suitcases out of the car before they even rented a room, and I have never seen, spoken or heard from them since.”
“They literally got out of the car, shut the door and walked away without a word,” she continued. “I never got a thank-you note, I never got a note of, ‘I’m sorry it ended that way.’ ”
This was how long ago?
“Ten years.”
Sorry, I Have To Get Off the Phone, Someone Is at the Door Giving Away Fascinating Religious Tracts
Judy Lewis, an owner of HudsonValleyWeddings.com, an online wedding planning resource, tells the story of a bride-to-be who was blindsided one day by a phone call from an out-of-town cousin.
“She proceeded to tell the bride that financial constraints meant that she would have to bring her three young children to the wedding,” Ms. Lewis wrote in an e-mail message. “Then she announced that the same economic downturn necessitated her staying at the bride’s home for a few days before, during and after the wedding. The cousin also said that since the bridal couple was going on a honeymoon immediately following the reception, she was sure the bride wouldn’t mind the family staying on when they went away.”
The bride, horrified, needed time to come up with an excuse, so she told the cousin she had to take a call. Then she e-mailed Ms. Lewis.
“I suggested that she tell the cousin that as much as she wanted them at the wedding, she simply could not put them up as houseguests,” Ms. Lewis continued. “I recommended that as an excuse, she say that there were many out-of-town guests who had requested lodging and she couldn’t say yes to one and no to another. As for staying at her home during the honeymoon, I suggested she say there were several maintenance things going on at the house which would eliminate the possibility of having guests: particularly fogging for pests, steam cleaning the carpet and painting.”
The tactic worked. Although the cousin still brought her children to the wedding.
Accept That Sometimes One Is Powerless Against One’s Guests
Houseguests come, houseguests go, but there are guests whose memory is forever fresh. Sally Billig, an 84-year-old retired psychologist now living in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Calif., recounts a story she told Ms. Dennis for her book.
“I was in my 20’s,” Ms. Billig said. “We were living in Natick, Mass. My friends gave me a call and said they were going to be in the area, probably for a conference, and could they stay with us? I said we would be away, I was terribly sorry, but I did not say they could stay at the house.”
Ms. Billig and her husband went on vacation, and when they returned, the house was exactly as they had left it. Then came a knock on the door from a neighbor, who told them that while they were away she had spotted two people — who turned out to be Ms. Billig’s old friends — climbing in the window.
“My neighbor asked them what they were doing. It was very clear they knew me,” Ms. Billig said. “I had no way of knowing when I came back that anything had gone on.”
What crazy behavior. What did these people do?
“He was a psychiatrist.”
The Obamas Have a Big Place, Too — Do You Ask Them to Let You Stay?
When a 37-year-old broker and freelance writer managed to buy a four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan several years ago, her mother warned her that everyone in the world would want to stay with her. This proved to be true, but Rachel Benjamin (her pen name, which she asked to use to avoid family tensions) was, for the most part, fine with it.
The problem turned out to be her relatives: specifically, a 21-year-old college student on her mother’s side of the family, who asked to stay during her six-week internship this summer, but arrived early and announced she would be staying three months. This cousin had made a few weekend visits — “Come to think of it, I only hear from her when she wants to stay,” Ms. Benjamin said. Her cousin contributed nothing to the household expenses, nor did she help with chores. Two and a half months into the stay, Ms. Benjamin was going crazy.
“I went to business school, so I am pulling out all my management skills,” she said. “I sat her down and said: ‘We have to renegotiate you staying here. You need to dust the floor, and when you make something smelly, you put it in a plastic bag and seal it and take it to the garbage.’ ”
There were family pressures as well.
“My mother also doesn’t want me to ruin her relationship with her brother by telling her to get out. My dad is like, ‘Get her out.’ My mother is like, ‘Ignore your father,’ ” Ms. Benjamin said. “My sister, who lives in California, said to me, ‘I don’t want you to ever do this again.’ ”
“But we put ourselves in our guest’s shoes,” she continued, “and remember what it was like when we were 20.”
Uh, oh — the dreaded habit of putting the guest’s concerns before your own. For all of Ms. Benjamin’s high-powered professional skills, she appears to be a host who gives too much.
A clinical history establishes this: Back in the days when Ms. Benjamin was living in a studio, the mother of one of her high school friends called to tell her that another daughter’s boyfriend needed a place to stay in New York for two days before heading home to Wales. Although the young man was a stranger, Ms. Benjamin agreed to let him stay with her. She was annoyed to discover, after he left, that he had run up a $30 cable porn bill.
Ms. Benjamin has agreed to host many other strangers over the years. Once, when she was talking to a Buddhist monk about why she had been lucky enough to get such a large apartment in New York City, he seemed to intuit that. “He said, ‘You’ve probably given shelter to many people,’ ” Ms. Benjamin said.
Then did he ask her if could stay there?
“That was another person he worked with, a Buddhist teacher,” she said. “A hotel would have been very, very expensive, so I had him come and stay at my house for three weeks.”
Saturday, July 4, 2009
At Pinnacle of Liberty, Feeling a Bit Confined
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
| LOVE AND LIBERTY Aaron Weisinger, 26, proposed marriage to Erica Breder, 25, in the Statue of Liberty’s crown. (Ms. Breder said yes.) The crown was opened to the public for the first time since 9/11. |  | |||
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For the privilege of being the first people in nearly eight years to climb the 354 steps to the crown of the Statue of Liberty, 30 visitors on the sun-kissed morning of July 4 had to first endure a bit of bureaucracy: red tape and stiff security.
No wonder by the time these huddled masses reached the top of the hot, sticky and narrow staircase, they were indeed yearning to breathe free.
“Absolutely awesome!” declared Tracy Musacchio, 32, of Harlem. But then, upon further reflection, she added, “Intensely uncomfortable.”
A history professor and Egyptologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Ms. Musacchio likened the claustrophobic experience to being inside an underground chamber of a pyramid.
Some wonders, apparently, do come with strings attached.
The visitors, who paid $3 online for tickets to the national monument and $12 more for the 15-minute ferry ride to Liberty Island, said they had won the chance in various ways to be among the first to ascend to the crown. Gathering in a room at the base of the statue before 9 a.m., they first had to wait as politicians gathered around real red tape — a giant red ribbon — four of them wielding an oversize pair of scissors.
Ken Salazar, the United States secretary of the interior; Gov. David A. Paterson of New York; Gov. Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey; and Representative Anthony D. Weiner of Brooklyn together cut the ribbon as Mr. Salazar proclaimed, “We are going to open up the crown to the people of America and to the people of the world.”
The statue was closed to the public after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and while the base, the pedestal and the observation deck reopened in 2004, the crown remained closed because of security concerns. For the statue’s reopening on the morning of Independence Day, uniforms were everywhere. Some parts of Liberty Island had the feel of an armed fortress, with officers from the Coast Guard, National Parks Service and the New York Police Departmental Justiceg. Coast Guard cutters and police launches bobbed in the harbor.
Before boarding the ferry at Battery Park in Manhattan, ticket holders had to empty their pockets, open their laptops and pass through magnetometers, only to repeat this experience after they debarked on Liberty Island. There they were herded through large white tents and had to pass through an air sensor that puffed in its search for chemicals, according to a worker.
The well-orchestrated events began just after 8 a.m. with a citizenship ceremony for seven military personnel. The Marine Corps brass band played “God Bless America” and “Amazing Grace,” and Jane Holl Lute, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, administered the oath of allegiance.
An hour later, crowds were already assembling at the granite base of the “mighty woman with a torch,” as the poet Emma Lazarus famously wrote.
The torch, soaring about 306 feet above the foundation, has been closed since 1916, when German saboteurs blew up a munitions depot at the nearby Black Tom Wharf in New Jersey.
The first 30 visitors on Saturday waited in the pedestal to climb the narrow, winding stairs, many wearing green foam crowns and holding small American flags. They were directed to the sides of the staircase, watching as news photographers snapped pictures of the ribbon-cutting. After some visitors shook hands with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, they began the dark ascent.
By 10:15, they had returned from the crown, sweat-streaked and a little out of breath. For Erica Breder, the experience had also left her speechless.
That is because when she reached the small room at the top with 25 windows overlooking New York Harbor, her boyfriend of three years, Aaron Weisinger, 26, got down on one knee and proposed marriage.
“I was beyond surprised,” Ms. Breder, 25, said in a telephone interview.
The couple had traveled from Walnut Creek, Calif., for a special weekend that Mr. Weisinger had secretly planned for months. After being shut out online and by phone for July 4 tickets, he wrote to the Statue of Liberty Club asking where he could at least propose on the island. As it happened, the club’s vice president, Brian Snyder, had proposed in the crown, and Mr. Weisinger said he helped him get tickets.
Getting the diamond ring through security without Ms. Breder knowing might have been the most difficult part. Mr. Weisinger said he transferred it from his pocket to a friend’s camera bag at the last moment before going through the second set of detectors.
Mr. Weisinger said his great-grandparents had arrived at Ellis Island after emigrating from Hungary and Russia, while Ms. Breder’s father, Peter, had come to New York from Czechoslovakia. He drove a taxi before bringing his mother and wife over.
“That’s why it was so important,” Ms. Breder said. “It’s the perfect place for both of us.”
Al Baker contributed reporting.
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