an aggregate of all things Johnson

Right now I am sitting in a waiting room at the King’s County Supreme Court building. Again. I was chosen as a juror and this is my fifth day hanging out in this waiting room, attempting to get some work done, and trying not to feel like I am wasting my time. I am happy to be a part of the judicial process and to be doing my civic duty, but it is getting more and more difficult to NOT feel like I am being completely disrespected.

This photo is from our Saturday run with Team in Training in Red Hook. I like to think of it as really lovely graffiti even though it is actually part of a mural on a construction site.

It has been quite hot in NYC — even reaching 100 degrees — but I like running in it. It feels like a challenge, one that I have the skills to meet. Heat tolerance seems to be one of my only assets as an endurance athlete. Tonight we are running a timed 5k test…

What are you up to this week?

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The Lamble family is hip to the times. We’ve all all got ourselves cool, new Google+ accounts and tonight we tried the “hangout” feature in honor of my twin brothers’ birthday. (Happy birthday, Adam & Aaron!) Sadly, Google video chat doesn’t work on the iPad, so not everyone could join in, but it was pretty fun just the same.

If you are on +, add me to your circles!

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Last night a friend told me, “Every woman is beautiful when she smiles.”

“Totally true,” I agreed, but in my head (and maybe out loud, too) I thought, “but you get extra points if you are young and thin.”

Which sort of brings me to the images above… Vogue Italia featured full-figure models in its June cover story. (Click through for more images, but they are somewhat NSFW… unless you work for Vogue. Hey, its European.) The cover story is sexy. It adds more evidence to support the argument that size really doesn’t matter when it comes to beauty.

Vogue Italia also warms my heart by having an entire V Curvy section of its website. My one semester of Italian isn’t much help in appreciating it fully, but I’m glad it’s there.

The loss of youth and beauty is an anxiety as old as time, I suppose, but is it a little worse in the age of super models and photoshop? The American Medical Association recently formally denounced retouching photos with photoshop and asked ad agencies to consider setting stricter guidelines for how photos are manipulated before becoming advertisements.

I truly have no idea where I stand on this issue. Sure, images of women in magazines and on tv are completely unrealistic (even the curvier women seen above are undoubtably retouched), but who wouldn’t want a public image of themselves to be enhanced a bit? Plus, aren’t we smart enough to know the difference between reality and fantasy?

The standard for beauty that I have etched in my brain is this photo of Gwyneth Paltrow on a 1998 cover of W magazine. (This is the largest image I could find, but I think the actual cover is probably still at my parent’s house in a box. I had it hanging on my wall as a teen.) I am sure that I identified with her blonde hair, but I liked her freckles and messy bangs. I don’t think I paid much attention then, but now I also appreciate the fact that she doesn’t have gaudy, round baseball cleavage all up in our faces. But that’s just me.

I really don’t know where I am going with this, other than to say that I am defintely getting older and less thin. (I know I’m getter older because the Victoria’s Secret models now look like 7-foot-tall, computer generated 13-year-olds to me. Don’t ask how I know I’m getting less thin.) That’s the bad news. The good news is that I think I am at peace with it. I think… Well, I’m at least at peace with the idea that there are many different types of beautiful. Young & thin doesn’t have a monopoly. Right?

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I love the Tenement Museum. I wrote about my first visit to the museum two years ago and I’ve been a member of the museum ever since.

Since Chelsea and Scott were going to be in town visiting, I jumped at the chance to buy member-only tickets to the brand new Taste of the LES Walking Tour on Saturday. The tour promised to feed us local food while also “exploring the immigrant experience and some of the ways immigrant foods have shaped American food.” The LES is one of the oldest neighborhoods in New York and at times has been one of the most densely populated and ethnically diverse places in the world.

We showed up at the museum hungry and ready to expand our food horizons. Our tour guide was fun and friendly and gave us bottled water for our journey. Throughout the tour we got to taste nine different foods…

• First, we tried a soft pretzel which represented the earliest history of the Tenement Museum, when the neighborhood was called “Little Germany” (Kleindeutschland) and there was a saloon in the building’s storefront. Our tour guide told us that the saloon owners sold salty pretzels in an attempt to get their thirsty patrons to buy more beer.
• Next, we had delicious “new pickles” (my favorite) which represented the neighborhood’s Jewish heritage and past identity as the “pickle district.” The Pickle Guys is the last exclusive pickle vendor in the neighborhood now… and sadly it was closed on Saturday.
• Our next stop was El Castillo de Jagua, a latin food restaurant where we got to try a fried plantain. I believe the restaurant is technically Dominican, but our stop represented all of the Latin influence on the LES, including the large number of Puerto Rican immigrants.
• Next, we stopped by Economy Candy and tried their best selling item, chocolate covered pretzels. Yum! A family owned candy store that was originally opened in 1937 as “Economy Shoes” but soon found more customers in the candy business. They have a huge selection of hard-to-find and international candy.
• Next, we explored the concept of “fusion” and tried delicious mini creampuffs with green tea filling made by a second generation Chinese American bakery owner. I loved them (and had two) but not everyone liked the unique filling.
• My least favorite taste test was of the cured, sliced beef – sort of a cross between prosciutto and beef jerky. We tried it outside the University Settlement Neighborhood House where we discussed the role of reformers who came into the neighborhood to try to better the lives of the poor, but often added to the forced assimilation into “American culture.”
• We continued on to Essex Street Market, the one-stop shop for LES residents. From the website: “Essex Street Market began in 1940 as part an effort by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia to find a new place for street merchants to do business. At the time, pushcarts and vendors crowded the city streets, making it difficult for police and fire vehicles to easily pass. To ease congestion, Mayor LaGuardia created the Essex Street Market and several other indoor retail markets throughout the city.” The market contains both artisinal vendors and local specialties. We tried both the Latin Queso Blanco (seen above) and a locally made sharp cheddar cheese.
• Not pictured are the dumplings we sampled from Vanessa’s Dumpling House. The Lower East Side borders (and sometimes merges) with Chinatown to its South and you can find unending options for asian food of all kinds. Vanessa’s serves some of the best deals, with dumplings costing as little as six for a dollar!
• Since it was Saturday, many of the Jewish stores were closed, including Kossar’s Bialys. I have never tried a Bialy – something like a Polish bagel – and would have loved to, but instead we got to sample donuts from the nearby Donut Plant. I suppose that the Donut Plant represents the current wave of gentrification in the LES and the young entrepreneurs who are creating new businesses centered around nostalgia for an older way of making things by hand.

We sampled a wide variety of food, just like the wide variety of neighborhoods in Manhattan!

The food was all good and the four of us had a fine time on the tour (despite the heat). Our tour guide was great and it was fun to explore the Lower East Side on foot, but I came away slightly disappointed by the tour. I guess I was hoping that we would get to go into more of the shops and meet more owners. I was also expecting to get to taste larger portions of the food… but maybe then we would’ve all been way too stuffed! (As it was, Chelsea, Scott, Travis and I were still a little hungry afterward and continued on our own personal food tour to Tiny’s Giant Sandwich Shop and then to a brand new macaron store.)

Overall, the tour was truly a great experience, but I think next time I have family in town I may just plan my own LES food tour. There are so many more places I would have loved to have stopped at, like Russ & Daughters deli, or the 100-year-old Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery, or even the vegan Babycakes cupcake bakery. There is a lot of amazing food in such a diverse place!

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Chelsea and Scott (Travis’ sister and brother-in-law) are in town for the holiday weekend. We’ve already fit in a lot of fun! On Thursday we started at Penn Station, traveled to Brooklyn, ate at Bonnie’s, went to the DUMBO area of Brooklyn and checked out the water and Dewey’s Candy, then ate dinner at Two Boots.

Yesterday, we visited Peter Pan Donuts, a famous breakfast place in Greenpoint, then headed to Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and did some shopping, headed uptown to eat at Shake Shack in the UWS, then met the Manns (just off a cruise from London) in Central Park. After a brief stop at the steps of the Met, we walked (and walked and walked) south to Serendipity III where we had the most insane desserts on the planet. (And we only waited an hour to get in. Not bad.) After the chocolate recharged us, we headed over to Bloomingdale’s to do a little shopping. (I got new lipstick.)

We’ve taken cars, taxis, and the subway, plus lots and lots of travel on foot. So, basically we’ve had the true NYC tourist experience. ANd we have two more fun days ahead of us!!

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