Friday, July 6, 2012

Can Anyone Besides Nora Ephron Possibly Find Me a New Place to Live?

The more Nora Ephron tributes I read, the more I regret not having known her—and no longer because
I once had hopes that she’d blurb my memoir (not knowing then that I couldn’t write it and she didn’t blurb) or otherwise guide my “writing career,"  but to fix my life—my practical life. I’ve searched for decades for someone to fix it, I’ve hired people who said they could fix it--—ye gods, I’ve even tried to fix it myself—but here it remains, completely unfixed.

Nora was famous for constantly fixing the lives of her friends, one of them being Richard Cohen, to wit:

Nora took my life and renovated it. She decided that I should become a columnist and somehow it happened. She found summer rentals for me and made her friends mine, and she instructed me about love, writing, real estate and investments. I hardly made a move without her.

Another being Melina Bellows (also a writer, but also a girl): 

At our first lunch, she locked her brown eyes on mine, lowered her voice and gave me a lecture. "You must take your personal life every single bit as seriously as your career. You have to work hard at it. Go out every single night of the week. I don't care how tired you are. That's what you have to do if you want a boyfriend.  It also helped me to have a very loose description of the term attractive."  
     Nora set me up on blind dates.

Though it’s clearly too late for finding the boyfriend and even more so for the (paying) career, there are still two things I would have liked to ask Nora to find for me before the sun sets tonight:

A New Place To Live
Yes, once again the house I live under has gone on the market, and once again, eviction doth loom, only this time it loometh ten times more darkly.  All I need is a detached one bedroom cottage with updated everything plus plenty of quiet, sunlight, and charm, and, what the hell, my own private patio.
The film producer upon whose estate this empty cottage now waits will, of course--because Nora asked him--rent this to me for what I pay now.

Bolognese Sauce--the kind that's slightly sweet and orange from the carrots as opposed to brick red
from the meat and tomatoes--a distinction Nora would so understand. 
I'm not insisting on the actual sauce, just the recipe Il Farro used for the twenty minutes it was in business before it vanished from Burlingame Avenue and, it would seem, the face of this earth.

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