1) Saturday evening we were invited to a family dinner at Bacaro, a fantastic little Italian restaurant on the Lower East Side. The food is very authentic Italian, and we had a wonderful time. There is a small bar upstairs, and downstairs is the restaurant, which feels like you are in an Italian tavern in Italy. We had a family table in a separate area, with long benches around the table. It's perfect for small private event, and the 12 of us were very comfortable and we were able to visit with each other in comfort. The photos below are from their Instagram account.
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| The private table |
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| The pork shank over polenta was delicious |
2) Sunday started off with the sad news that NBA basketball legend Kobe Bryant, his 13 year-old daughter Gigi, and seven other people died in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California. Kobe was my younger son's favorite basketball player, as Kobe was to many people my son's age. My older son said that Kobe was the first athlete most people their age really knew. People my age and older will remember feeling the same way when baseball great Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash at the height of his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, bringing aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. On the day after the crash, I saw this on the NYC Link charging station up the street from me.
3) Wednesday night, two of us from the Book Cellar took a road trip up to the Barnes & Noble store on 86th Street to listen to authors Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig talk about their third collaboration with Karen White, All The Ways We Said Goodbye. It's a wonderful story set in three time periods- WWI, WWII, and 1964- featuring three female protagonists and their connection to the Ritz Paris Hotel. It was a fun evening, the ladies really enjoy working together. My blog post on that evening is here.
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| Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig |
4) I just finished listening to a true crime podcast, The Shrink Next Door, about an NYC psychiatrist who takes over his patient's life, his business, and gets him to cut off all ties to his only sister and her children. It's a crazy story, told by Joe Nocera of Bloomberg and Wondery (who did the Dirty John podcast). You can find the podcast here. (Thanks to Rick for the suggestion.)
5) I started reading Susan Elia MacNeal's upcoming novel, The King's Justice, the ninth book in her Maggie Hope series. It's 1943 London, and Maggie has left the SOE, where she had been working as a spy for the British government. Now she works diffusing unexploded bombs that the German had dropped, another dangerous job. She and her friends and roommates all are having problems coping with the stress of living through the war. Maggie is unwillingly drawn back into one of her old cases when a sequential (serial) murderer is on the loose, and it looks like the killer has a connection to a monster she helped put away. It's a terrific read so far, and I'm fearing for poor Maggie who is drinking too much. If you are a fan of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series, this is the next series you should be reading. I'll post a full review closer to publication date of February 25th.
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| The King's Justice |
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