Closing the chapter on what was 2024 brings an uneasy sense of relief and trepidatious pleasure. Every time I look forward to a new anything, it comes with challenges and setbacks, and entering a new year, particularly one as potentially big as 2025, leaves me excited and scared. Before that, let’s send 2024 off with a fond farewell…

January 2024: A lot of New Years. 

A fragrance to start a new year properly, courtesy of Le Labo.

Madonna, still ‘Crazy’ after all these years.

21 years of half-naked navel-gazing.

A month for meditation.

My grandmother’s waltz.

Madonna’s greatest comeback: The Celebration Tour. 

Hygge happening.

Jeremy Allen White in his underwear.

Boston afterglow.

A birthday post for Mom.

Be fucking fabulous.

February 2024: A first winter without Dad.

Snow comfort.

New social media rules.

Shawn Mendes shirtless.

Future nostalgia: Part one and Part two.

Looking for mercy.

Apricity.

Valentine nostalgia.

A pop of underwear color.

Harry Styles in and out of his underwear.

The Middle Ages in Connecticut. 

Tom Daley in a crocheted Speedo.

A return to Cape Cod in the middle of winter, when the sunsets carry a different sort of beauty. 

My brother’s band.

Andy is still a trooper.

March 2024: Tricks of Father Time.

Looking up at Albany.

A Boston tease.

Kira and I in Boston – the old team back in business. 

Preparing for guests.

Jaxon and Uncle Andy.

A modern-day Joan-of-Arc.

After 35 years, everyone must still stand alone.

A gorgeous fragrance: Patchouli Ardent.

The bold and sexy style of Luke Evans.

The week the power went out in an ice storm.

The twins turned fourteen.

He sits on my lap now.

The porcelain trappings of youth.

April 2024: An indulgence.

Crying at Trader Joe’s. 

Naked like a perhaps hand.

The heart of a jonquil.

Finding fabulousness. 

A purple reign weekend with friends old and dear, tried and true. 

Get busy living…

Jaxon’s happy face.

May 2024: Anniversary month.

Spring in Connecticut. 

A visit to my Mecca.

An unremarkably remarkable anniversary spent with Andy in Boston. (It was so good it needed three parts.)

A pool of pink petals.

Coming into the Carnal Flower at last.

‘The Great Gatsby’ on Broadway.

A bittersweet return to Broadway with Mom turned out to be more sweet than bitter. 

Messy and moody.

A godson grows.

Social media apathy.

It’s too bad most journalists didn’t listen to or heed this dire warning.

Time to tea dance.

The moon tried to hide but I found her.

June 2024: Our coquette summer was christened.

A coquette summer playlist.

A coquette night to remember.

Our seaside retreat to the Beautiful Place By the Sea was as lovely as it always is. Ogunquit still works its magnificent magic. 

Forget-me-nots.

Playground love.

A setting for the coquette day, and a setting for the coquette night. 

Orville Peck got naked for Paper.

Pride Month – now more than ever.

Lace and leather and coquette dreams.

A presence on the night wind.

A first Father’s Day without a father.

Preamble: the Ass.

I absolutely loved my first colonoscopy! Well, I loved a few key parts of it, and overall I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Maybe I’m just accustomed to putting my ass through the ringer. 

The stars are blind and the coquette mystique is in effect.

The kind of blue not found in the flag.

A mass of neuroses belies a coquette summer.

Boston begins summer in beauty and rains just a little on our parade.

We don’t have to take our clothes off to have a good time.

June ended with a second coquette summer playlist, setting the scene for the rest of the year to follow… 

With Christmas done and New Year’s Eve and Day on the way, we are in that mid-holiday-week limbo. I’m not a fan of such indecision – on with the weekly recap…

Cookies for Santa from a friend.

A Boston holiday tradition evolves. 

A Christmas tradition coda with Chris.

A Christmas message for you and yours. 

Christmas counter-programming.

Post-Christmas relief.

The location of wickedness.

The thirsty mirror.

Lusty colorful world.

A very first dinner party.

The week between.

Zebra in motion.

Entertaining teenagers.

Why do appetizers taste better when served on fancy toothpicks?

There were no Dazzlers of the Day! Send me some names on who should be featured… 

I don’t see it. Is this zebra moving?

Some say it is, some say it isn’t. 

I’m in the naysayer camp.

And I don’t usually do camp.

Not that kind of camp. 

This Sunday morning post has been brought to you by sleep-deprivation. 

This purgatorial place between Christmas and New Year’s Day used to be a space of joy, when I was a kid and on vacation, when I was in college and on break, when there was magic on the eves of both those bookends. Now we have to find magic in different ways – no, we have to make magic happen, because life doesn’t just hand you anything when you’re no longer a kid. Growing up is the sad realization of this, and it happens over and over. Some people try to recapture it, to prolong their childhood – adults still playing at life, afraid or unable or simply refusing to mature. Some people give in to it early, then learn later to find the play and the fun again. Some are just trying to get through the damn day. 

I’m not sure where I’m falling these days, but I’m somewhere in the middle of it all, like most of us. Trying to be better than the day before, trying to be ok with when I’m not. 

“It takes the rare spirit to convince them to flock with those unlike them.” – Gregory Maguire

This evening marks what is the first grown-up dinner party that I am throwing for the twins and their guests. It’s a bit early (my first attendance at an adult dinner party was when we were planning Suzie’s return from her exchange year in Denmark which was when I was about seventeen) but at fourteen the twins are already growing up faster than anyone wants to admit. 

When they asked what the dress code was, I blurted out ‘casual elegant‘ since that seemed like the easiest thing to do, in my particular mind, which may not be the mindset of the average teenager – but who the hell wants to be average? Let’s lift it. And so it’s an outfit of sequins for me, to highlight a sparkling theme as we near the finale of the year. There are a few surprises in store, some conversation sparkler-starters, and the requested comfort food dinner of macaroni and cheese (Patti LaBelle’s Over the Rainbow Mac and Cheese to be precise). 

Watching the twins grow up has been one of the joys of my life – and with little Jaxon just starting out on his journey we’re not done yet. If there’s one thing I hope they pick up from their crazy Uncle Al, it’s that they keep their hearts and minds open to people who may be different from them, that they forge their own paths of goodness and decency even when it’s not popular or accepted, and that they always try to do what’s right even when it’s not the easiest way. 

“Watching the world wake up, dress itself in the dark, take on its daily guise, reminds me of how we fathom human character when we encounter someone at a distance, at a gallop, in the shadows. We get no more than a quick glance at the man on the street, the child in the woods, the witch at the well, the Lion among us. Our initial impression, most often, has to serve.

Still, that first crude glimpse, a clutch of raw hypotheses that can never be soundly clinched or dismissed, is often all we get before we must choose whether to lean forward or to avert our eyes. Slim evidence indeed, but put together with mere hints and echoes of what we have once read, we risk cherishing one another. Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through. 

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.” ~ Gregory Maguire

Sweet blessed day after Christmas, how grateful I am that you have arrived with my sanity somewhat still intact! Of course, we have merely landed in that strange purgatory that leads through New Year’s Day, but the biggest day is over, and I feel no shame in rushing quickly through the rest of it. My daily meditations have fallen by the wayside the past few weeks, which is strange as this is when I need them  more than over. I’ll begin again soon, because I miss them, and they provide a calmer baseline that would have been especially helpful these past few weeks. Luckily, my healthier survival mechanisms saw me through, as did a few friends, and always Andy. He has his own difficulties during the holiday season, so when he made me an omelette on Christmas Day it was one of the sweetest offerings I’ve had this season.

Now onto the year-end recaps and all that nonsense, even if I don’t know anyone who wants to look back on this year at all. Maybe I’ll skip the year-end recap entirely – or just truncate it to a one parter. Some years are best left forgotten.