cooking in my underwear

A red dress! Dramatic? Exciting? Standing out from the crowd? Not when everybody is wearing one! What the hell was going on at the Oscars? The yawn inducing fashion parade leads me to believe that every woman in the place was given the following directive - your dress must be either red or black, it must be either one-shouldered or strapless, and it must have a mermaid-cut skirt. There were very few exceptions to this uniform, and I applaud the women who wore them, good, bad or ugly. Most notably : Marion Cotillard in an exquisite ivory Gaultier gown, Diablo Cody in a dress (and I use that term loosely) made from curtains apparently salvaged from a bordello, and Tilda Swinton in something that looked like it was retrieved from a box under the kitchen sink. But even the ugly dresses earned my respect on Oscar night, simply because they stood out from the mind-numbing procession of 'safe' choices. I've gained a whole new appreciation for the oddball in all of us, and a deep

So you're up late at night clicking through the channels and you come across a movie you've seen maybe fifty times. And you decide to watch it, one more time, all the way to the end. Even thought it's really late, even though you can just record it and watch it later, even though you probably have it on DVD, you've simply got to watch it just one - more - time. Here's my short list, what's yours? The Matrix Reservoir Dogs The Usual Suspects Fight Club So I Married an Axe Murderer* *What? A girl can't be silly every now and then?

A couple of years ago, my sweetie and I attended a Carnival fete with my best friend and her husband. I remember being blissfully happy at that fete. Happy at the prospect of being outside, at night, in the middle of February, wearing a tank top and capris; happy because I was eating and drinking to my heart's content with the knowledge that I would be able to dance off every calorie before the end of the night; happy because I was in a country where the phrase 'wind-chill' was an entirely alien concept; happy because I was among my friends, and rapidly approaching the two days of unbridled revelry that would become Trinidad Carnival 2006. My best friend wasn't having such a good time. She was cranky, for many reasons, some still unknown to me. She was displeased that the DJ was talking too much (I didn't notice), she was upset that the headline act didn't show up (in hindsight, a reasonable grievance, but in my eyes at the time a non-issue), she was quite riled