Reggie Darling

Saucer of the Week: French Cornflowers

2012-02-02T00:11:00.000-05:00

Bear with me, Dear Reader. I promise that I will stop writing exclusively about ceramics. But humor me, please, and let me share with you but one more ceramics post before I move back on to more interesting topics.. . .

Here goes:

Many years ago, when I was in my twenties, I spent several memorable days in Charleston, South Carolina, in the company of my dear friend George Pinckney, a southern gentleman if there ever was one. At that time, George and I were more than "just friends," and our visit to Charleston—a city he spent much time in as a boy—was a honeyed journey down the memory lane of George's then recent youth. It was a place he took pleasure in showing me, when we were callow young men starting out in the world. I remember the trip with great fondness and pleasure.

A French porcelain cornflower-decorated saucer, ca. 1780s
Photograph by Boy Fenwick

During our visit to Charleston, George and I came across an old-fashioned antiques shop of the kind that is rarely seen anymore today. It was a shop devoid of decorators' tricks or furbulows, and the interior was an unadorned, white-washed shell containing the owner's wares ondisplay for sale. That's it. It was all about the goods. The shop was owned by a woman who seemed positively ancient to me at the time, probably then in her late seventies and a contemporary of my grandparents. Today, she would be a colleague or a sibling!

A botanical print of a cornflower, ca. 1895
Image courtesy of Vintage Collectibles

In the shop I was captivated by a fine porcelain saucer, decorated with blue cornflowers, to which I had a visceral I must have this reaction. I learned from the dealer that it was probably French, dated from the late eighteenth century, and was in a pattern that was supposedly a favorite of Marie-Antoinette. The saucer's listed price was well beyond my purse at the time. The dealer, however, graciously offered the ceramic bit to me at half the asking price, for—as she said—she recognized in me someone who had the potential to become a collector, and she wanted to encourage such an inclination. So I bought it, and I was thrilled to have it. And I have been ever since. It is one of my treasures to this day.

A similarly decorated bowl in the collection
of the Victoria and Albert Museum
Image courtesy of same

It is my understanding that Marie-Antoinette was responsible for popularity of cornflower-decorated china, which became all the rage when the doomed Queen commissioned a service of it from Sèvres in the early 1780s. It has been popular ever since.

A cornflower-decorated Corning Pyrocerama® casserole, ca. 1970
in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum
Image courtesy of same

I ask you, Dear Reader, to keep in mind the influence that you have on others who are younger and more impecunious than you, and I implore you to share your passions with them, as the Charleston antiques dealer did with me thrty years ago. For, if appreciation for such objects is to continue beyond the madness of our times, it requires that we pass the flame of ardor for such things along to those who can carry it forward, when we are gone. Not as a labor, mind you, but rather on the wings of love. We are all but stewards of our possessions, and fortunate and responsibity come with them hand in hand. It s our honor to ensue that they be well cared for during but the whisper of time we're are fortunate to own them, before we pass them along to the next generation.

Tell me, have you engaged a yonger person in discussions of your collections yet? It is well worth it, I believe...

Reggie's New York Antiques Week 2012, Part II

2012-01-30T08:41:00.002-05:00

Well, there wasn't supposed to be a Part II. At least I wasn't expecting there would be a need for one, as I thought we were done buying during Antiques Week.

But I was mistaken, as it turns out.

On Wednesday, Boy and his assistant designer, Nancie Peterson, did some shopping for clients on Lexingon Avenue and then combed the aisles of the Winter Antiques Show.

Image courtesy of the Winter Antiques Show

As I have written before, the Winter Antiques Show is the Granddaddy of the New York antiques shows. I believe it is the most prestigious and vaunted antiques show in America, in league with the top European fine arts and antiques shows. The Winter Show, as it is known here in New York, is the longest running antiques show in the city, and its opening party is one of the major events of the New York social season.

Boy vowed that our personal shopping during the shows and auctions was complete. However, when trolling one aisle of the Winter Show he spotted this 7½ inch tall Staffordshire eagle, circa 1835, tucked in a corner cupboard at the booth of Jeffrey Tillou Antiques. Boy said, "I think I might need that." He looked at Nancie for her opinion, and she, knowing our house and its collections, nodded, "Yes, I believe you do!"

The figures's feathers are sublime.

And the bits of flora bocage on its perch are quite divine.

Here, the bird is straining to fly from our Manhattan apartment's window and soar to Darlington House, where it will join our collection of English Staffordshire figures and animals.

Since the Winter Show officially closed yesterday evening, and was the last event of Antiques Week to do so, I am now confident to say—with a mixture of pleasure and relief—that we really are now done with the shows this season.

All photographs by Boy Fenwick

Reggie's New York Antiques Week 2012

2012-01-22T19:04:00.000-05:00

Well, this was New York's Antiques Week, with sales and auctions all over town. Between the two of us, Boy and I visited most of the shows and also previewed the Sotheby's and Christie's auctions. One of the handiest guides I've found for planning one's busy schedule during Antiques Week is a program blessedly published each year by Stella Management, which manages two of the shows:

The invaluable "NYC Antiques Week At A Glance"
Courtesy of Stella Management

This year was not a big buying year for us, and from the looks of things and what we heard from others out and about during Antiques Week, we were not alone.

Our own reasons for increased selectivity, if not parsimony, this Antiques Week were due to several factors. The first was the frank acknowledgment that Darlington House is, in fact, already packed to the gills, with every one of its shelves, tables, walls, closets, and cupboards jammed with objects, china, paintings, and more. There simply isn't much—if any—room left for any more stuff. The second reason is our household's increasingly conservative financial outlook due to the unsettling—and continuing—volatility and uncertainties of the global financial markets. We've been clamping down lately on unnecessary expenditures beyond housing, transportation, and sustenance, and limiting what extraneous purchases we do make to "little-ticket" items.

But Antiques Week in New York is something that is not to be missed for us, and attending the shows is a professional requirement for Boy because, as a high-tone New York City decorator, he must always be on the lookout for his clients' needs. That being said, we approached the shows this year with the mandate to keep our personal pocketbooks firmly clasped (as I also vowed to do last year, albeit ultimately unsuccessfully, as I related in an earlier essay), and only to pry them open if confronted with what we both immediately agreed was an absolute "must have"—defined as being something we already collected (i.e., no new ground to be broken here) and where the failure to add the object to our collection would be considered a loss, once the opportunity had passed us by. Oh, and any contender had to be exceedingly well priced.

Our "new" basalt urns, ca. 1861/1887
Photograph by Boy Fenwick

On Friday morning, at the Antiques at the Armory show (also known as the downtown Armory show to distinguish it from the far more expensive uptown Winter Antiques Show at the Seventh Regiment's Armory on Park Avenue), Boy spotted a pair of black basalt campagna-form urns at the booth of Mad River Antiques, of North Granby, Connecticut, moments after the doors to the show opened. Standing ten inches tall and decorated with Arcadian figures in classical dress, the urns are stamped WEDGWOOD and ETRURIA, and also with the letter P. Based on these identifying marks we determined that the urns were made prior to 1891, when the word ENGLAND was first added to the Wedgwood mark. We further pinpointed the exact year they were made as being either 1861 or 1887, the only two years that Wedgwood used the letter P to identify when a particular piece of pottery was produced. ETRURIA refers to Wedgwood's pottery factories in Staffordshire, England—the Etruria Works—where the urns were made. The Etruria Works opened in 1769 and closed in 1950.

A twentieth-century WEDGWOOD urn with lid
Image courtesy of House of Stowe Galleries

The basalt urns Boy acquired are missing the lids that originally surmounted them. The lost lids would have been similar to the one seen on the modern jasperware urn shown in the above photograph. I hasten to add that Boy and the dealers were all well aware of this fact. While it would have been awfully nice to have the lids for our urns, I suspect that we would likely not have been willing to front the necessary funds to acquire them, as the presence of such lids would have supported a selling price much higher than Boy ultimately paid.

I have a great fondness for black basalt, Dear Reader, and have collected it for more than thirty years. I love the severity and vigor of it. Our "new" basalt urns are a marvelous addition to our collection, I believe, and will be appropriately pride-of-placed on the chimneypiece in our dining room at Darlington House, where they will stand between the gilt bronze and crystal girandoles I wrote of recently. Bravo, Boy, for finding them!

"First in war, first in peace, and first
in the hearts of his countrymen"
Photograph by Boy Fenwick

Also at the downtown Armory show, Boy found this diminutive (it measures only 4½ inches high by 5¼ inches wide) framed print of George Washington at the booth of Andrew Spindler Antiques of Essex, Massachusetts. As readers of this blog may know, we have a collection of Washingtoniana at Darlington House, where this pleasing little image of the Father of Our Country, probably dating to the Centennial era, will be a delightful addition. It was very attractively priced and is what both Boy and I agreed was a "no-brainer" when our criteria for buying during Antiques Week were applied.

This year we came away empty-handed at the New York Ceramics Fair and the Metropolitan Show (a new incarnation of what had been known as The American Antiques Show until this year), both of which have been fertile hunting grounds for us in the past. So far we've not attended the Winter Antiques Show, the Granddaddy of Them All, but I suspect we shall roam its aisles one night after work this coming week, as it continues its run through January 29th.

Our "new" nineteenth-century figure of a white leopard
Photograph by Boy Fenwick

On Saturday, at the Americana & Antiques at the Pier show, we captured this porcelain figure of a white leopard at the booth of J. E. Rider Antiques, who—like Andrew Spindler—also hails from Essex, Massachusetts. We had to buy the leopard because it is virtually identical, save for the painting of its coat, to a figure we already own that is painted as a tawny-coated lioness, and which is shown—albeit blurrily—in the background of a photograph in an earlier post. Just as was the case of the two early-nineteenth-century classical figures I wrote about recently, the leopard and the lioness could even have come out of the same mold, but are painted to resemble different cats. Mr. Rider said that he believed the leopard was made in the nineteenth century, likely in France, in imitation of an earlier Meissen figure. In looking the piece over I would agree with him that it was most likely made in the nineteenth century, but I have difficulty dating when, as such pieces were in constant production—in one form or another—from the eighteenth century up through the first half of the twentieth century, both on the Continent and in England. In the end I agreed to buy the little leopard (it measures only 4 inches long by 2¾ inches tall) because I liked it, which is the most important consideration for me when it comes to such matters. I plan on doing a future post in which I compare and contrast our "new" leopard with the lioness already in our collection.

The main dining room at Orsay in New York City
Image courtesy of same

After leaving the Pier show we celebrated our Antiques Week success of acquiring three "must haves"—without having lost our heads, unlike in previous years—by having a delicious and leisurely lunch of oysters, salmon burgers, and Sancerre at Orsay. A favorite brasserie of ours, on upper Lexington Avenue, Orsay occupies the former site of the fabled Mortimer's that I wrote about a year ago in my review of Swifty's, also another great favorite restaurant of ours on the UES of Manhattan.

And so, Dear Reader, another year of New York's Antiques Week has come and gone for those of us (Pompey included, of course) fortunate to call Darlington House home.

Violets for Darlington

2012-01-16T12:17:00.007-05:00

I've never really been a fan of Staffordshire poodle figures. Not much of one for spaniel figures, either. I do have two Staffordshire hound figures that I like. And, of course, we do collect figures of pugs, since we do so love and adore our darling little Pompey.

A sweet little poodle, carrying a basket of violets
Staffordshire, England, ca. 1850
Photograph by Boy Fenwick

The other day, when out and about shopping in the nearby town to Darlington, Boy came across a diminutive Staffordshire figure of a very coiffed poodle carrying a green basket of violets in its mouth. Despite Boy's best intentions, he fell in love with it. "I can't believe I like this little poodle, as I usually can't stand this sort of thing. But I must have it!" he said, looking at me to confirm whether I agreed with him or thought he had lost his mind. And I did agree with him—it was charming—and I said that I thought it would be a delightful addition to our collection of Staffordshire figures at Darlington House.

King Charles II of England (1630-1680)
Painted by Sir Peter Lely, 1670
National Maritime Museum, London

We date the figure to the 1850s because—among other reasons—the cut of the poodle's coat is in a style popular at the time, inspired by the wigs worn during the reign of Charles II of England. Also, the Roccoco Revival molding around the figure's base led us to conclude it was made in the mid-1800s rather than later.

Revue Horticole, ca. 1800s
Image courtesy of encore-editions.com

References to violets as symbols of rebirth and love have appeared in verse dating back to the ancient East and to the Classical world and have persisted in art and song ever since. One of my favorite popular references to violets is "Violets for Your Furs," a hit song popularized by Frank Sinatra in the early 1950s. It was indelibly etched on my childhood brain by my father, who played the LP album upon which it appeared, Songs for Young Lovers, often enough that its grooves practically wore out.

The cover of my father's favorite Sinatra album

According to the American Violet Society, violets are "symbolic of the awakening year, earth's renewal, hope, and the simple joys and sorrows of love." Carried in the basket by the adorable little poodle that Boy had to have, they are a fitting and welcome offering at Darlington House this bitterly cold January long weekend.

It was winter in Manhattan, falling snow flakes filled the air,
The streets were covered with a film of ice,
But a little simple magic that I learned about somewhere,
Changed the weather all around, just within a thrice.
I bought you violets for your furs and it was spring for a while, remember?
I bought you violets for your furs and there was April in that December.
The snow drifted down on the flowers, and melted where it lay.
The snow looked like dew on the blossoms as on a summer's day.
I bought you violets for your furs and there was blue in the wintry sky,
You pinned my violets to your furs and gave a lift to the crowds passing by,
You smiled at me so sweetly, since then one thought occurs,
That we fell in love completely, the day I bought you violets for your furs.

— "Violets for Your Furs" by Tom Adair and Matt Dennis, 1941

The Barrels of Darlington

2012-01-02T11:03:00.001-05:00

This Christmas Boy gave me the present of a miniature screw-top barrel, only an inch and a quarter tall, carved from whalebone by a sailor in the mid-nineteenth century. Boy bought it (as I learned) from Angus Wilkie at his elegant antiques shop, Cove Landing, on Lexington Avenue. I suspect the vessel was originally made to hold snuff.

I was absolutely charmed when I opened the package and found the tiny barrel in it. I love it.

And it got me thinking . . . I have always been drawn to barrel-shape objects, and I have collected a number of them over the years. I'm not alone in having an affinity for barrels, either. There was a mad nostalgic vogue for them in the first half of the twentieth century, when all sorts of barrel-shape objects were made out of glass, ceramic, silver, and other materials.

Here is an early twentieth century silvered glass barrel-shape ornament in our collection, hanging on this year's Christmas tree. We found it in an antiques group shoppe a number of years ago.

Over the years we've collected vintage glass barrels in various sizes to hold Pompey's kibble, biscuits, and treats. We've found them in group shoppes, at yard sales, and in junk shops. Most of them were made by the Anchor Hocking Company in the 1930s and 1940s.

We use a vintage glass barrel in our laundry room to decant powder. It is a much more attractive alternative to the powder's original and rather ugly packaging.

In the mid-twentieth century American glass manufacturers, such as Libby and Corning, produced drinking glasses in the form. We have a set—a great favorite of mine—decorated with bands of sanded white and gold, that we use for summer cocktails on the screened porch. We found them in a long-closed group shoppe in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a dozen or so years ago.

Ratcheting it up a few notches, I leave you with an image of a smart old Sheffield silver wine cooler, dating from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, that we bought last spring from Spencer Marks, Ltd. at an antiques show at the Park Avenue Armory.

The cooler was a "must buy" purchase for me as soon as I laid my eyes on it. I loved its simplicity and the fact that it was in the form of a barrel. (Notice that it appropriately holds a decanter rather than a new bottle of wine.)

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

Here's to Next Year . . .

2011-12-31T17:08:00.001-05:00

Among the pleasures of this nearly finished year, a number of our dear friends, Boy, and I were also offered a sobering set of private challenges. We sit here in our kitchen at Darlington House, with the light turning gray outside the windows, and the views to the Catskills blurring, and think fondly of all the people upon whom we depend, who depend on us, and who are connected in meaningful ways with our household and our businesses.

The dawning of a new year is also the dawning of a new day. Noticing that the one and only potted Amaryllis we have this winter was trumpeting its first blossom, Boy whisked it out to the column upon which sits our sundial and snapped this photograph: a colorful bloom against a fading sky.

Happy New Year, Dear Reader.

Photograph by Boy Fenwick

A New Leaf for a New Year

2011-12-29T22:15:00.000-05:00

We are hurtling toward a new year, so it is time to turn a new leaf.

For many years, Boy has collected early English green feather-edge creamware, circa 1780-1825. He always has his eye out for pieces of it when we are out and about at shows, auctions, and shoppes. Several years ago he bought two leaf-form dishes, likely made to hold sweetmeats, to add to his collection. He found the first—a small and very dearly priced one—at the New York Ceramics Fair. The next day, at a show at the New York City piers, he carried away an almost identical example for a somewhat lower price. A collection within a collection, instantly! The other day, while foraging for vintage ornaments at a decidedly down-market group shoppe, Boy spotted this one, another example of the leaf-form dish:

Our "new" feather-edge sweetmeat dish, ca. 1820

We suspect its plain mold and detailing suggest that it is slightly later than our other two dishes. The blue in the glaze of the two earlier pearlware examples in our collection is absent, as is the detailed veining, snipped edging, articulated stem, and raised base. Our newly acquired dish is simply not as finely made or crisply detailed as the other dishes. Also, it is subtly crazed and slightly discolored. Because of these deficiencies Boy almost left it behind at the sales desk. But since he rarely comes across such dishes in his travels, and this one was exceptionally well priced, home it came with us to Darlington House!

The "new" dish, in the foreground,
is not as white as our two finer examples

I hope that our "new" dish will brighten and whiten up nicely once we give it a hydrogen peroxide bath. However, it wil never be as fine as our other sweetmeat dishes, regardless of its condition. But so be it. The dish was a bargain at the price we paid, and it is a happy addition to those already in our possession.

It also lacks the raised base and the sharp edging
of the two finer examples

Tell me, Dear Reader, how do you decide when faced with buying "up" or "down" for your collections?

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

Cheaper By the Dozen

2011-12-26T18:12:00.000-05:00

Ornaments, that is . . .

Today, Boxing Day, had us stir crazy for our annual vintage-ornament-hunting pilgrimage to a large bottom-fishing group-shoppe antiques center on the other side of the Hudson River. While Boy captured an early nineteenth-century green feather-edge creamware tidbit (the subject of another post), we scored some individual glass balls and this much-needed box of twelve chartreuse ornaments.

Originally priced at fifty-nine cents in the last century, it was marked at fifteen dollars today—minus ten percent during the day-after-Christmas sale. The Coby Glass Products Co., which made the ornaments, was based in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, according to the short end of the box.

I ask you, Dear Reader, did you find a Boxing Day bargain today?

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

What We Didn't Do Last Night . . .

2011-12-25T12:27:00.002-05:00

. . . was go to midnight service, despite our best intentions.

And, well, here is what we are doing this morning:

Drinking fortified eggnog . . . and preparing our Christmas midday dinner of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and haricots verts—from recipes of our dear friend Lindaraxa.

Each Christmas we are the delighted recipients of a potent treat of a secret and time-tested Southern family recipe of eggnog from our dear friends Ted and Betsy Greenwood. They deliver it to their lucky friends in large Ball Mason jars called "Tednog." Today we are consuming the "Tednog" in our secret and unexpectedly "retail red" goblets while preparing Christmas dinner. How is it that we are so lucky to have such darling friends as Ted and Betsy? How fortuate we are!

Happy Christmas to you, Dear Reader, and to yours from Darlington House!

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

Reggie on New York Social Diary Today, Again

2011-12-23T11:13:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader, I am pleased as punch to have Reggie's Ten (Little) Rules for Keeping It Together appear today on New York Social Dairy, again.

David Patrick Columbia, the mastermind behind NYSD (along with Jeff Hirsch), published these Rules earlier this year on his marvelous blog (of which I am an avid follower and sometime contributor), and he has re-run them today as one of his year-end collections from the archives of this year's NYSD.

For those of my readers who are not regular readers of NYSD, I urge you to visit it often. While the party pictures and social histories featured are always lots of fun, DPC also shares with his followers thought-provoking and, at times, moving essays and reflections upon life, growing up, and lessons learned. As a case in point, I provide you with a link to a recent essay he wrote, titled Christmas as a Kid, about his experience growing up in a household where all was not always jolly during the holidays, but where the Christmas spirit still shone through. I found it moving, and I believe you will to.

Thank you, DPC!

Image courtesy of NYSD

Oh, Christmas Tree . . .

2011-12-22T10:12:00.005-05:00

A number of readers have asked me to post photographs of our decorated Christmas tree at Darlington House. I am more than happy to oblige, thank you. I'd been planning on posting pictures of it all along, but I hadn't done so as we only put it up several days ago. We are not one of those households that immediately gets into the Christmas spirit the day after Thanksgiving. It takes time for the spirit to build with us. We usually wait until mid-December, at the earliest, to put up our tree.

This year, we (or should I say Boy, since he is the one solely responsible for decorating the Christmas tree in our house) put up and decorated a pale green, old-fashioned feather tree on one of the serving tables in our dining room. We bought the tree last week at Treillage, in Manhattan. I think it is one of the loveliest Christmas trees that Boy has ever done. And that's saying a lot.

This is the first Christmas that we've not had a "real" tree. Even though I have an inborn prejudice against artificial trees, I love feather trees, because they are—in part—meant to look artificial; they're not trying to fool anyone that they are a living tree.

Boy has hung the tree with a combination of vintage and new-ish gold, green, silver, and orange ornaments that we've collected over the years. And, as I described in my recent post I'm Just Wild About Slim, he's also decorated it with dried slices of oranges, a gift to us from fellow blogger Slim Paley.

Boy anchored the tree in a vintage silver-plated ice bucket from one of the great (and long gone) grand hotels. He has surrounded it with a forest of miniature bottle-brush trees that we bought years ago from the late lamented Martha By Mail, placed on little silver beakers and footed bowls atop a snowy-white linen runner.

It's really rather pretty, don't you think?

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

A Very Reggie New York Day

2011-12-21T09:40:00.007-05:00

While I adore Darlington, I also like taking a break from it every now and then to stay in New York for the weekend. I particularly enjoy doing so during the winter months, when I happily play tourist in my own city.

This past weekend we decided to do just that. Rather than rushing up to Darlington House on Friday as we normally do, we stayed in town to take in some shows, eat out, and do some holiday shopping. On Friday night we (somewhat improbably) attended a rock-n-roll concert performed at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village by a friend and former business colleague of mine. Although I felt a decided fish out of water at such a venue and event, I had a remarkably good time of it, all things considered. I congratulated myself that I could even enjoy singing along to "Glory Days" as performed at the conclusion of the evening, despite it being a complete charade on my part in pretending to do so. All I can say is thank goodness my friend Paul A. was also in the audience and handed me some earplugs at the outset of the show, or my ears would still be ringing as I write this, given the punishing amplification of the evening's entertainment.

The Bitter End: New York's oldest running rock club
Image courtesy of same

Having fulfilled that particular obligation, we crawled back to our apartment with the plan to sleep in the next morning. We lounged around the apartment for a couple of hours on Saturday morning reading the paper and chatting, and then made our way over to our most adored Swifty's for a leisurely, boozy brunch of the famed restaurant's spot-hitting, delicious, comforting food.

Swifty's was all decked out for the Holidays

Well fortified by doing so, we strolled about the neighborhood afterwards, stopping in at some of our favorite shops nearby, including the exquisite Lexington Gardens, where we always find something pretty and decorative to buy.

Conveniently located next door to Swifty's,
Lexington Gardens is a visual treat and sensory overload

Their windows were particularly festive and fun this year.

I particularly loved this window's
display of nut arrangements

Our next stop was Treillage, one of a number of the inestimable Bunny Williams' retail outposts in the city.

Treillage is just up the street
and full of temptations

Our "real" mission for the day was to attend an exhibition at Hirschl & Adler featuring the works of Duncan Phyfe and his contemporaries, which the gallery had just put up in connection with the Duncan Phyfe show that opened at the Metropolitan Museum yesterday.

The Crown Building at 57th and Fifth,
home of the Hirschl & Adler Galleries

While we were at Hirschl & Adler we spoke with the ever-charming and lovely Elizabeth Feld, who curated the show. She did a marvelous job of it. I plan on doing a more detailed review of the exhibition in a future post.

One of the gallery displays at Hirschl & Adler

H&L's galleries have been stunningly arranged for the show by Liz's father, Stuart Feld, who has displayed the furniture, art, and decorative arts on exhibition to its best advantage. The show is splendid!

Spanierman Gallery sits on a side street across the street
from the Four Seasons Hotel

Afterwards we dropped in at Spanierman Gallery, hoping to meet up with our dear friend Gina (and Boy's representative) there, but learned that she was out that day.

James Robinson sits on the corner of 58th and Park

So we consoled ourselves with a visit to James Robinson, a very dicey proposition indeed.

James Robinson is a rather dangerous store to go into
if one likes pretty and expensive things, as I do

Although we were tempted to buy a set of silver nutcrackers there that Boy admired, we decided against it, since we already have a number of handsome crackers of our own. And it was a good thing I didn't lose my head and buy the vintage 1950s-era gold, diamond, and sapphire set of studs and links for sale there made by Van Cleef & Arpel that I looked at and admired. I'm not much for men wearing flashy jewelry, but yours truly would have been quite happy to sport these baubles out one night. Since they were twenty-eight thousand dollars for the set, though, I was more than happy—sighs permitting—to give them a "pass."

A small selection of temptingly and reasonably priced
cufflinks on display at James Robinson

Not everything at James Robinson is so stratospherically priced, though. They also have a nice selection of enameled men's cufflinks available at only $295 a pair.

Boy needed to pop in to Karl Kemp on Madison Avenue
to pick up some tearsheets for a client

Our next stop was Karl Kemp Antiques, where Boy showed me a number of pieces he is considering for one of his decorating clients. It is always such a treat for me to be out with Boy when he visits the Carriage Trade shops, such as Karl Kemp, in his capacity as a decorator to those who have the means and taste to buy from them.

The entry to Ed's Chower House, conveniently located
across from Lincoln Center
Image courtesy of same

After a quick nap back in our apartment to recover from the day's strenuous efforts, we scurried over to the West Side and met up with assorted friends at Ed's Chowder House near Lincoln Center for dinner. The place was mobbed, but the service was excellent, and the food was too.

The program for the concert we attended

Our reason for meeting up with our friends was to attend a Holiday Jamboree concert at Alice Tully Hall of the Yale Whiffenpoofs, the Harvard Krokodiloes, and the Princeton Nassoons, along with a guest appearance by Darren Chris of Glee, where he plays Blaine Anderson, formerly of the Warblers a cappella group.

The Whiffenpoofs assembling on stage

The concert was well-attended, with most of the seats in Alice Tully filled with the type of people you'd expect at such an Ivy League gathering, and those that weren't were occupied with ardent young female admirers of Mr. Criss, who were more than happy to fill the air with their trilling appreciation whenever he spoke or sang.

The Whiffs were joined by Darren Criss, singing
his hit cover of Katy Perry's Teenage Dream

It was a delightful concert and a lovely way to cap off a most pleasant day and evening of what New York offers best—fun, food, shopping, and entertainment. The contrasts between the concerts we attended at The Bitter End on Friday and at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday were not lost on either me or Boy. Nor did they detract from the pleasure we took in them individually, I might add. Variety is, indeed, the spice of life, Dear Reader.

I had an absolutely lovely time.

Only in New York, kids, only in New York!

Unless noted, all photographs taken by Boy Fenwick on his iPhone

I'm Just Wild About Slim

2011-12-19T14:56:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite bloggers in the lifestyle sphere where I bobble about is Slim Paley, whose blog of her fabulous and über-stylish life in and about Santa Barbara, Sun Valley, and other swell environs is a "must read" of mine. She's marvelously funny, wickedly smart, intensely visual, and takes the most gorgeous photographs of flowers, fashion, and interiors, many of her own, that she shares with us, her most fortunate followers. She's a dynamo!

A week ago Ms. Paley posted a series of photos of her Christmas tree, in which she showed that she had decorated it with, among other things, the most beautiful dried slices of oranges imaginable. The moment I saw Slim's Christmas orange slices I was filled with longing to have some for myself. Well, not actually longing, Dear Reader, but rather lust. I left a comment that indicated a certain degree of my covetousness. Yes, Reggie admits that he is not immune to one or two of the Seven Deadly Sins from time to time. He is mortal, after all.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I received a brown-paper package shortly thereafter from Lady Paley containing her gift of several dozen of said orange slices. Not only was the package prettily and cleverly wrapped, but what it contained was as precious as jewels!

Within but a blink of an eye of my opening the package, Boy began hanging the orange slices on our Christmas tree at Darlington House. He was already well underway placing the vintage (and some new-ish) glass gold, silver, and green ornaments that he had chosen as his color scheme this year. What timing! Boy darted to the basement and retrieved his small rare stash or orange glass ornaments to complete the new palette.

What had originally been conceived of as a Winter Woodland Christmas tree at Darlington House was now transformed into a citrusy shimmer of gold, green, silver, and orange.

I am beside myself with joy.

Thank you, dear Slim Paley.

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

Boy Makes a Wreath, Again

2011-12-12T08:36:00.002-05:00

This past weekend saw a proliferation of Christmas decorations in the town where we live in the Hudson River Valley. By Saturday evening almost every house in the village had put up Christmas lights, and garlands, and wreaths. Except ours, that is.

One of the boxwood shrubs
on our property at Darlington

We've been rather preoccupied with other things this season at Darlington House. Unlike our neighbors, we haven't (yet) put up lights outside or raised (yet alone even cut and bought) a Christmas tree. We have put out a footed bowl of vintage ornaments, but so far that's it.

Boy Fenwick, preparing to harvest boxwood
for our Christmas wreath

On Sunday, Boy decided that something must be done, and took matters into his own hands to raise the Christmas Spirit at our house. Just as he did so two years ago, Boy decided to make a wreath from the evergreens on our property for our front door.

Little bundles of boxwood
ready for attaching to the wreath form

He cut sprigs of boxwood from one of the hedges, bound them in little bundles with floral wire, and fastened them to a wreath form that was left over from a previous Christmas.

The finished wreath in our gardening barn,
ready to hang on our front door

That little bulldog head you see on the wall above the completed wreath? That's a cast-iron bottle opener in the form of a bulldog's face, puchased in honor of my alma mater, Yale. Boola-boola!

The freshly made boxwood wreath,
hanging on our front door

What a pretty wreath Boy has made for our front door at Darlington House this year! We're going to leave it just as it is, with narry a ribbon or ornament upon it.

We like its unadorned simplicity, naturalness, and purity.

Merry Christmas, Dear Reader.

Photographs by Reggie Darling and Boy Fenwick

Reggie Recommends: Agraria's Bitter Orange Potpourri

2011-12-07T21:46:00.000-05:00

I'm not, in general, a fan of potpourri. Most of what is available today is vile, made of things like artificial peach scented cedar shavings. No wonder it has such a bad reputation.

One of our Chinese export punch bowls, ca. 1800,
filled with Bitter Orange potpourri

However, there is one potpourri out there that I love, and which I make a point of buying every year when the weather turns cold and the heating season begins. It is called Bitter Orange, and it is made by a company called Agraria. I recommend it to you, Dear Reader.

It is the most marvelous potpourri there is.

Agraria makes its Bitter Orange potpourri in small batches of fragrant dried flowers and orange slices, cinnamon sticks, cloves, lavender, natural oils, and other exotic organic ingredients. Bitter Orange is lovely—citrusy, floral, spicy, and woodsy. I fill an antique Chinese export bowl with it every year at this time and place it in our drawing room at Darlington House, where its scent deliciously pervades the room.

I first learned of Bitter Orange back in the early 1980s, shortly after it became available in New York. I vividly recall my introduction to it, in the living room of a large apartment on the Upper East Side that belonged to the parents of a classmate of mine from Yale. I remember sitting in a chair in the room and wondering "What is that marvelous scent, and where is it coming from?" and my then delight in learning that it was a potpourri called Bitter Orange from a small company named Agraria, based in San Francisco. The mother of my friend had just bought it at Henri Bendel, the only store in the city that stocked it at the time, and she was quite pleased with herself for having done so.

A freshly opened box of Bitter Orange,
revealing the treasures inside

At the time I had never seen or smelled potpourri before. It seemed rarified and exquisite to me, and I was entranced by it. This was long before potpourri had become a degraded mass-market commodity found in every gift-shoppe, drug store, and big box retailer in America. It was very special, then. Bitter Orange created a sensation in New York when it was introduced to the city in the mid-1970s, where it became known as "the Park Avenue potpourri," as it was immediately popular among the city's uptown smart set.

I had to have it. I went to Bendels at the next opportunity I had and bought myself a box of it. I was shocked at how expensive it was, but that didn't deter me. I simply had to have it.

And I've been buying it ever since.

Agraria's handsome box
for its Bittersweet potpourri

Agraria's Bitter Orange has spawned many imitators over the years, but none have succeeded in replicating its signature scent or quality. It is unique. Bitter Orange was the foundation of Agraria's subsequent success, and today the company's products are widely distributed, a testament to its vision and the integrity of its offerings. I'm pleased that they have been so successful.

If you are not already a fan of Agraria's Bitter Orange potpourri, Dear Reader, I recommend that you get some, because I trust that you will love it, as I do. But be forewarned: it is addicting.

Agraria's website can be found here.

Please note: Reggie has received nothing from Agraria for making this recommendation, nor does he expect to do so. He is recommending Bitter Orange potpourri to his readers for the sole purpose of providing them with pleasure, his goal in writing this blog.

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

A Prismatic Morning at Darlington House

2011-12-04T11:38:00.002-05:00

This morning I walked through the dining room at Darlington House and nearly tripped over two rays of refracted color on the floor.

No, Dear Reader, a little elf hadn't painted them on the carpet during the night.

The source of the rays was sunlight refracted by crystal prisms hanging on a pair of antique gilt-bronze girandoles standing on either end of the mantel in the room. We bought our girandoles many years ago from Charles & Rebekah Clark, dealers of American classical furniture, lighting, and decorative arts. The Clarks feature numerous examples of similar girandoles on their website.

Before owning girandoles, I had always assumed that the purpose of their crystals—other than being decorative—was to reflect candlelight at night. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they also throw refracted rays of color when hit by sunlight during the day.

There were splashes of color scattered all about our dining room this morning. They are one of the pleasures at Darlington House when the sun travels far enough south during the late autumn and into the winter months such that its light streams through the front windows and creates a play of rays through the girandoles' crystals.

But, like all rays, they are ephemeral and momentary, and just as quickly as they form, they vanish!

Reggie's Rules for Dining in Better Restaurants, Part II

2011-11-30T00:52:00.003-05:00

Oh, la! I realize that it has been almost five months since I published my first installment of Reggie's Rules for Dining in Better Restaurants. Today's essay is the second, and final, installment in the series.

The art of presentation is a defining feature
for many restaurants of the better sort

The focus of these rules (and the rules I share with you in general, Dear Reader) is to provide advice and guidance to people who would like to be thought of as courteous, mannerly, and discreet by those observing them—either for the first time, or repeatedly. In other words, to stand in stark and pleasing contrast to the tedious, loud-mouthed, ill-mannered boors one encounters with increasing frequency these days, and who are a noxious intrusion on the lives of well-behaved people who have the misfortune to be within earshot of said cretins.

While I covered the majority of my rules for dining in better restaurants in the first installment of this series, here are the remainder of the rules I was not able to cover beforehand:

10. Don't bring young children with you to dinner in a restaurant for grown-ups

While there are very few of the city's better restaurants where well-behaved children under the age of twelve are not welcomed during the day, it is not appropriate to bring them to dinner in better restaurants where the primary clientele is comprised of cocktail-imbibing grown-ups, out for the evening. If you can't bear to leave your children at home with their nanny or babysitter, then either take them to a different restaurant that is suitable for families, or stay at home with them and eat with them there.

It is best to leave small children at home when out for dinner
at grown-up restaurants such as this

Don't get me wrong, Reggie adores children, and believes that it is more than acceptable to take them out to eat in restaurants—but only to ones where it is appropriate to do so, and only when the child is old-enough, well-trained enough, and well-behaved enough to be able to handle the experience without having a meltdown or making a scene.

11. If you have a petulant or wailing child with you, either deal with it or leave the restaurant with it

Too many of us have withstood the misery of sitting in a restaurant where a parent (or parents) of children allow their little darlings to kick up an unsupervised ruckus. This is not acceptable. If your child is misbehaving in a restaurant (or any other public place for that matter), then it is your responsibility to either quiet it down or take it outside with you if you cannot.

12. Refrain from speaking on cellphones

Don't make calls from or answer your cellphone when sitting at a table in a restaurant. It is rude to your table-mates, and irritating to those sitting nearby who are not interested in listening to you make plans or discuss your personal life with someone on the other end of the line. If you feel you absolutely must use your cellphone, then excuse yourself from the table and go someplace else where you will not disturb anyone.

13. Be discreet when texting or emailing

While Reggie believes one should refrain from using PDAs to check email or for texting while sitting at a table in a restaurant, sometimes it is unavoidable. Under such circumstances, however, he advises that you hold the device on your lap under the edge of the table and out of view, so that others around you aren't made glaringly aware of it.

In closing, I offer you a quote from the website of La Grenouille, one of New York's very best restaurants, and a place where I have been most fortunate to have dined with pleasure numerous times over the years. In fact, I reviewed it earlier, here.

"Out of consideration for your fellow diners we ask you to refrain from using cell phones or other devices, and that children under 12 be left in the care of a loving babysitter."

I couldn't have said it any better myself.

Photographs courtesy of LIFE Images

Reggie Out & About: Hermes Mallea Book Signing

2011-11-27T11:20:00.001-05:00

Last night Boy and I had the pleasure of attending a book signing party held in honor of Hermes Mallea, in celebration of the publication of his beautifully written and lavishly illustrated Great Houses of Havana: A Century of Cuban Style, published by the Monacelli Press.

The announcement in the window of Rural Residence

The book signing was held at Rural Residence, a treasure trove of a store in Hudson, New York, which was the subject of a post that I did last year at this time. Timothy Dunleavy, the owner/proprietor of Rural Residence, hosts book signings there from time to time, most recently for Hermes Mallea's Great Houses of Havana. Another party for the book was recently held in New York at the 1st Dibs Gallery, and was featured on New York Social Diary, where yours truly is a sometime contributor.

Stacks of books, ready for signing

The book signing party at Rural Residence for Mr. Mallea was a great success, full of friends and well-wishers, and so well attended that at times the crowd spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of the store. People were buying books by the armload, and the author spent much of the evening sitting at a table busily writing inscriptions, hardly able to circulate around the room given the demands for his autograph. Fortunately he didn't need to leave his chair as all were there to see him, one by one.

The author inscribing our copy of his book

Hermes Mallea and his partner in business and life, Carey Maloney, have a weekend house in the area and we see them out and about at the larger parties in the county. They are charming and pleasant company.

I spent several hours this morning reading through and looking at the photographs in Great Houses of Havana. I am impressed. It stands head and shoulders above many of the decorating and architecture coffee table books that have been rolling off the printing presses in recent years. It is a scholarly, well-researched, and beautifully illustrated tour of residential and civic architecture built in Havana in the one hundred years leading up to the Cuban Revolution. Mr. Mallea writes articulately, thoughtfully, and knowledgeably (he is, by profession, an architect and a partner in M (Group), a design firm based in New York).

The party in full swing

Great Houses of Havana contains a lot of information, both written and visual, about the history of Cuban architecture, the island's pre-revolutionary culture, and the colorful and visionary people who built and inhabited the buildings showcased in the book. Great Houses of Havana is richly illustrated with many contemporary and vintage photographs of the buildings and their interiors, and their occupants (including one of Mrs. Earl T. Smith, the wife of the former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, and who was the subject of an earlier post of mine). Many of the once-private houses featured in the book are today public museums or serve as ambassadorial residences, and appear to be well cared for—in some cases exceptionally so.

Dear Reader, I encourage you to consider getting a copy of Great Houses of Havana, as it is a worthy addition to the library of anyone interested in architecture, design, cultural history, and the fascinating island of Cuba. That would certainly describe me, and I suspect it would also be an apt description of many of the people who read this blog.

You can learn more about the book and its author at www.greathousesofhavana.com

Please note: Reggie has received nothing in return for making this recommendation, nor does he expect to. He is recommending Great Houses of Havana solely for its merits and for the pleasure of his readers, which is why he writes this blog in the first place.

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

Reggie's Thanksgiving Tradition

2011-11-24T11:54:00.000-05:00

Every year, at Thanksgiving, while sitting at the celebratory meal with family and friends, I follow a tradition where I suggest that each person at the table shares what it is he or she is most thankful for. I know that some people find this hokey, and it does at times make people uncomfortable. But I press on, and I encourage everyone to participate, because I find that what people have to say they are thankful for is fascinating, in many cases enlightening, and oftentimes food for thought and later reflection. It is also a window into the souls and lives of those who are willing to do so, as most people are, I find. Regardless of how tough a year someone may have had, there is usually something they can be genuinely thankful for.

A sheaf of wheat decorating our dining room
for Thanksgiving at Darlington House

Pausing during the hurly-burly of the meal to listen to and reflect upon what those of us who are sitting there are thankful for makes the gathering more memorable, in my view, and hearkens back to the very reason we find ourselves at the table in the first place: to give thanks.

The colors and patterns that one sets one's
Thanksgiving table with can be subdued . . .

Sometimes the answers given are short and sweet, and other times can be surprisingly emotional and sad, if not wrenching. Whether sweet or sad, however, I believe the process of listening to what others say they are thankful for, and then volunteering what oneself is also thankful for, makes the observance of Thanksgiving a more enriching experience for many of us.

. . . or rich and exhuberant—whatever
strikes one's fancy or mood

This year, as I do most years, I expect to say that I am most thankful for my health, for my sanity, and for the deeply rewarding and ever-evolving marriage I have with my wonderful spouse, Boy Fenwick. There are other things that I am thankful for, too, but these are the ones that sit at the top of my list this Thanksgiving Day.

Tell me, Dear Reader, what are you thankful for?

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

My Lifelong Love Affair with Gucci Loafers

2011-11-21T20:24:00.006-05:00

I don't remember when I got my first pair of Gucci loafers. I know that it was when I was at prep school in the mid-1970s, at Saint Grottlesex, either during my junior or my senior year. But I can't exactly pinpoint the date. It's been so long that I just don't remember.

The iconic, classic Gucci loafer

Gucci loafers. I'm referring to the classic, old-fashioned, pre-Tom-Ford-era ones, with snaffle-bits, favored by slippery-slope investment bankers, louche Euro-trash, and the denizens of Kennedy-era Southampton and Palm Beach and their social and stylistic offspring. Footwear fashions may come and go, but the classic Gucci loafer remains essentially unchanged for more than half a century, and rightly so, because it is a highly profitable mainstay of the firm's footwear empire. Leaders at Gucci blessedly know not to kill the golden goose of the House of Gucci. They might play with it, as they do, by offering variations on it, but they haven't yet killed the original. And I hope they never do, at least during my lifetime, as I plan on wearing the classic Gucci loafer to my grave . . .

Gucci loafers have been a staple of my footwear wardrobe ever since I first slipped my feet into a pair as a teenager, my fevered heart pounding with anticipation that, yes, my dream of owning a pair was finally coming true. I had coveted Gucci loafers for long enough that when it came time for me to actually try on a pair to buy I felt like Cinderella confronted with the glass slipper brought 'round after the ball. I knew they were meant to be mine.

A 1970s preppy hottie, wearing Gucci loafers
Photograph courtesy of Google Images

I had to put up a fight to get them, though. Neither of my parents wore Gucci loafers when I was growing up, and they disapproved of them. My parents were far too conservative to wear such shoes, and considered them flashy, shockingly expensive, and downright frivolous, given who wore them—people of suspect morals and spendthrift ways.

People just like me, as it turned out.

I first became aware of Gucci loafers when I went away to boarding school. It was there, at Saint Grottlesex, that I encountered them on the feet of the fast-living, unnervingly sophisticated, more-than-worldly, Manhattan-raised offspring of families with boldfaced names, limitless resources, and house accounts (remember those?) in stores stocked with expensive European-made goods. Remember, this was back in the 1970s, long before every major city in America became over-retailed with specialty stores and shopping malls clogged with purveyors of luxury goods, all to be had with just a Visa card and a credit line. In those days it was hard to find a store in America outside of Manhattan that stocked Gucci loafers.

The flagship Gucci store in Manhattan, before it moved to the Trump Tower
Photograph courtesy of Google Images

My schoolmates at Saint Grottlesex who wore Gucci loafers (a relatively small minority of the school's population, I admit) seemed impossibly glamorous and sophisticated to me, and I wanted to be like them. And that meant I needed to ratchet up my wardrobe in order to fit in with them. I needed a pair of Gucci loafers.

Douglas Fairnbanks, Jr., wearing Gucci loafers
Photograph courtesy of Google Images

"You want what?!" I remember MD asking me when I told her I wanted a pair of Guccis, instead of the much more reasonable and mundane Bass Weejuns she was prepared to buy me to take back to boarding school for the fall semester of my junior year. Except that we didn't call it "Junior Year" at Saint Grottlesex; we called it the "Fifth Form," in the traditions of the English public schools that Saint Grottlesex (and others like it) followed.

"Are you crazy?!" she said. "Have you any idea how much those ridiculous shoes cost?! Forget it!"

Brand-new and begging to be worn . . .

At the time I didn't know how much Gucci loafers cost, except that they were expensive (they had to be, considering those I knew who wore them). But I was determined to own a pair, despite my mother's objections and her unwillingness to foot the bill. I don't know whether it was then or within the next year, but I somehow scraped together enough money to buy myself a pair—black leather ones with brushed brass snaffle-bits. I was beside myself with excitement when I brought the shoebox home, the forbidden treasure nestled inside, wrapped in tissue paper. And when I slipped them on my feet, alone in my bedroom, I felt flushed with pleasure, but nervous, too, knowing that I had done something rash and extravagant and that my parents would disapprove when they discovered what I had done.

Even though I took no end of heat from MD for squandering what little money I had on a pair of shoes I could ill afford, I was thrilled to have them. I felt as if I'd crossed over to the other side, to where the fast and exotic kids from New York at Saint Grottlesex lived and played. I no longer felt like a suburban hick, staring through the window at the fun happening inside. I was inside. Well, sort of—at least I now had the same shoes as those inside wore . . .

The Gucci store in Florence, in the 1950s
Photograph courtesy of Google Images

And I've been happily wearing Gucci loafers ever since, thank you. In fact, I'm wearing a pair of them right now, as I write this essay for you, Dear Reader.

The classic Gucci loafer is deliciously comfortable and marvelous looking in a sporty, horsey way, and pretty much "goes" with anything, in my view. I wear them with suits, with khakis, with jeans, and with shorts. I draw the line with black tie, though, but I didn't used to when I was younger, before I owned embroidered velvet slippers, or Belgians, or kidskin dancing pumps to go with my evening wear. But that's another story for another evening, I suppose.

I wear Gucci loafers everywhere: to the office, while walking the dog, out to eat in the city, or knocking about in the country on a summer weekend's afternoon. I wear them so often that I sometimes absentmindedly find myself wearing them while engaged in impromptu outdoor weekend chores or projects—hopefully (but not always) beat-up old ones, and not a fresh pair, just brought home from the store. In cool weather I wear Gucci loafers with socks, but in warm weather I mostly wear them sockless—that is, assuming my ankles have the barest blush of a tan, a requirement to carry the sockless look off, in my view.

A mess of our worn-out Gucci loafers

Between the two of us, Boy and I own dozens and dozens of pairs of Gucci loafers in various stages of wear. It is almost embarrassing. Part of the reason we have so many pairs, though, is because we haven't gotten rid of our worn-out ones when we've bought fresh ones to replace them. Boy has a number of what he calls "Gardening Guccis" that he keeps at Darlington, shoes that are so worn and scuffed that they really aren't suitable to wear off the property, but which are wonderfully comfortable and admirably suited to wearing while—well—gardening or doing painting projects.

Boy's mud-caked Gardening Guccis

In addition to his collection of classic Gucci loafers, Boy also has a number of pairs of what he calls his "Ghetto Guccis," as they were clearly designed to appeal to the Hip Hop set and are much fun to wear at parties.

A party favorite in three different colors of leather!

Me? I stick with the old-fashioned, tried-and-true, classic Gucci loafers with the snaffle-bits, in either brown or black leather. Sometmes I might get a pair with red and green ribbon beneath the bits, or I'll try some sleek driving shoes; more recently I bought a pair with bamboo "bits" instead of metal snaffle-bits.

The classic, with a twist

I even have a couple of pairs from the 1990s that were so of-the-moment when I bought them as to be unwearable today. They languish in my closets, unworn. Most of the Gucci loafers I own, though, are the classic style that looks good on the feet of anyone from a fourteen-year-old boy (should he be so lucky), out goofing around with friends, to an eighty-year-old codger out for a swell lunch with a scrumptious niece or granddaughter.

The look, the dog, the loafer . . .

In short, I love me my Gucci loafers. And I'll never stop wearing them, either.

Tell me, when did you get your first pair of Gucci loafers?

All photographs, except where noted, by Boy Fenwick

Reggie's Three Minute Rule

2011-11-17T10:06:00.000-05:00

One of the rules that I follow on a daily basis is what I call "Reggie's Three Minute Rule."

Every weekday morning before I leave for the office I go through our apartment straightening it up a little bit, here and there. I walk into a room, pause, look around to see if anything is amiss, and I take care of it if time allows. I devote no more than a few minutes to doing this task, and sometimes less. By this point in the morning I've already made our bed and tidied up the kitchen and the bathroom, so the "big" stuff has already been taken care of. My focus here is on doing one or two extra little bits of tidying that I can accomplish quickly before walking out the door. It could include picking up an empty coffee mug left sitting on the chest of drawers in our bedroom, or plumping the squashed pillows on the sofa, or putting yesterday's shoes away in the closet.

The goal is to make where we live a more welcoming and serene environment for when we return to it at the end of a busy and oftentimes stressful day. That way we can focus on unwinding and preparing for the evening, rather than taking care of the niggling little tasks left behind for us to "do later." In my view, spending just a few extra minutes taking care of these tasks at the beginning of the day, versus later, is time well spent, and well worth the minimal effort required.

And that, Dear Reader, is why I follow this "rule."

Tell me, do you also follow such a rule?

Image courtesy of periodpaper.com

An Autumn Weekend at Darlington

2011-11-14T07:54:00.003-05:00

It was a lovely weekend in the Hudson River Valley this past weekend. Not too cold, and not too warm. A perfectly sublime late-autumn stretch of days, really.

The trees held on to their leaves later than usual this year. By this past weekend, however, most of the remaining leaves had begun to drop. I suspect that the rest of the leaves will have fallen by this coming weekend, when we return to Darlington House after a busy week of work in Manhattan.

The farmers' market in the nearby town was bursting with the final bounty of the season. Boy picked up this ornamental kale there on Saturday from Cedar Farm, a local wholesaler of cut flowers who is one of the salwarts of the market.

He made a lovely, simple arrangement of it for our dining room, where it decorated the table during a dinner we had with our friends Jasper Lambert and Francesca Montmore, who were visiting us for the weekend.

The arrangement looked particularly good with the amethyst colored glasses and green feather edge creamware plates that Boy chose for the table.

Outside, one of our maples still held on to its leaves, one of the last on our property to do so.

Our scarlet oak was in full color, and will be one of the sole trees on our property to hold on to its leaves throughout the winter, a characteristic of oaks.

The leaves on our elm tree had turned a beguiling yellow, tinged with brown. They had mostly dropped by the time we left on Sunday.

The allee of crab apples on our property was loaded with red fruit, wating to be harvested by the birds who will denude the trees over the next several weeks.

This year was a particularly good one for our boxood, which remained a gorgeous, healthy green. We protect the boxwoods at Darlington from being damaged during the snowy season by having them wrapped in burlap.

The remaining herbs in the pots on our terrace were on their last legs, with the tenderer ones already having been dug up and their pots stored away until next year. One of the last holdouts as winter approaches was this hardy sage.

Along with rosemary, which continues to thrive. We bring our pots of rosemary indoors for the winter, but we're waiting to do so until we've had several more hard frosts, so they go fully dormant.

On the way back to the city on Sunday afternoon I pulled the car over to the side of the road so that Boy could take this picture of the sunset on his iPhone. It was a fitting cap off to a glorious late autumn weekend.

Photographs by Boy Fwnwick

Reggie's Rules for Calling Someone on the Telephone

2011-11-05T13:00:00.001-04:00

The other evening I attended a large cocktail party where I ran into a former colleague, JL. I like JL and enjoy speaking with him whenever I have the pleasure of seeing him, which is at least several times a year.

A reasonable reaction upon answering the telephone
and being confronted by a rude caller

We fell into a conversation that eventually turned to the topic of the sorry state of manners in today's world, and our shared belief that telephone manners, in particular, had reached a new low. As an example, JL recounted a telephone conversation he had at home one recent evening:

Telephone: Ring-ring-ring

JL: Hello?

Caller: Is Bobby there?

JL: May I ask who's calling, please?

Caller: Peter

JL: Peter who?

Caller: Peter Porterhouse

JL: Oh, hello Peter, this is Bobby's father. How are you?

Caller: Okay

JL: I'm sorry, but Bobby isn't available right now. May I take a message for him?

Caller: No, I'll try him later.

JL: Okay, thanks Peter. Nice speaking with you.

Caller: Yeah

JL: Goodbye Peter

CLICK

JL was particularly irritated by this exchange because he knew Peter Porterhouse, one of his son's friends and a regular visitor at JL's house. We both agreed that Peter was a boor, but since he was still relatively young—a teenager—we agreed that it wasn't necessarily his fault but rather that of his parents, who raised him to be an ill-mannered oaf, without (for starters) instilling in him basic good telephone manners.

I then related a telephone conversation I had one recent weekend afternoon, where the caller was even ruder:

Telephone: Ring-ring-ring

RD: Hello?

Caller: Who is this?

RD: Excuse me?

Caller: Who is this?

RD: What do you mean, "Who is this?" Who's calling, please?

Caller: [pause] . . . uh . . . this is Sandra

RD: Sandra who? Who are you calling?

Caller: Where's Mike?

RD: I believe you have the wrong number.

CLICK

Even though this was obviously a wrong number, I found this call particularly annoying because the caller who initiated the call did so by asking me who I was, rather than identifying herself to me first, and then hung up on me when I informed her that she had dialed the wrong number, without any acknowledgment or apology.

Dear Reader, I share these two conversations with you as prime examples of callers who clearly did not appreciate, or had not been properly trained in, the rudimentary rules required when initiating a telephone call.

In my view, these rules are:

Rule Number 1: When making a telephone call you must always begin the call by identifying yourself to the person who answers the phone. Unless you recognize his/her voice and are on first-name basis with him/her and speak with him/her regularly, and are confident that he/she will immediately recognize who it is that is calling him/her, then you must identify yourself by stating your full name, including both your first and last names, such as "Hello, this is Reggie Darling. I'm calling to speak with Emily Toplofty. Is she there, please?"

Rule Number 2: Never initiate a telephone conversation by asking, "Who is this?" You may only seek to learn the identity of the person who has answered the telephone after you have identified yourself first. The proper way to do so is to ask, "With whom am I speaking, please?"

Rule Number 3: If you have dialed the wrong number, it is incumbent upon you to say, "Excuse me, I believe I've dialed the wrong number." You may thus politely terminate the phone call.

Rule Number 4: When the person who has answered the telephone identifies herself to you as someone other than the person you are seeking to speak with, you must respond with a polite acknowledgement, such as "Oh, hello Mrs. Toplofty, I hope you are well."

Rule Number 5: Always end a telephone conversation with some form of closing salutation, such as "Goodbye," or "Talk to you soon," or "Thank you." Never simply hang up the telephone without closing out the conversation first.

In summary, I believe it is the responsibility of the person initiating a phone call to inform the person answering the telephone of their identity and the purpose for the call. The caller should also be prepared to engage in a brief exchange of pleasantries, as a matter of courtesy, with the person on the other end of the line. Finally, the caller should always conclude the call with some form of acknowledgement that the call has been completed by both the caller and the person with whom they have spoken.

These are the rules I follow when I call someone on the telephone, and I believe every other civilized person should too. I'm heartened to know that I am not alone in believing this, given my former colleague JL's emphatic agreement.

Tell me, what do you think?

Photograph courtesy of LIFE Images

The Family Game

2011-11-01T10:30:00.002-04:00

Every family has a favorite game. Whether it be board, card, or psychological . . .

Our backgammon board, in play at Darlington House

In our family, at least as how I define it these days, it's backgammon.

I was taught to play backgammon when I was eleven by a cousin of my mother's, named Frances, who visited us in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1968, coincidentally during the race riots that gripped the city in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Not exactly a salubrious time for her to visit the Nation's Capitol, but it was a pleasant and noteworthy visit for young Reggie, nonetheless.

Cousin Frances lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was recently widowed, rich, and Republican, all of which she found more than agreeable. She was probably in her early sixies at the time, and was visiting us while making a sentimental journey "up north" to see her Yankee relatives, driving a brand new Cadillac equipped with "all the bells and whistles" that she had bought especially for the trip.

The counters neatly stacked in a row, having
been successfully removed from the board
during a game

Frances was a jolly sort, who loved telling stories and reminiscing, and was quick to laugh, and I adored her. She'd loved her departed husband, and missed him dreadfully, but she said she also felt liberated to be on her own again and in charge of her own life and daily schedule after many years of attending to her dear, albeit increasingly infirm, husband's every whim, beck and call. "I loved him, for sure I did, honey, but now I'm on my own and 'free at last, free at least!'" she'd merrily cry in her lovely southern drawl. "Now, let's have some fun!"

Frances arrived at our house in Washington several days before the riots began, and was just settling in for an extended visit when all Hell broke loose, and the next thing we knew the inner city neighborhoods were on fire, curfews had been established, schools and public buildings were closed, and members of the National Guard were posted on street corners in the city's terrified white neighborhoods. It was all very exciting.

A convenient "cheat sheet" for the board's proper set up
provided to members of our city club's backgammon set

We were mostly confined to our house during Frances' visit, both day and night, and had to entertain ourselves. Watching television was much too grim, given its coverage of the carnage gripping the nation and the limited number of channels available at the time. Frances loved games, and I remember spending hours on end during her visit playing rounds of gin rummy, double solitaire, and hearts with her and various members of the Darling family. But I was her primary partner in such activities as I had more patience for, and a greater affinity for, such activities than most of the others in our household. At one point, having exhausted every card game in her arsenal, Frances asked me if I liked to play backgammon, and if so would I please bring out the board and play it with her. She was astonished to learn that not only did I not know how to play backgammon, but that we didn't even own such a board.

"That's not right!" she declared. "Every young man worth his social salt should know how to play backgammon! Come on, darlin', I'll buy you one as a present, and teach you." Within several hours, and despite the fact that finding an open store that sold such games during the riots was not without challenges, I became the proud owner of a new and expensive backgammon board, a gift from my dear Cousin Frances.

I've been a devotee ever since.

My backgammon skills took off when I went to prep school several years later and joined the school's backgammon club where I fell in with a fast and louche set of Manhattan-raised kids that made me feel like the proverbial country cousin, down from the farm. But it was a great learning ground for developing my skills, and I came to appreciate the game (and also play it) with a whole new perspective. My skills were further honed at Yale where I spent many evenings playing backgammon and drinking and carousing with other like-minded afficianadoes, and where I learned the joys—and dangers—of playing it for money. Fortunately, I (mostly) came out ahead, which was a good thing since I was on a strict (and meager) allowance while an undergraduate there.

Our backgammon board, closed after a game's play

After college I stopped playing backgammon regularly, until I met Boy and we bought Darlington House, where we took to playing the game as a pleasant way to pass the time during our leisure hours. We play backgammon regularly during the week, too, at our city club which has an active backgammon culture, and where games tables are scattered about the clubhouse to promote such activity. We recently treated ourselves to a new and luxurious backgammon set from T. Anthony on Park Avenue, as shown in the pictures here in this story. It is beyond luxe, all leather and pigskin, and is a decided improvement over the perfectly good but not as aesthetically pleasing set that we got a dozen or so years ago from Scully & Scully (also on Park Avenue), which we now bring out only when we have backgammon tourneys during weekend houseparties at Darlington House.

So, what is it about backgammon that keeps me coming back for more? It is a game that combines skill and luck, but not so much skill as to be daunting or so much luck as to be dispiriting, and where the tables can turn deliciously and unexpectedly at the roll of the dice. It is aesthetically satsifying and fun to play, particularly when one is lubricated by a tumbler or two of spirits, and it also has a certain tone—it is a game traditionally favored by and found in the homes and the clubs of the upper classes, as opposed to such baser games as canasta or parchesi. Not surprisingly, good backgammon boards can be rather expensive. One feels most comfortable and cosy when playing said game when shod in Belgian shoes or velvet slippers, preferably with red pitchfork-weilding devils or one's monogram embroidered upon them. In short, it is game that is right up Reggie's alley.

Tell me, what is your house game?

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

Last Chance: The Colonial Revival Show at the Museum of the City of New York

2011-10-25T15:31:00.002-04:00

Dear Readers, if you haven't had the chance to make it to the Museum of the City of New York to see its landmark exhibition "The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis," then you have just a few short days—until Sunday, October 30th—to do so.

The Museum of the City of New York, ca. 1932

A prime example of Colonial Revival architecture

Image courtesy of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art

Reggie urges you to throw off any and all excuses and get yourself up to the Museum and take in the show, and he urges you to also buy the exhibit's accompanying beautifully written and profusely illustrated catalogue. This is an important exhibition, and one that people will be talking about, and writing about, for years to come. Don't miss it!

"The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis"

exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York

Image courtesy of Donald Albrecht

Thoughtfully and creatively curated by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, and beautifully designed by Peter Pennoyer Architects, the exhibit is an absolute gem, and one of the first to explore in depth the quintessentially American style of architecture and decorative arts popular in the first half of the twentieth century that was inspired by the Colonial and Federal eras.

A Colonial Revival inspired door surround
designed for the exhibition by Peter Pennoyer Architects
Image courtesy of the New York Times

The Colonial Revival movement first gained popularity during the Centennial celebration of our nation's independence, and remained extremely (and deservedly) popular on these shores through well after WWII. It is still admired, practiced and appreciated in certain traditional, classically-inspired circles here in America, notably by the members of the most worthy Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, which co-sponsored the show.

The cover of the exhibition's catalogue
written by the curators Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
co-published by the Museum of the City of New York
and Monacelli Press

The American Colonial Revival is one of Reggie's favorite periods and styles, and was, in fact, the subject of one of his very first forays into the blogosphere, when he was graciously asked by the inestimable Emily Evans Eerdmans to do a guest post on her eponymously-named blog about rooms that have most inspired his own, personal decorating. I selected as my subject two Colonial Revival rooms in houses owned by Historic New England (formerly—and more elegantly—known as The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities). You can read that post on EEE's blog here.

A vintage postcard of the Colonial Revival "Town of Tomorrow"
at the New York World's Fair, ca. 1939
Image courtesy of Richard Layman

The show at the Museum of the City of New York is jam-packed with photographs, objects, and examples of the decorative arts from the Colonial Revival's heyday, and is an absolute treat for those of us who appreciate such things. The exhibit features numerous reproductions made during the period, some completely accurate and others, well, "inspired" by the originals. There were several reproductions of Duncan Phyfe seating furniture in the show that were so perfectly done (and so perfectly patinated) that Boy and I initially assumed they were original, made in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and not made one hundred years later, as they were, by W. & J. Sloane. Examining them gave us pause to wonder whether some of the furniture in our own collection at Darlington House attributed to Duncan Phyfe (or one of his competitors) could quite possibly actually be later, very good reproductions.

A Colonial Revival style Howard Johnson's restaurant
in Queens, New York, ca. 1930s
Image courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York

Despite the admittedly uneasy feeling such considerations gave us, we still loved the show and I urge you to go see it for yourself, Dear Reader, before it closes this Sunday.

The Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street
New York, New York 10029
(212) 534-1672
http://www.mcny.org/

I'm Just a Cockeyed Topiary Optimist!

2011-10-23T13:35:00.000-04:00

As readers of this blog may recall, Reggie isn't very lucky when it comes to caring for topiaries—those charming, impossible-to-sustain, diminutive potted standards sold by swell florists and specialty growers to those of us weak-willed enough to succumb to their siren call. I've written about my failures with keeping such darlings alive, despite my most earnest efforts to, here and here.

Our remaining topiaries—trimmed, rinsed,
and sprayed, and (I hope) ready to be brought
indoors for the winter...

But, being the optimist that I am, I never seem to figure out that buying yet another topiary (which for me actually means buying at least two of them at a time, since they look best in pairs) will lead to the inevitable death of said plant. For under my care death is what their fate will most assuredly be, despite my best efforts otherwise. I've killed countless dozens of them over the years.

This spring, at the Trade Secrets garden show held annually in Sharon, Connecticut, (founded by the inestimable Bunny Williams) I bought half a dozen new pots of topiaries from Atlock Farm, one of the vendors showing there, to replace the topiaries I'd murdered over the previous winter. I did so with the newfound understanding that my approach to owning and caring for topiaries had theretofore been flawed. In the past I had erroneously thought that I could keep them alive for months (if not years) with careful and loving treatment. I had also considered that my inability to do so was, well, a failure on my part. Not so, one wise reader, named Flo, advised me—I was in good company because it is virtually impossible for mere mortals such as Reggie to keep such tender lovelies alive over the winter in a northeastern house, particularly one such as Darlington House that is lived in only on weekends and where there is no temperature- and humidity-regulated greenhouse for the topiaries to vacation. Just think of a topiary, she wrote, as an expensive potted plant that has a limited life span, and enjoy it as such.

Such freedom! I now understood that my topiaries' withering was as inevitable as the tides rolling in and out, something entirely beyond my control. That is, unless I were Bunny Mellon, famous for—among other things—an extensive collection of perfectly cared-for topiaries, acres of greenhouses, and armies of gardeners charged with ensuring said topiaries' long life. As I've pointed out here before, I am, most assuredly, not Mrs. Paul Mellon.

Of the half dozen topiaries I bought at the Trade Secrets show this spring, four remain with us, having survived a summer of mostly benign neglect on our screened porch at Darlington House. I am showing them, ahead of our bringing them indoors for the winter, pruned (by Boy) of their late-summer shagginess and returned to their desired, perfectly coiffed profiles. They are resting behind our gardening barn in the shade, after having been rinsed and sprayed, awaiting their transfer into the house.

Even though I know there is scant hope that these topiaries will survive until spring under my care, I still hope and wish that they will, despite the odds stacked against me. I just can't help myself. I'm a tender-hearted optimist when it comes to such things.

And that is why there will always be a demand for nurseries and plantsmen to bring fresh batches of topiaries to market every spring—because of cockeyed optimists like Reggie who, when confronted by a new topiary deludes himself into believing that he might be able to, this time, nurture it from one year to the next.

And because I am aware that such optimism is foolishness on my part, I know that I will return to the Trade Secrets show next spring to, once again, replenish my stock of topiaries, continuing the never-ending cycle . . .

A Classical Coincidence

2011-10-18T14:53:00.000-04:00

As I have written in past posts, one of the (many) things we collect at Darlington House is early-nineteenth-century pearlware figures of deities and virtues. Made in Staffordshire, England, from 1790 to 1825 or so, the figures, which are almost all dressed in classically inspired garments fashionable at the time, were largely intended for the domestic English market, and relatively few of them were exported to the Americas.

Our "new" figure of Hygieia

English pearlware, ca. 1800-1820

We have been collecting such pearlware figures for as long as we have owned Darlington House, and we keep a determined eye out for them whenever we visit antiques shops, antiques shows, and auction houses. As readers of this blog well know, we frequent such places rather a lot, and doing so is one of our favorite pastimes.

A nearly identical figure of Hygieia (?)

already in our collection

But we only rarely come across these figures. Although we see mountains of later, Victorian-era Staffordshire figures whenever we are out and about, the earlier classical figures seem as rare as hens' teeth here in the American northeast. We go to a lot of shows and visit a lot of dealers and shops, but we probably only come across one or two—maybe three—examples in the course of a year. And when we do, we more often than not already own a version of that figure.

The two figures, side by side

Several weeks ago, when out in the town near Darlington where we do much of our shopping, Boy came across a pearlware figure that we did not already own, in perfect condition, in the shop of pickers where we have had much good luck over the years.

The figure had just come into the shop—a lucky find by the owners at a recent Brimfield Fair—and was exceedingly well-priced. So, without so much as a hesitation, Boy bought her.

As we were sitting in the car examining our new purchase, both Boy and I thought the figure in front of us looked oddly familiar. That's not surprising, though, since we probably own upwards of twenty of them, representing various goddesses, deities, and virtues. The figures are all approximately the same height, decorated similarly in pretty pastel colors, and almost all of ours are women (we call them "the Girls"). Only relatively few of such figures depict men or boys, we have found.

It was not until we got back to Darlington House with our new figure that Boy realized that we already owned a figure that was almost identical to the figure he had just bought. They both depict Hygieia, the Greek and Roman goddess of good health, cleanliness, and sanitation, and who was the daughter of Asclepius, the god of medicine.

Or do they?

The figure we already had in our collection carries a label from the dealer we bought her from ten or so years ago that identifies her as Hygieia, and we never had any reason to suspect that such an attribution may not be accurate. But when comparing the two figures we noticed that they were decorated differently, in different colors and patterns, and had a minor—albeit significant—difference to their modeling. But it was clear to us that the bases and bodies of both figures were made from the identical mold, and were—but for some minor variations—the same, although likely painted at different times by different people working in the same factory.

In examining the primary differences between the two figures—what they are carrying in their left hands—I am now not so sure that the figure that was already in our collection actually does depict Hygieia, even though it is the one marked with a label identifying her as such (seen in the photograph of the inside of the figures). Hygieia, I have since learned, is typically shown carrying a snake, which the figure shown on the right (our "new" one) does. The figure on the left (our "old" one), however, is shown carrying a sword, which is not typically associated with the goddess Hygieia. Furthermore, she does not have the flaming bowl on the top of her pedestal that Hygieia has, frequently seen in depictions of her. Consequently, I am now not so sure that these figures are supposed to represent the same goddess at all. I now suspect that the one shown with the sword (our "old" one) is meant to depict another goddess entirely (could it be Athena? Or the more obscure Enyo?), and was adapted from the mold originally made for Hygieia, but altered with different accessories (which were applied separately to the molded figure before firing) and painted differently as well.

Another pearlware figure of Hygieia
from Stafforshire Porcelain: 1740-1851
Pat Halfpenny, editor

Regardless of whether the figures are of one and the same goddess, or not, I'm delighted to have them both in our collection at Darlington House, and most pleased that Boy spotted the newest addition when he did.

Tell me, Dear Reader, do you think they are both Hygieia? If not, who do you think the goddess with the sword is supposed to depict?

The Passage of Time . . .

2011-10-16T13:47:00.000-04:00

Hello, Dear Reader.

I am afraid that I have been rather remiss in my postings of late, despite my stated intentions to the contrary.

The sundial at Darlington House

A number of you have been so kind as to ask what accounts for my absence and have sent me your good wishes and felicitations. Thank you.

I am happy to report that all is well in the Darlington household. My absence from the Blogosphere is largely attributable to a grueling, albeit extremely interesting and absorbing, work-related travel schedule that takes me out of the country and away from ready wifi access for days at a time. When I have returned to my beloved Darlington between my travels I have been much engaged in catching up, relaxing, and recharging my batteries, preparing for yet more international business travel.

So, that's what's up.

Once my travel commitments ease up, expected by mid-November, I plan on resuming my more regular posting. In the meantime, I do have a number of essays to publish that I hope you will enjoy.

With fond regards, I am your most humble servant,

Reggie

Photography by Boy Fenwick

Saucer of the Week: English Child's Punch and Judy Plate

2011-09-25T10:15:00.001-04:00

Several weeks ago, while Boy was out and about doing errands and a bit of idle shopping, he came across a whimsical little plate in a pocket-sized antiques store that belongs to a family of pickers and that has been a most happy hunting ground for us. It is the same shop, in fact, Dear Reader, where Boy found the souvenir portrait of the inestimable Robert Burns (identified as such by the eagle-eyed Corinthian Columnist) that now graces our dining room's pride of space (we have since had the painting cleaned and the frame restored).

The little plate Boy brought home was designed, I believe, to be used in a child's tea service, and depicts a scene from the Punch and Judy puppet show that was wildly popular in England from the late sixteen hundreds through the mid-twentieth century and continues to be performed in that country to this day. The brown transfer-print design features Punch with his wife, Judy, who is holding their daughter, accompanied by a pipe-smoking frog nearby. I had initially suspected that the figures depicted were based on illustrations done by George Cruikshank (1792-1878) in 1828, when a script for Punch and Judy was published for the first time.

A Cruikshank illustration from John Payne Collier's
The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy, published 1828

However, when I compared the figures on the plate with those of Cruikshank's, it is clear that they are based on later illustrations, perhaps of the 1840s. The overall design of the plate, though, is unmistakably of the even later English Aesthetic movement, popular in the 1870s and 1880s. My, what a hodgepodge of inspiration this delightful child's plate is!

When the plate is turned over, a mark is revealed identifying it as having been made by Charles Allerton & Sons, an English pottery active 1859-1942. Based on what research I have been able to do, and taking into account the style of its design, I date the plate to pre-1889.

The plate's mark

While not technically a saucer, my diminutive little plate qualifies for inclusion in this series because of its size (it is only four and one quarter inches across) and because I choose to do so.

The Punch and Judy plate currently sits on a bedside table in one of our guest rooms at Darlington House, where it provides sweet pleasure—one hopes—to our guests and a most decorative and utilitarian repository for their keys, errant buttons, and the small bits of printed papers and spent candy wrappers that one empties one's pockets of when retiring at the end of the day.

I hope you find this little plate as charming as I do, Dear Reader.

Photographs by Boy Fenwick; Cruikshank illustration courtesy of allposters.com

Reggie Reporting on New York Social Diary

2011-09-23T08:07:00.000-04:00

Today, Dear Reader, I have the distinct pleasure of reporting on David Patrick Columbia's New York Social Diary, a blog that is a daily must-read of mine, as it is for many that I know, where one catches up on what's up and who's doing it here in Gotham and its environs.

In the post I interview Martha Glass, a charming lady whose photograph regularly graces NYSD, about her passion for collecting ceramics, an interest that she and I share in common. I urge you to click over to NYSD and read the interview, Dear Reader, because Ms. Glass is charming, amusing, sensible, and full of good advice, and the story is full of photographs of her lovely collections. I am sure you will like her as much as I did, and do.

Martha Glass in her dining room, with a selection of plates and
serving pieces from her collection.
Photograph by Jeff Hirsch for NewYork Social Diary

Reggie's Rules for Those Who (Still) Smoke

2011-09-20T09:28:00.005-04:00

As readers of this blog may remember, Reggie is no stranger to the pleasures of smoking cigarettes. I was for many years a sometime social smoker and only gave up the evil habit after more futile attempts to do so than I'd care to admit. Fortunately I succeeded in my efforts to quit smoking once and for all more than five years ago, and today I am what I consider to be a former smoker. Not a non-smoker, mind you, but an ex-smoker. Once a confirmed smoker, I believe one can never regain one's status as a non-smoker, but will always (at least if one is successful at it) be an ex-smoker. It's like drinking: once a drunk, always a drunk, whether wet or dry.

Reggie in his younger days, enjoying a restorative smoke

Even though I gave up smoking cigarettes regularly years ago, I'm not immune to lighting one up every once in a great while at a party (whether in my own house or someone else's) if a pack is brought out and offered 'round. But I generally need to be fairly soused and among the company of other smokers, a rarity in the circles I run in these days. I'm the type that needs a ring leader to bring me into the fray: you know the kind, the ones who slyly bring out a pack at a dinner party once the dishes have been cleared and says "Mind if I smoke?" and everyone else at the table responds "Mind? Not if I can have one, too!" and then happily settles into an evening of boozing and smoking, having an absolutely lovely time of it.

Until the next morning, that is, when one awakes with a cigarette hangover and wonders "What was I thinking?"

Not all that long ago, it was considered socially
acceptable to smoke at dinner parties

So, for those of you who may question under what authority Reggie speaks when it comes to the behavior of and rules for smokers, I believe I have the smoking credentials to spell out what I believe are the rules by which smokers should abide in today's increasingly rabid anti-smoking world. I'm not expecting you to agree with all of these rules in all cases, Dear Reader, but please do read them and give them some thought. I'd be interested to hear from you, too, as to whether you think I've missed one or two, or am wide of the point in one or two cases.

Bars, booze, and butts: a match made in Heaven

Before I get to the rules, however, I'd like to share that I think the whole anti-smoking thing has gone too far here in America, and more recently in Europe. Sacré bleu, that one cannot light up a cigarette in a restaurant in Paris anymore! As far as I'm concerned, people should at least be allowed to smoke in bars and nightclubs, and even in certain grown-up restaurants that are large enough and well-ventilated enough to be able to support having a smoking section. I'm fine with there being non-smoking restaurants for those that can't abide secondhand smoke, but I think there should be some choice in the matter, too—what's the harm in allowing a restaurateur the choice whether or not to have a smoke-free place? I don't buy into the view that it isn't fair to non-smoking employees and other patrons of such establishments to be exposed to secondhand smoke. Vote with your feet. I don't know all that many people who are exactly forced against their will to work in or go to a bar or club that allows smoking, who don't have any other employment or entertainment choices available to them. Smoking is the least of the vices available in some of those establishments—at least it was in more than a few of the choicer places I found myself in the wee hours of the night in my younger days. If you don't want to inhale secondhand smoke, folks, then don't go to or work in a bar! It's as simple as that.

Needless to say, Reggie does not countenance
encouraging young people to smoke

Now that I got that off my chest, here are my rules for thems that still smokes:

1. Confine your smoking only to areas and places where it is explicitly allowed

Even though you may find the present-day restrictions on cigarette smoking inconvenient, if not annoying, you must heed such restrictions. Rules are, after all, rules.

2. Ask first, before lighting up

Whether in public or private. It's common courtesy, thank you.

3. Don't get shirty if someone objects to your smoking

Their rights trump yours.

4. Take it outside

Unless explicitly condoned, confine your smoking to the great outdoors.

5. Don't smoke while walking on the street

It is rude to the other people who are out and about, particularly those walking downwind of you, who have no choice but to inhale your secondhand smoke.

6. Watch it with those ashes!

If you must walk around in public smoking a cigarette, don't do it holding it in such a way that there is any risk that you could brush against someone, leaving ashes on them, or even possibly burn them. This is a particular pet-peeve of mine when walking along the sidewalks of New York, where I have on more occasions than I care to recollect found myself with someone's cigarette ashes deposited on my sleeve. And if you do accidentally ash someone, you should apologize profusely for doing so, particularly if the person you've ashed objects to it!

7. Don't walk around with a cigarette butt hanging out of your mouth, like some kind of Bowery bum

It looks disgusting and down market.

8. Don't throw a lit cigarette butt onto the sidewalk or the street

It is thoughtless and dangerous, and can burn the feet of those you share the sidewalk with, such as my dear little Pompey.

9. Dispose of your spent cigarette butts in proper receptacles

Don't just toss them on the streets or sidewalks, or into the bushes, assuming that someone else is going to pick them up after you. And don't even consider depositing them in a potted plant or planter. Your spent cigarette butt is litter. Always dispose of cigarette butts in a trash can or in one of those public ashtrays set out in front of buildings. If none of those are around, put the damn cigarette butt in your pocket, and dispose of it properly later.

10. When taking a smoking break from your place of employment, do not hover around the entryway of the building, but rather walk a discrete distance away from it.

It is decidedly unpleasant for those entering and exiting a building to have to walk through a haze of cigarette smoke in order to do so. Besides, there's nothing that looks more depraved than seeing a gaggle of smokers sucking on cigarettes outside of a building.

11. Don't smoke in the car

It is dirty and leaves a vile smell, and is unpleasant for other non-smoking riders trapped in the car with you.

12. Be thoughtful of the people around you who may not share your love for smoking cigarettes

At the end of the day, this is what it is all about.

And there you have it, Dear Reader, Reggie's rules for those who (still) smoke. If you must smoke, I suggest that you follow them, both for your sake and for the sake of others.

All photographs courtesy of LIFE Images

Back to School

2011-09-12T08:14:00.001-04:00

It's that time of year again, isn't it?

A favorite old photograph of mine of a boy's cross country team
delightedly posing for the camera, sporting boutonnières

Autumn is my favorite season. Although I am long past my schoolboy days, I am still drawn to the rhythm of the school calendar, more so than the Gregorian calendar that we use to mark the passing of days, weeks, and months. Even though that calendar may say that the new year begins on January 1st, the day after Labor Day is more of a psychological new year's beginning for me. That's when the new school year starts, and clothes are bought or taken out to wear again. There is the sense that I have another opportunity to make something of myself, that I have another chance to succeed in what I put my mind to.

Coincidentally, Autumn is also the season here in the Hudson River Valley when the weather is at its most lyrically beautiful. It is still summery and warm through much of September, and the skies are often cloudless and brilliantly cerulean blue, days on end. There is little more beautiful to me than when the trees start to turn and then become ablaze with yellow, orange, and red leaves, and the fields become golden. With the nights becoming refreshingly cool again it is perfect porch sleeping weather at Darlington House, one of the great joys of life, I believe.

As with so many new beginnings, though, there is work to be done. And so I am back to RD again, after a lazy hiatus these past two months. I had a busy June and July at the office which culminated in a lovely August largely devoted to spending time by the shore and then kicking back when I wasn't. It was delightfully pleasant.

During the final weeks leading up to Labor Day the streets in midtown Manhattan are sparsely peopled during the day, with only a few tourists and office workers straggling about. And it is a virtual ghost town on the UES where we live, as most of its inhabitants are either away for the summer or locked within their air conditioned apartments. Fortunately for those of us who found ourselves in the city then, as I happily did this year, the restaurants were empty and thrilled to take walk-ins, there was no traffic to speak of, and the streets were full of empty taxis roaming for fares. I love being in New York when everyone else is out of town.

The minute that Labor Day weekend is over, though, it is as if the starting gun has gone off at Saratoga, and, like clockwork, the city immediately becomes clogged again with throngs of people rushing about the sidewalks, traffic becomes unbearable, the restaurants are jammed to the rafters, and finding a free cab during rush hour is a fruitless exercise indeed.

Back to school. Back to work. Back to life. Back to RD.

Here are some of the essays that I am working on that you can expect to see here in the coming weeks:

New installments of Reggie's Rules
A Pompey post or two
An interview with a lovely lady who shares her mutual passion for collecting ceramics with me, which will first appear in New York Social Diary before running here
The return of the Saucer of the Week essay
A piece in which I explain how "Saint Grottlesex Made Me Who I Am Today"
An essay about windsor chairs, and how they are a more versatile seating form than many give them credit for
Musings about the distinctions between what it means to launder versus wash linens and clothes
The joys of a well-ordered linen closet
Some new additions to our collections at Darlington House, and
Attending the Colonial Revival show at the Museum of the City of New York

I appreciate your patience (and thoughtful emails), Dear Reader, during my absence, and I look forward to picking this up again.

Thank you,

Reggie

A Souvenir of Nantucket

2011-08-22T09:09:00.001-04:00

Well, souvenirs actually. I liked the sound of the title better as "A Souvenir of Nantucket," since it sounded more old-fashioned to me. And that's what I like about Nantucket: it is old-fashioned, in the best sense of the word. The pace is slower, the air is cleaner, and there is little here to jar the eye, that seems out of place. Nantucket still retains a lot of what I fell in love with when I spent my first summer here as a little boy, more than forty-five years ago.

I bought these playing cards on the ferry over from
the mainland. I was drawn to them because
I liked the old-fashioned graphics on the package

Some people complain that Nantucket has become "Disney-fied" over the years, what with its rigorous zoning and enforcement of aesthetic codes designed to preserve and promote the island's heritage as an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century whaling center, and then as a vacation destination for the nation's WASPy Eastern elite. Well, if that means there are no big-box retailers on the island, no invasive light pollution, and no Tuscan-style condo developments littering the landscape, then that's just fine with me. Yes, there are a lot of ridiculously expensive stores in town catering to the island's richer-than-rich population, it is hard to find a decent house to buy for less than several million dollars, and the restaurants are as pricey as ones found on the UES of Manhattan. But you don't find the attitude or aggressiveness or the midnight traffic jams here that you do in the Hamptons (a place I'd as soon visit again as have my fingernails extracted), and so long as you steer clear of the insanely picturesque town of Nantucket on weekends (which becomes unbearably clogged with day-trippers), then it is a remarkably serene place to spend a leisurely and relaxing vacation.

Oh, and most of the people you see out and about are actually wearing real clothes. The other day I saw a gaggle of college-age boys in town horsing around with each other, and not one of them was wearing a tee shirt, cargo shorts, or flip flops. They were all casually dressed, to be sure, but they were wearing shirts that had collars, bermuda shorts, and loafers or boat shoes. They looked great.

What a pleasure it is to come to a place where people still have standards.

The deck and view of the ocean at the house we rented

This year, for the second summer in a row, we've rented a sweet little salt-box shingled cottage sitting on a bluff overlooking the ocean in a sparsely settled area of the island. Plain and simple. Nothing fancy about it, but rather "just so," and as satisfying as tucking into a perfectly cooked lobster pot pie washed down with a cold bottle of beer. There is no internet service at the house (I'm writing this sitting at a table at the Nantucket Atheneum), and I have to get into the car and drive around in order to receive a signal on my BlackBerry. The lack of electronic connections at the house is rather inconvenient, I admit, but it does enforce one's resolve to "get away from it all."

Our "new" mustard spoon

The weekend that we arrived on the island we attended the Nantucket Historical Association Antiques Show, where we came away with a number of souvenirs of our visit. While Reggie has been known to buy a refrigerator magnet or two while on holiday (including one on this vacation) he generally aspires to acquiring loftier trinkets than the basest run-of-the-mill sort to commemorate his journeys. The antiques show we attended was a happy hunting ground for such purposes.

The first thing we found to buy was at Kathleen and Roger Haller's Silver Plus Antiques, where we purchased a diminutive silver mustard spoon (it's only four and seven eighths inches long), made in England in 1831. We already owned a number of what we thought were mustard spoons, that look like tiny soup ladles. However, we learned from the Hallers that what we own are, in fact, condiment spoons, and that mustard spoons have oblong bowls, as is shown here. With that new information in hand we had to acquire a spoon appropriate for the delivery of England's favorite accompaniment to roast beef.

A pair of late nineteenth-century watercolors
of coastal Massachusetts, bought at the Nantucket
Historical Association Antiques Show

Our other purchase at the show, after much dithering on my part, I admit, was a pair of charming watercolors of coastal Massachusetts. We found them at the booth of Carlson & Stevenson, who thought they possibly depicted the ruins of the old Sandwich glass works on Cape Cod. They were painted by an E. L. Moore of Southbridge, Massachusetts, in the 1880s, and have a marvelous limpid quality to the sky and water depicted. I was immediately drawn to them. The pictures are small, measuring only 9 ½ inches high by 12 ½ inches wide, including their frames. I bought them to hang in our flower arranging room at Darlington House, where I look forward to seeing them and pleasantly remembering where I found them.

A Staffordshire pearlware figure of a
boy feeding a rooster, circa 1800-1820

One of the antiques shops that we always make sure to stop in when visiting Nantucket is Linda Willauer's charming shop in town specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and Chinese export ceramics. It is a veritable emporium of antique figures, dishes, serving pieces, tureens, and jugs stacked chock-a-block floor to ceiling, accompanied by every imaginable decorative period accessory to go with them. As readers of this blog well know, we have a weakness for such things! Over the years Boy has bought a number of figures from Ms. Willauer, and came away from her shop this visit with a sweet early Staffordshire pearlware figure of a boy feeding a rooster. Boy has been eyeing this particular figure for a number of years—both in Ms. Willauer's shop on Nantucket and in New York where she exhibits at the shows—and finally succumbed to its charms once and for all.

In closing, I leave you with an image of another old-fashioned souvenir of Nantucket: calamine lotion. As I wrote earlier, the house we have rented is located in a sparsely settled area of the island. It is far away from the manicured lawns and perfectly maintained privet hedges of the town of Nantucket or the village of 'Sconset. The landscape where we are staying is mostly untended, and mostly wild. And lurking in much of the bushy scrub is that most pernicious of plants: poison ivy.

I've come down with a minor case of that vine's infernally itchy rash, despite valiant efforts on my part to steer clear of its evil, oily leaves. That is because our dear little Pompey is a most efficient delivery device for spreading the plant's venom to unsuspecting fellows such as I, particularly when he snuggles up next to me in bed at night, which he is wont to do.

Much as I do love to let the little darling run off lead when it is safely possible to do so, he has been firmly leashed to my side when crossing the threshold of our house ever since I realized that he was the source of the inflammation that precipitated the purchase of said calamine lotion earlier this week. It is, for me, a somewhat unexpected souvenir of the island, but fortunately it is a far more impermanent one than those we happily found elsewhere during our visit.

photographs by Boy Fenwick

Pompey sur la Plage

2011-08-11T11:13:00.000-04:00

We are on Nantucket for our summer beach holiday, which is one of the reasons for the relative infrequency of posting here. That, along with my rather demanding responsibilities at the Investment Bank where I work. One does have a day job after all.

As some of my readers may remember, last year at this time I wrote that Pompey didn't care for visiting the beach here on the island. In fact, not one bit. It was all so wet, sandy, and noisy—what with waves crashing and seagulls screaming. This year, though, he finds it a bit more tolerable. At least he wasn't outwardly miserable when Boy took him there the other day just before cocktails.

It does help, though, that he has a nice fluffy towel to sit on.

He sends you his snuffles and kisses, Dear Reader.

photograph by Boy Fenwick

Saucer of the Week: English Stand, Part II

2011-08-04T08:18:00.000-04:00

This week's Saucer of the Week is of yet another stand, continuing the theme of my last installment in the series. My inspiration for again featuring a stand, as opposed to a saucer, was a comment I received from a perspicacious reader who was convinced that the stand I featured in my previous post was most definitely designed to hold an oval teapot.

And right he was.

Our early nineteenth century English stand and teapot

In our cupboards at Darlington House we have an example of such a stand that has not become separated from its intended teapot. It is identical in form to the stand I featured last week, albeit decorated differently, with gilt-painted banding and flora. We found the stand with its accompanying teapot in an antiques shop in Hudson, New York, a decade or so ago. Both stand and teapot are in perfect condition, and appear to have been little used since they were made almost two hundred years ago.

The teapot and stand, united as intended

Having a stand to sit underneath a teapot ensures that any errant drips from said teapot will be contained by the stand, instead of falling unfortunately upon one's linens or polished tables. It also helps insulate the table's surface from the boiling heat of a freshly filled teapot.

How delightfully clever our ancestors were, and how frustratingly humdrum it is that today such stands are not routinely provided with teapots sold in most retail establishments.

I have been so deeply moved in writing this post that I have decided that it is my duty to mount a campaign for the return of teapot stands. And I have already come up with a name for it, too: The Society for the Preservation and Reinvigoration of the Teapot Stand, (abbreviated as "SPaRTS"). I urge you, Dear Reader, to join me in my noble pursuit of this vitally important initiative.

Can I count on your support?

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

High Summer

2011-07-31T10:10:00.000-04:00

It is now high summer here at Darlington House. The gardens have peaked, and we must now water the lawns between rainfalls in order to maintain their greenness. Fortunately, we do not suffer from drought or water shortages here in the Hudson River Valley. Our lakes are full, our water tables are high, and the well on our property flows abundantly.

Nothing quite says "high summer" to me like sunflowers do. This was the first Saturday when there was an abundance of them at the farmers' market in the nearby town. Boy bought every bunch of sunflowers from one of the vendors there and brought his bounty home with him.

He arranged the sunflowers in a large blue-and-white ginger jar that I bought in New York's Chinatown many years ago. It is one of pair. I think I paid all of twenty dollars apiece for them. I bought the jars to place on top of a Georgian secretary-bookcase that I had at the time, along with a grouping of other large blue-and-white Chinese vessels. I had seen such an arrangement in an English country house and admired it. I am confident that the vessels arranged in the house that inspired me were far finer and more valuable than mine, but my attempt at recreating the "look for less" was a success, and I was quite pleased with it. While I no longer have the secretary-bookcase—a victim of changing tastes and circumstances—I have kept the ginger jars because they are useful for displaying large bunches of flowers, such as Boy has done here. When the jars are not being used to hold flowers or branches we store them on a shelf in our flower arranging room, the luxurious presence of which is this flora lover's dream come true.

The arrangement of sunflowers Boy made is a substantial one, standing just shy of two feet tall. It is shown sitting on top of an antique tole tray on our screened porch, where it has quite a lot of impact. The cast-iron frog, also seen on the tray and one of a collection we own, appears to be quite interested in the gorgeous sunflowers, don't you think?

Happy summer, Dear Reader.

Photograph by Boy Fenwick

Saucer of the Week: English Stand

2011-07-25T14:26:00.001-04:00

I am somewhat chagrined that it has been more than a week since I last published one of my saucer scribbles, and—for that matter—more than a week since I last posted anything. That's because I have been rather over-scheduled and over-committed these past several weeks. Fortunately it has all been good stuff, but I'm afraid that even a good thing, if delivered in too great quantities, can be, well, too much. I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm explaining.

Back to the subject at hand: Saucer of the Week. Well, not a saucer this week, actually, but rather a stand. Today's featured plate is an exceptionally pretty and unusually decorated oval rimmed stand that was originally made to hold another vessel, such as a teapot or a small sauce tureen. Whatever it once held has long since parted ways.

But what remains is lovely indeed. The stand is English, circa 1820. It is decorated with magenta bell flowers and frothy seaweed-like vegetation. I haven't a clue what type of plant the decoration is supposed to suggest. I would appreciate your thoughts, Dear Reader, if you know what it might be. The plate measures 6 ¾ inches by 5 ³⁄₈ inches and is unmarked.

The stand was a birthday gift to me earlier this month from Boy, who found it at Bardith, Ltd.'s tiny jewel of a shop on upper Madison Avenue. When he was there Boy mentioned to the ladies who run the place that the plate he was buying would quite possibly be the subject of a post in my continuing series on saucers. Apparently the good ladies of Bardith weren't interested in that bit of news in the slightest.

Reggie who?

photograph by Boy Fenwick

Winning Bid: Directoire Bouillotte Lamp

2011-07-17T10:27:00.001-04:00

Several weekends ago, in pursuit of yet more silver for the entertaining household, I attended a weekend auction in the neighboring town that included several pieces of silver I fancied. The auction featured the contents of a number of what once must have been rather sumptuously decorated Fifth Avenue apartments of days gone by, along with the contents of several country estates (quite possibly belonging to the same city dwellers also featured in the sale) spread across northwestern Connecticut and along the Hudson River Valley. I came to the sale to bid on a large silver punch bowl and a silver cigarette box (a weakness of mine, even though I gave up smoking years ago), both of which I am pleased to have won. I won't be posting on either of those winning bids, however, as each prominently (and beautifully) displays the engraved names of the fortunate couple who received them as wedding gifts more than fifty years ago, and who—I have since learned from a mutual acquaintance—are still alive, but no longer have much use for such possessions. I respect their privacy.

My recently acquired Bouillotte lamp,
lit with candles, and reproduction
18th-century playing cards at the ready

While at the sale I found myself bidding on, and winning, a silver-plated Bouillotte lamp of the Directoire period. Just as I have a weakness for silver cigarette boxes, so have I weakness for Bouillotte lamps, which I consider to be the perfect occasional lamp for one's household. Well, at least our household. With the addition of this latest acquisition to our collection, we now have six Bouillotte lamps scattered about Darlington House.

So, what is a Bouillotte lamp, you might ask?

The Bouillotte lamp, with unlighted candles

A Bouillotte lamp is a type of lamp that was used to provide light during night-time games of Bouillotte, a card and counter gambling game popular in France from the late eighteenth century well into the nineteenth century, supposedly similar to the modern game of poker. The lamps feature a dish-shaped base, designed to hold counters (chips), a central shaft with a movable candelabra attached to the shaft with a key, a movable metal or tole shade, also attached to the shaft with a key, and a ring at the top of the shaft that can be used to pick up the lamp or hang it from a hook. Because both the candelabra and the shade are movable, and slide up and down the lamp's central shaft, Bouillotte lamps are a highly versatile form of lighting, and can be adjusted to shield the game players' eyes from the candles' flames as they are burned. Bouillotte lamps provide a most pleasing, directed form of light to one's table.

A detail of the key that is used to fasten
the candelabra to the shaft of the lamp

Most Bouillotte lamps are electrified today. Old ones made before the days of electricity, such as the one I found at auction, have in many cases been subsequently electrified. Newer ones are routinely made as electricified lamps (and oftentimes as a result do not have as many movable features as the original ones do). Half of the Bouillotte lamps that we have at Darlington House are old and were originally made to hold candles. The other half are of a more recent vintage and were electrified when made.

Here the lamp is shown with the candelabra
and shade at the low end of the lamp's shaft

Most of the Bouillotte lamps we own are electrified, but a few of them are not. We like to use a candle-burning Bouillotte lamp on our dining table at night when it is just the two of us for dinner. When lit with candles a Bouillotte lamp casts a most lovely and intimate light.

Although one wouldn't normally slide the
candelabra and shade to the top, I am showing
it here to demonstrate the lamp's versatility

Bouillotte lamps have been popular forms of lighting since they were first made, and they are frequently seen in photographs of chic, classic interiors of upper class tastemakers of the latter half of the twentieth century, such as those of Brooke Astor, Jacqueline Onassis, Bill Blass, and Cy and Alessandra Twombly. Bouillotte lamps work well in both traditional and modern interiors.

A detail of the key used to fasten the tole
lampshade to the shaft of the lamp,
and the ring used to carry or hang the lamp

When I attended the auction on the day it was held, my sole purpose for doing so was to bid on the silver bowl and cigarette box. I did not go expecting to buy a Bouillotte lamp. Not only did we not "need" another, but lamp buying was simply not on my radar screen that day.

The discarded candle-form electric sockets

I arrived at the sale well before the silver bowl or cigarette box lots were up, in the middle of the auction's household furnishings section. I noticed that there were probably five or so Bouillotte lamps of varying quality in the sale, some first (pre-electrification) period and others later. The first two lamps were hammered down at remarkably good prices (Bouillotte lamps tend to be rather expensive), which perked up my interest (Reggie being one who appreciates a bargain), and I found myself bidding on the sole Bouillotte lamp that I had admired at the preview, a diminutive silver one with an old tole shade.

Residual evidence of the lamp's later electrification

Within a minute or two I found myself to be the owner of the lamp. I was relieved when I picked it up to bring it home with me that it appeared to be first period, made in the late eighteenth century. While it was catalogued as Directoire style, I am convinced it is of the Directoire period, dating from 1795-1799. This was confirmed to me by Isaiah Cornini, the architectural historian we work with at Darlington House, who is an expert on early period lighting and whose opinion I trust in such matters.

The Bouillotte lamp, restored to its
original functionality

Since we didn't "need" another Bouillotte lamp, Boy decided to de-electrify my purchase so that we could use it with candles. He pulled out the lamp sockets and wiring, and in so doing restored the lamp to its original functionality. Although the lamp was unfortunately (but discretely) drilled in a number of places when electrified, it is easy to have such holes plugged by knowledgeable silversmiths, which I shall do at some point. Or not.

Tell me, do you have any Bouillotte lamps in your house?

My Name Is White Rainbow

2011-07-12T08:34:00.004-04:00

Several months ago, while rooting around in a box filled with old papers and photographs, I came across a brochure for a summer camp that I attended as a boy, in the latter 1960s. Given that it is now high summer camp season here in America, I figured that writing about my experience at this particular camp—one of the four that I attended as a lad—would be an appropriately timely subject. Not just timely, though, but an interesting subject, too, since the camp whose brochure I came across was not of a type typically favored in those days for the children of the nation's Eastern establishment, among whose ranks my family dwelled . . .

The brochure I found was for a boy's camp named Camp Flying Cloud, located high up in the remote hills of rural central Vermont. One of the (then) five summer camps owned and operated by the Farm and Wilderness group of camps, Flying Cloud is still operating today, albeit with a different mission than it had when I went there, more than forty years ago.

According to the brochure, when I attended Flying Cloud it was "the first camp—as far as we know—based largely on the culture of the Northeast forest Indians," where boys between eleven and fifteen had the "exciting experience of true wilderness living, using all the skills the Indians developed," and "live like Indians."

So what, exactly, did that mean? According to the brochure it meant that the campers at Flying Cloud would:

Play Indian games
Learn Indian dancing
Explore wilderness areas
Live in tipis
Engage in work projects "for the good of the tribe," such as "constructing an authentic long-house, putting up a larger sweat lodge, improving the council ring, working on a forest conservation area which includes spots where 'visiting braves from other camps' may find lodging for the night"
Learn Indian crafts, such as "making your own bow and arrows, Indian breech cloths, and moccasins"
"Cook your own meals without pots!"
Engage in feats of strength and skill, including "Indian wrestling"
Have time just to sit and think
JUST HAVE FUN!

Why an Indian camp? Because (and again I quote the brochure), "The [Farm and Wilderness] Camps have been increasingly convinced that the culture of the Redmen, sensitively handled, offers much of deep value to boys brot up in the city." In other words, the founders of Flying Cloud believed that affluent little caucasian boys, such as the citified Reggie Darling, would benefit from spending their summer living "like an Indian"—or at least a highly fantasized version of one, circa 1967.

And I did. I loved it.

All these years later, though, when reading through the brochure and reflecting on my experience at Camp Flying Cloud, I'm somewhat amazed that I wound up going there, that it even happened. That's because Camp Flying Cloud was a most decidedly "alternative" summer camp when I went there, and of a type that Mame Dennis would have gotten into all sorts of trouble with her nephew's horrified trustees for sending him to, had she done so, before they yanked him out of it and placed him in a more respectable, conventional camp for boys.

Fortunately that wasn't my fate.

Setting aside the absence of Political Correctness of the camp's (then) mission—at least as articulated in its brochure—when I attended Flying Cloud wearing clothing there was largely dispensed with, except for warmth, and we spent most of our days either wearing skimpy leather loin cloths or buck naked. I'm not joking. While not exactly a nudist camp, Flying Cloud encouraged its campers and counselors to cast off conventional clothing much of the time. The brochure may have featured photographs of lads in loincloths, but the reality was we were, more often than not, running around naked!

And Flying Cloud wasn't the only one of the Farm and Wilderness camps that encouraged nudity among its campers and counselors. In those days all of the other camps in the F&W group encouraged their campers to at least swim without wearing bathing suits. But I believe that Camp Flying Cloud was the most extreme of the group's camps when it came to encouraging au natural living.

I'm not exactly sure if my parents fully realized the extent of the nudity that prevailed at Camp Flying Cloud when I first went there, but they came to experience it vividly on a first hand basis when they stopped by the camp, unannounced, one afternoon during my second summer there. What they found when they arrived at the camp were approximately forty boys and perhaps ten or so counselors running about the campground wearing little more than loincloths, if not naked. Well, not entirely naked—most were probably wearing something on their feet.

At least that is all that the head counselor of the camp was wearing that afternoon when he met my parents. I recall that his name was Rick, and that he was an extremely handsome fellow in his mid twenties with piercing blue eyes and a head of thick, curly brown hair. I admit that I had a bit of a little boy crush on him.

As readers of this blog well know, my mother, known as MD, was not one to blanch or blush, but even she was rather taken aback by what greeted her at Camp Flying Cloud. I recall her as being uncharacteristically tongue-tied when Rick was standing in front of her and my father, naked as a jaybird, speaking with them about the camp and clearly enjoying showing himself off to them as a veritable nature boy!

Afterwards, when walking with my parents back to their car, they asked me if I was having a good time at Camp Flying Cloud, and was I happy there? I responded that I was, indeed, having a terrific time (which I most decidedly was), and that I loved the camp. With evident relief at this news, they then gave me a quick hug and a kiss and climbed into their car and drove away.

Years later, I had a conversation with MD in which I asked her about her visit to the camp, and what she thought of it?

"Well," she said, "all that I can clearly recall is the experience of meeting that handsome young man who ran the camp. But I can't remember anything of what we spoke of because I couldn't concentrate on a word of what he was saying, since I was—uh—rather distracted by the fact that he was as naked as a newborn baby! And he was very well formed, and rather lovely to look at. I do remember that."

"But why did you send me there, to that camp, instead of a more mainstream one, such as a tennis camp?" I asked.

"Because, dear, we thought it would be a good experience for you. We figured that you would be able to play tennis for the rest of your life, but that you would most likely not have all that many opportunities to run around naked in the woods, playing Indian, when you grew up."

She had a point there.

So, what do I mean when I write in the title of this essay that "My Name is White Rainbow"? Well, when I went to Camp Flying Cloud all of the campers were given an "Indian name" in a night-time ceremony that involved supposed Indian dancing around a big bonfire amidst much drumming of tom-toms and the singing of supposed Indian songs. "White Rainbow" was the name I was given, and was the name by which I became known thereafter at the camp. All of the names given to the campers were supposed to signify something unique about the camper's personality, ideally with a spiritual element thrown in, too. I recall that my "Indian name" of White Rainbow supposedly reflected what the counselors considered to be my general good nature, along with my propensity to joke around most of the time. It is not exactly what I would consider to be a particularly manly name for a lad of eleven, but it is the name I was given, and I liked it.

While Camp Flying Cloud continues to operate today, it has long-since dispensed with its mission to be a place where boys learn to "live like Indians" and its campers are no longer encouraged to engage in au natural living.

Flying Cloud is now a more culturally sensitive and conventional camp focused on developing wilderness skills among its campers, and the "Redmen" orientation of the camp's identity was dropped years ago. The Farm and Wilderness camps have also long since stopped allowing nudity at their camps, even for swimming. I would imagine in today's litigious world that such activity is simply too great a liability risk for them.

Looking back on my experience at Camp Flying Cloud, back in the days when it was still a place where little boys like Reggie could engage in the fantasy of "living like an Indian," unencumbered by conventional clothing or today's more jaundiced world view, I am glad that I went there when I did, in more innocent times. And, to MD's point, even though I gave up playing tennis for good more than a decade ago, I can't recall having had the opportunity since I attended Flying Cloud to run around in the woods, naked as a jaybird, "playing Indian." Not that I lose any sleep over it, mind you.

Tell me, what was your summer camp experience like?

A Reggie Road Trip: Chicago

2011-07-09T09:39:00.003-04:00

Boy and I spent the Independence Day weekend in Chicago. Our primary purpose for going there was to attend the lavish wedding of his assistant, Clarissa Montgomery, in Lake Forest. But we scheduled enough time before and afterwards to poke around Chicago, too, a city that neither of us had visited for some time.

It was jaw-dropping.

Living in New York it is rather easy to fall prey to the generally accepted view there that everywhere else is "out of town." In other words, that when compared to the Big Apple any other city comes up short.

Well, Chicago put that idea to rest.

A view of Chicago's lakeside skyline from the John Hancock Tower
Image courtesy of the Frequent Buyer

Chicago is a gorgeous, beautifully maintained city full of handsome architecture, broad boulevards, beautiful parks, marvelous restaurants, top-notch shopping, and a stunning lakeside situation. It is, in a word, magnificent!

The recently opened new Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago
designed by Renzo Piano, architect
Image courtesy of structurehub.com

First things first, though: Chicago is really clean. The city is exceptionally well maintained, with none of the grit and dirtiness of New York. The area we spent most of our time in, downtown, is beautifully landscaped and full of parks and street planters gorgeously bedded out with flowers, ornamental grasses and shrubs. Even though the city's sidewalks and parks were mobbed with people when we were there, I didn't see anyone littering or disturbing the plantings, in contrast to what one would expect to see on a busy weekend in New York.

One of the Art Institute's most famous paintings: Paris Street; Rainy Day
by Gustave Caillebotte, 1877
Collection of the Chicago Art Institute

We were (mostly) impressed by the restaurants we ate in, including Seasons at the Four Seasons Hotel (where we stayed), Pelago Ristorante, Henri, RL, and Terzo Piano at the Art Institute (where we spent a glorious day reveling in the museum's collections). We did a bit of shopping on Michigan Avenue, a retail thoroughfare populated with all the stores you'd expect to see in a city of international standing. But most of our time was spent walking around, delightedly taking in the sights, the architecture, the views, and the parks—including several well-spent hours visiting Millenium Park, a stunning testament to modern-day civic design. We were highly impressed.

Terzo Piano's light and airy main dining room
Image courtesy of Terzo Piano

The only downside of our visit was how crowded the city was with hordes of people wearing the depressing uniform increasingly seen everywhere you go today in America of tee shirts, cargo shorts, and flip flops. The only major difference between the sexes we saw on our visit was that most of the males wore baseball caps. Everywhere you turned in Chicago that's the uniform you saw on people, with only the most minor of variations, such as substituting cheap nylon basketball shorts for cargo shorts, or team jerseys for tee shirts. It didn't matter where you were, either, it could be on the street, at the Art Institute, in the lobby of the Four Seasons, or in restaurants—everyone was wearing the same thing. All ages, sizes, socio-economic groups, races, shapes, sexes. Everyone! It was mind-numbing.

The wildly popular Crown Fountain at Chicago's Millenium Park
Image courtesy of GreenSpace

Needless to say, we felt like complete fishes out of water wearing the summer sport jackets, collared shirts, trousers, and leather-soled shoes that we had on while walking about the city during the day, and we noticed people staring at us and checking us out as if we were somehow strange or exotic looking. At one point early on in our visit Boy bought a summery cotton bow tie and put it on and wore it out of the store. He liked the way it looked so much that he wore it for much of the rest of our visit to Chicago. People on the street there gawped at him as if he were some kind of alien (a very good-looking and smartly attired alien, I might add), and we heard one little girl exclaim, "Look at that man, he's wearing a real bow tie!"

The lovely interior of Henri Restaurant
Image courtesy of same

It got us wondering—where were the people like us in Chicago? Where were the ones who actually took some care with the way they dressed and presented themselves to the world? Were we complete anomalies? Had it come to that?

A vintage postcard of Chicago from the 1940s
Image courtesy of BuyMePosters.com

It took us a while before we realized that just as we had left New York for the Independence Day weekend, so had the people like us who live in Chicago also left town. Either that, or they were holed up in their houses or apartments, visiting friends, or at their clubs—anywhere else that they could go to get away from the hordes of ill-dressed tourists mobbing the streets, stores, parks, and sites of the city.

Of course that was it—we were visiting Chicago on the one weekend of the year when its residents did everything in their power to get out of town! Once we realized that we roared with laughter.

A view down Chicago's Michigan Avenue today
Image courtesy of planetware.com

We then were able to relax and enjoyed the show. We really did have a lovely time visiting Chicago, and even though we were frequently appalled by what we saw people wearing (or in some cases not wearing), it really was all remarkably entertaining. And, for the most part, everyone that we saw out and about in Chicago was having an absolutely lovely time, walking around with broad, happy smiles upon their faces, visibly taking pleasure in visiting one of the most marvelous cities in America, if not the world.

And in that respect they were just like us.

Saucer of the Week: Chinese Export Porcelain for the American Market

2011-07-02T09:50:00.002-04:00

This week's saucer post takes the series in a different direction, far from the shores of England . . .

. . . to China, where this pretty saucer was made in (around) 1800 for the American market. It is decorated with an urn, similar to the English saucer I posted several weeks ago, that Parnassas so cleverly photoshopped. The decoration is also related to that found on the Thomas Willing Chinese export porcelain service that I saw in the collection at Bayou Bend, three plates of which I acquired for our collection at Darlington House at the New York Ceramics Fair this past January.

But in this case, the urn is surmounted by a bird. I'm not exactly sure what type of bird it is, but I think it could well be a stylized eagle. I am confident that this saucer was made in China for the American market, given its decoration, the asperity of which the citizenry of the New Republic preferred to the more elaborate decorations favored elsewhere at the time.

I found this saucer in a pile of dusty plates in a junk shop in rural Connecticut thirty or so years ago, along with three other dishes from the same service, identically decorated. I think I paid a dollar a plate for them. After I had completed my purchase, and with the plates safely in hand, I explained to the fellow working behind the counter what he had just sold me, and that they were actually worth far more than what I had paid for them. He didn't seem to care all that much, since he was an hourly employee of the shop, and not one of its owners. He responded, "You're the second person who said that to me. Just yesterday some other guy came in here and bought up the rest of them. Must've been twenty or thirty of 'em he got. He probably didn't see these ones that you found just now."

"Well, well," I thought, "that was some lucky guy." If only I had been there the day before, imagine what a haul I would have found!

As it is, I didn't do all that badly . . .

Reggie's Rules for Dining in Better Restaurants, Part I

2011-06-30T08:23:00.004-04:00

While there may be some on the blogosphere who claim that a gentleman doesn't dine in restaurants, it is Reggie's view that a fellow needn't be the opposite of one if he enjoys doing so. Although Reggie has the good fortune to be a member of one of New York's venerable clubs where he is able to dine excellently whenever he so chooses, he believes that life would be far less enjoyable indeed if he were to confine his gustatory pleasures to only within such walls when venturing beyond the sanctity of his own dining room, or those of his entertaining friends.

Variety is, after all, the spice of life.

As readers of this blog well know, Reggie regularly eats out with pleasure in New York City's restaurants, and has reviewed a number of them here on this blog. He believes that one of the great pleasures of living in New York is the access it provides to excellent, varied, and superb restaurants, and he believes that refraining from going to them would be silliness indeed. He's working on a number of additional restaurant reviews at this time that he looks forward to posting for his readers' delectation in the not-too-distant future.

Fewer restaurants provide table-side service these days,
but it is such a pleasure when they do

In the meantime, I thought it would be helpful, Dear Reader, if I were to outline my basic rules for dining in what I call "better" restaurants, which is the type of restaurant I (mostly) choose to frequent these days when out for an evening in New York (or elsewhere, for that matter). I have divided my essay into two parts: the first focuses on the primary, or most important, rules for doing so, and the second outlines additional rules of a more miscellaneous nature. I may even add a third one, if I feel it appropriate to do so.

Reggie's Rules for Dining in Better Restaurants, Part I

1. Dress appropriately for the establishment

It may be fine to wear cargo shorts and a tee shirt to a quick gobble at a pizza parlor or the Olive Garden (a "casual dining" restaurant chain that Reggie has never eaten in, but is familiar with from having seen their impossibly cheery commercials on television), but it is not at all appropriate, in his view, to wear such an outfit to what I call "better restaurants," namely those where the food is superior to the run-of-the-mill, the rooms are carefully and (sometimes) expensively decorated, the tables are covered with cloths, and the maître d' is dressed in a suit, or an approximation of same.

One should dress appropriately when dining in "better" restaurants,
such as at the Four Seasons on Park Avenue

Reggie is routinely shocked at what he sees people showing up wearing at such restaurants these days, and dismayed that the miscreants who do so are rarely turned away by management, despite said diners' brazen flouting of the establishment's (oftentimes) published dress codes. Reggie firmly believes that if one is going to a "better" restaurant one should wear "better" clothes to do so, both out of respect for the establishment and for the sensibilities of the other diners who have made the effort to dress appropriately.

2. When shown to your table, if you are not satisfied with its location it is in your right to request to be seated elsewhere

Sometimes a restaurant's maître d' will initially show diners to a room's less desirable tables, hoping that they can fill them before surrendering the room's better-placed, or more desirable tables. While Reggie is sympathetic to the desire to spread diners throughout a restaurant's rooms, he believes one needn't accept a table located next to the kitchen's swinging doors or a busy serving station, simply because that is what one is first offered. It is more than acceptable, in his view, when shown to such a table to nicely ask to be seated instead at a different table, if one is available. All one need say is, "I would prefer to have a table over there, if possible, please," and nod in the direction of where one would like to be seated. You may not get the exact table you wish for, but odds are high that you will at least be seated at a better table than what you have initially been offered.

3. If the restaurant's tables are packed together, it is appropriate to acknowledge the diners on either side of you

Popular New York restaurants often jam their tables close together, with diners at neighboring tables sitting cheek to jowl. If you should find yourself being seated in such a restaurant, it is basic good manners to acknowledge the diners at the tables on either side of yours, particularly if you have to "excuse me" your way between the tables to reach your seat. A simple "Good evening" will do.

4. Be polite and pleasant to the staff

Once you have been seated, have good manners and acknowledge your servers as they go about their business of attending to you, since they are human beings and have feelings, too. Do thank the person who takes your order and delivers your food, and also the busboy when he pours your water or removes your plate at the end of the meal. You needn't go overboard in doing it, but you shouldn't ignore them, either.

A well run restaurant, such as Swifty's on Manhattan's UES,
is staffed with professionals trained to serve you expertly

If your server appears to be somewhat over-familiar with you, and asks a few too many questions along the lines of "How are we doing tonight?" it is appropriate to respond "Well, thank you," and leave it at that. You needn't feel compelled to ask them how they are "doing" or engage in exchanging names with them, at least if you are not so inclined. Do be polite, however.

5. When seeking the attention of the staff, do not make a show of impatiently waving your hand or—God forbid—snapping your fingers

Such activity is vulgar and is to be avoided, and is a decided disincentive to the person whose attention you are seeking to come to your assistance. Simply raising your hand and making eye contact is usually sufficient to draw the attention of a restaurant's staff. On the other hand, if you feel you are being egregiously ignored, for whatever reason, it is in your right to (discretely) bring it to the maître d's attention, so that they can remedy the situation.

6. If the food you ordered is cooked improperly, it is in your right to send it back to be remedied

A restaurant's management would rather you be a satisfied customer than a disappointed one, as satisfied customers are repeat customers and disappointed ones are not. So, if you ordered your salmon cooked "medium," and it is delivered to you either undercooked or overdone, do not hesitate to (nicely) send it back to have it cooked the way you asked for it (or replaced with one that is). That does not mean you have license to be persnickety, or unreasonable, or difficult about it—just politely ask that the food you ordered be cooked the way you requested it (and are, incidentally, paying to have provided to you). The same goes for a bottle of wine—it is appropriate to send a bottle back if it is "off," but it is not acceptable to send it back simply because after tasting it you don't care for the vintage.

7. Do not speak loudly or use vulgar language, don't fight, and do not engage in conversations that are insulting to those near enough to hear what you are saying

You are not sitting in a cone of silence. Respect the fact that the people within earshot are paying to spend a pleasant evening out, and listening to their fellow diners' foul language, squabbles, or less-than-flattering commentary is not part of what they have signed on for. Keep a lid on it when out in public, please, and confine such unbecoming chatter to when and where you don't have an audience of strangers forced to listen to it.

A restaurant is not the proper venue to engage in fisticuffs

Now, Reggie admits that there are certain, very rare instances when it is permissible to take off one's gloves in public and really let one's dinner companion have it, audience be damned. But Reggie believes that one should be extremely selective when doing so, and that one should only do it when one has been most shockingly and violently provoked. It should be reserved only for those once-in-a-lifetime situations where one's dinner companion has (for whatever reason) insultingly and maliciously crossed a line with you that must never be violated, where there is simply no going back. But only then. Reggie is, in fact, working on a post about just such a confrontation that he once had (rather spectacularly) in a restaurant more than a decade ago, that he looks forward to sharing with you, Dear Reader, one day.

Now, getting back to the subject at hand . . .

8. Do not allow the waiter or busboy to remove your plate until everyone else at the table has also finished eating

Many restaurants attempt to clear a diner's plate as soon as he (or she) has finished eating, even though there may be others at the table who have not yet finished. This practice is to be discouraged, regardless of the establishment's intentions or general practices. Reggie firmly believes that plates should only be allowed to be removed when everyone at the table has finished the course at hand.

The proper knife and fork placement for signifying
that one has not yet finished eating, and that
it is not yet appropriate to clear the plate from the table

Just so there should be no confusion in the matter, Reggie advises that when one has finished eating and others at the table are still eating, one should (a) be careful to place one's utensils on one's plate in such a manner that it is clear that one has not yet finished, and (b) if the waiter or busboy attempts to remove the plate anyway, then one should politely inform them that one has not yet finished, and only allow them to remove the plate once everyone else at the table has also finished. It is only after all of the diners at the table have finished eating that it is appropriate to arrange one's silver in the four o'clock position signifying that one is ready to have one's plate taken away.

The proper knife and fork placement for signifying
that one has finished eating, and that it
is now appropriate to clear the plate from the table

The point here is that it is up to the diners to dictate to the waiter or busboy when it is appropriate to clear plates from the table, and not the other way around.

9. Tip appropriately, with the general rule of thumb being 15%-20%, and higher if service has been exemplary

Restaurants in New York City charge a combined city and state sales tax of 8 ⁷⁄₈%. When determining the proper amount to tip in the city's restaurants, most diners simply double the sales tax as a tip, which is an appropriately generous payout rate of 17 ¾%. When service is better than average, though, rounding the tip up to 20% is merited, and if the service has been truly exceptional, well, then sometimes paying as much as 25% is justified.

Next: Reggie's restaurant rules pertaining to children, the use of electronic devices, doggy bags, and when one should call ahead . . .

Photographs of restaurant interiors from LIFE Images and Google Images; photographs of cutlery and plates by Reggie Darling

Use a Handkerchief, Please!

2011-06-27T08:08:00.002-04:00

Reggie would like to bring something to your attention, Dear Reader.

He thinks you should use a handkerchief. No, he is not referring to what is rather euphemistically known as "facial tissue," such as Kleenex™, but rather to an old-fashioned cloth handkerchief, the kind your grandparents used. Well, at least Reggie's grandparents used . . .

Reggie carries a handkerchief with him most of the time, and he finds it most useful to have one with him. In fact, he cannot understand why the regular use of handkerchiefs has become something of a rarity in our society today. Even amongst polite people.

A baker's dozen of white cotton handkerchiefs,
recently purchased at Brooks Brothers

In order to qualify for Reggie's approval, handkerchiefs needn't be white, they needn't be expensive, nor must they be monogrammed or edged with lace. A plain, inexpensive cotton one with stitched edges will do very nicely, thank you. If one prefers not to carry a white handkerchief (unlike Reggie, who does, at least most of the time), one can find handkerchiefs in any number of appealing colors, including solids, patterns, and prints. A diminutive colorful bandana is perfectly suited (and sometimes preferred) to be used as a handkerchief when one is feeling in a country mood.

Just carry a handkerchief, please.

Reggie has heard many people say they would never use a handkerchief, as they consider carrying one filled with snot to be disgusting. Well, Reggie agrees, a handkerchief filled with snot is disgusting. But he is not suggesting that you do that, Dear Reader. If one has a horrible cold, producing a lava flow of mucous, Reggie believes one has no business being out in public but rather should be at home in bed, attending to such matters privately.

No, he is advocating that his readers carry a handkerchief with them when out and about, because he finds one to be a remarkably convenient and versatile accessory when he is out in public, away from the niceties and hygenic pleasures of his home.

While Reggie uses the handkerchiefs he carries to occasionally blow his nose or sneeze into, tasks for which they are admirably suited, he finds handkerchiefs to be far more versatile than merely being a receptacle for one's nasal effluvia.

When one is out on a hot summer's afternoon, a handkerchief is the perfect choice to mop one's sometimes sweaty brow, and a far preferable choice for doing so than using one's sleeve, a degraded practice he has seen engaged in by certain baser sorts in public during the warmer months.

A handkerchief is a most useful protection, too, when used to grasp something when one is in public that one doesn't particularly care to touch with one's naked hand, such as a grimy subway strap handle, or the knob of a door leading into a heavily used gas station restroom.

And Reggie far prefers to use a handkerchief when he is overcome by the sudden need to sneeze, which he frequently is in public, as opposed to using his bare hands, or the more recently advocated practice of using the crook of one's elbow instead of one's hands. He is not so sure that this development is an improvement on the former. But he is more than confident that neither of these options are an improvement over using a handkerchief.

Now some people might ask, "But Reggie, why use a handkerchief when a Kleenex™ (or similar) will do?" Because, Dear Reader, a handkerchief is sturdier than a Kleenex™, it doesn't rip apart, and it doesn't pill, all of which said Kleenex™ does. Also, if one inadvertently leave's one's handkerchief in the pocket of one's trousers, one is not then confronted with a disintegrated, wadded mess of what once was a piece of Kleenex™ when one reaches one's hand into such trousers after they have been laundered.

Others might also say, "But Reggie, don't you find carrying a used handkerchief to be rather unpleasant?" Well, Dear Reader, it is all a matter of degree. Just as I change my undergarments daily, so do I replace the handkerchiefs I use each day, so I can be assured of having a fresh one at hand. That is, after all, why one does laundry (or if one is very fortunate, that is why one has one's laundry done).

But I do carry a handkerchief, and I do use it, and I think you should too.

Tell me, do you?

Photograph by Boy Fenwick

Saucer of the Week: English Orientalism

2011-06-24T07:47:00.003-04:00

This post marks the return of Saucer of the Week, a series interrupted by my musings and remembrances of college reunions past. How nice, and what a relief it is, to once again focus one's attention on the pretty and the lighthearted.

This week's saucer is, again, an early nineteenth century English one done in the Oriental taste that was then much in vogue. It is more vigorous and vibrant than the ones in such taste I've posted previously, and is a great favorite of mine. I like the refined crudeness of its design. It is decorated with an underglaze application of dark blue, and then subsequent overglaze decorations in orange and green, and a final application of gilding—captured brilliantly in the photograph, above.

The saucer measures a generous 5 ½ inches across, and the china it is made of is thicker than on the more rarified saucers I've posted to date. It is unmarked. I suspect that it was made by one of the lesser English potteries of the day, long since vanished, in imitation of what was being produced in the more noteworthy potteries of the time. It is one of a pair that we supposedly bought at Bardith, Ltd., on Madison Avenue years ago.

Not everything need always be of only the finest calibre to excite Reggie's fancy, Dear Reader . . .

Photograph by Boy Fenwick

Reggie's Three College 25th Reunions, Part III: Vassar Class of 1985

2011-06-22T08:50:00.002-04:00

Perhaps much to the relief of some of the readers of my blog, this essay is my last on the three college 25th reunions I have attended over the years. My purpose in writing this series, Dear Reader, is to chronicle how much one aspect of the world I come from has changed during my lifetime, and—in my view—for the better . . .

Vassar Class of 1985 25th Reunion

In addition to coming from a family where Yale figures prominently among the men, Vassar figures prominently among the women. My father’s mother, known as Granny Darling, went to Vassar (class of 1913) and initiated the first Yale/Vassar marriage in my family when she married my grandfather, Yale class of 1911. She dearly hoped that one of her offspring would continue the tradition. My Aunt Mary (her daughter), Vassar class of 1941, was the first to frustrate that wish when she married outside the fold (headstrong girl!), and my father disappointed, too, when he married my mother, Sarah Lawrence class of 1943. After both of my Vassar-educated cousins (classes of 1967 and 1972) failed to marry Yale men, Granny then looked, with mounting desperation, to her two grandsons with Yale potential (my older brother Frecky and me) to remedy this unfortunate situation. She was further frustrated when Frecky (Yale class of 1974) married a Brown graduate shortly after finishing Yale.

An early postcard of Vassar's Main Building, taken prior to

when the later porte-cochère was removed

I was, then, her remaining hope for such a felicitous union. More than once when I was an undergraduate at Yale my Granny Darling gently admonished me to be sure to “look up a nice Vassar girl” in the hopes of achieving her goal. Unfortunately, Granny Darling died before I graduated from Yale and long before I met, and then married, Boy Fenwick, Vassar class of 1985.

Granny Darling was in the Vassar Daisy Chain in 1911
around the time this photograph was taken

Image courtesy of Mount Holyoke Archives

I can just imagine hearing my dear Granny’s reaction upon learning that one of her Yale-educated grandsons had indeed married a Vassar graduate (“At last! What joy!”), followed by her surprise when she learned that I had, in fact, married a Vassar Guy and not a Vassar Girl (“He married WHAT?!”). I am fairly confident that Granny would have eventually come around after her initial shock wore off, since at least it is a Yale/Vassar union after all . . . it’s just not exactly how she had envisioned it.

The main gate entry onto the Vassar campus

Image courtesy of US GenWeb

So when I joined Boy at his Vassar 25th reunion last year, I did so more than solely as his spouse, but with an added appreciation of that college’s history, traditions, and its meaning to my family. I enjoyed myself at his reunion, and I had a lot of fun there meeting his college friends and seeing the places on campus where he had once lived, studied and frolicked. I also thought of my dear Granny Darling and the other Vassar women in my family when I walked around the campus, and I felt a pleasant connection with them and to the school that extended beyond the pleasure that I took in joining Boy there as he and his classmates celebrated.

An early 1900s postcard of Vassar's president's house

Even though Boy graduated from college only six years after I did, his experience at Vassar was quite different from mine at Yale. For one thing, the majority of his classmates were female (55% to Yale’s 40% when I was there), which is not surprising, given its history. Also, his classmates were a somewhat more diverse group of people than mine had been at Yale, at least they appeared to me at his reunion. Finally, attitudes towards being gay had relaxed considerably by the time he enrolled at Vassar, and he was out as a gay man from the moment he arrived there as a freshman.

I think this is more of what my dear Granny Darling had in mind...

As I sat at our table under the large white tent during the big class dinner at Boy’s 25th reunion, I felt glad to be there with him and his friends who welcomed me with civility and good humor. I also felt a connection with my dear Granny Darling, and was amused that her wish for another Yale/Vassar marriage had finally come true, albeit not quite how she had planned it. And I felt very fortunate, indeed, that the world had evolved in my lifetime to such a point that I could happily find myself there with my beloved spouse, under the circumstances that I did.

All postcards, except where noted, courtesy of CardCow.com

Reggie's Three College 25th Reunions, Part II: Yale Class of 1979

2011-06-20T08:48:00.002-04:00

In this post, the second in the series, I reflect on how much had changed in the thirty five years that separated my own Yale 25th reunion from my father's.

Yale Class of 1979 25th Reunion

Although FD's Yale classmates were almost entirely made up of WASPs, after WWII the face of Yale’s undergraduates started to change. Slowly at first, and aided by the G.I. Bill, Yale’s student body began to become more diverse. By the time I entered Yale in September 1975 it was a very different place from the university my father had enrolled in. For one thing, Yale had gone co-ed in the fall of 1969 and by the time I matriculated 40% of my classmates were female. In addition, a substantial percentage of my Yale class were people of differing ethnic and religious backgrounds from my WASP origins, and the majority of undergraduates there had attended public schools.

While being a legacy offspring and a prep school graduate was certainly not a liability to getting admitted to Yale when I applied, it was no longer the easy ticket for admission that it had been in my father's day. In other words, Yale had become a meritocracy. But Yale remained, and remains to this day, a very macho, competitive, and elite university. Today, however, these defining characteristics of the university have nothing to do with the ethnicity or religion or gender of its students, unlike when my father went there when its doors were tightly closed to anyone who didn’t fit a very narrowly-defined vision of who should be admitted. I loved my experience at Yale, and I look back on it fondly and with respect. I feel fortunate to have been able to go there.

A view of the Yale campus, approximately 100 years later, ca. 1900

One of the things that has changed since I was an undergraduate at Yale is that the stigma of being gay in this country has largely dissipated in the intervening years, at least among sophisticated, educated people, and had long since become a non-issue among my classmates by the time of my 25th reunion, held in June 2004.

A 1907 postcard of Handsome Dan, the Yale mascot

But when I was an undergraduate at Yale in the second half of the 1970s, being gay was still stigmatized to a degree that would be unfathomable today, at least here in America. Even though Yale had become known by then as politically liberal (a reputation that enraged many of its conservative alumni), it was not yet acceptable to be gay in the social and athletic circles I ran in at Yale, and many of us callow youths there so inclined weren't brave enough to publicly admit our true orientation as undergraduates. Sure, there were a couple of out militant lesbians and extremist gays on campus, but they were marginalized exceptions, and were most definitely not found among the campus leaders whose ranks I aspired to join one day, and eventually did.

A Yale banner from the 1910s
Image courtesy of the Antique Athlete

While I (discretely) came out to a few of my closest friends during my senior year at Yale, it was not until half a decade or more after graduating from Yale that I finally fully accepted myself as a gay man, and closed the door—once and for all—on thinking that a life with and marriage to a woman was a possibility, however remote, for me.

Woolsey Hall, a fine Beaux-Arts pile of limestone
where all major convocations and concerts are held

It was not until my 20th reunion at Yale that I brought one of my partners with me back to New Haven, when I brought Boy Fenwick, my partner in life (and more recently my legally recognized spouse, at least in Massachusetts where we got married two years ago) with me. While some of my classmates were slightly taken aback when I first introduced Boy to them at my 20th reunion, they rallied immediately. And when he joined me at my 25th reunion, no one batted an eye. I had a marvelous time at my Yale 25th, and having Boy there with me by my side was an important part of what made the experience memorable for me.

Berzelius, one of the eight
secret societies at Yale

Needless to say, that would not have been the case for any of my father’s classmates who would have had the audacity to do such a thing at their 25th reunion in 1969, where they would likely have been met with disapproving astonishment at such an introduction, and where the offending classmate and his partner would have been ostracized, if not asked to leave immediately.

Bull dog! Bull dog! Bow, wow, wow! Eli Yale!

I'm glad that I graduated from Yale at such a time that I was not subjected to this type of treatment at my 25th reunion.

Sadly, this boat house had long since been abandoned
by the time I rowed at Yale

I'm also glad that I came of age in America when it had become possible in the world I come from to publicly admit to being gay without the fear of complete and utter ostracism. I am not sure that I would have been able to admit to myself that I was gay if I had been in the class of 1944 at Yale, considering the way of the world back then. Given who I am and the background I come from, I believe I would have done the expected thing then and gotten married to a nice girl from a similar background and had a family, as many gay men of that generation did. But I would have always known, at least subconsciously, that I had chosen to do something that did not come naturally to me. I also believe that it wouldn't have been fair to the woman I married, because I would not have been able to truly love her with the passion such a union deserves. Fortunately, through advances since then I did not feel compelled to pursue that path—unlike I am sure a number of my father's Yale classmates . . .

To the tables down at Mory's,
To the place where Louis dwells,
To the dear old Temple bar we know so well,
Sing the Whiffenpoofs assembled,
With their glasses raised on high . . .

I must admit, though, being gay hasn't exactly always been a cake walk for me, and it certainly isn't something that I would have chosen had I been given a choice in the matter. But I wasn't, and so I have made the best of it as far as I have been able to.

With a clear conscience.

Next: Reggie attends Boy's Vassar Class of 1985 25th Reunion

All Yale postcards from Reggie's personal collection

Reggie's Three College 25th Reunions, Part I: Yale Class of 1944

2011-06-16T08:31:00.006-04:00

Last year I had the pleasure of meeting Lisa of the blog Privilege for dinner in San Francisco when I was visiting the City By the Bay during a business trip. Over the course of the evening we hatched a plan to write guest posts on each other’s blogs about our 25th college reunions, hers at Princeton and mine at Yale.

Sheet music from the early 1900s

Image courtesy of Historic American Sheet Music

When it came time to write my essay, though, I decided to slightly alter my subject and write about the three 25th college reunions that I have attended over a forty-one year span, the first two at Yale and the third at Vassar. I did so as I believe they illustrate how one aspect of life has fundamentally changed over that period for a certain group of us here in America. And that change has been for the better—at least in my view. I have since edited and slightly expanded that essay, and will be publishing it as a three-part series here at Reggie Darling.

Herewith, Dear Reader, is the first installment.

Part I: Yale Class of 1944 25th Reunion

I attended my first Yale 25th reunion in June 1969, when I was twelve years old. I was there because my father, known as FD, was celebrating his 25th reunion that summer, having graduated from Yale in 1944. My father’s Yale class was a pivotal one, because it was one of the last that enrolled there before America entered WWII, and was almost entirely populated with the types of men that had attended the university since it was founded in 1701—namely White Anglo Saxon Protestants, the offspring of this nation’s ruling classes, largely drawn from the east coast, and the product of its elite boarding schools. When my father applied to college he did so only to Yale, since it was a foregone conclusion that he would be admitted there. As he told me when I asked him years later, it didn’t even occur to him to apply anywhere else.

A postcard from the 1940s of Yale's (then) recently completed
Saybrook and Branford residential colleges

FD brought our family with him to his 25th reunion, including my mother, my three older siblings, and me. I was pretty much odd-man (boy) out at the reunion, because I was too old to engage in the activities organized for children, not old enough to hang out with the teenagers, and too young to join the adults, whose primary occupation there appeared to be drinking and talking while wearing white tennis hats emblazoned with a blue "Y" and the reunion's blue-and-white striped jackets. My older siblings didn’t want to have anything to do with me, since I was a “dumb twelve year old,” and my parents were otherwise engaged. So I spent a lot of time on my own hanging around the Class of '44's reunion tent observing what was going on. One of the attractions of doing so was it provided me—in stark contrast to home—with unlimited access to Cokes, bottomless bowls of peanuts, and endless cheese and crackers, since the tent was set up with a fully stocked bar continuously manned with a fleet of accommodating bartenders morning, noon, and night. I was in twelve-year-olds' Heaven.

A postcard from the early 1900s, showing Connecticut Hall,
the oldest surviving building at Yale, built in the 1700s

My father's class at Yale was a particularly distinguished and accomplished one, and for a number of years bore the distinction of having made the single largest 25th reunion class gift in the college's history (a distinction that has long since and many times been surpassed). One of the highlights of the reunion was when one of my father's classmates, John Lindsay, who was then Mayor of New York, spectacularly arrived with his wife, Mary, and their children by helicopter and landed in the middle of the Silliman College quadrangle, where the reunion was being held, much to the delight and awe of his classmates and their families. Talk about making an entrance!

A postcard from the late 1800s showing the "Old Campus" at Yale where
most of the college's students live during their freshman year

As I wrote earlier, I spent much of my father's reunion hanging around the class tent observing what was going on around me. I was fascinated by the bartenders working there. I got to know a number of them by name, and I enjoyed speaking with them when they weren't all that busy. One evening, while lurking around after my parents had staggered off to bed, I noticed that one of the bartenders was having an argument with his manager, and I sidled over to see if I could overhear what they were fighting about. It turned out that the bar was understaffed that evening, and the bartender was complaining that he didn’t have time both to wash out the used glasses and also to man the bar (this was back in the days before plastic glasses were used at such events).

A postcard from the early 1900s showing the procession of faculty
and students at a Yale graduation

Having nothing better to do, I volunteered that I would be happy to wash glasses for them, and—much to my surprise—the exasperated manager agreed to let me do it (something that would never be allowed today). I spent the next several hours happily washing glasses and delivering them to the bartenders, who were quite pleased for me to take this burden off their hands. I had such a good time doing it, in fact, that I spent the better part of the rest of the reunion washing glasses behind the bar, and I became something of a mascot for the bartenders. My parents were more than happy to let me do it, too, since it got me out of their hair, they knew where I was, and—besides—they thought it was a hoot.

At the end of the reunion, much to my delight, the manager presented me with a crisp $20 bill for my efforts. Not only did I get to wash the glasses for my bartender chums, but I got paid for it, too!

Next: Reggie's Yale class of 1979 25th reunion, and his observations on how much had changed in the years since his father's Yale 25th

All Yale postcards from Reggie's personal collection

Saucer(s) of the Week: English Flight, Barr & Barr

2011-06-12T09:28:00.001-04:00

Or are they Barr, Flight & Barr? I wonder . . .

This week I am featuring three handsome saucers from a set of six that we own, decorated with black transfer scenes of various romantic subjects and surrounded by painted gilt decoration in the classical taste. Two of the saucers feature a large Gothick castle in a parkland setting, two feature a rugged lakeland view with a fisherman, and two depict a picturesque ruin in a hilly landscape with a passing figure. I am not exactly sure where we bought the saucers, but I believe it was from a dealer in Hudson, New York, who has since gone out of business. I think we got them thirteen or so years ago.

I believe these saucers were possibly made in one of the factories of the Flight & Barr partnerships, active in Worcester, England, from 1792-1840. Known as Flight & Barr from 1792 to 1804; Barr, Flight & Barr from 1804 to 1813; and Flight, Barr & Barr from 1813 until 1840, the factories produced some of the handsomest porcelains made in England during the period, meriting their Royal Warrants as porcelain-makers to the (then) King Georges.

The saucers, which measure 5 3/8 inches across, look exceedingly well when displayed on either side of one of our French gilt-bronze clocks on one of the mantels at Darlington House. I am rather partial to their gold, white, and black decoration, and they are a great favorite of mine.

While I believe the saucers may well be a product of the Flight & Barr partnerships in Worcester, I am not able to confirm that definitively, as they are unmarked. If any of my readers have more information as to their origin, I would most gratefully appreciate it.

Photographs by Boy Fenwick