OUR SISTER PAIGE’S FAVORITE CITY IN THE WORLD IS PARIS. She went there for the first time at 13, and fell in love. She hasn’t had chance for travel much of anywhere lately, though, so her Francophilia has mostly been fulfilled, you guessed it, by blogs…food blogs. Would you like to join Paige’s armchair voyages? You can almost taste the butter, smell the Gitanes, and hear the symphony of urban sounds a la français. And did we mention, bon appétit? Read on.
From the category archives:
Sister Acts
SISTER PAIGE WAS COMPLETELY CHARMED the other morning by a profile she heard on NPR of Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar. Three guesses as to who they are. And if you’re a Bollywood connoisseur, sorry, you’re disqualified. Get the scoop from Paige.
OSCARS, SCMOSKERS. YOU want to see some fashion, sisters? Forget the red carpet, eschew Joan Rivers chewing over (and spitting out) those unfortunate Academy Awards fashion faux pas, and sink your teeth into some genuine glam. We’re talking gowns–with shoes and bags to match–that have all not only been oggled by millions, but are in part owned by you. That’s right: you. Read Marion’s report on the latest additions to the First Ladies exhibit at the Smithsonian.
OSCAR HAIR. C’MON, you know you want some, says TSP’s redheaded Marion. How many people do you think contribute to pre-Oscar lifting and spraying, mussing and fussing, and, more to the point, how do we get us some of that slavish attention? “I can picture me now after just a bit of it,” Marion says, “scrubbing out the slow cooker while looking ever so much more like Julianne Moore; appearing in front of my front-load clothes dryer with just a smidgen of Streep-like casual-ness to my coif. Are you in, sisters?” Get Marion’s hair do’s and don’ts.
YOU PROBABLY KNOW by now that here at The Sister Project, we can’t resist a good sister story, and we love the sisters known as nuns, but this particular piece of news took us by surprise. Bill Murray is one of our favorite actors and comedians (seen his hilarious turn as himself in last year’s Zombieland?) but we didn’t know that one of his eight siblings is a Catholic nun, and a dramatic one at that. Our Sister Paige has the story.
WE TRY to keep track of notable sisters’ birthdays, so that we can remind ourselves (and you, of course) of all the women we admire, and acknowledge them on their special days. But as we were putting together our plans for this month, we noticed that an awful lot of spectacular sisters were born this month. This Friday is the birthday of Indy car racing pioneer Janet Guthrie, and next week, we’ll be celebrating actress Lynn Redgrave, Civil War heroine Harriet Tubman, singer Liza Minnelli and photographer Diane Arbus. That’s a whole lot of talent packed into seven days. As with everything around here, Sister Paige has her theories about why.
NOT ONLY DID MEG WAITE CLAYTON WRITE THE BOOK on sisterhood, she’s done it three times–two already published novels and the third just sent off to her editor. “The emotional turf I seem to go back to again and again is sisterhood in the friendship sense,” Meg, the author of the national bestseller The Wednesday Sisters, told TSP’s Sister Marion. Marion’s profile of Meg is here to enjoy.
SOMETIMES WHEN SHE’S HOMEBOUND with cabin fever, Sister Paige says, she finds friends and sisterhood in unlikely places. Where does she go for a sense of community with hobby chicken farmers and collage artists and writers and other moms–all her kinds of people–when she can’t leave the driveway? Get the roadmap here.
PAIGE’S GOOD FRIEND told her that Mary Karr’s Lit was the best non-fiction she’d read in years, that while she couldn’t bear to put it down, the prose was so divine it made her want to stop after each passage just to savor it. This friend is no easy sell when it comes to writing and reading, so OK, said TSP’S Paige: “add that book to my reading list, stat, and here’s why.”
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By Marion Roach Smith
OUR FAVORITE NEW BOOK is the exquisite Monday Hearts for Madalene by San Francisco disc jockey Page Hodel. The images in the video above are from a series of handmade hearts created by Hodel in memory of her partner, Madalene Rodriguez, lost to ovarian cancer. Each Monday, Hodel, 53, makes and photographs a one-of-a-kind valentine crafted from everyday objects, and then emails them to friends and family as a reminder and celebration of their love for one another. The result? This book and website, as well as other products, a portion of the sale proceeds going to The Women’s Cancer Resource Center in Oakland, California. Now that’s all heart.
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W HAT GOT ME STARTED LOOKING AT GEISHA PHOTOS, I do not know, but I suppose that all this sister talk on TSP has me seeing sisterhoods everywhere. When I first discovered the breathtaking vintage-photo collection of Rob Oechsle, or Okinawa_Soba as he is called on Flickr, including many images of geisha, I knew that without question the women depicted were a sisterhood: “the solidarity of women based on shared conditions, experiences, or concerns,” as defined by Merriam-Webster. Yes, the geisha definitely qualify on all fronts. See a geisha slideshow in vintage photos.
WE ARE SAD TO LEARN OF THE DEATH OF LUCILLE CLIFTON, an American treasure, a prolific poet and author, and a recipient of just about every major poetry award or fellowship we can think of. Some months back TSP’s Sister Paige posted Clifton’s poem “sisters,” saying it “just made me want to cry, dance and sing.” Let’s cry, dance and sing today for the loss of Clifton, 73, by reading it aloud: [click to continue…]
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IT WAS ‘BROKEN GIRL’ (ABOVE) THAT WE TSP SISTERS HEARD first from the new album, Crows, by Allison Moorer (sister to another of our favorite singer-songwriters, Shelby Lynne). We’ve written about Allison and Shelby and all the other sisters of country and alt-country fame here before, remember? Any of them speak to you the way that birds (Moorer’s last release was titled Mockingbird) apparently catch her ear–and have you heard her latest, released this week, yet? One more thing: I was fascinated to find a tiny link at the top of Moorer’s homepage to 1 Turtle Dove. Apparently we have another crafting genius in our midst, and there is even a shop.
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First time here? Here's the idea: TSP is a network of blogs about the many facets of the word sister, and the concept of sisterhood. A sisterhood of sister blogs, you could say. Whatever sister means to you, from identical twin to sister-in-law (or in-friendship or in-feminism), we’ll make room to listen in about it or express it on TSP. Like the slogan up top says, “Don’t you have something to say to your sister?” We've got galleries of art and literature by and about sisters, and a Sisterpedia of sisterly trivia...but now we're getting ahead of ourselves. The quick study: 
As the suffix of its name suggests, 
No surprise, really, that sisterhood, often life’s longest relationship and always one of its most important, has been the Muse for so much creative self-expression by women, and also by men. 
