With the Grace of Liberace Go I

Is it cheating to write about books other people have read which I have not read myself? Oh dear, we hate to cheat.

In my beloved NYT I stumbled across a story written by a soul sister. She felt she gave awful parties and so did some research and began collecting books on "gracious living" written years and years before Martha Stewart put pan to parchment paper. She found "cheerfully deranged" tips for not only throwing a nice party but for living glamorously, and who doesn't want to do that? Not you, really? Well, try it before you judge it.

This initial interest led to collecting said books which now take up a special shelf in her library. At first my soul sister Jancee Dunn would kick off her parties by actually reading aloud the stranger bits to the laughter of the crowd. But I think she started to get something more out of them and stopped making so much fun of these helpful friends.

When I was a kid on the bald open prairie (we at home rarely said "prairie" without the "bald open") I craved a life less dusty. A life that maybe had more people in it, and people who did things other than talk about the weather which is, to be fair, a live or die element of life on the B.O.P. Somehow or other I got my hands on an old home economics text book which was probably in a box picked up at an auction as I cannot imagine anyone picking such a book out for me in a second hand book store. Anyway none of that matters, what matters is the book was a fascination for me. It talked about how to BE in the world, how to dress and speak and how to keep hairbrushes "fresh" and things like that. Can you imagine anything so intoxicating to a pre-adolescent freaked out by the judgement of the world? Never mind that the info was even then already two decades out of date.

This sort of "ideas for living" book is now a constant favorite though books of this nature are hard to find. Yes we have Martha but she's sort of, I don't know, stern and what we want is something a bit more celebrating. Jancee sums it up nicely: "...the more I read these cheery books, the more I discovered that what I loved about them was their offbeat joie de vivre, their plucky contention that with wit, verve and maraschino cherries, anybody can live a fabulous life."

That's sort of a nice idea on a rainy day, isn't it?

My own book list includes Elegance by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux who contends that god may not have made you beautiful but anyone can be elegant with the right gentle direction. The book speaks of women of the past who seem to have changed clothes about five times a day (morning dresses? what that?) but what the book really says to me is be respectful of your very own self. Then there is Entre Nous, A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl which is similar in intent. A French girl thinks before she speaks, guards her privacy carefully, chooses intellectual pursuits over the giddy charms of giddy charms. Very encouraging advice for a woman who feels like the trick pony at parties. Even The Bombshell Manual of Style, written in 2001 so a relative newcomer to the genre, has its place in that it encourages us to take good care of ourselves and to vet any new friends and boys to test their worthiness before they are allowed into the inner sanctum. That's kind of a fun idea.

Jancee has done even more sleuthing than me and so I am now on the hunt for some of her finds.

"The dictum of these vintage books was always "Be larger than life" -- markedly different from the message of modern-day tastemakers like Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray and Nate Berkus, who propose the more succinct "Be me." " Doesn't that sum up the current oeuvre? Martha is a dictator, telling me to clean up my room. I hate that.

I like the idea of the old girls' eccentricities (in Sex and the Single Girl, for example, Helen Gurley Brown suggests a brunch cocktail made of boiling down four cups of coffee to one, then adding gin and vanilla ice cream. Madness! But probably makes for an interesting party....) I like the idea of having FUN with life, and if Jancee calls that being larger than life, so be it.

You can't do anything about the weather or the face god gave you. Might as well throw a party.