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What's New? : a How-To Guide

Dec 31, 2018
6 min

What's New? : a How-To Guide

Does anyone actually, enthusiastically, genuinely enjoy a party? Are there any true, honest-to-goodness extroverts out there who thrive in places buzzing with small talk? I have my suspicions that these people don’t exist – or, that they are the extreme minority – and we’re all just milling about get-togethers trying to drink our dread away. It’s a dread that stems from the anticipation of having to answer the only question that gets asked over and over again in Hell: “What’s

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The Eclade de Moules, or the most dramatic way to cook mussels.

Aug 22, 2018
5 min

The Eclade de Moules, or the most dramatic way to cook mussels.

I love mussels. I love most shellfish, in fact. Scallops, oysters, lobsters, clams... if you have a hard shell and a soft body, I probably want to eat you. This is maybe true about the humans I like, too. The harder it is to get to know you, the more I will probably like you. It must be because my brother is a Cancer and I adore him. Or maybe because my mother grew up on a lake that had a fundraising clambake at the fire hall every year. I don't know what the root is, but she

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The Unbearable Ennui of Being

Apr 20, 2018
5 min

The Unbearable Ennui of Being

I’m not sure about this, but my friend Ally says that I do well when faced with the crushing and unending ennui of life. Frankly, I don’t know why they think that. I have a deeply melancholy soul and have spent most of my life dreading waking up in the mornings. The crushing and unending ennui of life is one of my favorite topics to go on and on about because it is all-encompassing, and I just don’t have anything else to talk about, really. Nevertheless, it appears that my me

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Buns in the Oven Part 8: International Thespian Society

Dec 6, 2017
4 min

Buns in the Oven Part 8: International Thespian Society

Your good news is not always someone else’s good news. Don’t let that stop you from sharing your news with people you want to share with, but do let that knowledge influence your method of delivery. Sure, we’d all like to rejoice in other’s successes and delights, but sometimes we just don’t have the goddamn energy to be there 100%. Lately, when someone announces their pregnancy to me, you can be sure that my joyful congratulations are a product of my many years of theatre sc

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The Creepy Secret to Glowing Skin

Nov 14, 2017
3 min

The Creepy Secret to Glowing Skin

A few months ago, during the height of sticky summer sadness, I went on a coffee date with a friend. We were chatting about this and that – summer vacations, coworkers’ gossip – when my friend leaned in toward me and said, “I hope this isn’t weird, but your skin looks fucking amazing. Why is your face glowing?” Between the ages of 11 and 17, I had terrible acne. The kind that makes people say, “Oh, don’t worry, no one notices it as much as you,” because lying is better than a

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Treachery and Beauty: Life Lessons from Hiking in Pennsylvania

Oct 27, 2017
6 min

Treachery and Beauty: Life Lessons from Hiking in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania rocks. It rocks in the figurative sense of being super great, and it rocks in the sense that there are literal stones, boulders, and glacial erratics strewn about the landscape as if a giant rock-eating dragon flew over the state chewing with its mouth open. The rocky reality of the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania has inspired hikers to dub the section “the Hardest Part of the Trail,” “Rocksylvania,” “Where Boots Go to Die,” and “Where I Had My Psychological Br

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Gold Plate Your Food!

Feb 24, 2017
3 min

Gold Plate Your Food!

Have you ever been eating a delicious piece of cake and said to yourself, "This cake is good, but it would be so much better if it were gold?" I feel certain that you have said that, and I am here to help. For Valentine's Day, our neighbors had a small wine and dessert get-together at their house. I brought Queer Martha's famous chocolate tart, but Valentined it by adding red raspberries on top. Once I finished placing the raspberries, I took a step back and looked at my hand

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Cookie Party Traditions and Tribulations

Nov 30, 2016
2 min

Cookie Party Traditions and Tribulations

Nearly every year since my sophomore year in high school, my friends Ally and Sarah and I have gotten together around the holidays to make cookies. The original idea was to give cookies and chocolates to our friends as cheap Christmas gifts. However, soon after I said, "Aren't we putting rum in the cookies? I always add rum to the recipe to make the cookies a little spicy," the intent of the party changed drastically. Cut to us getting loaded on boozy cookie dough, and a trad

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Tricks of the Trade: Between Fine China and a Hard Plate

Sep 2, 2016
3 min

Tricks of the Trade: Between Fine China and a Hard Plate

Hello! Since it is still too hot to bake in Philadelphia, we are once again skipping our regularly scheduled broadcast of Baking + Beer and replacing it with a lesson straight out of Mrs. Lucy Staley's classic book New Trends in Table Settings... and Period Designs, Too. Oh, yes, I am obsessed. This is an excellent lesson, though, and really quite simple. Tell me, how many times in the past week have you asked yourself, "Is this china set really as fine as they say it is?" Pe

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The Decade Dinner Party

Jun 22, 2016
5 min

The Decade Dinner Party

My beautiful mama turned 60 last month, and the only thing she asked for was a dinner at home with her family. She asked Rachel and me to cook. Now, you can say a lot of things about Rachel and me. Two of those things are that we never turn down an invitation to throw a party, and we just can’t help but give the party a theme. We wanted to give this party a theme that would ring in this milestone decade by celebrating everything that happened in the last decade of my mom's li

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Lessons Learned from Running Errands like its 1890

May 24, 2016
6 min

Lessons Learned from Running Errands like its 1890

When I lived in France I was completely charmed by the ever-present stores that sold one very specific thing or performed one very specific service. It is a trope that is totally true. French people really do buy their meat from the butcher, their bread from the baker, their flowers from the florist, and their medicine from a pharmacy that actually only sells medicine (You can't get cigarettes, greeting cards, or candy at French pharmacies it turns out.). Not every French per

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How to Make a Good Decision: Demystified

May 5, 2016
2 min

How to Make a Good Decision: Demystified

As many of you know by now, life is full of complexities. Everything we do has its pros and its cons. Sometimes it's hard to know if you are making a good decision or if you are about to ruin your life. You know what I mean - should I buy a house right now? Should I apply for that PhD I've always wanted? Should I drop everything and become a 1990s revival lesbian folk singer? Other questions have smaller stakes, but they still take up valuable mental energy. For example - sho

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Queer Casablanca

Apr 27, 2016
6 min

Queer Casablanca

One Monday night in late March, Rachel and I were stumbling through the streets of Shinjuku-2-chome looking for a warm place to rest our feet. We enjoyed warm, spring weather earlier in the day, but the air in Tokyo was steadily getting colder as dusk got darker. I shivered in my trench coat. As a side note, pretty much every Japanese lady wears a beige trench coat more or less identical to mine. Rachel lost me quite a few times in crowds because she couldn't pick me out from

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The Ballad of Dashed Sandwich Dreams

Apr 19, 2016
1 min

The Ballad of Dashed Sandwich Dreams

My friend Ally sent me this photo and said: "This was just lying there in the kitchen in my office. A single slice of untoasted bread in a sandwich bag. There's something really sad about it, I think.... It needs you to write a poem about it." So here is the sonnet to commemorate the sad piece of bread that never made it into a sandwich: You put me in a plastic sandwich bag, But I am just one simple slice of bread. I hear them now, they all begin to nag, These questions that

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How to Beat Jet Lag to the Punch (and Other Tips for Coming Home from Vacation)

Apr 11, 2016
5 min

How to Beat Jet Lag to the Punch (and Other Tips for Coming Home from Vacation)

Rachel and I arrived home from Japan Thursday night, and I am excited to share our adventures with you. It was a perfect trip, and Japan is a perfect place. We both were talking about ways to move to Japan before the trip was even over. While it is pretty normal for me to start making plans to move to the places I visit, it is really a testament to how great a place is if Rachel starts doing the same thing. She is drawn much less to hyperbole than I am. You can trust her judg

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The Ultimate List of Things to Do the Day Before You Leave for Vacation

Mar 24, 2016
3 min

The Ultimate List of Things to Do the Day Before You Leave for Vacation

So, you have been planning a big vacation for several months, have you? You got your passport updated, you dropped your cat off at your parents' house, and you sent your good trench coat to the dry cleaners so that you don't look schlubby. You are aware that you are representing America during a turbulent election year. You do not want to look schlubby. You're pretty ready to go, but there are always those day-before-you-leave jitters. How can you be sure you aren't forgettin

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Personality Tests for People Who Hate Personality Tests

Feb 11, 2016
3 min

Personality Tests for People Who Hate Personality Tests

I can't tell you why people are obsessed with personality tests, and I certainly won't pretend to be immune to the fascination. In fact, I place a lot of stock in my different pseudo-scientific labels, and I probably place a lot of stock in yours, too. I just feel like we spend our whole lives trying to know ourselves, and it is so nice to have parameters to guide that search. Maybe you are totally on board with personality tests. Maybe you think the whole thing is a bunch o

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Try Something New: Idioms for (almost) Every Occasion

Feb 6, 2016
6 min

Try Something New: Idioms for (almost) Every Occasion

Words are important. You know what is more important? Words that don't mean what they are supposed to mean. That's right, folks, we're talking metaphors - the ligustic equivalent to a gilded rococo sideboard. Why did you buy that crazy sideboard? Because it's freaking awesome, that's why. And so are metaphors. Some metaphors are so cool that they become codified as an idiomatic expression unique to a time and place. There is something special about using an idom - if you are

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A Comprehensive Guide to Winter Coats

Jan 30, 2016
7 min

A Comprehensive Guide to Winter Coats

You probably know this by now: I love winter. The chilling wind whipping through my body and preventing me from breathing makes me feel alive. When I stand in the cold and feel my nose and ears start to freeze, it makes me hyper-aware that I have a nose and ears that can be frozen, and isn't that a beautiful thing? Tell me - how do people in warm climates know they are alive if they never feel the rush of blood leaving their face when they step out into a polar vortex? Frankl

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Christmas in the Time of Climate Change

Dec 22, 2015
6 min

Christmas in the Time of Climate Change

If you have read previous posts on Queer Martha, you are most likely very aware of how much I love Christmas. I start to get excited about Christmas around the beginning of July - right when the humidity in Philadelphia suddenly pulls you into a giant, suffocating bear hug that lasts through mid-September. Now, I am a woman of the Northeast. I don't really mind the humidity. As soon as it picks up in the summer, however, it reminds me of how much I long for a blizzard to blow

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