Questions and Answers

From the imagined journal of Alice B. Toklas:

“1.January 1910, 27 rue de Fleurus

All the guests have left and Gertrude has retired. What a glorious evening!

And so a new year begins with the most wonderful of news which I will share at the end of today’s entry, saving the best for last.

Paris, 1910

I was asked by Gertrude and Leo to assist in preparing the holiday’s food which I did with pleasure. There are so many recipes that I have collected from my grandmother and mother and many of our cooks that someday I may have to do a cook book.

Assisting with soirées here has become such a pleasurable task as I have become quite familiar with the household as I come daily to transcribe Gertrude’s notebooks on the Smith-Premier typewriter—a marvelous apparatus.

» Read the rest of this entry «

For more than thirty years I’ve been mailing collaged, holiday cards at the end of the year. I would take a postcard and cover it with various stickers or other pictures or text found in magazines and add a catchy phrase linking it to the holidays.

About twenty years ago, these cards took on a GertrudeandAlice twist. The Ladies from rue de Fleurus became the focus of the cards and the annual greeting, with its usual irreverent humor,  seems to have become something that friends looked forward to receiving each December.  (Some of my friends have told me that they’ve kept all of the cards over the years, ready for a retrospective exhibition!)

Card of Holidays Past 2003

Card of Holidays Past 2004

» Read the rest of this entry «

People often ask me which of Gertrude Stein’s works they should read first.  Sometimes the question comes from someone who knows very little about GertrudeandAlice.  Sometimes it comes from someone who has heard of them and only knows Gertrude through her most famous quotes: “Rose is a…,” or “No there…” and knows Alice because of her cookbook’s most famous recipe the “H–hish Fudge aka ABT Bro-nies.”

Usually I’ve encouraged them to begin with THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS.  The book is very accessible, written in a straight forward narrative style with just enough touches of Gertrude’s stylistic word-play and chronology shuffling to let the reader know that this masterpiece of modernist literature is just that – a masterpiece of modernist literature.

GertrudeandAlice with words (to typeset) in a picture circa 1935

» Read the rest of this entry «