And the Winner Is……….

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Coco Chanel said, “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.”

As of this Valentine’s Day, at least one American woman can be guaranteed a future, because she’ll celebrate Valentine’s Day wearing Ubar, the perfume from Oman.

I know this because I started my Friday off early by knocking on the door of my friend Peter’s home.  Remember Peter from Ah Have Always Depended Upon…..?   He’s the man who carried my 9-foot-tall Norfolk Island Pine up three flights of stairs as if he were carrying a tea cup.

Drawing the winner of the bottle of exotic perfumeThis morning he turned all that strength to the delicate task of tenderly picking one heart out of a bowl filled to the brim with pink and red hearts.  Each heart represented one new subscriber to The Diary of the Vixen Divorcee, or one previous subscriber who had recruited a new subscriber.

I wish I had the resources to give a bottle of perfume to everyone who qualified for the

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Valentine’s Day #2

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Between my last Valentine’s Day as a married woman and my first as a divorced woman, (see Valentine’s Day), I spent my one Valentine’s Day as neither one nor the other holding hands with a handsome, dissolute, notorious lady’s man named Marius.

The setting for our tryst was La Perla, a restaurant on Playa la Ropa in Zihautanejo, Mexico. Our table sat alone, the furthest from the restaurant, the closest to the shoreline.  Moonlight, starlight, gentle waves, warm breezes, the sweet sound of soft voices and laughter drifting to us from the few boats in the bay; this should have been the setting for The Vixen Divorcee’s First Kiss, right?

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Some Enchanted Evening

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Some enchanted evening
You may see a stranger,
you may see a stranger
Across a crowded room
And somehow you’ll know,
You’ll know even then
That somewhere you’ll see him
Again and again.

 Who can explain it?
Who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons,
Wise men never try.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IbDxCIuuWk

As often as I listened to this song as a child, as often as my young heart yearned for such a romantic encounter, I never believed love would come to me this way.

It did.  It came exactly like this.

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Win a Rare Perfume for Valentine’s Day

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I haven’t completely lost my touch.  I still have my sources.  I’m using them to take one lucky subscriber on a sensual journey to far away and long ago.  The scent from this exotic, rare perfume will take you there. (see Valentine’s Day to read about the power of perfume).

Niche luxury fragrance house Amouage has reintroduced Ubar for Woman, a sophisticated and mystical perfume inspired by the rediscovery of the long lost ancient Arabian frankincense trading city of Ubar, called the Atlantis of the Sands by Lawrence of Arabia and which was rediscovered in 1992 in the South of Oman.

 

 

 

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Valentine’s Day

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The last Valentine’s Day I celebrated with my former husband, Alan, surpassed any dream I could ever have.  None of the Hallmark writers or designers could have come up with this scenario.

Alan had been travelling excessively for business.  He missed his birthday, my birthday, our wedding anniversary.  But it’s Valentine’s Day, he’s home and

 

we’re going to make it special.

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More on Seduction

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Detail of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

Slow down for a moment.  Forget all those things that you absolutely have to do in the next 30 minutes.  Allow yourself the pleasure of getting lost in this painting.

Why is it so widely loved?  Is it the complexity of pattern, the way that the background flows into his garment, which flows into hers without clear demarcations?  Is it the abundance of rich gold, contrasted against the traces of bright blue, red and green?  Is it the slightness of her body pressed against the dominating mass of his body?  Is it the precise molding of her face, the glimpse of her shoulder?

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The Poetry of Seduction

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Andrew Marvell said it best back in the 17th century.  I have never come across anything written before or since that more convincingly and beautifully expresses the compelling reasons to indulge in passion.

Alan, my ex-husband, the scientist, would never have come across this poem before meeting me.  I wouldn’t have expected him to know it.  But bless his romantic heart, he learned To His Coy Mistress, and would, when the moment was ripe, pull out a few select lines.   Always with the desired results.

But my own romantic heart hungered for more.  I wanted what he could never have done.  I longed for the man who, in a moment with stillness hanging heavily around us, would recite, unbidden, those lines for me.

I teased Alan that I would give myself, body and soul, to the man who did that.

August Rodin sculpture, the Kiss

French sculptor Auguste Rodin captured how I anticipated responding to an impromptu recitation of “To His Coy Mistress”.

 

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The Men of Paris

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Digging through my desk recently I came across a long-forgotten folder of sketches I’d written when Alan and I were living in Paris in the mid 1980’s.  Here’s one of them.

Contented marriage to a handsome American man hasn’t keep me from observing the beauty of Parisian men.

I started observing my first day in Paris, one of those rare bright February days when everyone strolls the boulevards to get reacquainted with the sun.  The Champs-Elysees  was packed.  Our taxi was stuck in traffic.  He jogged up to the corner from Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, hesitated a bit, then thread his way in front of us, through the honking jam of buses, cars and taxis.   Light brown hair blown back from his face, except for the comma that fell over his forehead.  Strong square jaw, high cheek bones and heavy-lidded eyes.  He must be a movie star or at least a male model, I thought then.  Now I know he was probably an architect, bank clerk or accountant.  Handsome men aren’t that uncommon in Paris.  I see at least one a day.

Here we are, stuck in traffic. Can you pick out the man I spotted?

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Invisible Women

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In the middle of a trendy, hip, upscale restaurant a woman of 55 came unhinged, setting shock waves blasting through the affluent clientele.  I wasn’t there, but my friend, Marlys, was among the five women seated with the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

With her flare for sharing dramatic details, Marlys painted the picture for me of what happened to her friend, Stephanie.

Stephanie, as envisioned by the artist Joan Miro

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The Toy Boy Responds

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Before I included the post about him in the Diary of the Vixen Divorcee  (see The Toy Boy), I emailed it to Guy.  This is his response.  What a gift to any woman to have her youth remembered like this, and to be told of those memories.

Blondie,

How much fun is that?

“Once upon a time…”  – you’re so cute. What a kick to read the private thoughts of such a special former lover. The realization that I had achieved an erection half way through the story made me smile and shake my head (Some things never change :-) )

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