It's no secret that women have had to play a certain game to make it in the business world, i.e. be the bitchy boss, dress down their femininity, or abide by the rules of a hierarchical structure. Today, however, women are running their own businesses in increasing numbers and are making their own rules. According to the Center for Women's Business Research, women-owned businesses comprise 40 percent of all privately held companies in the U.S. and women entrepreneurs are among the fastest growing groups of business owners. Compare this to our mother's time when, in 1970, women contributed 2-6 percent of the family income. Now the typical working wife brings home 42.2 percent of the income, and four in 10 mothers--many of them single mothers--are the primary breadwinners in their families.
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As a non-practicing Jew growing up in the secular city of Tel-Aviv in Israel I recall the many times that my friends and I were complaining that it was too bad that Israel was so much "not like America" when it came to the relationship between religion and state. We certainly envied Woody Allen and our other co-religionists in New York City who were not subservient to the strictures set by the Orthodox Rabbinate and its definition of "who is a Jew?" and who actually had access to civil marriages or non-religious divorces. And most important, Americans were not engulfed in the never-ending Israeli-Arab conflict that was gradually being transformed into a violent clash between Jews and Muslims, including over the control of the religious sites in Jerusalem.
Well, it is beginning to feel as though it is America that is becoming more "like Israel" as far as the role of religion in public life is concerned as the question of whether to allow the building of mosque is turning out to be a national political issue that could affect the outcome of Congressional elections and that also is being intertwined with debates over U.S. policy in the Middle East.
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Fear is a natural reaction built into the mind-body system. It is triggered by danger, and after the danger is past, so is the fear response. But when fear spreads out into a general condition, it becomes a mysterious thing: anxiety. Anxious people are afraid even though there is nothing "out there" to be afraid of. Others overreact to triggers that ordinarily should be fairly easy to handle, such as being left alone for a day on their own. Still others are nearly paralyzed by highly specific phobias such as fear of heights, open spaces, or insects. What is going on and what can we do about it?
Record numbers of people in modern society, predominantly women, suffer from mild to extreme anxiety. Billions of dollars are spent every year on tranquilizers to treat this condition, yet as the doctor writes out a prescription, he knows two discouraging things: no medication is a cure for anxiety and the cause of the condition is unknown. Since human beings have lived with the fear response before recorded history, there should be a way to heal anxiety, and perhaps the best way to approach the mild-to-moderate types is not as a disease but as a challenge. In anxious people, fear is allowed to roam freely; we can truly say that fear rules the mind. Yet it should be that we use our emotions, not that they use us. The challenge is to bring the fear response back under control. Otherwise, anxiety becomes ingrained and over time will spiral downward. The anxious person begins to be afraid of being afraid, because she knows that she has no power against it.
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Caviar. Gobs of it, served on tiny blinis with a dab of crème fraiche. "We used about ten kilos of whitefish caviar from Northern California tonight, " said Chef Benjamin Bailly of Petrossian, the fine dining and caviar emporium on Robertson. It was towards the end of TASTE OF BEVERLY HILLS' Saturday night party, the third evening of this very successful event. After garnering two such dollops, I walked across the aisle to Chef Kerry Simon's SIMON LA booth to sample his startling offering: a Maine Lobster and Black Truffle Pot Pie, served in a small ceramic cup, with a morsel of the season's first sunchoke, green peas and oyster mushrooms. Both were not something you would usually see at a food festival, but this was not an ordinary event...not by a long shot. As I reported in my HuffPost last week about opening night, the four day/night TASTE OF BEVERLY HILLS, sponsored by Food & Wine Magazine, confounded all of its participants and guests by being so much more than expected. And how often can you say that about anything these days?
I've never met the guy, Jeff Best of Best Events, behind the project, but he must be something of a magician to have created this massive and delicious wonderment. The site itself turned out to be astonishing...atop the parking garage across from the Beverly Hilton, they build two huge spacious tents the size of football fields, abetted by several stages and acres of tables and seating. Then he and his associates enrolled over a hundred of the city's top (and bottom) restaurants to participate, with an equal number of wineries and spirit companies. (Mescal, spicy rum, Prosecca anyone?) I suppose a word of praise should be offered to the half-dozen main sponsors who came into the event: Life's Good (I agree that it is, but I never expected a high-tech garbage can company to tell me so!); there were several smart Infinity cars scattered about the site, all attended by equally smart blond women demonstrating their features (those of the car, not the women); American Express had a comfortable lounge where cardholders could relax and rest their feet; Stella Artois, a Belgian beer which actually is quite good, had a big display with working spigots; the Beverly Hilton, of course, although I do have a bone to pick with them, raising the self-parking rate in the garage to a flat $25 was outrageous; Angelino Magazine, whose food critic Brad Johnson had an esteemed event of his own recently; Intelligensia, Nick Griffith's fine coffee company in Silverlake and Pasadena, and S. Pellegrino, which I drank because my favorite, Fiji Water, doesn't yet have a sparkling water. The city's mayor, the Honorable Jimmy Delshad, was instrumental in making it work, which should earn him another term or two, especially after witnessing his comedy performance with three of the Drago brothers at their cooking demonstration Sunday evening. P.R. maven Mary Wagstaff, whose fabulous platoon of women did a smashing job in telling the world about the party, informed me that the Beverly Hills Education Foundation will receive some of the proceeds. Tickets averaged $150 each evening, which seems high but, hey, this was an expensive big deal all around and no one went home hungry or thirsty (which is more than we can say about much of the world.)
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