Playing Chicken

I have invented a new nail system that will make me rich and famous maybe

I made a dish for dinner the other night, which called for pieces of chicken to be tossed in a mixture of flour and turmeric. I’ve made it before, and in the past I’d used a two big silver spoons to toss the chicken. It hadn’t worked well—lots of chicken pieces didn’t get coated with the flour, and others came flying out of the bowl (even though in real life, chickens don’t fly LOL). This time I went all pro-chef on the task, thrusting my bare hands into the mixing bowl and manhandling all the chunks of chicken, which was actually a lot of fun. It was also far more effective. (Note to self, get rid of all kitchen tools and get handsy.) Dinner was a success.

I used to have a lot of poultry—many chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese. Rather than use a boring stock photo of a chicken, here I am with my very own.)

Before I went to bed, I glanced down at my hands and reacted with a start. My nails had turned turmeric-colored. Turmeric is a beautiful smoky yellow. I had given myself a spice manicure.

As I mentioned in a post way back in the olden days (May 2025) I was not a big manicure fan until I was living in New York in the Eighties and an eight-buck manicure joint opened in the ground floor of my apartment building. It was irresistible to pop in whenever I was in the mood, and I fell into a regular habit of getting my nails done. I liked various shades of red, although now and then I’d wander into something weirder, like navy blue. Unfortunately, I couldn’t bear having chips, so as soon as a piece of polish cracked off, I’d run downstairs and get a new manicure. At one point, I realized that I hadn’t seen my natural nail color in…..well, I couldn’t remember when. During the manicure, when the attendant had stripped off the old polish and I briefly saw my naked nails, they looked curiously bloodless and wan, as if I had consumption.

I also got pedicures. Between the manicures and pedicures, I felt like I had signed on for the equivalent of getting a puppy: So much time! And money! And so much scheduling to deal with! I’d have to count backwards from any event to figure out if my nails would be fresh enough, and if not, figure out when I could dash in for a fix. I learned quickly that the at-home repair, of slopping on a little bit of polish to cover a chip, looked like hell. Once, I tried getting a nude manicure, thinking that 1)I would start getting used to the actual color of nails and maybe be able to transition back to no manicures and 2)maybe the chips wouldn’t bug me so much. Wrong, and wrong. Nude manicures are a whole other thing, with their own travails. Plus they looked too office-girl for me; I hated it. Back to Revvin’ Red or Comin’ Up Roses.

This went on for years, and then one day I just stopped. It took me a while to get reacquainted with nail-colored nails, but I did. Mostly, I savored the freedom from the commitment to taking care of them. It’s fair to mention here that there are people capable of doing their own nails, but I’m not one of them—even though I pride myself on being slightly ambidextrous, I’m hopeless when it comes to left hand brush manipulation. I’d literally have polish on my knuckles.

I was talking with a friend the other day about shedding these sorts of tasks and how revelatory it is to tick off an entire line of beauty duties forever. I’m not saying I’ll never get my nails done again, but for daily purposes, I just don’t have the patience. When I walked in Rachel Antonoff’s fashion show in the spring, we were fitted with press-on nails, and they did look amazing, and for one brief moment, I wondered if I’d dive down that rabbit hole. But I didn’t.

In the meantime, I had this little incident with my turmeric chicken dish, and for one brief moment, I thought that maybe I’d stumbled on a brilliant discovery that would make me super rich: A way to do your nails while prepping dinner! The curry yellow tone I got from the turmeric was maybe not the right direction—it made me look like I had a jungle disease—but what about chile? Or another nice bright red spice? Wouldn’t this be the ultimate in multitasking?

I’ll keep you posted as I further develop this genius plan. I did scrub the turmeric off my nails (not an easy feat, by the way: that stuff is DURABLE) so I’m back to nudie nude, and not sorry.

SHOW NOTES

—The thing that is most interesting about Lena Dunham’s Famesick, which I just finished, is that I think it provides an almost perfect sampling of what it would actually be like to be her friend. It’s hilarious and snappy; the writing is smart and fresh; you have so much fun being in her world and yet you also want to kill her. I think that’s an accomplishment, to provide such an accurate capsule experience of the writer. I consumed the book in one big gulp; it’s hard to resist.

—I don’t browse the Mango website often, but in a recent idle moment, I did, and it happened to be the day they launched a collaboration with groovy brand Eckhaus Latta. Some very cool pieces (unless they’re already sold out!).

—I watched “The Little Drummer Girl” on my recent flight home from London—the most recent BBC adaptation, with Florence Pugh and Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Shannon, adapted from John le Carré’s book. The plot gets a little twisty and confusing at moments, but it’s really compelling. It’s directed by Park Chan-Wook and it’s gorgeous. Somehow, it didn’t get the attention this all-star lineup would seem to merit. Highly recommend, and it might be fun now to go back and watch the original with Diane Keaton…

—I also watched a pretty amazing documentary on Netflix called “The Long Road to War”, which explained to me, for the first time that I can remember, the real causes and conflicts that led to World War I. It’s fascinating, and I learned an enormous amount that four years of college with a minor in history never really explained. I happen to be quite interested in WWI, partly because I wrote about it a lot in Rin Tin Tin, and my beloved Pat Barker trilogy (please read it if you haven’t) is set in that time, and also it is a rather important little world issue that issued in modernity, etc. So I was inclined to find the documentary interesting, but I have to say it’s incredibly well done and really makes sense of the very confusing geopolitical dynamic of that time. Also, they have a trove of amazing footage from that time. I loved it.

More soon—xSusan