My good friend and former roommate James Ponsoldt’s new film, Smashed, is in theaters this weekend. It was much-loved at Sundance (where it won a Special Jury Prize), and has garnered great critical reviews since (according to Metacritic, ‘universal critical acclaim’).

Here’s the trailer, which looks awesome, and gives a great sense of both Jamie’s knack for spotting and directing talented actors, and his subtle but highly visual shooting style:

Sony Pictures Classics is releasing it in New York (with the impressive double-whammy of the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza) and LA tomorrow, then more broadly over the next few weeks; you can check the list of theaters to see when it’s coming to you.

After months of hard work, Jess and her partner Catherine officially launched Dobbin, their new clothing line, this morning. The site is live at [www.dobbinclothing.com](http://www.dobbinclothing.com).

The idea is simple: fashionable clothing that flatters real bodies.

They’re using high-end Italian fabric and manufacturing here in NYC, yet have kept prices low by cutting out the retail middleman, selling only online.

The clothing is also full of a slew of smart touches. A pair of their pants, say, is made from stretch canvas, has a hidden adjustable elastic waistband and is proportioned with a slightly higher rise and very carefully shaped hips and thighs, to make a classically tailored pair of trouser-cut pants that look great on a wide array of body types.

Check it out, tell a friend, and buy something! As they’re offering free shipping both ways, you’ve got nothing to lose.

My grandfather is in the hospital today, apparently not doing well. Please send Father’s Day get well wishes his way. He’s a kind and loving person, a talented painter, and an endless repository of Yiddish jokes.

When I last spoke with him a few weeks back, he shared this one:

A nice Jewish girl brings her fiance home to meet her parents. After dinner, her father invites the young man to the living room, for a glass of Schnapps.

“So, nu, what are your plans?” the father asks.

“I’m a Torah scholar,” the fiance replies.

“A Torah scholar,” the father says. “Admirable. But how will you provide a nice house for my daughter to live in, as she’s accustomed to?”

“I will study,” says the young man. “And God will provide for us.”

“And how will you buy her a beautiful engagement ring?” asks the father.

“I will concentrate on my studies,” the fiance replies, “and God will provide for us.”

“And children?” asks the father. “How will you support children?”

“Don’t worry, sir, God will provide,” replies the fiance.

So, the daughter and the fiance head home, and the mother asks the father, “nu, how was he?”

The father says, “well, he has no job and no plans, but the good news is he thinks I’m God.”

Get well, grandpa.

And, to my own father, best Father’s Day wishes and all my love.

It’s always worth being reminded that life is unpredictable, that we’d best appreciate, share time with, and love our friends and families while we can.

Many thanks to all who sent in kind words of support for my grandmother. She’s off the respirator, back to conscious, and likely leaving the ICU tomorrow morning. A few weeks yet until she’s back to full steam, but at least she’s now clearly on the upswing.

Also of note, in the ‘no rest for the wicked’ category: pre-production on both Keeper of the Pinstripes and Yelling to the Sky is slated to kick off June 15th. It’s going to be a busy summer.

Almost exactly seven years ago, I blogged this about my grandmother Anita:

My 80 year old grandmother makes me look like a slacker and a lazy bum. This is a woman who, living down near Grammercy Park, will regularly walk the hundred block round trip to the Guggenheim Museum. This is a woman who, late in life, returned to NYU not only for a college degree, but for a masters as well. This is a woman who, throughout her 60’s and 70’s, worked at a day facility caring for drug addicts and the mentally disturbed. This is a woman who, now, volunteers at the senior center assisting people ten, fifteen years younger than herself, with absolutely no sense that by all rights she should be the one in the chair being spooned jello rather than the other way around.

And, most recently, this is a woman who, having decided she missed out on her Jewish heritage by not having a bat mitzvah at the customary age of twelve, took it upon herself to learn Hebrew, and, some 68 years later, is holding the traditional ceremony this evening. I’ll be in the audience, wishing her well, and hoping that I inherited some of those genes.

Late last week, she was still at it.

On Saturday afternoon, I got a call from my aunt, who was in midtown. By chance, she’d run into my grandmother.

At the time, my grandmother was midway through her afternoon walk. Nearly forty blocks from her apartment where she’d started. Less than five months after she’d been hospitalized and wheelchair-bound for a fractured pelvis.

But, since Sunday morning, my grandmother has been in the hospital again. From the time she started coughing up blood, through a series of ups and downs, it’s been a scary week. Tonight, though she’s sedated and intubated, after a day of great work by the wonderful MICU team at Beth Israel, we’re hoping she’s turning the corner.

So, wherever you are, please send happy, healthy, loving thoughts her way. I don’t use the word hero lightly, but she’s certainly one of mine. And, these days, we need to all the heroes we can get.

One afternoon, when my brother and I were about 5 and 8, respectively, our mother picked us up from school in the family Volvo. She then drove down the road about five hundred feet before announcing that she wasn’t our mother, but rather an alien, who had come to kidnap us.

Obviously, a debate about this ensued, with my brother and me insisting that she was, in fact, our mother, and her insisting, no, in fact, she was an alien, but that the other aliens had just done a remarkably good job in making her look precisely like our mother. The debate raged for nearly the entire ride home, with my mother holding out just long enough for my brother and I to start developing serious doubts.

To this day, I’m not entirely sure what possessed her to do that, but if she were to do it again, I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised. Because, while she’s logical and organized, my mother also jumps on beds and pushes people into swimming pools without warning.

Or, at least, without much warning; by now, my brother and I have both learned to recognize that certain gleam in her eyes which serves as the signal for both of us to run for our lives.

Apparently, my mother inherited this troublemaking streak from her own mother, who once, while measuring her for a skirt she was shortening, poked my mom in the posterior with a pin, “just to see what would happen.”

So, on her birthday (and, yes, astute readers, her, my, and my father’s birthdays do all fall within the span of a week), to any readers who have been following along with self-aggrandizement and wondering what the hell is wrong with me, I say: go ask my mom. Much as she’d deny it, her genes clearly account for at least half of the whack-job traits I possess today.

As left on her answering machine while they were apparently headed down to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk for caramel apples:

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Your husband’s the one who looks like a monkey,
But you smell like one so you probably shouldn’t laugh at him too much.

xoxo

j