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    7 Days in the Cultural Life of a Real Housewife of N.Y.C.

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    Between seasons of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” Erin Lichy is researching recipes, listening to Charli XCX and checking out fashion at the Met.Erin Lichy joined the cast of “The Real Housewives of New York City” last year, and like so many of the women on the long-running Bravo series, “housewife” doesn’t really even scratch the surface of her life. Lichy, 37, is a mother of three and sells luxury real estate in New York City and the Hamptons. She has a home on the Upper West Side and another in Sag Harbor.Before the premiere of the new season of “Real Housewives of New York City,” which is set for Oct. 1, Lichy kept track of her cultural goings-on during a busy week this summer. These are edited excerpts. (“RHONY” fans will be delighted to know that Lichy really does serve a lot of shakshuka.)On a busy summer Wednesday, Lichy visited bookstores around New York City to research recipes. Monday: Pilates and PickupsI arrived back in the Hamptons from visiting my son at sleep-away camp in Maine, then drove my two younger kids to day camp back in the Hamptons and finally got to a Pilates class. I picked up a cappuccino and a croissant at Carissa’s Bakery and got home around 10:30 a.m. to begin my meetings and calls. Then, I picked up the kids from camp at 3 p.m. and stopped at the farmers’ market on the way home to pick up fresh produce to grill for dinner that night. After we ate I put the kids to sleep, journaled and got to sleep early.Tuesday: Italian in Sag HarborBefore I dropped the kids off at camp, I stopped with them at Provisions to get the kids smoothies they love called “Strawberry Monkey.” I went to acupuncture in Sag Harbor for my “trigger finger,” and it actually healed it. Steroid shots didn’t work, but acupuncture did. It’s amazing. Then I got back around 10 a.m. to hop on a call with the mezcal brand Mezcalum team about a weekend that we planned in early August. We created lots of video content and social/YouTube content for the brand in addition to cocktail and recipe videos with Joey Wölffer from Wölffer Estate. Then, after a long day of work, I landed at Tutto il Giorno for dinner in Sag Harbor.Lichy outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she saw the “Sleeping Beauties” fashion exhibition.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      The Lijadu Sisters, Nigeria’s Twin Musical Pioneers, Are Celebrated Anew

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      Taiwo and Kehinde were groundbreaking for their funky songs, as well as their feminism. Five years after Kehinde’s death, their albums will be reissued.High above Harlem in early August, Yeye Taiwo Lijadu sat surrounded by her collection of sacred objects. Shelves displaying statues and icons of some of the 401 deities associated with the Yoruba traditional religion Ifá — in which she’s an ordained priestess — stretched nearly to her apartment’s ceiling. Lijadu (pronounced Lee-JAH-doo), 75, called this room “a museum of the ancestors.”Less prominent were artifacts from her past as one of Nigeria’s biggest 1970s pop stars, when she was half of the vocal duo the Lijadu Sisters, with her identical twin, Kehinde. Beginning in 1963, when they were schoolgirls in a talent competition, the pair became fixtures on Nigerian television. They began releasing records in 1968, and by the mid-1970s they were larger than life; the cover illustration of their 1976 album “Danger” depicted them as superheroes, clad in matching red outfits with knee-high boots.In Nigeria’s male-dominated music scene, the Lijadu Sisters were among the first — and fiercest — popular female artists, groundbreaking not only for their music (a mélange that included folky apala, funky Afrobeat and slinky disco) but also their feminism. In Jeremy Marre’s 1979 documentary “Konkombe: The Nigerian Pop Music Scene” (which will screen at BAM next month), the sisters rehearse and record while taking turns feeding Taiwo’s infant daughter, trying to make their voices heard amid a studio full of male musicians and technicians. “Women suffered at the hands of men in Nigeria,” Lijadu recalled, alluding to an atmosphere of disrespect and sexual harassment.But yesterday’s struggles have yielded to today’s admiration, as the pair have finally been accorded the acclaim their trailblazing influence deserves. After being out of circulation for years, all five of the Lijadu Sisters’ 1970s albums will be remastered and reissued by the Numero Group, beginning with the release next week of perhaps their most fully realized record, “Horizon Unlimited” (1979). But what should be a moment for triumph is filled with grief: Kehinde died in 2019 of breast cancer. “She was my life,” Lijadu said, “she was my everything.”The Lijadu Sisters released their debut album, “Urede,” in 1974 on EMI Nigeria, then signed a four-album deal with the Decca imprint Afrodisia.Pade AladiThe Lijadu Sisters’ music was striking for its sisterly connection. Singing primarily in English or Yoruba, the pair showcased uncannily synchronized harmonies, conjuring a choir of two. Their songs have been sampled — without proper clearance — by artists including Nas and Ayra Starr and cited as inspirations by a new generation of female musicians like Tems and Hayley Williams.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Margaret Qualley Is Getting the Hang of Being a Movie Star

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      Margaret Qualley could finally breathe again.“I’ve been working a lot,” she said over iced tea at Clark’s, a Brooklyn Heights diner near where she lives with her husband, the music producer Jack Antonoff. “I’m relishing these little lull moments.”Qualley, 29, has more than earned a break. After making a striking debut 10 years ago in the HBO series “The Leftovers,” she appeared in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” followed by Emmy-nominated performances in “Fosse/Verdon” and the Netflix mini-series “Maid.” In the past year, she starred in “Poor Things,” “Drive-Away Dolls” and “Kinds of Kindness,” and when we met, she had just returned from shooting three back-to-back movies — Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “Honey Don’t!,” John Patton Ford’s “Huntington” and Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon.”Moviegoers will next see her in “The Substance,” a film that is somehow a departure from all of the above and one she acknowledged was uniquely challenging. Directed by Coralie Fargeat and slated for release on Sept. 20, it is a body-horror blood bath in which Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress who, attempting to recapture her fading youth, injects herself with a mysterious serum.“I’m just trying to move through life like water in a river,” Margaret Qualley said, “and stay agile and move around the rocks.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesThe result is Sue, played by Qualley, a younger, taller, “perfect” woman who emerges fully formed from Elisabeth’s body. The two of them must trade places every week, with the one who’s off-duty kept nourished by IV bags of potions. But soon enough, Sue develops a taste for her brand-new world and doesn’t want to be put on ice when it’s her turn to hibernate.Qualley was in Panama, shooting Claire Denis’s “Stars at Noon,” when she read the script, and was drawn to the prospect of playing a character who seemed “really far from me,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Sasheer Zamata Is OK With Being the Practical B.F.F.

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      The “Saturday Night Live” alumna plays a sorceress in the new “WandaVision” spinoff “Agatha All Along.”As someone who once walked on stilts in Mickey’s Jammin’ Jungle Parade and operated a Sebastian the Crab puppet, the comedian and actress Sasheer Zamata is no stranger to the world of Disney.In August, she was in Anaheim, Calif., for D23 Expo, a weekend event for Disney fans where she promoted the new Marvel series “Agatha All Along,” a “WandaVision” spinoff in which she co-stars with Kathryn Hahn, Aubrey Plaza and Patti LuPone.Zamata, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member for four seasons, has worked on a Marvel project before, voicing one of the characters in the animated series “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.” In “Agatha,” she plays a sorceress.At D23, she said, “We sang our witch’s chant, we were in these hooded cloaks, there was fog, and it felt very epic. We were singing to a stadium of 12,000 people, full Taylor Swift-style.”Zamata went on to talk about the kid’s movie she rewatches every few years, the friend she talks to every day and the album she listens to before going onstage. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Black Girl SunscreenI run through it so fast. I slather it all over because it’s so moisturizing. Even if I’m not going to be outside all day, I still use it because it feels good. When I was younger, I fell into the idea that Black people can’t get sunburned. Now, I can’t even imagine walking outside without sunscreen.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Pedro Almodóvar, Master of Mystifying Films, Wrote a Book He Can’t Classify

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      Pedro Almodóvar is widely considered Spain’s greatest living filmmaker, but he sees himself as a writer first — a “fabulist,” in his telling. His extravagant plots took twists that were hard to predict or even pin down. The tale of two men who form a bond looking over two comatose women in “Talk to Her.” The story of a plastic surgeon who operates on a captive man, changing him to a woman against his will in “The Skin I Live In.”Of his more than 20 feature films, Almodóvar wrote or co-wrote nearly all of them. He had probably spent more days at a writing desk than on a set.As it turned out, he had been writing many other things, too — short stories, diary entries, a few unclassifiable essays — nearly the entire time he was making films. The tales sat in several mysterious blue folders, collected by his assistant Lola García over the course of the director’s many moves to different apartments in Madrid. In 2022, at the urging of the Spanish literary editor Jaume Bonfill, Almodóvar had a look at what had been saved over the years.“It was like seeing a dimension of Pedro that I didn’t know,” said Bonfill, adding that the manuscripts they sorted through contained writings the director had composed as a teenager as well as items Almodóvar had seemingly written decades later. The collection, “The Last Dream,” will be published in English on Sept. 24 by HarperVia.“The Last Dream” is due out Sept. 24 in the United States.HarperVia, via Associated PressJust what this collection is exactly is as much of a mystery as the folders were. Was this a memoir? (One piece was a journal entry written a couple of years back.) Was it fiction — or sketches of ideas that could be fiction — unfinished stories the director never turned into a film? (There is a tale about Count Dracula joining a monastery in Spain.) Much like with his films, Almodóvar feels little need to clarify his output into any defined genre.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares26 Views

      in Music

      Michael Kiwanuka Makes the Simple Profound on ‘Small Changes’

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      “A song can make you hear or understand things that you don’t know how to say,” the English singer and songwriter Michael Kiwanuka said. “I think of songs as ways to communicate without conversation.”For more than a decade, Kiwanuka, 37, has been creating songs that speak directly and soulfully. Most often, he uses just a handful of chords and succinct, open-ended lyrics. But his words often turn into incantations over lush, organic grooves that reach back to vintage R&B, psychedelia and trip-hop. The songs offer questions and life lessons, mingling the personal and the political, balancing sorrow and solace.“Music heals me,” Kiwanuka said in a video interview from his home in England. “So that’s what I try and do.”Kiwanuka’s fourth studio album, “Small Changes,” is due in November, while in September and October he will be touring North America as a co-headliner with Brittany Howard, including an Oct. 2 stop at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y.“I’m amazed by his songwriting; I think it’s classic,” Howard said from her home in Nashville. “There’s an art form to being vulnerable and telling your story, but also keeping it simple so that other people can relate to it,” she added. “The mood he’s creating, the stories he’s telling — it feels like I’m being let in on a little secret or something, like a close friend of mine is telling me their life.”Kiwanuka, whose parents are from Uganda, was born and grew up in London, often feeling like an outsider. “Maybe it’s an immigrant thing — you’re always trying to discover yourself,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      The Song That Connects Jackson Browne, Nico and Margot Tenenbaum

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      Browne wrote “These Days” at 16. Now 75, he and some famous admirers reflect on his unexpected mainstay: “If a song is worth anything, it’s about the life of the listener.”When he was 16, Jack Browne sat down at his parents’ kitchen table in Fullerton, Calif., and started picking out a tune on an old Kay guitar.It was the fall of 1964, and the fledgling songwriter and high school junior — inspired by books, records and his own suburban disaffection — began weaving together an existential number about loss and regret called “These Days.”It would be a year until he finished the song, nearly a decade before he recorded it properly. By the time Jackson Browne, as he would be known professionally, cut it for his 1973 album “For Everyman” — which will be reissued on Sept. 20 — it had already been done in two distinct, definitive versions: the first by the German chanteuse and Velvet Underground collaborator Nico, then later by the Southern rocker Gregg Allman.“These Days” has proved a remarkably durable composition, reinterpreted by Cher, St. Vincent, Glen Campbell, Miley Cyrus, Paul Westerberg and Drake, to name a handful. It inspired Wes Anderson’s 2001 film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and more recently has become the unlikely soundtrack to a series of TikTok trends.While Browne has had bigger hits as an artist (“Doctor My Eyes,” “Running on Empty”) and as a writer (Eagles’ “Take It Easy”), “These Days” has rambled through the decades, morphing musically, changing lyrically and taking on added layers of meaning. “In that regard, it’s sort of like a folk song,” Browne said on a late August afternoon, sitting in the control room of his Santa Monica recording studio, Groove Masters.“I come from folk music, that was my school,” continued Browne, somehow still boyish and bright-eyed at 75. “You’d learn several versions of the same song and adapt the parts of it that you liked and it’d become something else. That’s what’s happened with ‘These Days.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Are Star Crossed in Central Park

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      On a morning in mid-August, a breeze stirred Central Park’s midsummer leaves. Children skipped, dogs lolloped, a bunny peeked out from a hedge near the Great Lawn while a nearby saxophone ruined “Isn’t She Lovely.” It was a very nice day to fall in love.The actors Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler were there, hiking up to Belvedere Castle and then down to the Shakespeare Garden. Connor, 20, and Zegler, 23, don’t plan to fall in love. But the next day, at rehearsal, in Brooklyn they would discover how to make the characters they play fall desperately, terribly in love.As the stars of the “Romeo + Juliet” that opens on Broadway on Oct. 24, they will die for love, they will die for each other, eight times a week. Both are making their Broadway debuts and both have the not exactly enviable task of making a 16th-century play with (apologies for centuries-old spoilers) a famously grim ending feel breath-catchingly new and vital.Daunting? Not at all.“It should be fun,” Connor said, not without some anxiety. Zegler gave him a sardonic look. “It will be fun,” he said. Connor, a British star of the Netflix teen romance “Heartstopper,” and Zegler, an American who made a thrilling film debut in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” had never met until March, shortly after they each agreed to star in the revival, dreamed up by the Tony-winning director Sam Gold, with music by Jack Antonoff. They had been offered the roles separately, without the benefit of a chemistry read. That spring day, Gold brought them to Circle in the Square Theater, where previews will start Sept. 26, then bought them cups of coffee at the Cosmic Diner.Kit Connor, right, on the Netflix series “Heartstopper” opposite Joe Locke.Teddy Cavendish/NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Julianna Margulies on ‘Left on Tenth’: ‘This Is the Play I’ve Been Waiting For’

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      It was a meet-cute right out of a New York City rom-com.The actress Julianna Margulies was walking her dog near Fifth Avenue and 10th Street when a woman with her own dog stopped to ask if she was who she thought she was.“I love your book,” she said of Margulies’s 2021 memoir, “Sunshine Girl,” which follows her rather strange childhood and beyond, up through her time on “ER” and “The Good Wife.”The woman pulled down her face mask: “I’m Delia Ephron.” She, too, had written a memoir, “Left on Tenth,” about life, death and taking a chance on love for a second time, and it was coming out soon. Could she drop off an advance copy?“I plotzed because I’ve just always loved her writing,” Margulies said.While taking refuge from the heat last month, Margulies recounted this scene with Ephron, which happened a few years ago, over an iced cappuccino in the lobby of the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village.Then in January, Margulies went on, she received an email out of the blue from Ephron, saying she had turned “Left on Tenth” into a play — and she wanted Margulies for the lead.“So she emailed it,” Margulies said, “and I sat down, read it cover-to-cover within an hour, just raced through it, sobbed, laughed, emailed her right back, and I said, ‘This is the play I’ve been waiting for.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More