fitforafemme.com

What a weekend! It began quietly at home on Friday night. The girls and I piled on the couch with the puppies at our feet, delivery Indian food strewn across the coffee table, Secretariat on the widescreen. On Saturday, I cursed my Navigator all the way through the Sunset to the Castro to fetch the one and only Bevin Branlandingham of Queer Fat Femme for a lovely brunch tea.

Hm, scratch that. The weekend started early, I suppose, since we hit the town on Thursday night to check out the long lost Flourish party at Public Works in the Mission. The bar was well-stocked with many fine options and competent bartenders, and the space is really something else. Whoever put together the slideshow to benefit GLBT Historical Society did an amazing job and the photo booth fundraiser was lots of fun. We ran into many lovelies (and a few poorly behaved others) – Bevin and Miss Dylan Ryan and LISF – but catching up proved difficult over the loud music and trying to keep out the way of The Real L Word film crew! An exciting night, and the true beginning of a weekend that couldn’t come too soon!

Back to tea! It was a drizzly, gray sort of day, and I thought this dress was perfect for the weather and Tal-y-Tara, the equestrian & tea shoppe I’ve written about here a few times before. Bevin and I were headed there for civilized conversation and to film an episode of her delightful new web series called Lesbian Tea Basket. She thought I was kidding when I told her it was part polo shop, and after I chivalrously let her out in front while I found parking nearby, I found her wandering inside in absolute awe, touching all the fine pony things and blinking her big, lush eyelashes in disbelief. We sat and ordered and talked and marveled over the little fixins for tea sandwiches, the famous scones and shortbread and cookies and, of course, sipped tea. I won’t say much more but I can assure you that you’ll know when the special FFAF episode goes up!

I returned Bevin just slightly past her curfew (she was headed into the Santa Cruz mountains for the epic, overnight Hard French Winter Ball half of queer SF was at on Saturday night), and headed home. I needed to get out of this outfit (vintage dress and coat, Max Studio pumps, Alice + Olivia for Payless clutch) and into something suitable for Strikeforce, an MMA (mixed martial arts) event happening in the South Bay. M’s colleagues scored some tickets earlier in the week and it was my first time at an official fight night. I went from the pictured outfit to cowboy boots, ratty black tights, a short leather skirt, and a Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt under a dark wash denim jacket. I accessorized with piles and piles of mixed metal necklaces, my foxtail swinging from my purse, and red, red lips (inspired by Miss BB).

IT WAS EXCELLENT.

Amazing. I can’t wait to go again, and M said that she wants to go to a big UFC fight for her birthday this year. They shot huge, 10-ft. tall flames and fireworks from the sides of the stage whenever the fighters were announced, and the crowd was well-behaved for being at a bloodsport event. The fights weren’t bloody, but they were good. I drank beer and ate nachos and stole M’s Cracker Jacks. In a total 180, we woke up this morning and made our way to a very sweet baby shower for some friends of ours in Oakland. We all made pages for a custom baby book, played a fun game that had nothing to do with babies, ate French toast and quiche and cake, and marveled over all the hard work they’ve done on their home renovation in the past year. The rest of the day was spent in a dreamy, post-storm haze of (local) book shopping, hanging out a cafe, finding some tights to keep my gams warm, getting M a haircut, and unwinding over a low-key Italian dinner.

In fact, I have to wrap this up because M is waiting for me on the floor in front of our fireplace, with blankets and our books and pups. I hope y’all had wonderful weekends full of your favorite things, too!

XOXO,

FFAF

PS. A friend and dear reader noted that it was terribly coy of me to talk about all these books and not say what they were, and she’s right!

Here you go:

Clockwise from top right:

Revolutionary Road, Yates
The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut
The Wild Things, Eggers
Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart

Welcome to my tall glass of water.

Imagine you’re a sweet femme on a clear winter’s day, parked under a tree with your pretty .25mm pen with ink the richest shade of nutmeg brown, scribbling lists into a Moleskine or doing a crossword or sketching squirrels in book margins and pretending the world isn’t tucked under the bright green grass beneath you. Imagine that you look up just as this tomboy saunters by, walks up to the Conservatory of Flowers, finds the doors locked, the little ticket booth with a sign that says it’s closed, scratching her head and furrowing her perfect eyebrows up at the clouds behind you. Imagine the lilt in your gut as a rabble of butterflies sighs and changes tack.

OK, you can stop imagining now. I took these as M walked back to where her mother and I were sitting and talking. Can you believe that in just a month or so, we’ll have been in each other’s lives for six years? It’s unreal, and wonderful.

SPEAKING OF SQUIRRELS.

Look at this little son of a bitch. They were everywhere. I wouldn’t call them aggressive, but they were very bold. We have something to share with you. You might have easily seen it already on BBC3, or read about it from the fine folks over at Autostraddle, but we watched the first season in its entirely over New Year’s weekend, and are super impatient for the second season to air become available in the US. What is it? A new lesbian drama called Lip Service, set in Glasgow with lots of hot dykes with accents and a whole really lot of feelings and chaos and fucking up and fucking. You should totally see it! A good friend tipped us off to the full episodes available for free at Stagevu.com!

I’m not saying Frankie is a squirrel, but…the similarities are there.

The fine folks at Goya Zoya are offering three bottles of nail polish FREE if you like their Facebook page! You make the obscenely difficult choice of picking just three of their nail polishes (though you get loads of freebies if you purchase $30 and $50 in product, just saying), pay for shipping and voila! Hotness you can type with. Their polishes are vegan-friendly, and formaldehyde, toluene, dibutyl phthalate (DBP) and camphor-free, so you can feel good about pampering yourself! I got these awesome shades – what I’m hoping will be a 2011 honeysuckle, a shimmery periwinkle blue, a bright, pink-red poppy and a dirty, bloody red:

In the above pics the tomboy is wearing skinny RSQ NY jeans with a BEN SHERMAN shirt, a PENGUIN tie and BRIARD Italian wool sweater.

Boots by MARC NASON and EDDIE BAUER messenger bag.

If you mashed these colors together, you’d get something like this San Francisco sunset over the Sutro Bath ruins at the Pacific coast. We didn’t get a new dog. That’s just old Laddy, and he likes to hang out and intimidate the fine patrons of Tal y Tara, a real gem tucked away in the Richmond District. Isn’t he precious?

Well, it’s late and I’ve got a busy week ahead of me – a ski bunny summit with a few other femmes at the Lex to discuss plans for an upcoming winter wonderland weekend, an overdue visit from a dear friend, the Original Plumbing Fashion Party, the final meeting for Anna Karenina with my book club – so I’ll leave you with these last few sweeter-than-sugarplums snapshots and bid you goodnight!

CONFESSION: OK, so they aren’t real ponies! But it’s the one that lets you know the fancy tea and polo shoppe is open, and I love it to death. If I am not mistaken, this is the first dress ever posted here on FFAF, and it’s still going strong and I must say, looking better than ever. (Apropos of nothing at all, I need boots that are the exact color of the little elephants, my necklace and earrings.) The beach you are drinking in is San Francisco’s Baker Beach, my personal favorite. It is also a nude beach, but only a very small percentage of its visitors take advantage of this. There’s just something about being cradled between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific Ocean, the sun like a warm blanket on your skin.

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When: Saturday, August 23rd, 2008.

What: Zara Woman skinny blue jeans, Nocona cowboy boots with vintage spurs from Tal-Y-Tara, vintage candy-stripe swimsuit, SF hoodie procured from one of those post-baseball game street hucksters at AT&T Park in San Francisco.

Confession: I told y’all that some days I was low femme! Or, you know, not all dressy and shit. See? Earlier in the day I was traipsing around the beach in a Mango dress, but once the fog finally hit the sand around sunset, I yanked on these jeans and my new (favorite) hoodie. YAY SAN FRANCISCO!

It is worth noting that Tal-Y-Tara is SF’s only tea and equestrian shoppe. Their Motorloaf is the most delicious bread I have ever had in my life. All their recipes are very secret. M & I go here as often as we can to enjoy a lovely high tea in the wonderful garden, where you feel as if you’re anywhere but in the middle of one of the most exciting cities in the world.

Of course, if you prefer to enjoy your tea indoors you may do so amongst the excellent new and vintage collection of equestrian goods and anything your heart desires for having a fancy tea party of your own!

Oh, and they’ve got a giant pony statue thing that they put outside of the shop whenever they’re open. I highly recommend it.

(Tal-y-Tara photos courtesy of tea_austen @ flickr!)