Well last night we had our first meeting of the Scary/Monster/Beautiful committee. Really just the people in the show and us, the sisters. We were so nervous as we so respect and admire all of the people who were coming and wanted to seem as together and professional as we could (because we are so not) We decided that the best thing to do was to assign each of our guests a character in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. So we bought as box of those “Hello My Name Is …” and sat up the night before with our guest list assigning a character to each guest. Of course, Mr. Smith would be Lord Marchmain of the Byronesque aura and his partner, our house photographer Jowita Bydlowska would be Cara his mistress. Nancy and Liisa took turns being Julia. Elizabeth decided to be Kurt, Sebastian’s lowlife lover in Morocco who had shot himself in the foot to get out of army duty. Now I thought this a ballsy against type casting move on her part, but then realized she just did it so she could use her gangrene infected foot to make people get her drinks. Alice, ever the obstinate one decided rather recherché-ly she wouldn’t be a character in the book but be the actual person the character was based on, so all night stuttered and digressed as Anthony Blanche’s real life counterpart Brian Howard the poet/journalist. Magda got to be Cordelia, young and old. Naturally I was Charles, and gave long, drawn out speeches about ghosts and lost summers and strawberries. Thankfully, there was no Rex Mottram, that embarrassing entrepreneurial Canadian.

Our clever meeting tactic, needless to say, did not last long.

We did however come up with a clever game plan and copious notes. (There is also now a lot of beer in the house, much to our father’s chagrin as no one drinks beer, but everyone brought it. Red wine and martini’s were très populaire) What last night really did was totally inspire us, our friends are the most magical.

In the weeks and months to come we will introduce you to everyone in the show and update you more and more on our doings and give dates and times as we know you will want to visit. Think October. October. October.

For now, we send love.

- Sarah