Mr. Lester’s great aunt Hazel, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy and gossip…

The exquisitely patrician Connecticut lady pictured above had quite a career – and split her time between the East Coast and the West. Very busy. I don’t know that she really cooked more than brownies and put together hot fudge sundaes – but she did eat and appreciate food.

The people pictured below on the left are the Mister’s father and mother (expecting the Mister’s eldest brother), an uncle I don’t believe he’s ever met, and on the far right is his great-aunt Hazel. She was employed by Ms. Hepburn, and some other Beverly Hills/ Bel Air kind of people to run their kitchens. Aunt Hazel was a professional cook. She was the one who Spencer Tracy would seek out — then park himself at her kitchen table — to hear all the inside scoop from all the people who worked for all the people he hung out with, so to speak. Mr. Tracy loved to gossip.

Here’s where this blog gets to be a funny thing. I too love to gossip – and I don’t. Oh, conflicted emotions. They’re so complex.

On many levels gossip is entertaining and leveling and in a funny way connecting – and on another it is debasing, dehumanizing, and sometimes depraved… in my opinion. I once heard Michael Stipe being interviewed (I’m paraphrasing because my memory is a perimenopausal morass) and he said something like: nobody’s got a RIGHT to know what I do with my penis, UNLESS they’re sitting in my lap.

Kudos to Mr. Stipe.

Thoughts?