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Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘A Crazy Sign': How Meadowlands Pace Winner Charlie May Inspired A Family
'A Crazy Sign': How Meadowlands Pace Winner Charlie May Inspired A Family originally appeared on Paulick Report. This is a story about a boy and a girl who loved a racehorse so much that he inspired them to combine a little old-fashioned stubbornness with a little divine intervention for the greatest gift of and Dean May are a married pair of 30-year-olds who love going to The Meadowlands. They aren't regulars, but the one date etched in stone on their calendar every year is Meadowlands Pace Night, a card they've attended for about a decade now. 'Since my brother Kevin turned 18 and was able to start betting on the races, it's been a tradition to go the track on Pace Night,' said Dean. 'My birthday is July 13 and my dad's birthday is July 12, so it's a birthday tradition to go to The Meadowlands whenever the Meadowlands Pace is.'The night of the 2021 Pace, a name in the program caught the May family's eye: Charlie May, who was in that night's featured event.'We bet on him in 2021,' said Amy. 'What's crazy is, we looked at the program and said we love that name, and so we got a picture [of the program] in the event we ever had a daughter. We have always loved the name Charlie for a girl and it was so cool to see the name with our last name. We bet on that race and lost [after Charlie May was disqualified]. That was a pivotal moment in our story. To see that he had actually been the winner [and then lost], it was a crazy sign to just show how intertwined we are with him. We didn't find out until recently that he was later declared the winner.' Fast forward to March of 2023, and the young engaged couple are getting close to their wedding day when they got some terrible news.'A month before we got married, I was told I couldn't ever have children,' said Amy. 'I'm somebody that doesn't take 'no' for an answer very easily. I was young and healthy and we did a bunch of genetic testing to see what was wrong and there was no rhyme or reason, so I just needed to try everything, get a few opinions. Our first doctor said I couldn't ever get pregnant, but I just kept being that squeaky wheel until somebody wanted to listen to me, and we found a doctor able to help us get pregnant, which was a miracle.''After we got married, we were at my parents' house and coordinated our honeymoon around Charlie May's race [the 2023 William Haughton Memorial] on Pace Night,' said Dean. 'We left for our honeymoon the day after.''When the race started, it was like a moment of defeat, it didn't look good. We hadn't really started the process of fertility yet with the new doctor, so it was just kind of like a bad case of icing on the cake. Oh, we lose again.' But, then, driver Dave Miller skillfully guided Charlie May to a ground-saving trip and rallied to grab the win in 1:47.1 at odds of 30-1.'When Charlie May came around and won, the feeling is something I will never forget,' said Amy. 'It was a great moment. We didn't tell anybody the love we had for the name Charlie and how we felt connected to the horse, but Dean's family was there, and they all decided to bet on it, too. It was truly an experience I will never forget. We were all jumping up and down. It was everything that we needed to go on our honeymoon. It truly felt like it was a sign from God. A sign from up above.'It was like, it's OK, keep pushing, yes, you've been in last place, and, yes, you've been put down. But you are meant to be parents, your baby is meant to be out there. It's all going to work out.' About six months after getting married, the Mays were pregnant. Then, on June 19, 2024, Charlie May, the little girl, was born. 'Charlie' is the name on her birth certificate. It's the way it had to be for Amy and May's road from disqualified in the Meadowlands Pace to being named the actual winner sometime later after getting the DQ overturned was the first part of this perfect parlay. His win in the Haughton as a long shot when it appeared early-on he had no chance made things complete. The horse Charlie May served as inspiration to the parents of little girl Charlie May. The May family will be at the mile oval on the night of July 12, when the $700,000 (est.) Meadowlands Pace tops a star-studded card. It's unclear if their favorite horse will be racing that night, but are optimistic their little girl and the horse she's named for will at some point come face-to-face.'We've been in touch with [Charlie May's] owner, Don Tiger,' said Dean. 'And, he promised us, one way or the other, that the picture of the two Charlie Mays will happen.' 'It will complete the whole story,' said Amy. 'After talking with Don, it truly showed there is a reason why we are connected to this horse. There are just so many similarities with both of our stories, and I want our Charlie to know how special she is, too, and I want a picture of her with the horse that she can see when she grows up. Don and his wife had some of the same issues Dean and I had as well.'The Pace is something special to our family. The Meadowlands, it's truly a place where people can get together and have a good time. We have a ton of friends and family who come out for the Pace. We have a good time. It's special to be together. It means a lot.' This story was originally reported by Paulick Report on Jun 27, 2025, where it first appeared.
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lainey Wilson reveals her choice of funeral song
Lainey Wilson wants the same funeral song as her grandparents. The 33-year-old singer has revealed that when her time comes, she wants mourners to listen to an "old hymn called Beulah Land" because it has become something of a family tradition. Asked to name the song she would like played at her funeral, she told The Observer: "An old hymn called Beulah Land that both my grandpa and my grandma had when they passed away, because they both said they wanted it played at their funeral." Meanwhile, the Heart Like A Truck hitmaker started her career by impersonating Hannah Montana - who was the fictional pop star played by Miley Cyrus in the late 2000s in the Disney Channel sitcom of the same name - but admitted that these days, she can no longer bear to listen to the theme song from the hit series. She said: "The song I can no longer listen to [is] The Best of Both Worlds by Hannah Montana, because I used to be a Hannah Montana impersonator. It's not because I don't love the song any more, it's just that I sang it so many times, I'm never going to crank it back up." Lainey previously admitted that she is a huge fan of Miley - who since her days as Hannah Montana has gone on to an incredibly succesful solo career in her own right and recently released her ninth studio album Something Beautiful - and remembered that impersonating the wig-wearing singer became a "job" for her in her teenage years. She told E! News: "I love Miley Cyrus, I used to impersonate Hannah Montana when I was little. I did that for like five years. That was my middle school, high school job. "Every weekend I would do birthday parties, fairs, festivals, St. Jude, all of it. I would open up as Lainey Wilson for Hannah Montana."
The Guardian
05-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘Do you have a family?': midlife with no kids, ageing parents
A few years ago, my mom's brother in South Korea announced that he would be getting rid of their parents' graves. My grandparents had been buried separately, and this uncle and his wife were their keepers. They made several annual visits to the burial mounds (endless gridlock) and prepared Buddhist ceremonies at home (endless cooking and cleaning). Now that they were in their mid-60s and their grown children were unlikely to carry on any of these rituals, they wanted out. They set a date to exhume my grandparents' bodies, cremate their remains and say goodbye again. My mom wasn't happy about this, but she had no real say. She'd surrendered her rights when she moved to the US. We started early in the morning, at my grandmother's burial mound. My mom, dad, brother and I, plus my uncle and his wife, other uncle, surviving aunt and cousins walked up a terraced hillside in a lush private cemetery. It was cool and sunny. We bowed at the gravestone and made offerings of fruit, dried fish and alcohol. Three diggers did their work, first by machine, then by hand, as they got closer to the constellation of bones. The coffin had long since decomposed. The workers spoke of the dead in a formal, reverential way, as though my grandmother had passed the day before, not a half century ago. It was comforting, given the absolute weirdness of the event. We all stood around awkwardly, staring into the dirt. We were three generations: dead, old and middle-aged. The diggers combed the soil with gentle strokes, like archaeologists on reality TV, pulling up a sort of intact skull, suggestions of femur, crumbly archaeological bits wrapped in the tatters of a shroud. My mom cried, but didn't sob. 'I never imagined doing something like this,' she said. The process was at once invasive and abstract. They placed every ivory shard on to a blanket, then into a small wooden box. I had never seen real-life human bones. It was more depressing at my grandfather's mound, set deep in a public cemetery, wild with weeds and thorns, an hour away. The diggers there were brusque. They tossed bone fragments into the box, making an unnerving plonk. I wanted to remind them that someone once wore those bones. We loaded the small boxes into a hired hearse – my uncle had made all the right arrangements – and drove in a caravan to a busy crematorium outside Seoul. The facility was half automated and totally impersonal. We crowded around a window to watch my grandparents' remains go into a stainless steel firepit. Then we were bumped to the waiting room – vinyl seats, plastic tables. We kept our coats on and ate rice cakes, waiting for our number to pop up on the digital display. I hate: 'Do you have a family?'; 'When are you going to start a family?' The asker means children, not ageing parents or a partner or spouse or chosen family or siblings or animals or or or. At my age, any reference to 'family' conjures images of school pickups and paediatric appointments. Am I misleading my listener if I use this term to mean anything else? My family is still the one I was born into: mother, father and brother, all of them alive and well – the ultimate luck. Many friends have already lost their parents or slipped into sandwich-generation duties, raising their kids while scrambling for elder care. Others of us have traded reproduction for something like filial piety. I can think of quite a few childless friends who have moved to be near a parent or had a parent move in with them. Midlife for them – and for me – is an open-faced sandwich. The defining event of my adulthood will not be birth or adoption, but the deaths of my parents, especially my mom. When I was a kid, Mom would say, in classically morbid Korean: 'I just hope I live long enough to see you through college.' Once my college years came and went, our expectations shifted, or at least her phrasing did. She now says things like: 'I've lived long enough.' Or: 'I mean, I'd like to live longer, but even if I died today, I couldn't complain.' Every once in a while, she adds: 'What if you have just one kid? It's not too late. I'll do all the work. I'll raise her for you.' There's a movement, or voguish tendency, in South Korea called 4B, which emerged online as part of a #MeToo-style feminist resurgence in 2016. It pushed a four-pronged refusal of marriage, reproduction, dating and sex. (The B is for 비 bhee, meaning un- or anti-.) When a rightwing prosecutor named Yoon Suk Yeol rallied men's-rights voters to win the nation's presidency in 2022, the feminist wave seemed decidedly over. But Trump's re-election two years later provoked an American interest in 4B. According to some viral TikToks and newspaper articles, American women were disavowing heterosexual habits. The dust of 4B in Korea swirled temporarily back to life. I was in Seoul with my parents when I noticed the Korean social media posts quoting US social media posts celebrating dated Korean social media posts. My editor asked me to write a short piece about 4B, which I started to outline at the dining table of our rental in the Itaewon neighbourhood, near the decommissioned US military base. I had arranged a home swap with a friend who is also Korean American and a writer; my age, unmarried, childless. After college, he had moved to Korea where his parents were living half of the time. Then his mom was diagnosed with cancer. He cooked and cared for her until she died. Her framed portrait and denim backpack were set up in a little shrine above his desk, next to animation books, Murakami novels and cartoon figurines. I glanced at her portrait as my mom explained 4B to my dad. He nodded in appreciation of the Korean wordplay but offered no comment. 'I'm 1.5B,' I said in Korean – no reproduction, meh on marriage. My mom laughed. When my parents and I started making regular trips to Korea, just before I turned 40, all my Bs became more complicated. We usually went in the fall, my mom and I, and sometimes my dad, thanks to their retirement and my rather unanswerable status as a writer. Previously we'd had neither the time nor the money to travel. Now they were 70ish, and I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could. I was growing obsessed with their statistical nearness to death. I was also preoccupied with my own midlife vanity: my face, my hairline, whatever eggs remain in my ovaries. The ascendance of 'K-beauty' made me especially self-conscious about my skin, as though I had some obligation, by dint of ethnicity, to maintain an even, dewy complexion. I developed an unflattering habit of using a 3x mirror to zoom in on the age spots, sun spots, emerging wrinkles, scarred-over zits, areas of droop and birthmarks that pocked my face and neck. On one trip to Korea, I paid dearly for a course of 'laser resurfacing'. It's a treatment that burns the ugly stuff off your epidermis and looks and smells like miniature fireworks exploding across your cheeks and forehead. My mom encouraged this indulgence. 'But you don't even wear makeup,' I said. 'Yeah, but you're different,' Mom said. 'You live in New York! You're always meeting people. You have to take care of your looks.' The spots cleared for a while. I slathered myself in sunscreen and wore a hat with a dangling cape that covered my neck and ears. I bought anti-UV gloves and big plastic sunglasses. I slunk out of hiking dates. There was only so much I could do. The pigmentation was apparently hormonal: a condition called melasma. I paid for a second laser treatment the following year, then a third in southern California. Then microneedling, which is as gory as it sounds, at a medical spa near my parents' house in Washington state. The American clinics tended to be overdecorated in velvety pinks. The employees wore a lot of makeup and went big with their features – cheeks, eyelashes, nails. Acne scars were blasted, lips and foreheads plumped, jowls yanked up. The women waiting next to me for their appointments looked expensive but not always good. If I continued down this path, I would have to be careful. After I turned 40 I spent many insomniac hours Googling the ages of random artists, celebrities and writers. I liked it when successful people were older than me, and took special note of childlessness. Oprah (older, childless); Alison Brie (slightly younger, childless); Amy Tan (older, childless, also obsessed with Asian families); Frida Kahlo (dead, childless). I sought out midlife movies (Private Life, Past Lives, The Forty-Year-Old Version, Peppermint Candy, everything Ozu). I listened to 여둘톡 Yeo dool talk (Two women talk together), a Korean chatcast by two fortysomething writers who live and work together in childless, platonic bliss. I avoided reading Sheila Heti's Motherhood until I heard that it doesn't end, as most such books do, in the inevitable act of reproduction. I was satisfied when it turned out to be more about anal sex than vaginal passage. I became fond of an essay by Rebecca Solnit (older, childless) titled The Mother of All Questions. It begins at a lecture she's giving on Virginia Woolf, which during the Q&A spirals into a discussion of why Woolf did not reproduce – 'a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses', Solnit writes. At another talk, a British man grills Solnit about her own choice to go without. 'Such questions seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51% of the human species who are as diverse in their wants and as mysterious in their desires as the other 49%,' Solnit observes, 'only Woman, who must marry, must breed, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator for the species.' What I like about Solnit's essay is that it's short, as if to say: 'This is both boring and none of your business.' Here are some of her answers, though, to this mother of all questions: 'The planet is unable to sustain more first-world people'; 'I really wanted to write books'; 'I am very good at birth control.' Mom had been a stubborn teenager on an unannounced backpacking trip through Korea when her father died, and a twentysomething immigrant in southern California when she lost her mother, the person closest to her in the world. Not having seen them in their final days stuck with her like a punishment – and cemented her distance from home. She stayed in the US, first reluctantly, then why not for ever? She worked at a factory that produced foam packaging (where she almost lost a finger), a Korean-owned mini-mart, a now defunct chain restaurant called Sambo's and a bank. She enlisted in the US army. She sent money and letters to her younger siblings, whom she still refers to as 'the kids' when telling stories in past tense. Mom got her master's degree in psychology at night. She made a career in elder care, first as a social worker, then as an inspector and bureaucrat, regulating old-age facilities. At Christmastime, she scheduled my brother and me to play carols on the piano at a local nursing home. It scared me to see the residents wheeled toward us and parked in a half circle around the piano. Some of them had bibs on and could not control their necks. I feared their dependency and boredom. Mom went around and greeted them individually. She treated them like full, fully present human beings. Now she is the same age as many of the residents her office oversees. 'If I get dementia,' she told me, 'you might have to put me in a nursing home. It's OK – when it gets bad, you don't know where you are.' My mom had once dreamed of studying Chinese and becoming a foreign service officer, fluent in three languages. In reality, she is fluent in two and speaks to my brother and me in both. When we were in high school, our parents sent us on an Asian birthright-style motherland trip. The programme housed us and dozens of other uneasy diasporic kids in a scruffy hotel that had been built for the Seoul Olympics in 1988. We ate Korean food and learned bits of the Korean alphabet, Hangul, and peninsular history. I guess the motherland trip worked, because I kept trying to find my way back. I took language classes in high school to improve my standard Korean-American Korean (small vocabulary, sloppy grammar), and applied for money to travel. In Seoul, during college, I studied nongak percussion and translated wall text for the National Museum. I hoped that the Korean I had spoken exclusively from birth to age three had somehow primed me for fluency. In my 20s and 30s, as my Korean got good, then really good, I met my mother anew. We could talk at length, in her best and native tongue, about art, politics, random stuff I now knew the nouns and verbs for. Hearing aid, anarchist, rezoning, surrealism. Like many dutiful immigrant kids, I later went to law school – a poor fit. My classmates seemed excited to master a new vocabulary of power that, for me, whipped up feelings of estrangement and irritation. I went home during a break, to inhale the piney Pacific north-west atmosphere and regroup in my parents' care. At lunch one day I told them that I wanted to quit. The law wasn't for me, I said, nor was the life it seemed to imply – a desk job, marriage, kids. I sounded grandiose and also weaselly. Just finish school, they said. My loans already surpassed a hundred thousand dollars and would be impossible to pay back if I didn't continue. I graduated and passed the bar and did good, decent work at a legal services agency in New York City. About five years in, I decided to try out a second career, and gave myself the same number of years to establish myself, or at least survive, as a writer. Mom was worried, but didn't object loudly. I think she was afraid of driving me away. (A Korean saying: 'There's nothing scarier than one's kids.') I mostly had very good luck in journalism. But in 2018, I was fired from a job in TV, and bet my savings on a reporting trip to Seoul. Trump had just thrown the Koreas into the news, so chances were I'd be able to sell a story or two. Mom came along. She joked that she would be my research assistant, then actually was, clipping newspaper articles and proofreading my emails. We rented a tiny studio apartment up a series of steep hills in the centre of the city. The shower drain smelled of sewage, and the bed drove plastic springs into our backs at night. It was early summer, hot and sticky. Mom wrote to a classmate from junior high school, someone she'd never mentioned before. The woman was a journalist and English-to-Korean translator. We arranged to meet at her rather fancy office. Mom wore a grey-green T-shirt dress made of waffle-weave cotton. She looked slim and lovely, younger than her 69 years in the classmate's presence. I had wondered if she would envy this vision of a life she might have had if she'd stayed in Korea. But the journalist talked incessantly, mostly about herself. Mom looked relieved when it was time to go. We continued travelling together, back to Korea and elsewhere. We went to Mexico City for Mom's 75th birthday. She had aced a Spanish class at a community college and was the holder of some kind of quadruple-diamond-league record on Duolingo for her intense, years-long study via Samsung smartphone. Maybe she would be fluent in three languages after all. The jacarandas were in bloom. We saw all the art that tourists see and ate all the things tourists eat. I filmed Mom squirming and saying 'No! I don't want it!' as I held a forkful of grasshopper tamale to her lips. We shared a bed and drank stovetop espresso and sauteed unfamiliar vegetables and walked for miles through the city, practising Spanish phrases. Mom knew the genders of things and had excellent textbook grammar. I had the advantage of romance-language instincts and a shamelessness in speaking with strangers. One day, I got sick and cocooned myself in bed. She brought me cold water and touched her diagnostic hand to my forehead and neck. I was supposed to be the young, vigorous one. I am trying to work on a book. The book is about my mom and Korean history or the Korean present. It is hard to manage the metabolism of the project: slow and unlimited in words, not fast and short like I am used to in news writing. 'Don't write about me. Write about Korea, about the issues,' Mom has told me multiple times. Dad: 'You seem to write about our family when you run out of topics.' I am embarrassed by memoir and simultaneously drawn to the form. I am always reading books by sons and daughters. Most of the books daughters write about their moms come out after the mom is dead. I am hoping for a different sequence; an alternate ending. I want to beat time, but feel superstitious about the drafting. Would writing about my mom cut short our trips together? Could it somehow accelerate her demise? The book, whatever it is, would have to be more than good. It would have to answer the question of what I was doing, what I was building, in lieu of a traditional family in middle age. It has to make up for my fatigue and bristly hair and age spots. It has to be as good as a husband and a child. In the spring of 2023, I went with my partner to Montreal, his former home. I'd arranged to visit a Chinese Canadian scratch DJ and multimedia artist named Eric San AKA Kid Koala, who's about my age. He lives and works in a converted print shop with his wife and collaborator, Corinne Merrell, and their daughters. San had just released a new album, Creatures of the Late Afternoon, an appropriately midlife title, I thought. Like his earlier work, the tracks mix hip-hop beats with robot voices, rock samples, and the zigzagging play of vinyl – all fingers and hands, no laptops. I asked about one song that stuck out for its romantic, Motown-y quality. It was a tribute to his parents, he said. He had come upon a trove of letters and reel-to-reel tapes they'd exchanged when his dad was studying in North America and his mom was still in Hong Kong. Their story inspired him to compose a transpacific ode, at once a jukebox love song and the balladic offering of a son. 'I wanted to see if I could design shows that would involve other generations, including my parents,' he told me. 'I wanted to work on stuff that could resonate with them.' Here was a model of what I was hoping to do. But I feared that I was too slow, too lazy, too clumsy with words to make something before my parents were gone. I went to see Kid Koala onstage. There were puppets, dancing and midlife jokes. The parents in the audience looked about my age. The day after my grandparents' remains were disinterred, my extended family went to a temple east of Seoul, where a family friend is the head monk. He led a liturgy of prayers and chest-throbbing drone songs. We followed along from rice-paper hymnals and took turns bowing before the Buddha. Afterward, we went out to the gravel parking lot, to say a final prayer and spread the ashes in a little forest. We carried the two boxes of remains and a giant metal basin of steamed white rice – sticky and cold. The monk instructed Mom and her siblings to pour the ashes into the rice and mix it all together, into glutinous clumps. Better for the birds to carry off, he said. My mom, her sister, and the brother who'd initiated the disinterment (the other uncle went off to smoke) squatted around the basin and sunk their gloved hands into the pulverulent white and grey. They assumed the exact posture of kimchi making. Mom couldn't do it. It was too weird, too visceral. The bones, the ash, the rice; food, bodies, birds. She let my uncle and the monk do the rest. I held her shoulders. 'All I could think,' she told me, 'was: 'This is my parents.'' I went home for a few days in January, to my parents' house, south of Seattle. Mom had recently secured a funeral plot for her and my dad in a local cemetery. She wanted me to know about their plans, so she'd sent me the approval notice – mystical email subject line: 'Fwd: Pre Need Letter' – which I'd ignored. I found it impossible to think about their deaths, to consider even the most bureaucratic details, without sobbing. 'I couldn't open the email,' I told her. 'Yeah, I know. I know that's why you didn't bring it up,' she said. En route from some mundane outing, she and Dad tricked me into a drive around the cemetery. 'It's on the way home,' Dad said. 'Let's just stop by. It's beautiful.' The grounds were enormous and immaculately landscaped, layered in fog and bereft of visitors. There were discrete sections, divided, as best I could tell, by type of remains (body/coffin, ashes/urn) and style of grave marker (tall, flat). There were hundreds of little American flags. 'When it's time, just go to the cemetery office, and they'll help you,' Dad said. 'Everything should be straightforward.' He had told me that he'd wanted to be cremated, but now he was wavering. Mom was, too. I wondered if it had to do with seeing her parents' bones. I lowered my car window to get some cold air and take pictures of the dark green expanse. More reference photos for the book project, I thought. Mom pointed out a pair of black-tailed deer at the edge of a meadow, stock-still, necks craned in the same direction. I was grateful for the change of subject. We waited to see if the deer would move, to confirm they weren't gaudy statues. We drove away and came back, and waited some more. Finally, one turned its head toward us. A longer version of this piece appeared in n+1 magazine Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Grandmother Left in Tears After Bride Makes Surprising Move at Rehearsal Dinner (Exclusive)
A 25-year-old bride surprised her family by wearing her mother's wedding dress to her rehearsal dinner Olivia Turi captured her grandmother's reaction to the dress, which went viral on TikTok Turi tells PEOPLE that it "was such a powerful moment for all of us"When one bride-to-be stepped out at her rehearsal dinner, she wasn't wearing just any dress, but a piece of family history. Choosing to surprise her grandmother, Olivia Turi donned a slightly altered version of her mother's original wedding gown, preserving its most delicate details. The emotional reveal in front of St. Vincent Ferrer Church in New York City left her grandmother stunned and deeply touched. 'My grandmother recognized it instantly,' Turi, 25, tells PEOPLE exclusively. 'She was completely blown away and hasn't stopped crying since. It was such a powerful moment for all of us.' Her grandmother stood in stunned silence on the church steps, momentarily overcome with emotion. As she took in her granddaughter's beauty, tears filled her eyes, moved by the sight of the beloved dress that held decades of cherished memories. Turi's mother got married in July 1996, at Russo's on the Bay in Queens, N.Y. Nearly 30 years later, her dress was brought back to life after a thoughtful reconstruction by Lauren Holovka at Le Laurier Bridal. Rather than hemming the dress, Holovka designed a structured bustle that maintained its original silhouette while giving it some flair. The transformation left both Turi's grandmother and mother in awe. '[Our mother] was emotional in all the best ways,' Turi's younger sister, Gabrielle Martinelli, reveals. 'It had always been her dream that one of us would wear her gown, so seeing Olivia in it brought everything full circle.' The New Jersey native plans to carry the tradition forward, passing it down to Martinelli and, eventually, down to her future children. 'It's officially a generational heirloom now,' Martinelli says. Turi tied the knot on May 17, 2025, at The Pierre, A Taj Hotel in N.Y.C. Although she wore two different dresses on her wedding day, she was grateful to have had the opportunity to incorporate her mother's dress into her special moments. Wearing the cherished family gown, even briefly, created a powerful memory across three generations. Read the original article on People
New York Times
23-05-2025
- New York Times
The Summer's Best Beach Reads
The first time my husband joined my family for a beach vacation, he brought eggplant parmigiana and an anthropologist's curiosity about the Jersey Shore. I don't know what he was expecting — boardwalks? a brush with Bruce Springsteen? — but, after a day or two, he asked: 'So we're just going to read? The whole time?' We were. My family rented a house on Long Beach Island for a week each summer and spent every waking moment with our noses buried in books. My sister and I had a love-hate relationship with this itinerary, but the instant we exited the Parkway and sand glinted from the shoulder of Route 72, we fell in line with tradition. Our dad staked out a spot on the deck, where he plowed through mysteries and biographies for eight hours a day. My sister and I read on the beach with our mom, barely speaking, breaking only for lunch, which was silent except for the sound of pages turning. Luckily my husband is a reader too (although he did rent a Jet Ski one afternoon, just to be a rebel). In the years since that first trip, we've put our own twist on beach vacations, from Maine to South Carolina to Florida, with detours to a lake in Vermont and a highway-adjacent Airbnb outside Santa Barbara, Calif. We've dabbled in activities: kayaking and biking, sun printing and shell decoupage, water slides and paddle ball. Our Scrabble set has seen its share of picnic tables; our kids know their way around an arcade. But we always return to Long Beach Island, and we always arrive with towers of books. We've determined that the best time for beach reading is late afternoon, after the lifeguards and families with Bluetooth speakers have gone home, preferably at low tide when the shoreline is as deep as it is wide. Our optimal spot is dune-adjacent — close enough that you can hear the wind in the sea grass, but far enough away that you're not interfering with frat bros playing Spikeball. If it's chilly, bring a sweatshirt. If it's sweltering, bury your feet in the sand. If you have Bugles or Fritos, they pair well with smart, fun novels like these. I want a book I can hand to anyone, then discuss What Kind of Paradise Like bottles of sunscreen, the best beach reads are shareable. Pass this one-size-fits-most gem among fellow vacationers and, odds are, everyone under your Cool Cabana will find something to appreciate. In Brown's sixth novel, a father-daughter duo live off the grid in remotest Montana. Only something isn't quite right in their tightly controlled world: Jane, a perspicacious teenager, begins to realize that her father isn't who he says he is. When she makes a courageous — and dangerous — break for freedom, we find ourselves embedded in the early dot-com boom in San Francisco. If the Unabomber had a daughter, this could be her story. It might prompt a pop-up book club, and it will definitely make you think about our reliance on technology (especially if you're squinting at a screen). (Comes out June 3) I'd like a love story that's out of this world Atmosphere Imagine 'Apollo 13' crossed with Kristin Hannah's 'The Women' and you have the gist of Reid's latest, set in the 1980s space program in Houston. Here we encounter a handful of astronaut hopefuls, including Joan, who winds up in Mission Control, and Vanessa, who finds herself aboard the shuttle Navigator on the brink of a Challenger-level crisis. How their orbits converge is the crux of the book, but Reid packs in plenty of detail about spacesuits, thermal tiles and depressurization, not to mention sexism. 'There are no cowboys here,' she writes of NASA. Thankfully, that rule doesn't apply to her characters, who are bold, bighearted and more than willing to test boundaries — atmospheric and otherwise. (Comes out June 3) I'm in the mood for a dark comedy with plenty of heart Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar This is one of the most delightful debuts I've read in a long time, and kudos to Yee for delivering on the promise of her unconventional title. Its rogue semicolon sets the scene: Yee's tale takes place during a pause — between divorce and marriage, sickness and health, the unknown and the status quo. The titular visit to a bar turns out not to be a setup for a joke, but a husband's admission to his wife that he's leaving her for a woman named Maggie. Then our narrator — the soon-to-be-ex-wife — learns that she has cancer. She navigates both upheavals with dry humor, even finding it in her heart to write a 'Guide to My Husband: A User's Manual.' (Comes out July 22) Give me modern romance with a hint of historical fiction Great Big Beautiful Life Welcome to Little Crescent Island, Ga., where two journalists are vying to write the memoir of Margaret Ives, a reclusive heiress who calls to mind both Patty Hearst and Priscilla Presley. Alice Scott is hoping to shore up her fledgling career with this white whale of a story, while Hayden Anderson coasts into the competition fresh off a Pulitzer win. Of course the two fall for each other — this is Henry's world, we just read in it — while violating every basic rule of journalism. Surprisingly, Ives's back story proves more scintillating than the sunset trysts and cozy diner meals. 'Queen of the beach read' is an oft-bandied term, but let the record state: Henry wears the crown. Take me home again, and make it complicated The Other Wife 'I knew what it was like to become someone who cared, perhaps too much, about the lost twist-tie on the bag of sourdough,' Zuzu announces in the opening pages of 'The Other Wife.' From there, Thomas-Kennedy lets us in on a world of dissatisfaction, the kind that's hard to swim against because the current is so gentle. Zuzu is semi-happily married to Agnes, but preoccupied with her college friend Cash. They share an easy banter that's elusive in Zuzu's adult life, where she's mired in the minutiae of her son's routine and haunted by decisions unmade or regretted. When Zuzu suddenly gets called back to her hometown, she finally has a chance to take stock of what she left behind. Bonus points for text conversations and bite-size chapters — despite the weighty subject matter, this one is easy to dip in and out of between naps, chats and bodysurfing. (Comes out July 15) Give me a beach read with a dash of mystery Mansion Beach If you love Elin Hilderbrand and 'The Great Gatsby,' Moore's frothy confection of a novel, set on Block Island, is a satisfying treat. The outsider here is Nicola Carr (get it? Nick Carraway?), who trades a failed relationship and a miserable job for a borrowed cottage and an internship at a local maritime institute. Her stab at equilibrium is quickly thwarted by a love triangle involving her cousin's wife (whose family is her real estate benefactor) and the party-throwing fashion entrepreneur next door. We learn about their shenanigans — which culminate in a death — in part from a chorus of podcast guests. This might not be the freshest plot device, but what Moore sacrifices in originality she makes up for with smocked maxi dresses and snarky asides. (Comes out May 27) How about a stylish joy ride that celebrates every beach body? Sunny Side Up There's a lot going on in Sturino's debut: A 35-year-old P.R. dynamo, Sunny Greene, needs a plus-one for her brother's wedding. She's having a fling with her mail carrier. She's training a new assistant. She's traveling with new friends (they're 'ride-or-die,' as friends tend to be in beach reads) and rebooting a newsletter that once embarrassed her ex-husband (a total dud with a podcast of his own, The Zack Attack). What gripped me about the novel had little to do with all of the above (entertaining as it is) and everything to do with Sunny's determination to create an inclusive luxury swimwear line. In real life, Sturino is a body acceptance advocate. In fiction, she takes us along for a clever and stylish ride, from fabric swatches to boardroom presentation to creation of a logo and beyond. (Comes out June 24) I need a reminder that old friends are the best ones My Friends Backman had me at his dedication: 'To anyone who is young and wants to create something. Do it.' In that spirit, he unfurls a sweeping saga about young people, art and the way creativity connects friends and strangers across generations. The specifics are difficult to summarize: Three young people appear in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Decades later, another young person sets out to understand the provenance of the painting and learns more than she bargained for. If you've read 'A Man Called Ove,' you know Backman can be depended on to show how small the world is, and how fragile. He does it again here, this time with 'Stand By Me' vibes. Take me on a getaway gone wrong Murder Takes a Vacation If you're a fan of Lippman's, you know Tess Monaghan, the private investigator who cracks cases in Baltimore. Here we get to know Muriel Blossom, Tess's retired colleague, who picks up an $8.75 million winning lottery ticket in a Circle K parking lot and uses it to get out of Charm City. Her destination: the M.S. Solitaire, a cruise ship bound for French ports. But Mrs. Blossom's carefully laid plans are disrupted when she crosses paths with two men — one silver-tongued and suspicious; and one who bewitches her, then dies. What follows is a rollicking adventure of the highest order, with cameos from Tess and a refreshing spotlight on a woman who is, as my mother would say, no spring chicken. (Comes out June 17) I'd like a tense family drama A Family Matter Some prefer not to mix sand with serious subjects; I'm not among them. Lynch's debut burns like a sparkler, quick and mesmerizing. The story unfolds from two sides of a divorce. We have a wife's perspective from the early 1980s, when she's a young mother in love with another woman; then, four decades later, we get her ex-husband's view as he's receiving a cancer diagnosis. In the meantime, their only child believes her mother is dead until she finds evidence to the contrary. Now a young mother herself, she must piece together the puzzle of her own past. In an author's note, Lynch explains how she consulted old court cases and legal documents pertaining to lesbian mothers forced to forfeit custody of their children. 'Their words are included here as a reminder of how far away the recent past is,' she writes. 'And how close.' (Comes out June 3)
