The Firecracker at Redbook

     Thanksgiving is around the corner and I am hosting for the first time in many, many years. (Thank you most excellent hostesses of Thanksgivings Past, sisters Betsy and Jodi, and ex-neighbor Lindsay!) On the menu is the Bird, brined of course, braised carrots, corn from a field nearby that I took off the cob and froze a month or more ago, sinful Thanksgiving mashed potatoes and pies from Terhune Orchards in nearby Princeton.

      But what is really on the menu is my family. And Stacy Morrison, the editor of Redbook who I

 interviewed last week for What I Know Now About Success, reminded me of that in her recent post on Something About Stacy. My father and my step-mother will be trekking up from South Carolina. My sister and her family will be coming with their two kids. And my two kids will be home from college. What I have to keep remembering is that it’s really NOT about the food. Get out of the kitchen, Ellyn, and spend those quick hours being with them, not performing culinary feats. The moments I get to be in the same room with these dear folks are rare and getting rarer now that my kids are off at school.

     Stacy is a huge firecracker. When I walked into her office in the amazing diamond-flexing Hearst building with the gorgeous view, she began talking quickly, comfortably, amiably. And the observer in me thought: “Ah, here’s a woman who takes charge.” Well, I had that right, and wrong. She does take charge. And she knows, better than almost anyone I’ve interviewed, what her purpose is. But, as she explains it, talking is like a stream of consciousness total immersion in Stacyness. Growing up, her nickname was The Mouth.

      What comes out? That’s the interesting part. She doesn’t spin. She drops you into the processing of her own life. Not a recitation of her activities and challenges, but how she’s applying her brain to those things and where that brain has taken her—so far. Personal truths can be hard to disentangle from the official version of what your life is supposed to be like, but Stacy seems to be rigorous in separating the two.