For what seems like years, I have been saying that I want a blog so that I can do a tribute to the costumes and set design of Crossing Delancey (1988, Joan Micklin Silver). So here, at last, it is. Crossing Delancey was notable in my childhood because it was one of the few movies that my parents went to see without me in the theater. It was also one of the few movies that they had a VHS copy of in my synagogue library (along with the other seminal Amy Irving masterpiece, Yentl). I used to watch it over and over again and imagine that, one day, I would live in New York and my life would be exactly like that of the character Isabelle (played by Amy Irving). This notion was solidified when I visited New York for the first time in the early 1990s, and it looked to me just like it did in Crossing Delancey: a sea of beautifully frizzy hair, shoulder pads, and cluttered bookstores (I ran into the same frizzy haired woman, and her tweedy husband, two nights in a row: once outside The Cinema Village, and once at the off-Broadway play How I Learned to Drive starring Molly Ringwald. On some level I based many of my future fantasies on being that couple, and thought about them repeatedly over the years. I imagined that they had pots hanging from the ceiling in their kitchen).
