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(and a special thank you to all of you who were so kind in your notes of late. your know who you are.)

Does anyone know the name of the red-billed bird?  He (?) surprised me.

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June 29, 2010. 

I know I should have big things to say, to validate my choice of blog photo.  This is it, though.  This is all.  Big clouds.  Big life.  As it is.  As it will be.

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Yesterday, in preparation for the re-launch of this very blog (which will be happening soon), I did something I almost never do—return to books once written.  I was in search of a few words about each, and in going back, all the way back, over 12 books and five genres, I stumbled across the generosity of authors like Buzz Bissinger, Jayne Anne Phillips, Rosellen Brown, Ken Kalfus, Susan Straight, Kate Moses, Katrina Kenison, Sy Montgomery, and Jennie Nash; I was reminded of the kindness and illuminating intelligence of reviewers whom I've never met and likely never will. 

Whenever I could, wherever I could, I have sought to reach out, to say thank you.  But yesterday, I realized, I haven't said thank you enough to those who have tried to understand.  What I see.  Why I write.  How I hear.  What I want.  There's an I in each of those fragments.  That selfish, big, bolded I.  I stood where I stood, and others circled near.  You can't say thank you enough.

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These past many weeks long, my friends have written from far-off, quiet places—cabins near the shore, cabanas high on the beach, the slip of land beside the lake, a grandfather's lodge.  They've been reading and writing, staked out on a chair, cracking clamshells at night, throwing a lobster to the grill.  These are writers and readers, taking time away to do what they most love to do.

We haven't had that sort of summer here (though I have yearned for such a day or two).  Now it's August's end, and a single week remains before our son disappears for another university semester.  We have to go somewhere, we said to one another, and so we did what we tend to do when we have less than 24 hours within which to travel—take the 90-minute drive to Atlantic City.  We don't gamble.  We don't swim.  But we walk the boardwalk at night, have dinner, talk.  We're together, and that is what matters.

We leave before nine in the morning.  I take a beach walk before we do.  This was Atlantic City, just after dawn, today.

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A new HBO series, Boardwalk Empire, premiered this weekend. Worlds away from what we see on Jersey Shore, it has reignited interest in New Jersey history and culture. Bryant Simon (author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America and Professor of History at Temple University) has been interviewed for the accompanying HBO documentary, and here we ask him some questions about the “dreamlike” place that is AC.

You’ve described yourself as a native of South New Jersey. What drew you to writing the history of Atlantic City?

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Vineland, Philly was not the place that drew us; it was more Atlantic City. That was where we went for splurge meals, special occasions, amusement parks, parades, and shopping. In fact, that’s where I got my bar mitzvah suit! Years later, my family moved just outside of Atlantic City and I watched, while riding my bike in the morning on the Boardwalk, as gambling woke the place up and irrevocably transformed it. I was transfixed by the city, by people’s nostalgia for it, by its nervous energy, and its aching sadness and painful poverty in the midst of plenty. Really, it had everything I wanted to write about it – it was like a Springsteen song, a place that could be mean and cruel, but a place of romance and possible redemption. How could I resist?

Compared to places like Las Vegas or Coney Island in its heyday, how did/does Atlantic City epitomize the urban playground?

All of these places share something in common – they are each the tale of two cities. They are places built in the interests of visitors, not necessarily residents; they sell (or sold) fantasies – fantasies that put tourists as the center of the narrative and allowed them to slip their daily skin and imagine themselves not as they were, but as they wanted to be. That is what people paid for when they went these places – they paid for fantasies.

As you researched the book, what memorable anecdotes did you come across that really captured the heart and history of Atlantic City?

One of the first things I learned about Atlantic City stayed with me throughout the project. I remember looking at a postcard from the 1920s or so. In it, the benches on the Boardwalk were pointed away from the beach. I asked if this was a mistake. “No” an expert on the city told me, “That’s how it was.” That was my first lesson that Atlantic City was essentially a stage and the visitors were both actors and audience.

You’ve been interviewed for a documentary that’s set to run in conjunction with the HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. What do you make of the series’ take on Atlantic City, and what to your mind does it say about public perception of the city?

If the show is a success, it will no doubt draw tourists to town, looking for the romantic, if still violent, past the program surely mythologizes. Yet the real Atlantic City Boardwalk of today has little relationship to the past except its common geography. Most of the dreamlike hotels – buildings that looked like French chateaux and Moorish palaces – have been torn down. The amusement piers are long gone or covered up and turned into air-conditioned malls. The crowds of people dressed in their Sunday – really their sleek and elegant Saturday night best – have been replaced by people in t-shirts and flip flops. Except for the ocean and

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For one moment yesterday, it was all possible: The misted winter cold. The hazel-eyed warmth. The silence. The communion. Outside, down on the beach, four walked toward a storm.

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Well, because it's funny, and because it's my blog, and because if Paul Krugman can blog six times a day, maybe it's okay if I blog twice, but:

Some of you have asked about those shoes I bought in Atlantic City. The ones I danced around in after getting some nice publishing news.

It's this very pair, photographed against a black tango dress. Also bought yesterday. Also silky, and sleek.

Because, while it is true that I was the kickball queen when I was a kid, that my high school years were filled with guys who buddied up with me (and saved their flirting for others), that I wear lousy, ripped jeans when I'm out with my Sony digital, and that the running joke during a recent Friday night dance party was that the only way I'd get a man to dance with me is if somebody paid the poor fool for the favor (thanks to all who contributed to the dance-with-Beth fund), I do, every once and while, like to be a girl. A real one, with real shoes.

Like these.

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In a Woody Allen moment, I imagined walking out into the sea—down the spine of the pipe, over its buttresses, into the splash and foam. I'd mermaid for awhile, perhaps, and dream, and all that I'd been expected to do would be done (what would be the choice?) by someone conveniently not me (another one of the multitudes of Beth Kepharts?).

I'd reemerge eventually—salt in my skin, green in my hair, fewer responsibilities.

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In Atlantic City on Thursday afternoon we happened on an old Go Kart track—stripped to the bones, awaiting restoration. Only the hob-legged pirates stood while just beyond them surfers rode the crash-waves by the pier.

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