Aimee is the famous international love reporter who has appeared in the Reader calendar’s fabulous “Search for Nightlife” column interviewing lovers at Chicago hideaways like the AA Meat Market. As she is an expert on love, I wanted to ask her opinions of the year’s romantic trends. She travels so often, she is impossible to reach! For months I left messages everywhere!–at her condominium in Hong Kong, at her suite at the Cipriani in Venice, at her equestrian Edwardian waterfront in the Hamptons. In a stroke of good fortune I walked into the Club Lucky Supper Club and Cocktail Lounge on Wabansia Street last Monday night and there she was at her private table, head to toe in YSL eating artichoke hearts with a sloe-eyed man in a gray Borsalino. She looked up, her heart-shaped pupils staring hard, and said, “The capellini has put me in a good mood. Come tomorrow for lunch and I’ll tell you everything.”
Aimee: Merci beaucoup! I couldn’t decide if I should wear it with my Gaultier skating skirt or my Lagerfeld kilt but then I just threw on this puffy Scaasi evening dress. I’ve been trying on clothes all day, my legs are chapped. As always, I am wearing the earrings of Madame De . . . and my new Manolo Blahnik gold kid pumps.
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TS: I hear you work very hard on your love research. I see on your coffee table you have Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon.
TS: You are everywhere, Aimee!
Aimee: Of course! I get so many requests for interviews on so many subjects. Well, love trends–obviously flirting in the desert stands out in my mind what with all the men and women who fought side by side in the gulf war. There’s nothing like romance in the sand. Did you ever see Marlene Dietrich in The Garden of Allah pounding through the drifts on a camel carrying a train case and wearing chiffon? Plus romance in wartime is always so heightened. Peter Arnett said he was more worried about his relationship with his CNN intern than about a bomb falling on him. I remember my days in the French resistance–all that rushing for one another in trench coats while the planes were flying overhead and it was raining and we were nervous about being discovered in our hiding places with only red wine and Camembert for nourishment. At one point I had to disguise myself as a milkmaid . . .
TS: I heard you quoted saying that men are getting younger.
Aimee: Just the other day I was interviewing a young woman at the Avalon who shared with me this moment. She was with her new boyfriend Jeb, who does small fix-it jobs. They were in his trailer sharing a box of Moon Pies and listening to Guns ‘N Roses. They were sitting on the green shag nylon carpet and she was holding the silver balloon he had bought her that afternoon and he was wearing a yellow polyester shirt and he had his arm hanging down around her neck resting his body on her shoulder. He had just eaten swordfish. She looked up and knew it would never get better than this.
