Alicia Silverstone has an interview with People Magazine in which she describes her life at home as a single working mom in isolation with her son Bear, 8. Some of what she said rang true to me, particularly that she is busier now than ever. I think I’m just trying to work my way out of this, but I could relate. She said she works, does some stuff with her son and the day is over before she knows it. I got the impression that her days also feel the same to her, but maybe I’m projecting. Alicia is promoting three projects: the Valley Girl musical, (that looks crazy, why did they do that?), a VOD movie called Bad Therapy, with Rob Corddry, and The Babysitters Club on Netflix. Here’s what she told People.
“I’m so grateful that me and my family are healthy,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “But the sort of sweet part is you do get to slow down a little bit. This morning, Bear woke up and asked if we could make pancakes, and the answer was ‘Actually, yes, we don’t have to run to school so we can make pancakes!’” She adds, “Then we take care of the dogs, I get some work done and we have lunch and take the dogs on a walk again, maybe do some yoga or kids’ exercise, then he helps me make dinner, and there’s reading, and the day is gone!”
“Suddenly everything is coming at once,” she says, noting the she is having a bit of screen resurgence these past few years, after spending a lot of time gaining critical acclaim doing theater in LA at the Geffen Theater and on Broadway. (“I love, love doing theater.”)
“My series American Woman, and the Yorgos Lanthimos film [The Killing of a Sacred Deer] I did kept me busy for a little while,” she says. She also had Book Club and the most recent Diary of a Wimpy Kid film, plus the creepy horror movie The Lodge, on top of all the work she does on the side. She says she’s now running out of time during the days for much else.
“There’s not enough time in the day for anything, I don’t understand it!” she says with a laugh. “I have two more books in me I need to get out [the longtime vegan authored The Kind Diet in 2009], and I love to share how I feed my son on Instagram in hopes it can help other moms feed their kids healthy and well. And then I write blogs for my website, the kindlife.com.”
As for cooking and eating clean in a time like this, she says she’s more mindful than ever of what she puts in her body.
“The fact that there isn’t school and birthday parties, and that I’m not going out to dinner is making us a little more healthy and cleaner anyway,” she says. “There’s less that we have to balance out. But I’m really mindful that I want to keep our immune systems really strong so that we’re able to be resilient and fend off any infections and take control of our health as best we can. I’m cooking things like miso soups, kenpira stew…recipes that are really nourishing and healing.”
The best part of it is her son loves to cook with her as much as she does.
“He’s a little chef, my Bear,” she says. “We love to cook together, but one day he turned around and just started cooking on his own. I couldn’t believe it. He makes the most delicious meals!”
That’s a good problem to have, to be too busy. I was nodding along to that until she got braggy about how well she was eating and how her kid is cooking delicious food. Of course I’m cooking more and my son is also cooking and learning how to cook and bake, but we both have a lot of cooking fails. We’re also eating more snacks and desserts. I’ve seen Top Chef Jr. but I still have a hard time imagining an eight-year-old making delicious meals on their own. I guess some kids just take to it though. Plus I was never much of a cook and didn’t model that at home. I’m decent, but I almost always follow a recipe. Alicia is vegan and very conscious of what she eats, so she’s cooking whole foods every day. Did you see that video she made showing off her kitchen? She’s done a couple of kitchen videos actually. She doesn’t use paper towels, she’s reuses the plastic vegetable bags from the store, and she stores everything in glass jars. That’s kind of admirable actually.
In a video she posted on Instagram earlier this month, Alicia asked Bear what he would eat if he could have anything he wanted. He said Whole Foods pizza, a plate of kale and then vegan ice cream. He said he wants to feel good and that burgers, regular ice cream and McDonalds would make him feel bad and lazy. He also said he could make vegan pizza taste just like regular pizza. That must take a while.
Christian Siriano is a wonderful person.
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Glad she is doing theater. Saw her years ago in The Graduate with Kathleen Turner and Jason Biggs and she held her own on stage with the formidable Turner.
I’m still in love with her looks, always!
I am jealous of her feeling like days fly by. I have a 2 and 5 year old, the hours are many and the days can really drag on. I wish they flew by a bit more. We keep busy, play, cook, read, learn, have lots of active time, take walks, clean, play some more, but it’s a long day to fill for two busy little ones. I’m thankful to be home and safe and healthy, but often quite bored and intellectually kind of numb.
Alicia Silverstone is an anti-Vaxxer so yeah she is really struggling.
As a vegan who is very respectful of science, I am appalled to see that vegans often veer into nutcase territory. It’s so annoying. My SIL (who is vegan and whom I love dearly) tried to sell me the idea that olive oil is very bad for you based on a book by some kind of doctor called “How Not to Die”. How is this better than goopisms? How not to freaking die?! If only the title is misleading… And of course it’s the sad tale of a relative who was about to die of coronary disease and started off a plant-based diet bladiblahhh.
How would he know how regular pizza would taste? Ijs…hes a born vegan, has he ever eaten anything outside of vegan to make comparisons? My guess is no, mom just tells him it tastes just as good. But yeah, cool
Gah grammar police here: “My family and I are healthy” not “me and my family”. But anyway… Glad she is having a career resurgence, and doing well.
The healthy eating sounds like a bit of an obsession now, and one that she has passed on to her kid.
I do the same thing in kitchen – slav household education, and I had a conversation with my flatmate the other day about people being bored. I’m lucky to still be working as a writer (who knew?) but some of his friends have told him they were bored. And we were just discussing how we don’t feel we have enough time to do what we had planned. I get up, exercise, work, do my chores and sometimes I feel like I didn’t have enough time to finish everything. But I’m used to working from home so it hasn’t changed that much, still, I can’t grasp people who are bored. Do something you always wanted to. Maybe staying in just eats up ones energy to do that. I think it’s the worst for people living alone. You have to focus on yourself properly and that takes some time.
I think having home-based work like you helps a lot. I’m in the same position and can’t do everything I’d planned because although my gigs outside as a curator are cancelled, my writing and interviews are on full mode, especially now.
So I get how people can get bored. Not everyone loves cooking and homely tasks.
oh you have the best job! i always love working with curators – best conversations ever. glad you’re busy 🙂 and now is such a weird time but a lot of artists are finding it inspirational. hope you get something good come out of this.
Thank you @lemonylips! I hate to say this but lockdown helped me finish my thesis. It’s horrendous: my kids love being at home and I have more time to write and prepare my projects. But I would switch in a second for things to go back to the way they were before and perhaps learn a lesson from this time.
I hope you are also doing good!
I agree that working from home, for many folks, is meaning more work. I teach and my workload is 2x-3x what it was before with having to transition everything into remote format. It takes me 7-8 hours to create one short lecture video for one class. There is so much more to take care of. I’m not complaining; I’m happy to have a job that, for now, is paying (not close to compensation for the actual hours but it’s a paycheck as long as the class is in session). But when I hear folks talking about being bored, it sound strange. I worked 17-hour days last week and have been getting up at 4:30/5:00/6:00 a.m. to start working (and to get work done before the baby starts its screaming all day next door).
She’s busy which is nice. She was one of my faves in the 90s. Started losing her trail since Miss Match! But I was glad when I saw her in The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Other than that, I do agree with her in the sense that time passes differently when quarantined. Some days seem to last forever, others are just gone by quickly.
I truly have a hard time relating to people who are bored right now, though I feel for them. I’ve worked from home for several years, but I feel like when the work day is over, there’s barely enough time to make dinner and do some chores before I’m ready to relax in front of the TV for a bit before bed (8 p.m. is my cutoff time for chores). I live alone and there’s still not much time! On weekends I’ve been doing bigger house projects, reading, watching movies, listening to podcasts while I clean, etc. I feel so lucky to have plenty of entertainment when I want to relax. I find myself sad when the weekend is over now more than ever just because I’ve truly enjoyed being so productive and having extra time to indulge in my interests. I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to running errands for hours on the weekend – I enjoy being home too much!
On my end, a lot of the people I know who are bored are the ones who have lost their jobs and can’t find anything else til our country opens up a bit more (NZ, we’re on pretty strict lockdown)
Unpopular opinion: Children often say things to please parents. I not negating that non vegan food could make a vegan lethargic, I am just saying that her son’s statement could say more about their relationship that his real inclinations to food.