do we talk [all] about Eve enough?
Welcome. You are a PAID subscriber and you are wildly appreciated. This week’s non-newsletter work has me mulling West Tennessee’s peach orchards, blue catfish, and historically segregated maternity wards. Has me trimming synopses from lush and full to catchy and zippy. Right now, during focused work-time, I am listening solely to instrumentals (see below ⬇️) and I am solely making deadlines. Please send me Blue Bottle (hot NOLA with a splash of oat), and plate of mushroom taquitos fried hard with mounds of pico de gallo. Or just send me soft-boiled eggs with Tajin, and gallons of iced green tea so my physician hands me gold stars. And also, y’all will have to bear with me as I try different banners/logos every week. It’s fun.
November 10 is Eve’s birthday.
Eve Jihan Jeffers Cooper, even with all the hits, and the acting chops (Barber Shop 2, The Woodsman, the UPN series, Eve), somehow is not as regularly mentioned as other rappers who have fewer hits and frankly are less charismatic than she. Eve has been married to multimillionaire Maximillon Cooper since 2014, and they welcomed their son Wilde in 2022. She’s also a Grammy-winning, No.-1-album-making, international woman of mystery. She brings me joy.
Hip hop and Hollywood can seem like a watercolor background for her three-dimensional life in England, Ras Al Khaimah, Ibiza and more. Eve lives like she learned early that what you think is your destiny might only be a lap on your journey.” And that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it often, or for a living.
My 2004 talk with Eve must have been a phoner. I say this because — correct me if I’m wrong — I see no mention in the piece of actually seeing Eve in person. I see no description of place in the piece. Which is unlike me. And my editor would have called me on it.
I feel like my Eve editor was Ben Dickinson, who was assigning me lots of work back then. Among other things, in the mid-aughts, Ben gave me book reviews, and a Mos Def profile. Mos (and his driver, in a tricked-out minivan) picked me up from a diner near NYC’s The New School where I was just out of class (it was my MFA era). We went to the velvety restaurant at the Soho House in NYC’s Meatpacking District — this was before there was a Dumbo House or a Ludlow House. And this is why I think my Eve conversation was a phoner. Because I recall so clearly the one-on-oneness of the Mos Def meeting.
The below scans are from my personal archives: Eve in Elle, 2004. The blue silk Galliano for Dior in the third image is the one that does it for me. She rocks couture like it’s a fresh frock we found at Zara.
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