HOT FLASH FROM BARCELONA: Penelope Takes One Home
We're in Barcelona for a short visit before returning home, and the city is quite a contrast to neat and tidy Paris. Street sweepers here brush light trash off the sidewalks into little plastic paniers in the evening, but everything else, at least down by the waterfront where we are, sports graffiti and layers of grime, no doubt from the heavy car exhaust that permeates the air. And yet it's a lively, happy place to be, and the weather is fabulous. Now in late February, it's sunny and close to 60 degrees, and while locals bundle up in winter coats, my father and I enjoy light sweaters as we walk past swaying palm trees and flowering cacti. It's a nice way to prepare for the six inches of snow awaiting us on the other side of the ocean.

The Spanish newspapers today are filled with coverage of Penelope Cruz's win at Sunday's Oscars. Full page articles in all the rags show her in her vintage Pierre Balmain evening gown, kissing the statuette, and the news reports on television replay parts of her acceptance speech over and over. (It seems she did not faint after all.) Spain is proud.

Photo: Me calling home from the phone booth just outside our hotel in Barcelona. The city seems to have a phone booth on every block, and I love this photo of me looking like an Almodovar character who's hopped off her Vespa to make one of many calls to a crazy character who is, no doubt, ever elusive.