MY WEEKEND: Martha Plimpton
MARTHA Plimpton isn’t letting Presidents Day go by quietly. Monday at 7 p.m., the star of film, TV and theater (“Goonies,” “The Good Wife,” “A Delicate Balance”) will salute our commanders in chief with “All the Presidents Mann,” a slate of Aimee Mann songs at Joe’s Pub (PublicTheater.org). “A lot of her music is about human relationships and the ways people fool themselves, fall in love, get carried away,” says the daughter of Keith Carradine and Shelley Plimpton. “That reminds me of our relationships with our leaders.” Plimpton, an Upper West Sider for 42 of her 47 years, moved to Brooklyn in 2014. She tells ERICHEGEDÜS about her weekend.
One of my favorite things to do is to go to the nursery and buy plants for my garden. Kings County Nurseries [has] everything. I got a grafted four-apple tree — somehow they managed to graft one apple onto another apple onto another. It gives you McIntosh, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious and then one other kind. It’s pretty impressive.
I had a bunch of stuff framed recently at Brooklyn Frameworks. I was Googling my grandfather [late actor John Carradine] to see if I could find something and, lo and behold, I did. It’s a giant poster of a ’40s wartime noir film he did called “Waterfront,” but in Italian — it’s called “Bassifondi.” They did a really nice job framing that.
My favorite food store is Kalustyan’s. It’s in Little India and is the most spectacular store for buying any kind of spice or ingredient you need, be it Israeli or Middle Eastern or North African or East African or Asian: every type of pickle, every type of rice, every type of tea. It was introduced to me by David Rakoff, the brilliant writer. He was a dear friend and an avid chef. Kalustyan’s was his little paradise.
There’s a Korean place I went to recently in Prospect Heights called White Tiger. The kimchee was really, really good. I don’t know if you can call kimchee fresh, ’cause kimchee’s supposed to be buried underground for, like, a hundred years or something. But it tasted fresh.
I was nervous about leaving Manhattan, but the truth is I really don’t miss it. It’s not the neighborhood-oriented place it was. Now I live in a neighborhood again. My home is like a little farmhouse in the middle of the city. If it were up to me, I’d never leave.