By stufflovely
“I have good things happening every few minutes of the day,” she says. “Good things” being Martha Stewart-speak for the niceties that define her personal brand, like peeling a batch of roasted garlic and putting it in olive oil to keep in the fridge for dipping later.
Of course, even Stewart has found herself parked in front of the TV over the course of the past year. “I’ve seen anything [that’s] good,” she says. “I’m a fanatic.” Her latest binge-watch is Balthazar, a French drama about a forensic pathologist (he’s “very sexy,” says Stewart) who communicates with the dead.
She tells me she watches the show on Acorn TV, a streaming service I’ve never heard of, let alone used. It’s not surprising that Stewart is an early adopter. “Well, what I care about, really, is keeping up with what’s out there. I don’t like to get set in my ways,” she says. “For me, change is always good. Always. It’s been part of my life, change.”
“I think that keeping up with technology, chemistry, happenings out in space…” she trails off before recounting with enthusiasm the mission of AppHarvest, a startup changing the way vegetables are grown around the world. She joined its board last summer.
Perhaps the one constant in Stewart’s life is that throughout her home, there is classical music playing “all day long,” which I can hear faintly in the background of our Zoom. “I think the animals love it,” she says.
As her screen clicks off, the sounds of Mozart stop abruptly, and just like that, our time together is over. A few days later, Stewart posts a photo of herself getting the second and final shot of her COVID-19 vaccine. After all, she’s got things to do.
At a Glance
Stewart does not like doors: “Even in my kitchen, everything’s pretty much out in the open because I like to reach, grab, use, put back.” And when it comes to beauty products, what she reaches for depends on the day. “I’m a big experimenter. I will experiment and edit out what I like and what I don’t like,” she says. “I haven’t had any disasters. Nothing’s burned me or hurt me in any way, but some work much better than others, so [those are] the ones I keep.” The resulting setup is, in her own words, “an edited apothecary for beauty.”