Filed in LIFE & LOVE |
{Today, shooting an upcoming makeup tutorial with Veronica Sinclair}
I am so excited to finally be able to share this blog’s facelift with a brand new name and site! For those of you who have kept up with me in this blog’s former incarnation as Altared, thank you so much for your support. And for the newbies, welcome to Heels in the Hills!
Brief backstory: I’m a writer, actress and blogger living in the hills of Los Angeles with my three rescue mutts (Lucy, Tippi and Maggie) and one fiancé, Tony Cavalero. Tony and I met performing in the Groundlings Sunday Company and fell in love at first sight, to be completely cheesy (or love at first laugh, to be even cheesier). He’s my best friend and the best person I’ve ever met, and I love the idea of going to work at my kitchen table without having to bathe or change out of my pajamas, and so I started a personal blog tracking the madness that is planning a wedding. I called it Altared, because it was catchy and on-theme, and also because I titled one of my favorite screenplays Altared. It never sold and I loved the name, so I decided to recycle it.
Several months later, I received a cease and desist letter from a party who had trademarked the name Altared. (I’m not too worried about publicly shaming them because if you google “Altared,” it turns out there are lots of businesses, brands, bands and books named Altared. I wasn’t as clever or original as I’d thought!) Despite the fact that our two brands could not have been more different, they were extremely concerned that the public would be confused and unable to find them. Lawyers got involved. It was stressful and upsetting. I ultimately decided to rebrand the site, partly because it didn’t seem like these people had anything better to do and I was tired of dealing with them. Planning a wedding and mothering three dogs is hard enough without throwing a lawsuit into the mix!
{My happy place}
But, more importantly, I decided to rebrand the site because I want to write about more than my wedding and relationship. I never wanted my blog to have an expiration date and planned to continue blogging after the wedding, so this simply expedited the process of creating a new platform to write about whatever I want, and not just vent about my mom’s guest list of her 150 “best friends” (that she sent me the day after I got engaged.) To celebrate the joy I got from feverishly spilling my wedding plans, here are my favorite posts from Altared:
Our “dateiversary anniversary.”
The time I adopted a puppy while Tony was at a bachelor party in Vegas.
Going on a “practice honeymoon” with my parents.
Taking a marriage class (and graduating).
The day my mom tried to get Tony to audition for 50 Shades of Grey.
I’m a Type A control freak in most aspects of my life (neatness/organization is not one of them), and change is scary for me. But, things tend to find a way to work themselves out… And even if it’s not the way I tried to force it, it’s often for the best. I had dinner with one of my best friends/co-Maid of Honor Katierose tonight, and she pointed out that each chapter of my adult life has been marked by a new blog: Bitch Humor, when I was finding my voice in comedy and single for the first time out of college. Altared, as a newly engaged lady. And now that the wedding is a few months away, most of the major details are set and I’m entering a new chapter as a Mrs.-to-be, Heels in the Hills. I wouldn’t have been able to enter that new chapter so quickly or smoothly without the brilliant web design work by Richard Feliciano of Ally Studio, the gorgeous logo done by Jenny Sanders of graceline or the many late nights and tricky internet maneuvers done by computer genius Taylor, the husband of my lifelong best friend and co-Maid of Honor Jax. Or Tony and my parents helping me brainstorm new site names and coaxing me out of many a panic attack! (Sorry, guys. Thanks & love you!)
My dream for Heels in the Hills is to fall somewhere between Cupcakes and Cashmere and Kelly Oxford in tone and content. I love expensive wine, cheap cheese, any kind of scotch, eating frosting for dinner, all things wedding, rescuing as many dogs as is legally permissible, embalming myself in sunscreen, spending too much time and money on makeup, heels so pretty it doesn’t matter that I can’t actually walk in them, and writing under the gazebo Tony built for me in our backyard tucked into the hillside. I’ll continue sharing personal stories, but will also write about food, fashion, home decor, and will share guest blogs by the people I love and admire most. We’ll celebrate together when things to right, but I will also let you know when things go horribly, hilariously wrong. I’m not perfect – if I were, I’d be running Goop or Preserve while simultaneously starring in movies, and not getting cease and desist orders from random people while scrambling to memorize for auditions on our broken elliptical machine. My voice is evolving along with my life, and I’m so excited for this new chapter. Thank you so much for coming along for the ride!
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