Daily Blague

An interesting evening had I, one that unfolded on several dimensions. First, there was the simplicity of meeting up with Ms NOLA at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square and heading down to Pace University, by the Brooklyn Bridge, in search of the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts. It wasn't too hard to find, although the gent who was sitting on a planter out in front of Pace whom we asked could only tell us that we were the second people to ask him. We were on our way to Tom Meglioranza's River to River Festival recital. Tickets were free, and I'd reserved a pair as soon as I'd found out about the event.

I will save my remarks about the recital for tomorrow; they're not quite ripe. I do want to say, though, how astonished I was by Tom's encore, that old sappy standard, never sung by a pop singer ever, "I Love You Truly." Alfalfa sang it in Our Gang. My mother took it to be a token of everything Victorian that she rejected in her personal life. (This would have been in the Fifties. Ten years later, and the Victorians didn't look so bad to her.) If there is a song that stands for the America that the postwar United States threw out with the bathwater, it is the one Tom sang. And not only did he sing it, but he sang it for his mother. There were gasps here and there in the audience when the piano preliminaries began, but most of the audience had never heard the song before. Needless to say, Tom made "I Love You Truly" sound like an art song. By which I mean only that he made it sound worth listening to.

Tom's recitals usually last about ninety minutes, and at nine o'clock we were out on the street, thinking about dinner. There had been discussions about this beforehand, involving Les Halles, the downtown branch, in John Street, of Anthony Bourdain's flagship. It seemed too good to be true, but Kathleen tore herself away from her indentures and joined us. M le Neveu had already had dinner by the time he was invited, and a good thing, too, because he would have eaten the paper tabletop in the time that it took for dinner to be served. Let's just say that, while the food at Les Halles gets an A-plus for great bistro cuisine, our service was just about the worst that I have ever had in any New York restaurant. Eventually, someone senior intervened - someone to whom I had asserted that if our entrees weren't on the table within five minutes we'd be paying for our drinks and leaving. This is the sort of ultimatimation that I really don't go in for. I am usually all too content to go on drinking cocktails while dinner takes forever. But the cocktails had taken forever, and, when they came, they were naked.

That's right: a martini with no olive and a gin-and-tonic without a lime. We were truly, deeply shocked. The fruit was readily supplied, but zut alors! (As an American francophile/phone, I feel that it is my duty to preserve certain beloved expressions that have passed entirely out of use in France. I don't think that I have ever heard a native speaker use the phrase "zut alors," and in fact I have no idea how it really sounds - or sounded. But really, if you had had to endure the service at Les Halles, there's no telling what you wouldn't have said!) Dinner took well over an hour to arrive, although it certainly came less than five minutes after my threat. Kathleen was sure that it was all her fault: she'd told us what to order over the phone, from the Internet, while she was still at the office, a few blocks away. If we'd all been there from the start, she thought, our food would have arrived much sooner. This argument, of course, makes no sense, which is why it's probably correct.

Oh, and, by the way, this is the thousandth entry at the Daily Blague. Not even two years old - nowhere close.