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If you don't cut that out, the censors will
I feel as though I am writing a con report, even though all I did was spend not quite three days in New York City. I think the last time I stayed more than the night on someone's couch was, honestly, when I lived in New Haven. It was strangely reassuring to find out I still have luck with the city. I'd like to claim it's genetic: New York is the city of my parents and grandparents. It's not mine, although I love it. (I don't know that I have a city. I have lived in Boston for most of my life, but I think of it as the place where I was born, not where I belong. All my family's stories are of movement.) I will admit that there seems to be a problem with my MetroCard, in that I was getting charged twice at almost every station. But I can find my way around more of Manhattan than I think and no one has ever thrown up on my shoes, so I consider myself ahead of some curves.
So. Wednesday. I got up at silly o'clock to meet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and derspatchel at the T in Davis Square, the theory being that at least we would all be in the same place if the MBTA decided to pull shenanigans. No prizes for guessing, there were delays on the line. We still made our train, which at least two-thirds of us mostly slept or read through. I have good memories of looking out the window at the salt marsh in Connecticut. I read four novels by Daniel Pinkwater, of which Borgel (1990) is the clear standout. We got into New York at a perfectly reasonable hour in the afternoon, negotiated subways, stashed all of our stuff at The Jane (where the survivors of the Titanic were billeted when it was still the American Seamen's Friend Society Sailors' Home and Institute, say that five times fast with chattering teeth) and set out to find dinner. Admittedly, the immediate result this produced was three people with no blood sugar wandering around St. Mark's Place being unable to figure out where to eat, but then Rush-That-Speaks remembered the existence of Veselka and I can now say categorically that my life needs more Ukrainian food, because I had amazing borscht, kielbasa, pierogi (short rib!), most of Rob's blintz, and was briefly mistaken for one of the staff. Dessert was also Rush's doing, leading us a street and a half over to ChikaLicious, purveyor of delicious things like salt caramel macarons, coconut marshmallows made with actual mallow, tiny lychee-filled cupcakes, and crème brûlée with Cap'n Crunch. (About the latter, I would say I'm as surprised as the next person, but the next person was Rob, who ordered it, and I don't think he was surprised at all.) We walked on to the Film Forum, because all of us are people who travel by foot. We were met at the theater by ladymondegreen, who turned out to have independent connections to both of my travel companions. And we watched the reason we'd come to New York at all: Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943).
The thing about this film is not that there's a sequence in which Carmen Miranda, wearing a quantity of tropical fruit on her head and a dress sewn all over with strawberries, sings about her eponymous tutti-frutti hat while a line of chorus girls do a very good imitation of a kaleidoscope and/or something Freudian with bananas that are half their height, at the end of which the strawberries are flanking her like the Royal Grenadiers and a fountain of bananas is erupting from Miranda's hat. It's that "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" is not, by no means, not even close, the most surreal sequence in the movie. That is probably "The Polka-Dot Polka," which is not so much the finale as the point where the film just decides to stop. (Seriously: the love triangle is resolved in ellipsis, out of shot, behind a hedge. Busby Berkeley knows his conventions of cinema and he has better things to do, like meta references. The film is full of the crash-tinkle of breaking fourth walls.) There is neon. In the dark. Circles and circles of it. And body stockings. And vertiginous camera. And then all of a sudden there are giant singing heads. This film induces the same kind of flailing glossolalic cataloguery as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), of which The Gang's All Here is justly considered a forerunner. At the point where the screen filled with reflecting Technicolor abstracts, Rush started invoking Zardoz (1974), I said the requisite things about 2001 (1968), and Rob simply said he thought he was peaking. And it was magnificent. It wasn't camp. It was Dada. There is no other word for the sight of Edward Everett Horton with a faceful of lipstick. That and the song about Paducah. (It's another name for Paradise.)
(And everyone seemed to like everyone else. It really made me happy.)
Thursday, Rob and I did not get up at silly o'clock. Instead, we got lunch at a randomly appealing-looking café on 8th Avenue (Paradise Café, which seems to possess no website, but makes a very nice mango-peach cider-based smoothie) and spent the afternoon at the International Center of Photography with Weegee: Murder Is My Business, which I recommend to everyone within their definition of a reasonable distance. It's worth just seeing the photographs in their original contexts, time-foxed newspapers and magazine splashes, first-person pieces whose drafts were typed out on the miniature Corona we see on a reconstruction of Arthur Fellig's desk. He myth-made himself as much as New York City, but there was, in both cases, something there. There are two excerpts playing on loop from his short film Weegee's New York (1948), which at times looks like something made twenty years earlier by Hans Richter or just a decade later by anyone in the New Wave. There are astonishing abstract effects in the sequence titled "New York Fantasy" and a beautiful sort of documentary voyeurism in "Coney Island." I left both of my hats in Boston, so of course when we got out of the museum we were promptly rained on with varying degrees of severity, but we still walked to The Delta Grill and had a rather epic dinner that started with grits and alligator sausage and finished with bananas Foster (flambéed, self-caramelizing) and Pernod.
And then we walked over to the theater district, still in the misting rain, and saw the Broadway transfer of One Man, Two Guvnors, which I saw seven months ago as a live broadcast from the National Theatre. I can report with great pleasure that it was as delightful in person as it was on the screen. There were a few references changed for American audiences ("Brixton Prison") and some trimming of bits of business, but the major lazzi are all intact—and in at least one lovely case, improvised along completely different lines—and while the house band are not the same four musicians who made up The Craze in London, they transition as pitch-perfectly from washboard-scratching skiffle to the British Invasion, left-handed drummer and all. I have one complaint, which is that I don't know why they trimmed a verse and a half from "Sweet Suzy"; aside from the fact that it has some of the cleverest wordplay in the score, it's a story-song and it needs all the narrative it can get. Otherwise, everything I said about the production in September still holds, except that a different swathe of my friendlist now has the opportunity to see it for themselves.
(After the show, we went back to the only bar we had been able to discover the previous night that was neither frighteningly trendy nor blastingly loud, The Half Pint. It was impossible not to repeat, in awe-stricken tones, "A pub that does food!" It was also medically necessary to order some chips with cheddar and bacon, and although it was probably not a categorical imperative for me to try the perry float with vanilla ice cream, it was really good.)
And this afternoon we took the F train to the end of the line, Coney Island and Stillwell Avenue. Weeks ago, we had known that we wanted to go. And as it turned out, Coney Island in April 2012 is closed except on the weekends, so Rob showed me Coney Island anywhere from 1897 to 2011. We had lunch at Nathan's, missed out on dessert at Cones. The Parachute Jump spider-geysers over the boardwalk like an import from an alien skyline; it came from the 1939 World's Fair. There was a parking lot where the Thunderbolt used to be and the B & B is no longer the last remaining of Coney Island's twenty-five wooden carousels [edit: at the moment, anyway], but with the very kind look-away of a pair of repairmen, we got inside the abandoned Childs Restaurant with its blue-and-green-painted friezes of shells and sea-creatures over the roll-up steel doors and its medallions of triremes, galleons, and Neptune weather-bleeding down the stucco crumble of the outside walls. I don't know what the rest of the chain looked like, but this building is a rococo nautical ruin—inside, mostly cavernous and empty, but you could still see the patterning in the floor, Corinthian capitals peeling away in plaster sags, the same circular tiles like shield-bosses high on the walls, enameled with gondolas and bathing beauties. Out front, old men in deck chairs were sitting with their shirts off in the sharp bright sunlight and the blasting wind off the sea. We passed a mural being touched up by an artist in a broad hat. On 10th Street, Rob introduced me to a very beautiful old friend. My grandparents used to call Old Orchard Beach in Maine "Schlock City" because it was no Coney Island and I had only their word to take for it. (I learned to play skeeball from my grandmother there. I don't care that it was inferior for New Yorkers, I haven't been since she died. They had a Ferris wheel, a pier-end and an arcade.) We will be coming back, when the coasters are open and the sand is warm.
Dinner was at the Heartland Brewery with one of Rob's friends who may or may not have a livejournal, but he has got a terrific tattoo of Brooklyn in the shape of a red dragon. Buffalo chicken spring rolls were not anything like I expected them to be, but I remember eating all of them. The conversation was so good, our timing went all to hell; we were literally running back through Chinatown and the Bowery to fetch our bags from the hotel with half an hour before we'd have to stay an extra night in a different room, but we caught the last train out of Penn Station by minutes and the grace of a taxi driver whom I believe I blessed by telling him that his customers should all tip like there's no tomorrow, and there was a smoldering peach-and-shadows sunset over the city as the train rattled over the Hell Gate Bridge. I wrote about half of this post on the train. It's reportage, I think, not stories, but I want to remember it: I have been so happy these last couple of days. Apparently my life is doing that again. And now I am going to sleep.
So. Wednesday. I got up at silly o'clock to meet
rushthatspeaks and derspatchel at the T in Davis Square, the theory being that at least we would all be in the same place if the MBTA decided to pull shenanigans. No prizes for guessing, there were delays on the line. We still made our train, which at least two-thirds of us mostly slept or read through. I have good memories of looking out the window at the salt marsh in Connecticut. I read four novels by Daniel Pinkwater, of which Borgel (1990) is the clear standout. We got into New York at a perfectly reasonable hour in the afternoon, negotiated subways, stashed all of our stuff at The Jane (where the survivors of the Titanic were billeted when it was still the American Seamen's Friend Society Sailors' Home and Institute, say that five times fast with chattering teeth) and set out to find dinner. Admittedly, the immediate result this produced was three people with no blood sugar wandering around St. Mark's Place being unable to figure out where to eat, but then Rush-That-Speaks remembered the existence of Veselka and I can now say categorically that my life needs more Ukrainian food, because I had amazing borscht, kielbasa, pierogi (short rib!), most of Rob's blintz, and was briefly mistaken for one of the staff. Dessert was also Rush's doing, leading us a street and a half over to ChikaLicious, purveyor of delicious things like salt caramel macarons, coconut marshmallows made with actual mallow, tiny lychee-filled cupcakes, and crème brûlée with Cap'n Crunch. (About the latter, I would say I'm as surprised as the next person, but the next person was Rob, who ordered it, and I don't think he was surprised at all.) We walked on to the Film Forum, because all of us are people who travel by foot. We were met at the theater by ladymondegreen, who turned out to have independent connections to both of my travel companions. And we watched the reason we'd come to New York at all: Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943).The thing about this film is not that there's a sequence in which Carmen Miranda, wearing a quantity of tropical fruit on her head and a dress sewn all over with strawberries, sings about her eponymous tutti-frutti hat while a line of chorus girls do a very good imitation of a kaleidoscope and/or something Freudian with bananas that are half their height, at the end of which the strawberries are flanking her like the Royal Grenadiers and a fountain of bananas is erupting from Miranda's hat. It's that "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" is not, by no means, not even close, the most surreal sequence in the movie. That is probably "The Polka-Dot Polka," which is not so much the finale as the point where the film just decides to stop. (Seriously: the love triangle is resolved in ellipsis, out of shot, behind a hedge. Busby Berkeley knows his conventions of cinema and he has better things to do, like meta references. The film is full of the crash-tinkle of breaking fourth walls.) There is neon. In the dark. Circles and circles of it. And body stockings. And vertiginous camera. And then all of a sudden there are giant singing heads. This film induces the same kind of flailing glossolalic cataloguery as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), of which The Gang's All Here is justly considered a forerunner. At the point where the screen filled with reflecting Technicolor abstracts, Rush started invoking Zardoz (1974), I said the requisite things about 2001 (1968), and Rob simply said he thought he was peaking. And it was magnificent. It wasn't camp. It was Dada. There is no other word for the sight of Edward Everett Horton with a faceful of lipstick. That and the song about Paducah. (It's another name for Paradise.)
(And everyone seemed to like everyone else. It really made me happy.)
Thursday, Rob and I did not get up at silly o'clock. Instead, we got lunch at a randomly appealing-looking café on 8th Avenue (Paradise Café, which seems to possess no website, but makes a very nice mango-peach cider-based smoothie) and spent the afternoon at the International Center of Photography with Weegee: Murder Is My Business, which I recommend to everyone within their definition of a reasonable distance. It's worth just seeing the photographs in their original contexts, time-foxed newspapers and magazine splashes, first-person pieces whose drafts were typed out on the miniature Corona we see on a reconstruction of Arthur Fellig's desk. He myth-made himself as much as New York City, but there was, in both cases, something there. There are two excerpts playing on loop from his short film Weegee's New York (1948), which at times looks like something made twenty years earlier by Hans Richter or just a decade later by anyone in the New Wave. There are astonishing abstract effects in the sequence titled "New York Fantasy" and a beautiful sort of documentary voyeurism in "Coney Island." I left both of my hats in Boston, so of course when we got out of the museum we were promptly rained on with varying degrees of severity, but we still walked to The Delta Grill and had a rather epic dinner that started with grits and alligator sausage and finished with bananas Foster (flambéed, self-caramelizing) and Pernod.
And then we walked over to the theater district, still in the misting rain, and saw the Broadway transfer of One Man, Two Guvnors, which I saw seven months ago as a live broadcast from the National Theatre. I can report with great pleasure that it was as delightful in person as it was on the screen. There were a few references changed for American audiences ("Brixton Prison") and some trimming of bits of business, but the major lazzi are all intact—and in at least one lovely case, improvised along completely different lines—and while the house band are not the same four musicians who made up The Craze in London, they transition as pitch-perfectly from washboard-scratching skiffle to the British Invasion, left-handed drummer and all. I have one complaint, which is that I don't know why they trimmed a verse and a half from "Sweet Suzy"; aside from the fact that it has some of the cleverest wordplay in the score, it's a story-song and it needs all the narrative it can get. Otherwise, everything I said about the production in September still holds, except that a different swathe of my friendlist now has the opportunity to see it for themselves.
(After the show, we went back to the only bar we had been able to discover the previous night that was neither frighteningly trendy nor blastingly loud, The Half Pint. It was impossible not to repeat, in awe-stricken tones, "A pub that does food!" It was also medically necessary to order some chips with cheddar and bacon, and although it was probably not a categorical imperative for me to try the perry float with vanilla ice cream, it was really good.)
And this afternoon we took the F train to the end of the line, Coney Island and Stillwell Avenue. Weeks ago, we had known that we wanted to go. And as it turned out, Coney Island in April 2012 is closed except on the weekends, so Rob showed me Coney Island anywhere from 1897 to 2011. We had lunch at Nathan's, missed out on dessert at Cones. The Parachute Jump spider-geysers over the boardwalk like an import from an alien skyline; it came from the 1939 World's Fair. There was a parking lot where the Thunderbolt used to be and the B & B is no longer the last remaining of Coney Island's twenty-five wooden carousels [edit: at the moment, anyway], but with the very kind look-away of a pair of repairmen, we got inside the abandoned Childs Restaurant with its blue-and-green-painted friezes of shells and sea-creatures over the roll-up steel doors and its medallions of triremes, galleons, and Neptune weather-bleeding down the stucco crumble of the outside walls. I don't know what the rest of the chain looked like, but this building is a rococo nautical ruin—inside, mostly cavernous and empty, but you could still see the patterning in the floor, Corinthian capitals peeling away in plaster sags, the same circular tiles like shield-bosses high on the walls, enameled with gondolas and bathing beauties. Out front, old men in deck chairs were sitting with their shirts off in the sharp bright sunlight and the blasting wind off the sea. We passed a mural being touched up by an artist in a broad hat. On 10th Street, Rob introduced me to a very beautiful old friend. My grandparents used to call Old Orchard Beach in Maine "Schlock City" because it was no Coney Island and I had only their word to take for it. (I learned to play skeeball from my grandmother there. I don't care that it was inferior for New Yorkers, I haven't been since she died. They had a Ferris wheel, a pier-end and an arcade.) We will be coming back, when the coasters are open and the sand is warm.
Dinner was at the Heartland Brewery with one of Rob's friends who may or may not have a livejournal, but he has got a terrific tattoo of Brooklyn in the shape of a red dragon. Buffalo chicken spring rolls were not anything like I expected them to be, but I remember eating all of them. The conversation was so good, our timing went all to hell; we were literally running back through Chinatown and the Bowery to fetch our bags from the hotel with half an hour before we'd have to stay an extra night in a different room, but we caught the last train out of Penn Station by minutes and the grace of a taxi driver whom I believe I blessed by telling him that his customers should all tip like there's no tomorrow, and there was a smoldering peach-and-shadows sunset over the city as the train rattled over the Hell Gate Bridge. I wrote about half of this post on the train. It's reportage, I think, not stories, but I want to remember it: I have been so happy these last couple of days. Apparently my life is doing that again. And now I am going to sleep.
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Also, you had me at the chips with cheddar and bacon until I remembered that these are probably not chips but chips. Ah, well...
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Glad you had fun, but I missed our near-nightly IM conversations, so I'm glad you're back.
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The last time I saw it was in the company of a dozen athletic professional men in immaculately planned and executed cross-gender dress (just prior to the venerable high-heel race (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/going-out-gurus/post/dupont-high-heel-race-turns-25/2011/10/24/gIQAYK3TDM_blog.html) down 17th St., NW, WDC). Hirsute renditions of Cher, Salome, and the Queen of Night, among other icons, crammed into couches, chins dropped, at the swirling cacophony of thinly-veiled sexual in-and-out-uendo occurring on the flickering TV screen. It was a bit like the "behold the master" moment in some Kung-Fu films.
But Perry and vanilla ice cream? I'd never have thunk it. I see experimentation in the future.
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Out front, old men in deck chairs were sitting with their shirts off in the sharp bright sunlight and the blasting wind off the sea. We passed a mural being touched up by an artist in a broad hat.
Wonderful--for a moment I was there.
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Also, thank you for writing this up - it's all so vivid and now I wish I had the means for a trip to New York.
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Thank you!
Also, you had me at the chips with cheddar and bacon until I remembered that these are probably not chips but chips. Ah, well...
No, no, they were chips. (The other kind couldn't have stood the strain.) You'd have been welcome.
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Thank you. I never remember to bring a camera, so.
Glad you had fun, but I missed our near-nightly IM conversations, so I'm glad you're back.
I may be in hibernation for a bit, but I'm back.
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Nine
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I need to watch Carmen Miranda. And taste perry float!
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I don't know why Busby Berkeley isn't studied as one of the great surrealists! All of the ingredients of The Gang's All Here are a standard wartime romance with musical comedy inserts. From the very first frames of "Brazil," with the singer half-lit against the black and those harpstring parabolas of bamboo which somehow turn into cable-stays and dock rigging (and the most artificial skyline of New York ever, which pays off beautifully a few verses later), it doesn't even pretend it's going to behave like one—and from the very first frame, I was grinning my head off and I really didn't stop. Occasionally there was amazed laughter. Okay, there was a lot of amazed laughter. I mean, Benny Goodman sings! In what sane universe does that happen?
The last time I saw it was in the company of a dozen athletic professional men in immaculately planned and executed cross-gender dress (just prior to the venerable high-heel race down 17th St., NW, WDC). Hirsute renditions of Cher, Salome, and the Queen of Night, among other icons, crammed into couches, chins dropped, at the swirling cacophony of thinly-veiled sexual in-and-out-uendo occurring on the flickering TV screen.
"Then he's a two-time, double-cross snake in the bush!"
That's magnificent.
But Perry and vanilla ice cream? I'd never have thunk it. I see experimentation in the future.
I don't remember the particular species of perry, but the combination is sweet and woodsy and the fact that it's vanilla/pear keeps the cream from wiping out the fruit-edge on the alcohol or curdling under the fermentation. It's not my favorite drink from this trip, because I got a chocolate egg cream at Veselka and you really can't do that outside of New York City, but I am going to experiment further myself.
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It was a gorgeous windfall. I dream about buildings like that.
(I'm not joking. Some of them are in Ostia Naye.)
Wonderful--for a moment I was there.
Hah! Thank you.
It really, really was.
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I like both of these things!
(And it keeps going—tonight I get to hear
Also, thank you for writing this up - it's all so vivid and now I wish I had the means for a trip to New York.
Honestly, I kind of didn't. But it was still worth it.
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Thank you.
You don't sound like you've been doing too badly yourself lately.
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Thank you!
I'm glad that you had good adventures. Thanks for sharing them.
I'm very glad to. If nothing else, on those days when I suddenly start to flash back to Benny Goodman crooning "Paducah, Paducah—if you want to, you can rhyme it with bazooka," I'll want to know how that happened to me.
I need to watch Carmen Miranda. And taste perry float!
I recommend both!
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This, precisely!
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Thank you! We now return to your more regularly scheduled days, which I suspect will also be fine.
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*snatches back half-empty takeout container of harissa beets*
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Next time, come to New York!
*snatches back half-empty takeout container of harissa beets*
*has borscht, doesn't care*
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Thanks!
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So noted. Thank you! I will insist at some point on being in New York and seeing you.
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I thought of Ostia Naye, reading it.
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Well, quite. May all your chips be chips... (except when you want chips, of course!)
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I hope you've slept well, and that today will be a good day, also.
ETA: Thanks for reminding me about the Weegee exhibit.
*I've not been there in ages, it now hits me. I will have to do something about that. I think the last time I ate there was after class with a friend who was expecting. There was the usual awkwardness when we had to explain to someone or other that I wasn't the father. Her son's more than a year old, now.
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I hadn't realized they were famous!
I am fairly exhausted, but I think I did the right thing with my evening.
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I'd never thought of them as that, but I suppose they are, in a way. In the good sense, fortunately, as opposed to the sense that would lead to them being over-run with tourists instead of comfortably busy.
I am fairly exhausted, but I think I did the right thing with my evening.
I'm glad to hear that. Or at least the second part of it, any road.
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This and this reallly look as if they could have come from Pompeii or some other ruined but preserved city.
I also very much like this photo, which seems to have captured fingerprints made of rust.
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It made me happy too. You have excellent companions. I had utterly no compunctions about whispered commentary to
a rather epic dinner that started with grits and alligator sausage and finished with bananas Foster
This sound remarkably like a paraphrase of a bizarre song I learned in 11th grade choir. I get the impression, looking around the web, that it's a jazz classic.
The Coney Island visit sounds wonderful. I have only managed to drag people there once, but I have a great desire to explore it again, preferably in the company of people who would enjoy it as much as I do.
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Heh. I should make it clear you were not the ones I thought might have to do some wary cat-circling before they settled down, but I am quite glad you liked
I get the impression, looking around the web, that it's a jazz classic.
And I've never heard it! Thank you.
I have only managed to drag people there once, but I have a great desire to explore it again, preferably in the company of people who would enjoy it as much as I do.
Well, the season opens in June . . .