Sometimes I think I'd like to live in a big city. But yesterday I came home from work, swam laps in the pool, then drove five minutes to a theater that was showing short films from Bulgaria, Belgium, Cyprus, Lithuania, Poland and Wales. It hardly seemed to matter that they were all boring.
Lunch yesterday at the Brazilian restaurant called Brazilian Restaurant. (Good name: No one has ever asked: “What kind of restaurant is that?”) I sat there enjoying the hearty food – yesterday ham, okra, black beans and rice from the buffet that changes daily – the soft music, the friendly service and the lovely sounds of the conversations going on around me, an added benefit that you don’t get in most restaurants.
Saturday I picked up the Feb. 11 & 18 double issue of The New Yorker and found on page 63 a sepia-toned photograph of Joseph Mitchell standing in front of Sloppy Louie's seafood restaurant. I'm going to buy a frame at lunch today and hang it on the wall next to the photograph, cut from the same magazine last year, of Vera and Vladimir Nabokov.
I was at Sage in Hollywood last night, standing at the bar, when a woman in her seventies approached wearing a blue dress and a gold chain with letters that spelled out - I saw as she got closer - "Blond Bombshell." I thought: She'd be a great match for the guy in the T-shirt.
The hunched senior shuffled through the Galleria in grey T-shirt and big white sneakers. His plaid pants were tied in the front, like pajama bottoms, and rose well above his waist. But not so high that they obscured the message on the back of his T-shirt: Old Guys Rule.
... you finish your cauliflower and onion tart at your favorite lunch place, 11th Street Annex, and Penny comes out of the kitchen and asks you if you like cold soups.
You say you do and minutes later she brings you a little stainless steel cup of cold mango and coconut milk soup laced with lemon and ginger.