New Year’s Eve is usually a time of reflection and drunkenness, dear readers, and I hope you all engage in plenty of both tonight. I’ll do a little reflecting right now, but no drinking, since it’s morning and I allegedly have standards.
The official VM fiancée & I are heading over to Café Matisse tonight for a five-course New Year’s dinner. It’s an early meal, so we’ll have time to get hammered at home tonight. Last year, we watched the first two Lord of the Rings flicks before the clock struck 12. We’ll have less movie-time this year, so we might just groove with Sun Ra instead.
Tomorrow, we’ll go to Princeton for our traditional New Year’s Day get-together with our friend Cecily, who will likely grill Amy about all sorts of wedding plans. We’re still trying to figure out what (if anything) I oughtta get engraved on my wedding ring. It won’t be this.
How would you go about recapping a year of your life? The gist of mine: helped Dad deal with / recover from heart surgery; proposed to Amy; read Proust; walked around a near-empty city.
There are plenty of other details, many of which you longtime readers have been subjected to: bought her a ring; gained new perspective on 9/11; bought a giant TV; saw a world of comics-geeks; moved this blog to a new provider, then a new platform; visited Cracker Biodome; watched Ric Burns’ 8-part documentary about New York City; read plenty of other writers. There’s more for a recording angel to catch up with, but there’s only so much room for memories. Sez Marcel:
If the name, Duchesse de Guermantes, was for me a collective name, it was not so merely in history, by the accumulation of all the women who had successively borne it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency. Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our memories and our hearts are not large enough to be able to remain faithful. We have not room enough, in our present mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living. We are obliged to build on top of what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name Saintraille had just opened up.
All of which isn’t to say much but Happy New Year, everyone. Live well.
As somebody still acclimating to wearing a wedding ring, I think you ought to get “PIBO!” or if it fits “Put It Back On!”. I’ve already had a few occasions where that reminder would have been helpful. Unfortunately this was suggested to me after mine was already engraved.
One of you should get “less filling”; the other “tastes great.”
Our late-afternoon/early-evening pre-drunkening double-feature: My Dinner With Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street. Obvious, and neither film is great-great, but it really worked. I mean, I can’t sleep, but I think that was dinner more than Wallace Shawn’s acting. Plus it made me sad when Shawn talks about being a young prince in MDWA because now I’m old enough to know he was William Shawn’s kid.
Also, at one point Shawn actually says, “inconceivable” in MDWA, which made me laugh out loud.
Did you have the duck?
Yup! We split the first three “choice” courses, so we could partake of everything. The only letdown was the salmon, which was overdone and dry. Scallops & foie gras were fantastic, and I loved the chipotle shrimp from my previous dinner there last September.
My only Wallace Shawn story, of course was the time I bumped into him in a bookstore in NYC.
Which one of us is less filling?
Okay, I feel better now.
I am totally shocked you got bad salmon in New Jersey.
I think it’s up to the couple to decide who gets which side of the Great Debate of Our Times.