The Conical Glass: From stoemp to bammy

Friday, June 29, 2007

From stoemp to bammy

Our housemates (perhaps we could call them the Adventurous Eight) are out on a three-hour boat trip this afternoon. Yes, a three-hour tour -- just like "Gilligan's Island." I was actually willing to go, despite the fact that it cost $60 per person and involved dancing lessons of some kind, but Joe thought it sounded horrendous, so for once, we were co-wet blankets. Joe and I went down to the beach for a while instead.

I am covered with sweat, bug spray, bug bites and sunscreen. Just one more day now. Luckily, the food continues to be excellent. I especially like the bammy bread, the fried plantains and other exotic fruits.

A little more about New York, though it seems ages ago that we were there. On Friday, I took the subway to the Upper West Side and spent some time walking in Central Park. I thought I'd find the Swedish Cottage, which dates from 1876. It's only open periodically for marionette shows, but the outside is quite lovely. After that, I thought it would be fun to walk across the park to the East Side. I just figured I'd find a path and follow it. I walked and walked through lush green trees, feeling far away from the city and its crowds. I obviously don't have a very good grasp of the park's geography, though, as I wound up exactly where I started on Central Park West & 81st. I'd walked in a circle!

Incidentally, since I'm a longtime "Law & Order" fan, one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of Central Park is the fact that many, many corpses have been discovered there over the years. In real life, though, I felt completely safe in Central Park, at least the segment I walked through. There are vendors everywhere selling ice cream and soda, and lots of tourists looking at maps and trying to figure out where they are. Maybe if I'd done that, I wouldn't have walked in a circle.

I also visited Zabar's, which is an amazing deli/grocery store well known for its mind-blowing selection. You think we have good cheese shops in San Francisco and Berkeley? Zabar's puts them all to shame with more cheeses than I have ever seen anywhere in my entire life. The web site shows a mere fraction of what's available in the store. There's an awe-inspiring selection of prepared foods for the New Yorker who hates to cook, scads of coffees & teas, and tons of Jewish specialty items. It's a must-see for the foodie visiting NY. I bought my favorite local snack, the black & white cookie. Here's the recipe, but I somehow doubt it tastes as good outside of the five boroughs.

Joe & I hooked back up for an all too brief dinner with some pals at Kitchenette. Then we headed down to Greenwich Village for ROFL, featuring Josh of Comics Curmudgeon fame. ROFL was due to kick off at the rather late hour of 11:30 PM, so we hadn't bothered adjusting to the Eastern time zone since our arrival -- we just stayed up 'til 2 or 3 every night and slept 'til 11 or so, just so we'd have the fortitude to stay out super-late on Friday. ROFL was being held at Joe's Pub, which has long been a topic of conversation on a mailing list I'm on. A lot of folks resent its mediocre food and extremely expensive drinks (there's a 2 drink minimum or $12 food minimum per person), and the fact that the club routinely offers 3 separate shows per night -- one at 7:30, one at 9:30 and one at 11:30 -- so the performer usually gets hustled off the stage after playing for just over an hour. I looked at the drinks menu and was rather horrified to see something called "bottle service," which as near as I can tell involves paying $330 for a bottle of Absolut Vodka or other rather ordinary spirit that would cost $25 at a liquor store. I guess compared to that, $13 for a mojito seems like a bargain. Anyway, our server took pity on us and let us get away with one drink each (Joe had a $5 ginger ale).

As Josh has recounted on his own blog, he sadly got eliminated during his first-round match-up (I blame the drunken screaming idiot sitting right next to us, whose 100-decibel hooting seemed to influenced the judge), but I thought he did a great job making fun of porn spam. The idea behind ROFL is for hip & funny bloggers to show wacky stuff they found on the internet. It sounded a bit lame -- I mean, how's that different from getting YouTube links from your friends? -- but it was actually very entertaining to watch the stuff with a group. Despite his loss, it was quite obvious that Josh had a ton of supporters in the crowd. It was a great pleasure to meet him, although so many folks wanted to say hi that we didn't have much of a chance to discuss the latest happenings in Mary Worth or the Foobiverse, and I hope our paths cross again someday. If not, I'll see ya' in the funny papers, Josh!

Saturday morning we had to rouse ourselves early to meet Joe's mom and sister Melanie for breakfast; they drove up from Pennsylvania for the weekend. We went to a Belgian restaurant called Petite Abeille that Joe & I had visited a couple days ago. One of the dishes they serve there is stoemp -- I had never heard of it before, but it turns out it's a delicious combination of mashed potatoes & root vegetables. Yum!

Joe's mom & Melanie had wanted to go to the Museum of Natural History, so we headed up there on the subway. It's practically right across the street from the Swedish Cottage. The place was mobbed with people, including tons of kids, so I decided that maybe I didn't want to look at fossils after all. The previous day, I'd noticed a majestic building right across 77th Street from the museum, the New York Historical Society, and I suspected it might be more my speed than the MoNH. The Society has been around since 1804 (!) but I suspect it's off the beaten path for most tourists -- it wasn't overly populated, which was very pleasant for me. They had a great exhibit called A New Light on Tiffany that spotlighted the work of Clara Driscoll, who is not well known but designed many of Tiffany's most famous lamps and other pieces. There was also a lot of material about what it was like to be a working woman in NY at the turn of the century. I also enjoyed roaming through the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, way up on the 4th floor -- I was the only person there, except for the guard, most of the time! -- which features 40,000 objects from the society's collections, including everything from civil war muskets to old campaign buttons to a giant plaster head of Abraham Lincoln.

The only thing I was sorry to miss at the MoNH was the squid and the whale diorama, made famous in the film of the same name. But it turns out that exhibit was closed! Boy, did I make the right choice!

That night, we went to see "Grey Gardens" on Broadway, which we all enjoyed a lot. Christine Ebersole, who plays the mother in Act 1 and the (grown-up) daughter in Act II, is superb in the lead role and definitely deserved her Tony.

We have one more night in New York before we head back to SF, but it'll just be spent at an airport hotel... in, ironically, Jamaica, NY.

posted by 125records @ 2:47 PM

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