Three illuminations in one evening glorified last Thursday into a triumph of New York living.
The first revelation took place at a BAFTA preview screening of the new Stephen Soderbergh film, Contagion. If you’re wise enough to have avoided it so far, it’s a tired old story of a mysterious virus that threatens to destroy mankind. The film has been released here to coincide tastefully with the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and give Americans a weekend of total terror.
It’s mainly remarkable in that a host of star lemmings — Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Pottillard and Lawrence Fishburne — agreed to sign on to a mechanical script completely empty of any human emotion apart from hackneyed paranoia. Empty, that is, except for one line. It’s delivered after the snaggle-toothed Jude Law, playing a wicked blogger who uses the Internet to market a phony vaccine for the deadly disease, confronts an epidemiologist, who promptly turns on him: “Blogging isn’t writing,” the scientist declares. “It’s graffiti with punctuation.”
Ah, to have the true horror of hearing one’s own profession encapsulated in three words!
Illumination #2 occurred at dinner afterwards at the Russian Tea Room, an extravagant restaurant on West 57th street and Sixth Avenue, which has just been re-modeled with enough silver samovars and gold baubles to look like a wet dream of Roman Abramovich.
The sommeliere, a stern Ukrainean-American woman who resembled Kathy Bates in Misery, mandated that we order a ‘Cavitini’, a fearsomely strong martini perfect for celebrating yet another day of stock market declines. The oily clear liquid was skewered by a slice of cucumber, on top of which sat a soggy-looking lump of fish balls.
The Cavitini
“We make the Cavitini with Russian Imperial vodka,” Kathy said with much pomp, “and then marry it with wild American Hackleback Caviar.”
Kathy saw me fiddling with the garnish stick.
“Under no circumstances, drop the eggs into the liquid,” she said, anxiously. “They will be lost forever.”
“”Oh, ok.” I replied. “I don’t really like cucumber, you see. Is there a piece of cutlery to use to eat the caviar?”
Kathy frowned. “You should know that caviar reacts with metal,” she instructed. “The only correct way to eat it is with your fingers.”
Armed with Revelation # 2, I inquired of her: “Might you be able to get me some toast and butter?”
“We do not recommend that,” she said strictly.
“Why ever not?”
“Combining buttered toast and caviar is a very sick practice,” she said strictly. “What you have on your plate is sturgeon roe, dear. It’s not a toasted sandwich.”
Kathy forged ahead: “Buttered toast is indeed not recommended on its own. It always leads to those nasty brown and black lumps in the butter,” she decreed.
“Yes, my mother always told me how rude they were,” I concurred. “That’s the point of butter knives, no?”
“Butter knives are never properly obeyed,” she dismissed.
“True.”
“These lumps are a plague. You know their name?” she interrogated, in a way that made me wonder if she had Abu Ghraib on her CV.
“Their name?”
I took a gulp of my Cavitini.
“Yes, dear, their name. The word used to describe the infestation of toast crumbs in previously pristine butter?”
“No, no, I don’t,” I stammered.
As if describing a hideous form of eye cancer, she put a name on that scourge of kitchens throughout the world: “Toasticles!”
With that invaluable addition to my lexicon, I had completed my trinity of illuminations for the night.
