Personally, I’m for it. Although I understand both sides, Lucca doesn’t have much industry, and if the walled old city were to look like Cleveland, tourism may go the way of the Yugo.

Listening: “The Critic’s Choice” Oliver Nelson, More Blues and The Abstract Truth

P: if i don’t have parchment paper, is that ok?
can i just cook the bagels on a pan?
OF: Yes, but you should grease the pan, pref with lard, but canola oil would be ok, too
P: ok
lard, like Crisco?
OF: No, crisco is made out of virgins and black magic
Lard is made out of pigs
You could use butter, but it might burn in the oven, and oil is cheaper
P: haha, ok
what about pam?
OF: Do you hate me?

Lots o’ fun.

Funny story about the expression “you know.” When I first was in France, I would end every sentence with “you know”- in English. So I’d say something like: Il y a besoin de puisance pour audio, you know?

They let me do this for weeks before pointing out that it makes perfect sense to say it in French… in French.

Listening: John Mayer. Strange time.

My meals this week have been more telling than usual. I had lunch with [old friends who happened to be in town]( http://omnivorousfish.com/node/65); a [meat binge]( http://nymag.com/listings/bar/corner_bistro/) on the way to bring a mattress up to my place. Then I went “home” to pack a bag and went to another old friend’s to eat leftover Thai food to avoid thinking about the bag in the car. Tuesday, I went to dinner with my oldest friend in New York, who met me as an eccentric, sleepless, sexually ambivalent seventeen year old, obsessed with getting our diesel biology teacher to come out once and for all. I cooked for money back then, and if Ferran Adria had been around (in South Jersey) I would have thought he was the shit (now I’m not impressed). We already covered [what I ate Wednesday]( http://omnivorousfish.com/node/113).

Thursday was dinner with some of the South/West Orange crew, coincidentally at a slightly disappointing but overall decent “comfort food” place out in their hood.

Tonight, samosas and chicken biryana from the Indian place. Yes, up here it’s *the* Indian place. There’s the Indian place, the sushi place, the sort-of mexican place and [the other place]( http://omnivorousfish.com/node/113) up here, and that’s pretty much it. Sure, there are Chinese joints and pizzerias, but they’re all garbage. There are two fusion-type restaurants, one Asian-Latino, the other Pan-Asian-American, but they’re both pricey ad neither really delivers the goods. Besides, they’re both trying to be the nice restaurant in a non-shishy area, and since the food isn’t amazing, they’re both pretty much just plain pretentious. Further east are several Latino places that I will begin checking out, but I’m trying to drum up some recs from my super before I go one alone.

Besides, [I hate eating alone]( http://omnivorousfish.com/node/113). Meals at their best are a fellowship; to use a word that has been sullied by religion, communion. Food prepared by and for each other that nourishes our bodies, our souls and our psyches. The Agent and I were good at this, which is why it’s hard to have these repetitive let-me-tell-you-what-happened meals interspersed with these lonely ones. I’m adjusting to the sleeping alone (center of the bed- good advice from [Shuna](http://www.eggbeater.typepad.com/shuna)) and the empty apartment when I get home from the theater, but the meals are the toughest part thus far.

Listening: “Good Morning, Lazarus” by The Low Road. Lots of them this week.

That said, I still eat alone all the time. I’m spending a few nights in my “investment property” in Washington Heights, where there aren’t a ton of resaturants to begin with, and a sizable portion of them are patently abysmal. Tonight, I wandered into a place that I’ve been to for lunch in the past with acceptable reuslts. Sometimes, it’s better to eat at the bar when you’re alone, but not when the restaurant doubles as the one-tier-from-dive-bar of the neighborhood. At dinner, like many places for which I see no discernible reason, they like to turn the lights down really low. And, while there may be heart shaped mirrors along one wall, it’s not exactly a romantic spot. Interestingly, the lights were low, but readable until I unfurled my dinner companion (the new New Yorker). At that instant, the lights went down even further, probably for the benefit of the ONE other inhabited table.

I ordered pasta against my better judgement, and told myself that no matter how poorly cooked the pasta itself (pretty bad) I would base my judgement solely on the sauce. In this case it was linguine with portobello mushrooms and goat cheese.

In my imagination, the pasta was going to come out with big, meaty chunks of portobello along with tart globs of goat cheese loosened with some wine or pasta water. What I got was overcooked bad box linguine with slightly burnt thin slices of crimini mushrooms with a smear of supermarket goat cheese all inundated by some truly bad tomato sauce.

In about a month the kitchen in this place will be able to be cooked in. Yee-haw.

Listening: “Half a World Away” REM Out of Time

Then one day, something changed.

Maybe the coffee elves lost my address. Maybe it was the water in Queens, I don’t know, but now I am starting from zero. Less than zero, really, since the search for good coffee is complicated by my new intolerance to caffeine.

Funny how one day things can change.

Naturally, I am now convinced that Northern California is heaven on earth and everything wrong in my life would be better if I lived there. I fantasize about farmers’ markets and chilly foggy evenings in late spring, wearing [cable-knit sweaters](http://www.benbellen.com.au/alpaca-sweaters/mens-alpaca-sweater.html) and growing my hair longer.

We ate at Tabla last night, but the truth is I have been staring at the screen for an hour, and just don’t feel like writing about it. It was ok. I wouldn’t go back. I liked the decor, and the service was what you would expect from Danny Meyer, but the food all tasted like cumin, and nothing on the menu jumped out at me.

Listening: Watching Law and Order reruns, never a good sign.

I’m alone with my thoughts, about this party and the people who were here and the people who weren’t. This was my party for many years; now it’s ours. I’m ok with that, just getting used to the idea. I still hear the din and the glasses clinking and chirping and the faint whisper of christmas music in the background. The phantom party lives on in my mind.

Many people who were here will read this, and I want to thank you. Just like my work is nothing without an audience, so is my hobby. If you weren’t here, especially Nick, you were missed. When the show you work at changes, your surroundings change, the people in your life change. The moments that were really good live on in my memory and in this christmas party. Often, it’s the only time of the year I see the people who made those times special. They’re doing other shows, I’m doing other shows, that’s how it is. But tonight, I can offer a slice of ham and a glass of wine to damn near everyone I’ve ever met, and I love it. I eat a slice or two myself, and when I do, I think about some of the people who simply aren’t here anymore. Like the shows I did with them, they are gone from the stage, but not from memory.

Thanks so much to all of our friends, old and new, who came out. Happy holidays.

I understand this phenomenon well. I apprenticed to a chef briefly and worked in restaurants. I am now a stagehand, which is just as bad. I work alongside people, in an hourly paid, per-diem job that have master’s degrees from Yale. I’m not exaggerating. There is a multitude of them. They think they work in the arts, but in reality they pick up dirty cable and lighting instruments and pack them in and out of boxes and push said boxes on and off of trucks. I went to college for about an hour, and I tell them what to do.

Anyway, with any job where you’re part of a team, it’s largely the personalities that make it interesting. Restaurants and theaters have a lot in common: they are shit jobs that usually don’t pay very well where you do backbreaking work for minimal appreciation during hours that most people spend at home. For whatever reason, this environment draws more characters than say, the avergae CPA’s office. And, as unpleasant as it can be, it does leave one with a plethora of interesting memories, some awful, some hysterical. Very often, they go hand in hand. Case in point, Shuna’s negative experience reverberated in my memory with a bakery of Christmas Past, where I basically grew up. That memory, however, sent my head to another, much more funny memory that I’ll share.

The bakery was air-conditioned, so we had what’s called a proof box, which is basically an anti-refrigerator. It is a closed room that is heated with steam; thus we had a boiler. One day, one of the steam lines sprung a leak, and whenever the system’s pressure went up, a jet of visible steam shot out at ankle level from the boiler (right next to the bench where we worked- very safe) and drifted upwards. The red light from the exit sign beyond was vaguely visible, and almost shot through the steam, like a stage light. So, the next time the steam hit, I trudged directly into it, air guitaring and singing “Jumpin Jack Flash” to raise hell.

In retrospect, it’s not really all that funny (despite the fact that we all nearly pissed ourselves at the time), but at 4AM when you got up for school at 6 the previous day and have been at the bakery since 11, what’s funny can be relative.