A Feast Moves On

Last night, I got an email from the owner of one of my all time favorite New York City restaurants, Village, to announce that the establishment would be closing on Saturday. Yes, I like this place so much that two years after I moved to Texas, I continue to subscribe to the patron mailing list. The closing announcement lingers in my gut with a palatable sadness - the reason for closure felt like a calculated, personal injustice - "Our lease is up and, in a distinct irony given the times, the landlord was able to find a new tenant to pay double our rent."

Nothing makes me more nostalgic than talking about New York, especially the glimmering, golden, remembered and reconstructed New York of my youth, the evidence is all over my face. Village is a shining relic from my most recent time living in NYC in 2006. Unlike the cheap bars and restaurants I frequented as college kid on summer vacation, Village seemed to meet me where I was in my mid-twenties, refined, deco / European / Parisian flair, solid, delicious, and affordable. The service was always great and the dining room, well-appointed. Among the mainstays of the menu, one of the best roast chickens I've ever had - a steal for $30 prix fixe, a fabulous, bad-day-fixing, fluffy yellow omelet paired with simple salad and matchstick frites, and an ooey-gooey grilled cheese that was exactly what a wise, foodie friend called "the sleeper hit" of the menu.

I won't take any unearned credit for discovering the place, but once was I turned onto it, I claimed it, it became my go-to spot. Back in '06, I worked in Harlem and lived on Long Island. On a daily basis, I endured a one-way commute that routinely took between 60 and 90 minutes, depending on the mercy of the train deities. In that year, we did very little entertaining at "home," a crummy one-bedroom apartment with an even crappier kitchen that was 60-90 minutes away from the culinary capital of the world. Therefore, Village became a kind of surrogate dinner party space. It was a neighborhood kind of place, even though I lived nowhere near trendy 26th Street.

As I was reading the email about the restaurant's closing, in my mind, I saw a parade of cinematic flashes. I imagined myself seated at the various tables in the dining room - sharing a downtown dinner with my husband before rushing to hear Josh Ritter at the Beacon, a late dinner with a film professor friend on a rainy week night, reconnecting over wine with an old friend who deals coins. I remember meeting Yoshi for Belgian beers at dark bar downtown, and after several rounds of Chimay, stumbling out and finding Village - exactly what we needed at that moment - salty, yummy, bistro perfection. Village always fortified me with exactly what I needed.

What will now forever be my last trip to Village, was a wonderful, exuberant send-off. It was the Friday dinner of a long-weekend spent in New York City with friends last September. We were giggly and beside ourselves to spot one of the most famous contestants of Project Runway sitting a few tables away (in my reality tv-infused world, this constitutes a major, A-list celebrity). We tried to play it cool - when BAM - a piece of plaster fell from the ceiling and landed on Jack's shoulder, leaving a white trace behind on his black jacket. It took a minute for us to realize exactly what had happened, but once we determined that everyone was fine, we moved on to our appetizers, a free round of champagne cocktails helped.

I am usually prone to photographing my food, or the company around the table, at restaurants. For some reason, I never took a single photo at Village. There was probably part of me that wanted to take a picture during the most recent trip - especially one of those "you think I am taking a photo of my friend, but I am actually snapping something behind him - in this case, Austin Scarlett." I can't share it with anyone else, but I find great pleasure in replaying this jovial slide show of the stylish dining room in my memory, sipping it up in tiny portions. I am very sad thinking that I'll never be going back.

A day late...

And my guess is that this post will come up more than a dollar short. After a quiet month, some sort of chatter is needed to revive the conversation.

I feel like transition is all around me these days, yet, it's my path that seems to most certain.

It's strange, for years, I was the one moving every summer, looking for and then starting a new job, and exploring a new town. Every year, it was revival - everything new. Yet, this year, I am the one in stasis. One friend is launching a new business, another has just given official notice and plans to start law school in the fall, while another has an eye-turned to the market and considering making a move. In another city on the East coast, two of my friends are simultaneously awaiting their own big changes - one is sitting for her nursing exams on the brink of launching a new career while another awaits the birth of her first child (a son, due anytime now). P and I just learned that two of our friends are ending their relationship. My sister is looking for a condo and my parents are planning to sell their house, downsize their monthly bills, and take up residence in my grandmother's home (she moved to a nursing home over two years ago). I don't have plans to visit the East Coast until next December, but it's odd to think how different it all could be.

At work, my building is over pretty intense construction - walls are coming down, sprinklers are going in the ceiling, doors are barricaded by rubble, and you have to watch your step with all the nails and wires all about. It's noisy and dusty and it's given the summer a distinctly chaotic and distracted feel. After eight hours of drilling the other day, I insisted on a junk food dinner and several hours of lounging on the couch before bed - I was wiped out. The great irony is that the construction should wrap up in August, the completion date coinciding with my vacation.

Ladies Night

In English, there really isn't a gendered equivalent to the term Ladies Man. And no, I don't mean the sleazy Tim Meadows' SNL character of the same name and of reputed courvoisier-sipping fame. Taken literally, ladies man could be a male who is most comfortable in the company of females.

Were the situation reversed, you would never call such a gal a Gentleman's Lady. Not only does the phrase sound clunky off the tongue, it doesn't feel like the right descriptor. Call me what you will, but I am woman who feels most herself in the company of men.

In high school, I was thick as thieves with many great girlfriends, spending a particularly high amount of time with my field hockey and lacrosse teammates. But in the decade since, I've amassed a much higher number of male friends, probably at a three-to-one ratio. Case and point, at my wedding, I was supported by a Maid of Honor (my sister and only sibling) and a self-proclaimed Man of Dishonor (also known as my gay best friend, a frequent contributor to this blog).

Ever since arriving in San Antonio, I've greatly expanded my set of female friends - warm, funny, smart, awesome women. Last night I went out for "girls night," a casual dinner and wine tasting at a local haunt. It's been forever since I did something like this. While we talked about lots of things, at one point, the conversation turned to bras and turned sharply to boobs. Ladies night out, indeed.

Between the 10 of us, we have well over 150 years of brassiere wearing experience. Yet, despite our assumed expertise on the topic, no one had a solid recommendation about the best bra on the market. We might as well have been rating jock straps or garden hoses, no one felt strongly enough about the matter to be able to tell a friend. There we were, ambivalent and to a degree, dissatisfied about nearly all bras for some reason or another.

In the past, I was tempted to try out the Spanx bra, a kind of revolutionary undergarment that seems to me, very 21st Century. Despite the fact that I've spent more money on clothing items I've barely worn, I just can never justify the $62 price tag. For you toothpicks and string beans out there, Spanx is a line of slimming undergarments designed for those of us who want to tighten up various body parts without actually exercising or dieting. They are, coincidentally, a life saver (and much sleeker and more comfortable than a rubber girdle).

Many women, myself included, also expressed an unwelcome anxiety associated with bra shopping, citing (oddly) two uncomfortable customer service experiences with meddling Russian salesladies. Given how self-conscious the shopping experience is, I know that I have just picked the best of the worst to escape the store and be done with the confounded chore.

Even though I didn't leave the evening with any special tips or insight into the issue, sometimes it's nice to be in a like-minded company of sisters.

An Editor's Meeting

Generally speaking, I've never shaken my youthful wanderlust. In fact, as I've aged, hitting the road has become a more frequent practice as I now have greater means and cause to roam.

For me, there's a special and almost equal pleasure in both visiting and revisiting places. I'm not claiming this as some earth shattering original observation, but all travelers know that in returning to visited city from one's past, it is often easier to spot the changes in yourself than the geography of the urban landscape. I believe that there's always a new adventure to be had on familiar terrain.

True to form, 2009 is already a year marked and defined by travel. In the past three months, my husband and I have crisscrossed the country visiting our relatives in Las Vegas, Scottsdale, and now Boston. This most recent weekend brought us to a symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While P completed his obligations, I was left with a very open schedule, ideal for leisure and play. On Friday, I met one of my closest friends from college (a frequent co-contributor / editor to this blog). In a sense, considering that we were both playing hooky from our professional obligations, we forgave ourselves from letting another week lapse without a CM post. We did TALK about the blog over our Wagamama lunch, taking stock of where we are and thinking about the future.

While we haven't been entirely faithful in our pledge to post weekly, one of the main reasons we launched this blog was to deepen the dialogue between friends separated across the miles. Our shared creative venture is a way to get beyond the brevity of a text message or dashed off email and move toward something more substantive. For me, I can say that it has been nice to write something that is not purely utilitarian - something that I know a handful of friends will read.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I want to make it clear that we're not claiming any great literary genius here. It's not that we shun the superficial - in fact we've done the opposite - we've taken the care and time to explore topics from the Octomom to sweatpants, but we've done so in more thoughtful, painstaking depth. My friend and I are both a little disappointed not to have a larger community of contributors, but it's good to have a goal and vision for the future.

In Defense of Self-Indulgence

Friday again? Already? Seriously?

As I write, I am consciously adrift amidst a pervasive social fad - it's like Lance Armstrong yellow bracelets and business people talking about "synergy." Every time you turn around, there it is. I've read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and I know all about how some ideas/phenomena are "sticky" and take off once the right people endorse them. Ask Gladwell, fads, like germy epidemics, spread.

The fad in question is the "25 Things You Don't Know About Me" lists that have saturated Facebook in-boxes and consumed, according to Time, at least 800,000 hours of America's time (to write the lists) and easily more reading them. This article bashes the lists, labeling them a self-indulgent, useless exercise in over-sharing. Based on simple arithmetic, the article claims that over 125 million facts have been shared in the process and to a pointless end. Unarguably, this fad has long surpassed the tipping point and landed clear on the other side. The "25 Things" is the bubonic plague of social fads.

Let's dig deeper and think about why.

What's neat about self-disclosure is that when one person reveals an intimate detail about themselves, a respondent is triggered to respond with similarly telling fact. Remember the last time a relative stranger or a casual colleague divulged a personal tidbit? He tells you that he had lost a parent to a particularly painful battle with cancer; she had struggled with depression or substance abuse; or his relationship had hit a particularly rocky patch. What do you do?

My guess is that you do one of two things. A) You usually respond with empathy, state "I've been there," and cite a relevant personal experience. Or, B) Even if you can't relate to exactly what the person said, you mention, "I've had my struggles too" and reveal a telling anecdote. These lists spark that innate human reciprocity of sharing information.

Sitting down to write the list might not be the ego-stroking exercise in self-love Time accuses it of being - it could be guilt. The guilt that comes from knowing that your friends have taken the time and care and thought to put themselves out there and you've consumed it without lobbing back a volley.

Considering that when you post your list, you are suppose to "tag" 25 other virtual friends and invite them to share their own list openly acknowledges that peer pressure plays a role in perpetuating the trend. But given that people love to talk about themselves, how much prodding does it really take? We'll never know for sure, but would the lists have taken off with the tagging?

Even if it is self-indulgent practice, a fact I don't wholly dispute, the voyeur in me has taken great pleasure in the lists. As soon as someone posts one, I feel magnetically compelled to read it. I might even re-read it later in the day. One of the more interesting things about social networks, online activities, and blogs is that they play an important role in how we create and express our identities. We make choices to reveal certain personal (private) facts on the assumption that readers assemble interpretations thusly.

When teaching an introductory course on Interpersonal Communication a few years back, I spent some time discussing identity and where it comes from. One's public identity is a construction. Who you are, in part, extends from who you say you are. On one level, these lists codify the process of individuals taking an active role and controlling how they are viewed. For me, it's curious to see what kinds of facts people choose to include or exclude (lots of memories about the glory days?), what they deem important enough to say (is it deep stuff or favorite ice flavors and colors), and what they are oddly compelled to share (any TMI moments?).

But from these lists I am actually learning things. I've discovered many unexpected parallels that have further linked me to my friends. These are quirky little things that we have in common and that might have long remained discovered. The lists beg for comments, serve as invitations to rehash old memories, and vehicles to snigger about inside jokes. They act as conversation starters. While they begin as one-sided personal statements, they quickly morph into dialogues.

There's an unspoken irony about this kind of meta-blogging about self-disclosure and the impulse to share. I feel guilty reading the blogs of social acquaintances when they don't know I read the blog. I mean, you write a blog, you put it out there, you expect readers. There's less anxiety for me if I am reading the blog of a stranger. I've never successfully crossed the line and express my dedication, near obsession, or interest in their lives - for fear of coming across as a stalker or having a perverse curiosity for people/things I shouldn't. A perk about the list is that it's an acknowledged forum for revealing the secrets of selfhood.

So, are the lists bringing people together or fixing the nation's problems? Probably not, or not in any significant way. But I think that the popularity of the lists can be attributed to our desires to be known in ways we devise and construct these mediated self-identities. It's a collective process. The writer needs to put it out there for the reader to stitch together. Us bloggers have been engaged in this work for years, in some cases. The rest of the world is just catching up, 25 facts at a time.

Addendum: Apparently writing about the 25 Things list IS the new 25 things list, according to Gawker.