[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid: December 28, 2007]
Regular readers will recall that last week I retired ill and disgruntled at the intermission of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, cursing my groaning bronchii and amazed the theater had no bar.
The holiday season of 1997 never really recovered for me. I suffered through a few hours of work on Christmas Eve, then took to bed with a beaker of Wild Turkey. My mood is indicated by a few lines from the German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs inscribed on my diary's page for Christmas Day:
"...I set my foot fearful
On the quivering string
Of a death already begun."
Not exactly "Jingle Bells".
Nevertheless, with superhuman effort I kept an engagement for Christmas Dinner in the rinky-dink dining room of the Plaza Athenée. I dined with a colleague and his future wife, who ominously eschewed meat, alcohol and any manner of levity on even this festive occasion. I had primed myself with a flute of Perrier-Jouët in the bar, surrounded by a boisterous party of Australian tourists.
The hotel dining room was also then operating as a restaurant, Le Régence, and indeed Daniel Boulud and L'Absinthe's Jean-Michel Bergougnoux had each cooked there in the past. The Christmas menu was short, classic, and competently prepared. A "medley" of foie gras and smoked goose breast came with black truffles; beef tenderloin was cooked rare and served over a red wine reduction. The dessert was a seasonally apt chestnut soufflée. I needed a marc de Bourgogne to steel me for the chill walk home.
And I'm afraid it's mainly misery from that point on. Flat on my back with a copy of William Burroughs' early novel Queer, my diary tells me I ate out of cans the next day. On December 27, I forced myself out to buy some books, and took supper at the modest but inoffensive theater district veteran, René Pujol. My ability to go out to dinner, while clearly pretty sick, deserved some sort of medal.
The Pujol restaurant is one of the few in the city which has, over the years, served an edible cassoulet. I ate this with a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape after a bowl of vegetable soup, and - continuing to treat my infirmity with strong spirits - finished by pairing pear tart with Poire William, lame pun intended.
Let is sleet, let it sleet...and I paid for my indomitability with three straight days laid up, watching foul weather batter against the window, gazing at a book of Walter Sickert's mournful paintings and thumbing through back copies of an obscure London anarcho-punk fanzine called Vague, no doubt wishing I was ten years younger and a thousand miles away.
