Dinner at Luigi’s before the show. I go with the taglierini con porcini and Dawn with the rigatoni all’arabbiata. We get a very decent carafe of pinot grigio, although I worry that only a 1/2 liter of wine isn’t going to be enough if we’re used to having a regular 750 ml bottle with dinner when we go out. But it does just fine. I pace myself for once.

The Kirov coming to the Kennedy Center and doing La Bayadére is a much bigger deal than I had realized. This is the first time they’re doing the full version in Washington. When we got the tickets I was simply pleased that we were seeing La Bayadére again, having seen ABT’s version a couple of years ago. But this is the real deal, the real thing, with ABT’s being merely some sort of bastard cousin. I’m generally hopeless at remembering what we’re seeing or what we’ve seen, and I’ve often gotten La Bayadére confused with Le Corsaire. I know we’ve seen Le Corsaire as well, although I don’t remember if we saw the Kirov do it or ABT. One of them had boats, I remember. I keep picturing Luis Torres as Conrad, but that can’t be right. Maybe it was Marcelo Gomes.

I will now, though, always always remember the Kirov’s La Bayadére.

It’s funny what a mess it all is, for the most part. Starts out with Solor and Nikiya already in love. Then the Rajah goes and betroths Solor to Gamzatti. Solor just kind of goes with the flow on this as well, even though he’s sworn his fidelity to Nikiya over the sacred fire. Bastard. Then there’s drama. It’s the third act when all the business is all over where the dancing for no reason other than dancing really gets going.

Viktoria Tereshkina dances Nikiya. She’s got kinda big floppy feet and hyper-extended knees for my tastes. The treat for me is Irina Golub as Gamzatti. (That’s her picture there in the dictionary under cup-cake.) She spends the first two acts just acting, in heels, not donning her pointe shoes until the third act. Being a cupcake, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. And it’s possibly the cupcake factor which makes me more sympathetic to Gamzatti than maybe I’m supposed to be, although in her defense I will point out that she offers fabulous jewels to Nikiya, quite pleadingly, not just once but twice. And Nikiya does try to stab her. And I like to think that Gamzatti doesn’t know anything about the poisonous snake hidden in the flowers.

Is the opening of the third act which is the real star of the show, of course. The Kingdom of the Shades. Hypnotizing, mesmerizing, utterly dazzling, life-changing unforgettable. I’m like a caveman with words here, unable to express how transcendent it is.

Pretty typical for a Saturday morning, we’re up early to go work out. We’re up a little earlier even, a little before 7:30 a.m. Usually we get up closer to eight.

We’re getting ready to leave the house around 9:30, but I notice that the front tire on my bike is flat. I made it home just fine Thursday night; not sure why it’s flat now. So I try pumping it back up before I think about putting in a new tube. It pumps up to 80 psi, but I watch as the pressure gauge slowly sinks. This baby ain’t holding air. I’m gonna have to change it.

As I’m standing there contemplating all this, the tire blows out. I shut my eyes at the huge bang, as I’m quite naturally startled and not sure for the first few milliseconds just what has happened. I figure it out pretty quickly though. Dawn is waiting outside for me. She’s heard it too, but figures it’s just a random gunshot or something from the neighborhood. She doesn’t know it’s come from inside the house. Our cat Evie has been sitting by me, by the bike, this whole time. She seems completely unconcerned. Our other cat Gwen would’ve jumped about three feet in the air and dashed upstairs. Evie is either braver or dumber. Maybe both.

Other thing is, is that this was a puncture resistant tube. Apparently that means it’s filled with goo. And said goo has been flung all over the living room. I notice it on the couch first. It’s a new couch, so I run to get some paper towels to clean up quickly. There’s some sort of stain resistant coating or something on the couch, though. Cleans up easily. Next I notice the TV screen is coated. I clean that off too.

For the next couple of days I’ll keep discovering new areas of goo coatings. Other areas of my bike. The right shoulder of my barn coat. The ooze cleans up a lot easier right away. A day or two later and it’s not so easy to remove.

Since 5starjoe bails at the last minute, I get 3pennyjane all to myself yet again. But I do have the added pressure of picking a place. There’s apparently this new scheme where we don’t all sort of decide where we’re going, but more that someone has to nominate a place. And this week it’s my turn to nominate. So I go tooling through Yahoo yellow pages, looking at restaurants in an ever widening circle from the office. And I see Levante’s and immediately know it’s the place.

Although I check their website and discover that it’s a chain. I mean, I knew there was one in Bethesda and this one up the street just below Dupont Circle. But apparently it’s bigger than that. Says that it’s a successful chain in Europe. These locations evidently represent the vanguard of the assault on the Americas. It kinda makes me want to eat there less, but then I decide that that’s snobbery. So I still support the choice.

It’s nicer inside than I remember the Bethesda location being, when I went there with Erin Sellman and her sister Andrea, lo these 8 or 9 years ago now. I’m in jeans, since it’s Friday, even though we’re not supposed to be wearing jeans today since there’s committee meetings all this week. I’m one of two in the office who seemed to have fucked up this way. Although in his defense, the other guy is wearing a tie. But it’s with jeans, which I think calls attention to his jeans more than not wearing a tie would. Plus, his jeans are stone-washed, whereas mine are comfortably dark, much less notice-able. And he’s on the second floor, right in line with the large conference room, and I’m hidden up here on the seventh floor.

The point is that I’m in jeans and I feel a little under-dressed in here, while 3pj is lovely and appropriately dressed. But it’s lunch time, and I’m evidently wearing nice enough jeans, since they seat us.

We’re talking about the Colbert portrait currently hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. I’m such a yob; I’ve never ever been to the National Portrait Gallery. And I think it would be, I don’t know, the height of hypocrisy to go just for the Colbert portrait, although 3pj disagrees. She also notes that there are long lines, people waiting to have their picture taken with the portrait.

And also to my credit here I would like to point out that I’ve been planning on going to this museum. It was closed for a couple of years and has only recently reopened. I was on their website just yesterday, looking to see if they had anything by Chuck Close, even, and planning on a visit.

3PJ mentions that she went to a Joseph Cornell exhibit there last year. Man, that woulda been way cool to see. I mostly know his work from reading the standard popular biography, Deborah Solomon’s Utopia Parkway.

3PJ has the lentil soup and the kaser pide. Neither of us is sure how to pronounce the latter. I guess pide is enough like pita that maybe one couldn’t go too far wrong just saying that. And as for kaser, I think of it like kaiser. Maybe it’s like Turkish for emperor or something. (A little later research tells me it’s like the Greek kaseri cheese, if that’s any help.) I’m a little overwhelmed by the menu, so I go with the day’s special, a seafood stew and an entree of rockfish, which entree comes with small potatoes and giant asparagus.

I get the yearly email from Ringling, announcing the circus coming to town. And this year we get Bello! Hooray!

Wait. Wait a minute. Okay, says here they’re in Baltimore, then to DC to the Verizon Center, then out to Fairfax to the Patriot Center. Then up to NYC Madison Square Garden? Where’s the DC Armory? Two blocks from my house. When are they coming there? When is Bello coming to my neighborhood?

Answer: he isn’t. No Armory shows this year. And I actually get upset. Almost physically ill. A real sinking feeling in the pit of my gut.

And I don’t want to go the Verizon Center or any big hockey arena to see the circus. I love the circus at the Armory. It’s big enough for the high wire act, but small enough to actually see, you know?

Alas, no Bello for me this year.

So, apparently i Ricchi moved, some years ago. I remember going there when it was on I Street. Or maybe I just remember making reservations for Larry Garrett there, when I was his secretary. But I seem to remember we, the OFTS admin staff, went there for some function once. Ah, well. Doesn’t really matter.

When we get here today I do specifically remember having come with the ASH senior staff for some function, maybe Marty’s birthday. We sat in a private room way back somewhere, having to go past the kitchen and kitchen staff like gangsters or something. Today we’re in the little dining room across from the kitchen.

Our waiter is Carlos, and as soon as I’m friendly with him 5starjoe & 3pennyjane start to laugh and tell me to back off. Funny guys. And here I’d been planning on getting a glass of the Sant’ Elena pinot grigio in 3PJ’s honor. But they only have it by the bottle anyway. We’re not getting a bottle of wine for lunch. They get ice water and I go with the sparkling.

They don’t have like a special restaurant week menu; rather, it just contains certain items from the regular menu. I go with the pappa al pomodoro, Florentine tomato soup, as does 3pj. 5*J opts for the risotto, since he’s wearing a white shirt and doesn’t want to also be wearing tomato soup. So I tell a version of the famous joke:

Navy guy and a Marine are in the mens room. The Marine finishes, zips up, and goes to walk out the door. “Hey,” the Navy guy says. “In the Navy they teach us to wash our hands after we go to the bathroom.” The Marine replies, “Yeah, well, in the Marines they teach us not to piss on our hands.”

This leads to 5*j mentioning this movie with Jane Fonda that he rented or saw on cable or something where Jane Fonda’s character complains that all of the men lately that she’s met have for some weird reason decided to tell a dirty joke on the first date. I think he mentions that her next date, with Rod Taylor, goes the same way, so she walks out. So 3pj counters with a story of a man she knows who had a woman, on a date, tell him that he had perfect abs off of which to snort coke, in reply to which he threw the woman out of his apartment. So this leads me to mention that somewhere in life or literature along the way I picked up the understanding that the height of decadence would be snorting heroin off of little boys’ bare asses in Bangkok, and that I did in fact mention this once on a first date.

(Later I discuss with 3pj the absolute horrors of human trafficking and sexual tourism, especially in Bangkok. And I feel bad about joking about it.)

5*J mentions a disastrous first (and only) date, where he knew that she was going to say that she liked going to Club Five. That’s right next door to 18th Street Lounge, site of that first date with mention of snorting heroin off of little boys. (Although in fact mention of said depravity was later, back at her place, on the front steps of her apartment building.)

As for entrees, they both get the pork loin, whereas I go with the salmon. We all get the tart for dessert. I try to get a copy of the menu from the manager as we’re leaving, but he seems to lack any interest whatsoever in helping me. So I leave without.

It’s restaurant week.

We’ve kinda had this regular Friday thing going, 3pennyjane and 5starjoe and me. Started as a small holiday lunch, Friday before Christmas, but 5_*j was out so it was just 3pj and me at Luigi’s. Then the next week we went with 5_*j to Mackey’s. So then it became this regular thing. Last week it was Penang.

But, like I said, it’s restaurant week in DC this week, so 3pj researches and comes up with two options, in lieu of Vidalia on Friday, which has no tables, no room at the inn. One is Vidalia on Tuesday; other is i Ricchi on Friday. I immediately declare, in the spirit of Solomon, that it should be both.

3PJ agrees, but 5_*j has like some work or something to do. So I get 3pj all to myself today. This more than makes up for the fact that we can’t get a table until two o’clock. I’m like Jack dining with the gunroom, grumbly with hunger by the time we sit down.

3PJ starts off with the wild mushroom soup⁰, which is a “creamy purée with red wine-truffle emulsion¹ and house cured shoat² pancetta³.” I go for the seasonal lettuce blend, which I generally just call the salad, that’s apparently a “roulade⁴ of hazelnuts, brad’s goat cheese, dried apricots, fines herbes and champagne vinaigrette.” 3PJ then has the roasted briar hollow farm rabbit leg, “with ginger-carrot purée, heirloom onions, herbed spaetzle⁵ and amish mustard-rabbit emulsion⁶.” I go with the cape hatteras stew, which has “octopus, mussels, shrimp and oysters with heirloom beans, preserved tomatoes⁷, croutons and saffron-mussel broth.” For dessert we both have the vanilla bean cake, layered with strawberry-champagne jam, valhrona⁸ white chocolate mousse and poppy seed crème anglaise⁹.

I mean to get wine, but I chicken out. 3PJ gets the ginger cola. Possibly Blenheim’s, but I don’t remember now. I get the Cricket Cola, even though the waiter warns me away from it. Tastes awful, he says.

I have been to Vidalia once before, years ago, with Erin Sellman and Don & Gloria, I believe. Looks nothing like I remember it. I seem to remember it as one big room, whereas now it’s broken up into different sections. I like it, mind. It’s very nice. Nicer than I remember actually. Still way out of my price range, my league, my class, usually. So it’s nice to come, to splurge, blow some Christmas money.

⁰ All of the descriptions reflect that the entire menu is in lower case, so certain things that I would assume to be proper nouns are not capitalized. But I imagine that it’d have been Brad’s goat cheese, Amish mustard-rabbit emulsions, Cape Hatteras stew, and Valrhona white chocolate mousse.

¹ An emulsion in general is a mixture of two things which can’t be mixed. In food terms, let’s say like with oil and water. Oil and water famously don’t mix, of course, but shake them together and they seem sort of mixed-ish, for a while anyway. So to emulsify something is to disperse the one substance within the other. They’re technically not really mixed, even though for our purposes here, say eating them, they’re mixed. Here, specifically, they’re serving a red wine-truffle emulsion. One imagines the truffles dispersed throughout the red wine. What else would you call it?

² A shoat is a young, weaned pig. They claim that it’s house cured, although I’d go with the hyphen, house-cured, here. Either way, they’re somehow doing it on the premises. Is what they’re saying, anyway. We won’t go so far as to assume that they’re also, say, slaughtering the little fellows here.

³ Pancetta is cured belly of pork. An Italian thing. And not just any belly in this case, but of the aforementioned young, weaned pig, remember. But the -etta seems to denote that as well, the diminutive, the little one. And think of the panc- part as like paunch. Paunch like belly. So, little paunchy. Or, better yet, lil’ paunchy, how about?

⁴ In music, a roulade is a quick succession of notes sung as one syllable. In cooking, it’s some sort of filling rolled up in something else. Either way, the name’s from the French rouler, to roll. I guess the musical use suggests rolling off the tongue or something. On my plate today it’s like a daub of cheese, evidently from a goat, and possibly made by somebody named Brad. Unless they mean that the whole thing is a roulade in the sense that it’s tossed. Could go either way here.

⁵ Spaetzle (or spatzles) are German noodles or dumplings, in this case dumplings. The name comes from the German for little sparrows. They look like tiny gnocchi, which name comes from the Italian for knots, as in knots in wood.

⁶ See ¹. Not sure if the mustard or the rabbit or the emulsion itself is Amish. Or I suppose you can imagine some Amish dude suspended in mustard, if that’s your thing.

⁷ Preserved tomatoes sounds so much ritzier than canned, don’t you think? I like it also since it’s Killick’s first name. Honest to God.

⁸ I believe they mean Valrhona here, transposing the r and the h. It’s a French brand of chocolate.

⁹ Literally English cream, although it’s in fact a light custard. A custard has cream, of course, as a basic ingredient, but it necessarily involves mixing with eggs as well. The word custard seems to come from some sort of bastardization of crustade. (The OED in fact calls it a perverted form of crustade. Kinky, yeah?) And that comes originally from the French for crust, of course. It was originally a sort of pie, with the c/r/ust/ard on top.

(And all of the preceding smart tidbits are courtesy of research in the OED. I didn’t know any of this stuff.)

We drink a lot of diet soda at home. Pretty much the various iterations of Diet Coke. There’s the regular Diet Coke for Dawn on weekend mornings. For me it’s the Lime Diet Coke. And then there’s the caffeine-free for evenings. It’s kinda like the lazy man’s coffee, something a little bitter and sweet in the mornings or after dinner.

So anyway, Coke has this promotion called My Coke Rewards, where products have this code that you type into their website. It’s like totally tracking everything you drink. Creepy and Orwellian, no doubt. But hey, they’ve got swag in return. Each twelve pack of sodas has a code for ten points, and now after twelve-hundred-some points, I cash in for my prize.

It’s your basic 50mm refractor. You could buy it for like $44 or so. But, hey, in my book, it’s free. Cause I drink Coke, man.

I totally have to set it up on the back porch as soon as I get home. It’s pretty cloudy, though. I can only find like three stars out total, I have no idea which though, without other stars for context. I know Mars is out pretty bright these days, so maybe one of them’s that. I haven’t even calibrated the spotter scope with the main objective lens yet, so I can’t even find them anyway. But still, it’s great fun to have a telescope.

Someday maybe when I’m old and retired and we’re living someplace farther away from bright city lights, it’ll be more useful. Or anyway, I’ll take it down to Newnan GA when we go for Thanksgiving this year. Out on the farm in the middle of nowhere, it ought to be of some more use. And when I’m old and retired I’ll probably invest in like a six-inch reflector with an equatorial mount. But, again, for now, this little baby’s fine. And free, remember?