Magnolia X Soulangiana

Saucer Magnolias in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY
Saucer Magnolias in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY

They call these Saucer Magnolias or Magnolia x soulangiana in Latin. Peggi is always looking at the little tags that the park people affix to the trees. She’ll recite Latin phrases all the way home so she can Google unusual tree specimens. It’s not surprising the Vatican still uses Latin when they want to shuffle sex offenders around. I hope they’re not done kicking the pope around. I want to see him cry “uncle” and make some changes to their men’s club.

Martin Edic sent us a link to a lady DJ who uses two iPads. I noticed YouTube has upped their limit to the size of movie uploads and this video Martin sent was about seventeen minutes long. What happened to that ten minute limit? The link made for a nice afternoon break.

I stuck the Facebook “Like logo” in my sidebar and clicked the blue thumb. I keep catching myself giving that goofy thumbs up sign. I gave it to James Nichols last night after a few songs. He sat in with the band and sounded great on the grand piano. Bob was off mending his back. Our neighbors have a house concert tomorrow and we might have dragged our feet too long because I heard it was sold out.

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Spring As A Cliche

Springtime Durand Eastman Park Rochester, NY 2010
Springtime Durand Eastman Park Rochester, NY 2010

The lilacs in our yard are blooming. Their appearance is considerably ahead of most other years. Nothing would make me happier than seeing the lilacs come and go before the announced start of Rochester’s Lilac Festival. I’m old school that way. Let nature decide when the lilacs will be in bloom. Don’t go booking all these bands in the Bowl and sad arts & crafts shows and fried dough vendors that stink up the park to coincide with such a beautiful display of these fragrant purple flowers.

Bob Martin threw his back out so he won’t be at tonight’s Margaret Explosion gig. We called Jack to see if he wanted to sit in again but he and his son are going to see Neil Innes from Monty Python. It’s his son’s idea. Last week Jack took his guitar out his case and realized his son had borrowed his guitar strap so he played sitting down. I think this guy, James, will be sitting in on piano tonight so it should be fun.

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Goodbye Ruth

Paul Dodd in High School play at RL Thomas
Paul Dodd in High School play at RL Thomas

Ruth Bair, the drama teacher at R.L. Thomas, was so sweet. Irene (Palermo) emailed me that she had died and calling hours were held for her last night on Empire Boulevard. I learned that she continued teaching special needs children at St. Joseph’s Villa after her retirement. I too had special needs when she attempted to crack through my numbskull high school zombie state and on some level she succeeded.

She was an “open study hall” monitor when I met her and she decided I should be the lead in the upcoming production of “Teahouse of the August Moon”. I had never acted or even though of doing so. I was more of a clown although the real honors for that went to Jeff Munson.

I had a hard time taking the whole thing seriously and could not remember my lines. In a dress rehearsal before schoolmates I bounced from the first act to the third taking the entire cast with me and had to free associate to get back to the first act. I remember the drama assistant, Miss Brenda Dockery, taking me into her office to sit me down and look me straight in the eye and stress how important it was to the whole cast that I get serious and learn my lines. Somehow I got through but I know I was bad.

Ruth was fun loving and brave. She let us borrow her car during study hall. I remember taking it airborne on Pellet Road and slamming the bottom on the road on decent and then stopping at the Satellite on Ridge Road for a burger. But mostly I remember her making a real connection. Not many teachers could do this.

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Record Day

Local records section at Bop Shop Records in Rochester, New York
Local records section at Bop Shop Records in Rochester, New York

I’d rather think of of “Record Store Day” as record day. It sounds more fun than supporting a dying business model. And it was fun. Bop Shop had two turntables set up in the atrium and the Modern Lovers first record cranked when we walked in. We saw old friends plowing through boxes of vinyl and got caught up in all. Every record in the old Bohdi’s Café space was one dollar. We came home with “Guitars Ala Lee”, Debussy “Nocturnes, Wagner Preludes and Overtures, Carpenters “Close To You”, Toscanini conducting Wagner’s “Good Friday Spell”., Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary, “South Pacific”, Lesly Gore’s “Love Me by Name” with a picture of her on the cover looking like Bowie’s Alladin Sane and something called “A Bunch of Bongos.”

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Prom Night

Deer parts in the woods
Deer parts in the woods

A piano player named James sat in with Margaret Explosion last night. He sounded great and he had a good time so he will probably be back next Wednesday. Bob Martin was in Las Vegas for a trade show so Jack Schaefer played guitar and bass clarinet. We fell into another prom night thing (I’ve posted the last one below) and it went over really well. I had my eyes closed and half expected to see people slow dancing when I opened them.

We found the bones shown above on the left on one side of the creek and the ones on the right on the other. What looked like the head of a strange animal turned out to be the back end of a deer. When we flipped them both 180 the entire rib cage fell into place. You can see the saw marks in the skull from where a rackaholic cut off the deer’s rack.

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Urban Realists

Detail of a Rembrandt self portrait etching at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY
Detail of a Rembrandt self portrait etching at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY

Peggi dropped me off at Culver and Clifford right in front of the church my parents were married in. She was headed out to her mom’s and I took off on my bike to meet Scott Regan at the Memorial Art Gallery. Scott suggested we walk through the Memorial Art Gallery together after we had a an engaging discussion at the the Little Theater one night. I casually mentioned that I liked the little abstracts on the wall and he pushed me to explain why. I told him I don’t usually try to explain why I like something. I just respond in a flash. Of course some things are acquired tastes but Scott is more reasoned. Abstract art is usually not reasoned although Kirk Varnedoe made a pretty good argument in his brilliant “Pictures of Nothing” book that it is.

Scott had just come from a photo session for an upcoming profile in “Lake Affect” Magazine and he had to be somewhere else in an hour and half so we got right down to business. We started in the gallery store looking at Janet Williams’ posters from her Primordial Flea Market Series. The posters bother me because someone has added type to reproductions of her absolutely beautiful paintings. Absolute doesn’t need any more. I asked if they still had any of the paintings and they did in the back room. We were allowed to go back there for a few precious minutes.

Down the hall where the gallery staff sometimes display their new acquisitions we stopped at a beautiful abstract wood cut print by a Japanese fellow. Can’t remember who it was by. I’m slow with names. Scott again asked me, “Why do you respond so favorably to this”? I felt like I was explaining the obvious but of course it is not that simple. Did I really say, “I find it delightful”? On down the hall past the hideous fireplace mural recreation to the Lockhart Gallery for the Rembrandt etching show. We both agreed he is our favorite artist, hands down. Whether he’s sketching the country side or a constructing devilish self portrait he is masterful.

Scott suggest we go upstairs and we spent some time analyzing paintings from the 1800’s before studying the “Urban Realists” from the early part of this last century. Someone came over and asked us to keep at least six inches away from the paintings. He said the people behind the camera were going crazy as we gestured. He pointed up to the ceiling. I wondered why we didn’t see any guards hanging around.

We only saved a few minutes for the modern collection which is where I usually spend most of my time. Peggi and I had just watched a beutiful Alfred Stieglitz documentary and it was fun to see paintings from his stable of artists lined up there. Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Georgia OKeefe. On the way out the door we stopped in the “This Is A Series” show in the gallery of the Creative Workshop. I have three paintings down there, one of which I am still uncertain about and Scott helped me sort that out.

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Action Items

Cellino & Barnes billboard on Atlantic Avenue in Rochester, NY
Cellino & Barnes billboard on Atlantic Avenue in Rochester, NY

My father used to take us down to this section of tracks (click photo for enlargement) so we could watch the trains. It was just a short walk from our house but it seemed a world away. I think about that every time I ride my bike down Atlantic Avenue. Bike riding is conducive to thinking and dreaming and contemplating billboards. How do these two guys have “Over 50 Years?” Is that combined or did somebody do a good airbrush job. I went to their state of the art lawyer site.

I picked up our taxes at Steve Friga’s office andthe secratary had everything all laid out for me. There were little red flags on the edges of papers that needed to be signed and she gave had a self addressed, stamped envelope prepared for me to send back with the check for their services. She even made a short list of these tasks. She called them “action items”. I was knocked out by her organizational skills. It was probably painfully obvious that I lack these skills.

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Free Food

Fixing Leo's fence to keep the deer out
Fixing Leo’s fence to keep the deer out

I suspect Pete and Shelley usually go to bed shortly after sunset and then they are probably up with the dawn. That would only be natural if you lived up in the woods off the grid. But when they come to Rochester all that goes out the window. We were up til two on Wednesday and Thursday and then well past three on Friday.

Most of that time was spent around the table talking although we did duck out for smoked trout at Rick and Monica’s and to see/hear Watkins & the Rapiers at the Little. Guitarist, Steve Piper, was wearing a Margaret Explosion t-shirt. With seven guys in the band it was hard to hear the lyrics and that is where the charm is. I brought the iPad with us to play music in the car and I didn’t want to leave it in the car so I brought in with us. Because we don’t have a case or anything it was spotted immediately and then passed around two tables. I’m pretty sure Apple has a hit on its hands with his thing.

We slept like babies last night and spent most of the day repairing the fence in Leo’s garden so we can keep the deer and rabbits away from our plants. The mint and chives and rhubarb are all up over there. With a little digging we found potatoes and parsnips from last year and had the potatoes for dinner. Rick caught a trout in Irondequoit Bay and gave us a fillet for tomorrow’s dinner. We are a little uncertain about eating big old parsnips and Bay trout but we will probably go for it.

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Club Joker

Old biker bar on Lake Avenue in Rochester New York
Old biker bar on Lake Avenue in Rochester New York

Trish, who’s married to one of the letters in “LDR” down at the Char Pit in Charlotte, says they tried to burn this old biker bar building down but it didn’t work. It’s a few doors down from the LDR and it looks like a Hollywood set. This whole part of town is kind of funky but LDR was hoppin’ when we stopped by for a Friday fish fry.

Pete LaBonne is visiting. He played with Margaret Explosion on Wednesday and has been preparing his 24 album “Gigunda” set for a digital release, 320 variable bit mp3s with the original cover art. I put a track from 1994 below. It’s sort of rude.

We watched the T.A.M.I. show dvd Wednesday and then again last night over in Rick and Monica’s basement. That thing is exhilarating. Watching James Brown I was thinking about how the husband of a childhood friend of Peggi’s. He was a huge fan of the Detroit Red Wings and had a heart attack while watching one of their games. The doctor ordered him not to watch any more games.

Here’s Pete LaBonne – Club Joker Is Wild

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Horse, Rooster & Goat

Horse Rooster Goat Paintings
Horse Rooster Goat Paintings at the Creative Workshop Gallery in Rochester, NY

Our painting class took a two week break and resumed last night. There is a new show up down there in the gallery called “This Is A Series.” Most of the paintings are in threes and I have some crime faces one of the walls. I particularly like these three.

We walked in the woods today in the pouring rain and we noticed that animals really don’t give a hoot about whether its raining or not. We saw a couple of ducks, colorful mail and a brown female and then a groundhog going about his business. We interrupted a deer who was grazing and then came out on the golf course. It was especially green. I took a photo of Peggi in her slicker. We have matching slickers. I found a golf ball with a Guinness logo on it. I took that as a sign of good luck.

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Butterball

Stella on her back
Stella on her back

Stella weighed eighteen pounds last year. This photo was taken back then. She couldn’t even clean her butt. I just put her on the scale. Actually I got on the scale with her in my arms while she meowed. And then I weighed myself without Stella. She weighs 12 and half pounds.

No secret to her diet. She’s an indoor cat and we only put a third of can out in the morning and then a quarter cup of dry out at night. We weren’t able to control her weight when Ornette was alive because he was an active outdoor cat. He’d push the door open and chow down and run back outside. So we had to have food on hand at all times. We miss him.

Stella goes out in the morning for a few minutes but if one the neighbors makes a noise she comes to the door demanding to be let in immediately. She still sleeps most of the day but if he is awake for two hours that would be twice as many waking hours as when she was fat. Despite the new profile we still call her “Stelly Belly” and “Butterball”.

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La Cucuracha

Swans prepare nest in pond in Trott Lake at Durand
Swans prepare nest in pond in Trott Lake at Durand

After reading the “They Gay?” article about pets I can’t be too sure exactly what is going on here but what I think we’re watching a male swan prepare the nest for his Mrs. He was yanking these dry weeds out by the roots and piling them up on the nest while his lady worked the material under her butt.

Spring is moving in so fast it is going to be over with before we know it. We took a walk early then knocked out a backlog of work. We did a print ad for the Bop Shop for the Jazz Fest brochure and we airbrushed a a photo of the Stone Tolan house for a brochure the Landmark Society is putting together. And we did a layout for a new website, our second shopping cart set-up with the Russians (X-Cart). They use funny names for portions of the site that you need to customize to make it your own. They call the nav bar the “Speed Bar”. And when you want to add your own html content to pages within the data base framework you go into the “Languages’ section. They charge for customer support so we spend hours duking it out rather than paying.

We had Easter dinner at my sister’s and played Wii Music with our nephews. Peggi played guitar and I played percussion on a wild version of La Cucuracha. We passed the iPad around and my father wants one. We knew how easy it was import photos from iPhoto and music from iTunes but we were astounded how easy it was to set up our email accounts when we tried syncing with another computer. I bought the $9.99 Pages app this morning so I can have a program to work in when I’m not online. And my brother-in-law hooked me up with an WFMU app for streaming wacky music. I’m listening to Liza Minelli tear up “Stormy Weather” as I write this. In fact I entered this post from my iPad.

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Lamb Of God

Easter lamb to the slaughter at Palermo's on Culver Road in Rochester
Easter lamb to the slaughter at Palermo’s on Culver Road in Rochester

My grandfather was a butcher so there is something very comforting about this photo. I used to love seeing him behind the counter and he would always pull on the big tubes of liver-sausage out of the case and slice a few slabs for me. I stopped into Palermo’s to buy some olives. Of course I picked up a few impulse items like freshly made octopus salad. While I was studying the options I spotted the owner throwing a whole lamb on the cutting board and before I could get my camera out of my pocket he had cut it’s head off. That’s the head shown to the left up above.

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The Golden Age

I Pad launch at Best Buy in Rochester, New York

We watched “L’âge d’or”, a Buñuel movie from 1930, last night and I fell asleep before the extras. It was kind of bizarre. This from IMDB: “This film was granted a screening permit after being presented to the Board of Censors as the dream of a madman. Opening at Studio 28 in Paris in October 1930, word spread about the film’s bizarre content. On the evening of 3 December 1930, the fascist League of Patriots and other groups began (halfway through the film) to throw purple ink at the screen, then rushed out into the lobby of the theater, slashing paintings by Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Man Ray.” It didn’t make it’s US premiere until 1979.

I woke before the alarm this morning. We don’t usually set that but today was the official launch of Apple’s iPad. We cashed in some credit card point for Best Buy certificates and we were at the store at 8:30 with a thermos of coffee. Some kids in the front of the line were there at midnight but there only about twenty five people in line when we showed up. A store employee told the crowd that UPS had been there at eight and there would be enough for everybody. A couple of Best Buy employees went out to the Apple store to buy theirs before work. We heard hundreds were in two lines out there.

We had one in hands by 10AM and then headed downtown to look at an art show we had missed last night, a painting by Enrique Mora that the Philips Gallery used in their First Friday ad really caught my eye. The gallery didn’t open until noon.

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Yours Sincerely, Wasting Away

Love bicycle locked up in front of Village Gate
Love bicycle locked up in front of Village Gate

We had dinner with our friend and neighbor, Rick, and then raced downtown for the early show of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer“. The is over two hours so started at 6:30. We met Monica in the lobby. She had just come from her yoga class. And we took sets down front. We were a little late so it was sort of confusing at first but then moved along effortlessly. Polanski has made some of favorite movies, Knife in the Water, The Tenant, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, so was definitely not gonna be a “wait for Netflix.” He is a master in full control of this craft. Sparse but beautiful settings heighten the focus, rich characters whose performances stay with you when their parts have only a few lines and way of telling the story that lets all the movies that have gone before carry weight so you’re on the edge of your seat because you just know what’s coming and then something else happens. Ewan McGregor played a perfect ghost and even Pierce Brosnan was perfect.

We caught the second set of Miché and Scott Bradley at the Little and then headed over to Dick Storm’s 64th birthday celebration at the Flipside on East Main. Of course we all sang that McCartney song. And Jeff Spevak wrote about it all on the HerRochester page.

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Shrewd & Bone Headed

Margaret Explosion 50 Song Compendium to Live Dive
Margaret Explosion 50 Song Compendium to Live Dive

We’ve listened to a lot of live Margaret Explosion in the last month while we picked songs for this 50 Song Compendium to “Live Dive”. Once we settled on the fifty song we liked best we tried them out and in the last week bumped the sampling rate of the aiffs (wavs on the pc side) up to 320 variable bit and re-uploaded them. Even tweaked a few of the covers and launched the site today. We sent out a few emails and we’ll see if the server holds up. We’ve broken even with cd sales so now we’re giving away the store. A shrewd and bone headed marketing move.

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News Junkie Fix

Michigan Militia Christian Warriors
Michigan Militia Christian Warriors

These Christian warriors’ heads look like specimens on a mad scientist’s shelf. I was really taken by this collection in this morning’s paper. I’m planning on painting them. And it has been so much fun to watch the pope squirm. Almost as much fun as watching the Code Pink woman accost Karl Rove in a Beverly Hills bookstore.

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You Don’t Own Me

James Brown fans at 1964 TAMI show
James Brown fans at 1964 TAMI show

We read a pretty enticing review of the T.A.M.I. show dvd in last weekend’s paper and then another by Jack Garner in the local paper. So we hopped online and dutifully ordered it from Amazon. Eleven bucks and we’ve already got our money’s worth out of it. We expected James Brown to be sensational (that’s a freeze frame shot of the crowd while he performed) and he was, but Lesley Gore was a knockout. Her version of “You Don’t Own Me” transcended the whole teen thing by a mile. The Supremes did too. Diana Ross was at the peak of her powers. The Stones were very cool and it was great to see Brian back with the Beach Boys but James Brown kicked ass.

Sunday was sort of nice day. We picked up Peggi’s mom and took a ride in the country ending up overlooking the lake down at Canandaigua. By the time we got down there though, it was raining. Couldn’t find Kelloggs. They must have torn that place down. So decided to go to El Rincon but when we pulled up front, the name had changed. That is not usually a good sign but in this case we were assured that the place was still in the family and as good as ever. Can’t remember what the new name is.

The place was really crowded so we ordered an appetizer as soon as we had our waiter’s attention. Ceviche, made with Talapia, lime juice, fresh purple onion, real avocado slices and thin slivers of fresh jalapeños. So fantastic we quickly put in an order for another. It took them about twenty minutes to get our Margaritas but the only one that noticed was Peggi’s mom. We ordered some chicken flautas to split and then some blue corn tortillas with a chocolate mole sauce made with almonds, walnuts and pistachios and covered with stringy Oaxacan cheese.

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No One Has More Fun Than People

Chandler Travis Philharmonic at the Bop Shop in 2010
Chandler Travis Philharmonic at the Bop Shop in 2010

Chandler Travis Philharmonic played at the Bop Shop on Friday night and Ricky, the cross dressing drummer extraordinaire and Candler’s Incredible Casual bandmate, was back home in Cape Cod. Chandler has put more space in his arrangements which almost sounds impossible with six big guys in the band. He writes NRBQ/Colorblind James like rock/popsongs and has sweet voice but he shines as the evening’s mc in pajama pants and clown hats. He performed a beautiful song with words written by David Greenberger from the Duplex Planet. We talked to him after the show and he told us he has a third band that does a cover of Pete LaBonne’s “Pajama Pants Baby”. That would work.

Tiny horse (born five days ago) and mom
Tiny horse (born five days ago) and mom

This little horse is less than week old and already running around like a miniature race horse. He may be a race horse someday because the three horses in the corral next to him compete at the track in Canandagua. His mom was being very protective and and didn’t want us to get too close so we continued on our way.

Spring Valley Finger overlooking marsh in Durand Eastman Park
Spring Valley Finger overlooking marsh in Durand Eastman Par

We headed down the hill and over to Spring Valley where the mustard green is already covering the ground in the sunny spots. Not only is it invasive, it also gets a head start on the competition. We hung around on one of the ridges that dead end up there overlooking the marsh. The vegetation is just slightly more brown than grey at this point.

Most of Saturday was devoted to chopping up the big pine trees that fell on the street’s pool lot during that heavy snowfall. There was enough sun out there to get a burn so we felt especially warm in Rick and Monica’s living room on Saturday night for their house concert. Connie Deming dedicated a beautiful song called “Beautiful Boy” to her son who was sitting nearby and she told the crowd that the setting reminded her of a Joni Mitchell song. She proceeded to do a spot-on version of Ladies of the Canyon. Maria Gillard followed and sounded great. Like Wreckless Eric, she is full of personality and most enjoyable between songs. As she laughed at one of her own stories she told the crowd her uncle used to say, “No one has more fun than people.”.

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That’s Italian!

Osteria Restaurant on Culver Road in Rochester, NY
Osteria Restaurant on Culver Road in Rochester, NY

Before Peggi began controlling her cholesterol levels with diet we would frequent the many Italian spots in and around Rochester. At some point we we started keeping track of our meals and the experience on the pages of the Refrigerator. Readers submitted quite a few of their own opinions as well but we fell behind with the updates. There is a substantial backlog folder to post and I promise to get there soon. For now I thought I would prepare an entry here and move it to the Refrigerator column at a later date.

I had been drooling over the picture of the fried the Calamari from City newspaper’s review of the Osteria Restaurant on Culver Road. In fact we cut it out and have it on our counter. This place is the very last establishment on Culver Road before it turns to meet Lake Ontario. We were there at sunset last night and enjoyed a spectacular view. This place was Fiorivanti’s for a number of years, another Italian place of course, and thankfully they didn’t mess with the funky ambiance. The owner and manager of Osteria used be to be the owner and manager La Trattoria up on East Ridge Road but they have switched hats.

When this place was Fiorivanti’s they didn’t have a liquor license so we called ahead to find out if we could still bring our own bottle of wine. They said that would be fine but there would be a fifteen dollar corkage fee. It’s hard to come out ahead with that deal especially with the type of wine we buy. Fiorivanti’s charged only a dollar to uncork your bottle. Probably why they went under.

The obligatory Padra Pio donation box was on the counter as we entered and every table was full but one. Pretty good for a Wednesday night. We ordered the cheapest red wine on the menu and the Calamari dish we saw in the paper as an appetizer. Their bread and olive oil were delicious and the Calamari arrived in no time. It included peas, green and Calamata olives, garbanzo beans and Italian parsley. It was sensational! Almost as good as Mario’s. We could have made a meal of it. We decided to split the shrimp/pasta/sun-dried tomato/zucchini special that our waitress described but she told us there would be a five dollar “plate sharing charge”. Peggi tried arguing that the Calamari was her order and the pasta dish was my order and this confused the waitress. She went in the back for a second and came back to say, “Never mind”. That dish too was spectacular but there was enough oil left over for another dish.

Chef Giustino Toppi came out to greet us after our meal and we told him everything was delicious. How many times do you think he has heard that? He is old so you better get down here quick.

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