I have had such a deluge of suggestions for brunch spots, through email and comments on the blog—thanks to all who shot me a message—that I now have no excuse not to have a fabulous brunch next Sunday.  It's a lot of pressure, people.  I just hope I don't get performance anxiety (it has been known to happen, but usually after a couple mimosas to steady myself I'm fine).  Now all I need is a brunch date... sigh.

JOKING!  (Had ya there, didn't I?) No, my friend Spanky Park* has graciously offered to escort me to one of his favorite brunch spots in the neighborhood.  All perfectly above-board and platonic, of course.  I do like to get sweaty and work up an appetite before brunch, but I guess I can take a jog along the Charles early Sunday morning for that.

Seeing as I have no fewer than twenty brunch spots to check out now, I will be taking applications for future brunch dates, too.  But before I get to vetting applications I did want to clear up what may have been a couple of misconceptions from the original post.

First of all, I am not advocating malingering.  Most folks are pretty reasonable when it comes to how long they spend languishing at brunch.  My point was that the Rosebud was probably reacting to one or two malingerers, and I do think banning the paper altogether to get rid of them was a tad excessive.  It is a diner, after all, and diners and newspapers go together (I would go so far as to say they're inseparable, myself). Most people can read the paper in a reasonable manner, and should be free to do so.  Kyle's solution for those who aren't is perfectly reasonable, too. 

As for Tony's rant.  We love Tony, it goes without saying.  But the point of brunch is not for brunchers to turn over their tables as quickly as possible so that their waiters and waitresses can make more in tips.  I'm all for waiters and waitresses—some of my best friends are waiters and waitresses, and I even dated a busboy once!--but yours is a pretty radically waitcentric stance, Tony. And frankly I don't think the world is ready for it, even though there seems to be significant movement in that direction in some server circles.  The restaurant does not exist to serve the servers. The waitstaff is not the restaurant's raison d'etre. 

Servers are necessary—sometimes evil, more often not—but they are a component of the dining triad of which cooks and customers are the other necessary elements. Where the elements are out of balance you have the eating-out version of Koyaanisqatsi.  And that's enough to give anyone a stomach-ache, if only from motion sickness. 

We can certainly argue the right balance amongst these parts, but one thing is for sure, it's a delicate one.  Which is why so many restaurants fail after so short a time.  

The second thing I want to clear up is that I am personally not a crossword puzzler. My dad, God love him, was. Some of my earliest memories were of him sitting in his hideously upholstered armchair (if memory serves it was covered in a burlap-like fabric—the pattern had great clusters of purple grapes and huge, evil-looking blackbirds swooping down out of ominous thunderheads to feed on them)—sitting in his great armchair absorbed in his crossword, he would twirl strands of his comb-over round and round and round his fingers while he pored over his puzzle.  You knew he was finished puzzling because he'd have one big stalk of hair sticking up like Alfalfa in "The Little Rascals."  It was like one of those pop-up Turkey-timers.  Ding!  All done!

I did not inherit my old man's passion for puzzling, or his comb-over.  I've heard baldness is inherited from your mother, and mine still has a full head of hair.  So I got lucky, I guess.  Maybe I'm missing out in the other department, but while I have done the odd acrostic out of abject boredom in the odd doctor's waiting room, I've rarely had even the slightest urge to sit down and do a crossword (and still less sudoku).  I've had puzzling friends and lovers, of course.  I would never discourage them from such a quiet, benign pastime.  Quiet and benign make the best friends and lovers in peace time. 

Occasionally my dear old friend Dirk** would bring a puzzle on the T and enlist my help finishing it on the way to wherever we were bound, but as a solitary pursuit crosswords never moved me.  And as for parlor games, I prefer twister. 

The last time I did a crossword was in Vermont nearly four years ago.  It was a night that will live in infamy.  I had consented, against my better judgment, to spend a weekend in a little cabin in the woods with three friends, without television, running water, heat, or even the consolation of sex. I wrote about it to another friend:

I knew we were in trouble when Sonny*** was calling out clues to a crossword puzzle in the paper, and when Dirk offered ‘perform’ as a solution, she spelled it p-r-e-f-o-r-m. A quick survey of the rest of the crossword next day showed similar unconventional solutions.

Now, you may shrug. I did, too. I don’t mean anything by it.  It's not a moral failing, after all, merely an intellectual one, and if you're crafty you can overcome those easily enough.  I don’t do crosswords myself, because they make me feel stupid. Pop does them because they make him feel smart. The fact is, some people like to do them and other people don’t, and to each his own, I say.

What was sort of new to me in this case was someone who does them, apparently unaware that there is but one solution for each clue, and that the sole point of the exercise is to find it. Unaware, it seems, and totally unconcerned that such is the case.

No harm in it, of course. 

I was told it was a tough crossword. I wouldn't know, really, but Dirk does them almost every day, and the ladies seem to be into that scene, too. They all said the puzzle was a little off-beat. It was from The Burlington Free Press, and they said they thought the fellow who makes them up—a certain Bill Ballard—must be a crank, because his clues were old-fashioned and obscure.

I didn’t have much to offer in the way of answers, and read another section of the paper while Dirk massaged my feet. I called out a few answers. Dirk was nice, because if he thought there was a clue that required some book learning, even if he knew it, he pretended not to, so that he could defer to me. 

So, for example, he took 1 across, four letters, clue: ‘elegant,’ solution: ‘posh,’ and 10 down, ‘ump’s supply,’ ‘balls,’ and left 59 across, ‘architectural style,’ five letters, ‘ionic,’ and 6 down ‘Look Homeward Angel author,’ ‘Wolfe’ for me. 

Sonny was sometimes skeptical of my answers, but as she was the one filling in the puzzle I guess it was her job to be. Sometimes, though, she took it a bit far, I thought. I will admit that I lost her confidence when I, perhaps too stridently, suggested ‘snare’ for ‘it’s a mess’ (62 across). It turned out to be ‘snafu,’ of course.  Later, however, I was the one who provided the ‘f’ in ‘snafu,’ which led her to that solution, by offering ‘Haifa’ for 51 down (‘Israeli city’).

But the one that really irked me, and which we had to wait for the next day’s paper to finally vindicate me, was 1 down, the clue for which was ‘Innocent and Urban.’ First of all, Sonny kept saying, ‘urbane’ instead of urban (maybe she thought it was a sort of fancy way to pronounce urban, and not an altogether different word), and she didn’t bother to tell us both words were capitalized.

We had the first letter, ‘p,’ from ‘posh,’ and I think we also had the last letter, ‘s,’ from ‘sanmateo’ (23 across, ‘City on San Francisco Bay’), the first clue I was able to provide an answer for. We may even have had a third letter, maybe the ‘e,’ from ‘eli’ (20 across, ‘Bush or Clinton once’), which was one of Dirk’s. So, I think we had P_ _ ES.

Sonny kept saying she thought the solution to ‘innocent and urbane’ was ‘naïve,’ but if that was right, then ‘posh,’ ‘eli’ and ‘sanmateo’ were all wrong, and she didn’t want to go that far out on a limb, or we might all revolt, and leave her to solve the bloody puzzle all by herself. And anyway, innocent and urbane are fairly opposites, so ‘naïve’ wouldn’t make any kind of sense as a solution. But it wasn’t only Sonny who was skeptical when I blurted out ‘popes!’

Nobody believed me. 

By the time the night ended (abruptly at 9:30 p.m., as I recall) it was a wonder we hadn't come to blows.  Although, as I said, I was vindicated in the next day's Free Press, a little part of our friendship died that night in Vermont.  Had it not been for that foot massage, the whole weekend would have been a wash. 

Just as in the past, after suffering such self-perpetrated traumas, I have resolved, for example, never to talk politics over dinner, or to wear a stetson and bollo tie to a job interview with the Diplomatic Corps, or to put on a cock-ring before going out on a movie-and-dinner date (it's generally not a good idea to sit around for five and a half hours with the blood-flow to your bits cut off)—after seeing first-hand the creeping paranoia, growing distrust, accusations, wanton heckling, and bursts of full-frontal nudity that seem to accompany group crossword puzzling—after I saw how it almost destroyed cherished friendships and futures—well, of course, I swore off puzzling for good. 

But even though crosswords aren't my cup of tea, I will fight to my dying breath for your right to do them with your cup of tea, if you so choose.

That's all I'm saying.
_________________________________
*His nom du porn.
**His nom du jeu de mots croisé.
***Her nom lesbien.