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We Haven't Gotten Another Dog Yet, but We've Been Doing Some Other Pretty Cool Things, Part II

Two Mondays ago, we treated Lou to dinner at Wallsé for his birthday, which was actually the following Monday. His next birthday will be a milestone one.

We were way overdue for a dinner out with Lou, mostly because he'd been so busy performing in shows and spending time out on Fire Island. He had e-mailed to see how we were doing and to ask whether I'd seen any new restaurants that appealed to me. And he told me he had made a variation of my chicken corn chowder the previous Friday.

I e-mailed a list of suggestions in the West Village—including the new Manhattan outpost of Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli's Frankies restaurants, called Frankies 570 Spuntino, and Monument Lane, which I've passed by many times while walking Rudy and which looks so inviting from the outside—to Lou and Tony and asked for any suggestions they had. Lou replied that he had had a "pretty good" lunch at another one of my suggestions, dell'anima, before it stopped serving lunch and added that he was "up for anything that Tony can stomach." Tony thought Wallsé was the best bet for his being able to eat gluten- and dairy-free.

I enjoyed the Wiener Schnitzel that both Lou and I had for our entree—even though it was too salty, it was wonderfully flavorful and as tender as buttah—but my favorite thing I ate was the Quark Spätzle that Lou ordered for his appetizer and that he gave me a generous amount of to try. Tony and I thought the meal was a little too spendy* to justify going back really soon, but I have to have those spätzle again at some point. They were divinely rich and creamy and utterly satisfying—something your momma would have made for you growing up if you'd grown up in, well, Wallsé.**

My main objection to the cost of the dining experience was the wine list. There were only two bottles—one white and one red—that were priced under $50, which made me feel cheap when I asked the sommelier about ... those two wines. I opted for the 2008 Nigl Zweigelt because Tony and I tend to enjoy zweigelts; the sommelier said it was light to medium bodied, so it was bound to go down easy for Lou, who usually isn't into reds; and the white was a pinot gris from Germany, which seemed like an odd place to grow that grape, and, when in doubt, I usually go for a wine made from a grape that's associated with the place where the wine was produced. We all enjoyed the Nigl, so it turned out to be an OK choice.

For his first course, Tony got a plate of sauteed vegetables, as he is wont to do, and for his entree, he got the Steamed Halibut With Cucumbers, Dill, and Chanterelles. He said he thought everything was well presented and the ingredients were of high quality.

Lou chose the superior dessert, just as he'd picked the superior starter. (I'd gotten a delicious salad, but it couldn't compete with those spätzle.) He let me try his Champagne Soup With Elderberry Mousse and Fresh Market Blackberries, and it was awesome. I enjoyed my Quince and Pear Strudel With Salted Caramel Ice Cream. Tony's trio of sorbets were served on a log of ice that carried traces of their pretty colors after Tony had finished eating them.

The evening before, Tony and I had gone to City Winery to have dinner and hear one of his favorite singers, Al Stewart. I wasn't too familiar with Stewart, but I enjoyed the show—once the friendly British guy next to me and I told the annoying straight couple to our left (between us and the stage) to shut up and listen to the musicians we'd all come to see. The guitarist who played with Stewart, Dave Nachmanoff, was extremely talented, and Stewart had a wonderful stage presence.

Tony and I enjoyed City Winery's house wines. If I remember correctly, we got carafes of the sauvignon blanc and the pinot noir. To eat, Tony got the Roasted Monkfish With Escarole, Peppers, Maitake, and Piri Piri Sauce, which inspired us to make the monkfish when Mark visited. I got a delightful vegetarian pasta dish with Sun Gold tomatoes, summer greens, and ramp pesto. To start, I'd gotten the Roasted Baby Beet Salad With Herbed Goat Cheese, Mache, and Candied Walnuts and Tony had gotten some sauteed arugula. For dessert, I got, fairly predictably, Chocolate Orange Mousse, which was satisfying but not overly orangish.

CW has a program where you can make your own wine. And Lucille Ball is apparently involved:

Here's a shot of the barrel room, behind glass, in the basement:

*That's not, of course, meant to be a commentary on having paid for Lou too. :-)

**You have to scroll down to the bottom of the text under Information.

We Haven't Gotten Another Dog Yet, but We've Been Doing Some Other Pretty Cool Things, Part I

We met Scruffy and a couple of the other Lil Monsters dogs three Fridays ago, and I'll write more about that experience in a later post. For now, I'm going to start writing about more-recent events and will work backwards in time until I'm all caught up on the pretty cool things we've been doing.

Last night, Tony and I went to Andy's 31st birthday party at Sardi's, which was the location for his 30th birthday celebration too. We hung out a lot with Mark McC and his sweetie, Jose. Here's a photo Tony took of the birthday boy and me:

And here's a photo he took of me acting like I'm pinching Norbert Leo Butz's cheek in his caricature at Sardi's:

Yesterday afternoon, I took Rudy to the vet to have a lump on his stomach examined. I assumed it was a harmless lipoma, and the vet thought that's what it was too, but he took a fluid sample for testing to make sure, which is what I was hoping he'd do. I also picked up Emme's ashes.

For lunch yesterday, we had leftover ribs, potatoes and carrots that Tony had cooked up in the crock pot on Friday evening. Delish! The meat-to-fat ratio on the ribs was quite high. I contributed some roasted romanesco, to which I had added only some almond oil, minced garlic, and a sprinkling of salt:

Yesterday morning at the farmers market, I bought these gorgeous dahlias:

I bought the vase after work on Friday to replace the one Rudy knocked over with his tail. I floated two of the blossoms because their stems had snapped.

Earlier yesterday morning, I went to the TKTS booth at South Street Southport to try to get discount tickets for today's matinee of Anything Goes for Dan and Paul, Dan's mother—who has a birthday coming up this Saturday—and Tony and me, but there were none available. 

Last weekend, Tony's buddy Mark from DC came into the city for a too brief visit. He arrived by bus late that Friday night. On Saturday morning, Tony and Mark did some shopping on Bleecker Street while I hit the Union Square Greenmarket. In the afternoon, we went to the High Line, and Mark and I both took a gajillion pictures:

We went from the High Line to Chelsea Market. Tony bought some monkfish tail at Lobster Place to cook for dinner. I had tried to get some at our more-local Greenmarket, at Abingdon Square, earlier in the day, after I'd gotten back from Union Square and before I'd gone to meet up with the fellows, but the stand had just sold out of it.

For a starter, Mark and Tony made a no-cook carrot-ginger soup that was creamy textured thanks to the addition of avocado. (Like Tony, Mark can't eat dairy.) They prepared it using the juicer Tony had bought a little while ago. It was crazy good.

Tony did a good job of preparing the monkfish. The texture was a little unusual but not in a bad way, and I liked the flavor. He also cooked some Brussels sprouts and mushrooms. We ate it with the somewhat embarrassingly named Cupcake Chardonnay I'd purchased at Chelsea Wine Vault. I'd asked one of the people who worked there for a buttery chardonnay, which is what Tony had said he wanted to serve with the fish, and that's what the guy handed me. I liked it more than Tony, but he thought it went well with dinner and was indeed buttery. (Mark didn't have any.)

Mark left fairly early the next morning to catch his return bus. Tony took this photo of the two of us. Mark is wearing a cool new hat he'd bought the day before:

Follies and Catch Me If You Can

A week ago Thursday night,* Missy, Nate, Tony, and I caught Follies, starring Bernadette Peters as Sally and Jan Maxwell as Phyllis, and a few weeks ago, during the weekend it closed, Tony and I saw Catch Me If You Can, starring Norbert Leo Butz, who won the 2011 Tony award for leading actor in a musical.

Tony loved Follies. I liked it, and I liked it even more after Tony gave me his take on it. I had had reservations about the ending given to one of the main couples.

The cast was amazing: Danny Burstein and Ron Raines were great as Buddy and Ben. British stage star Elaine Paige got a "starring" credit below the four principles' as Carlotta, whose big number is "I'm Still Here," and Paige really did it justice. Tony was blown away by Rosalind Elias as Heidi Schiller and Leah Horowitz as Young Heidi performing the operatic number "One More Kiss." And Terri White, whom I'd seen in Finian's Rainbow, led a bunch of the gals through the fantastic Mirror Dance set to "Who's That Woman." I enjoyed Peters's version of "Losing My Mind," and Maxwell's "Could I Leave You?" was outstanding. The cast album will be available at the end of next month.

Missy, Nate, and I waited outside the stage door for autographs. I was hoping to get all four of the leads to sign my Playbill. Peters emerged fairly quickly, and I took this photo of Missy and Nate with her:

The other three principles didn't appear for quite a long time, so we gave up on getting their autographs.

Here's my Playbill with Peters's autograph tastefully photographed next to my flowers from the Greenmarket for the past two weeks—and still going—because they're so long-lasting, ageratum:

Before the show, the four of us had a nice dinner with Joyce at Nizza, which gave her a chance to verify, along with Missy and Nate, that Tony is real and not a figment of my imagination. :-)** (Joyce had just seen Follies and, even though she'd enjoyed it, wasn't up to seeing it again so soon.) I took what would have been some cute pictures of Joyce holding Dash, the second son of Missy's BFF, Edith, who was sitting at the next table with her family, but the lighting was so bad in them, I'm not going to post one here. Sigh.

***

I mainly wanted to see CMIYC so I could see Butz in his Tony-winning role. He was very very good. I was also curious to see Aaron Tveit, whom I'd missed in Next to Normal because he was in Seattle working on this show. And I thought he was super as well.

CMIYC was fun overall, but it wasn't fantastic. And I have to agree with the assessment of the New York Times's Ben Brantley that the choreography was mostly uninspired.

Tony said the show would have been better if it had ended with Butz's FBI agent, Hanratty, visiting swindler Frank Abagnale Jr., played by Tveit, in prison. The backup dancers could have been dressed in sexy striped outfits, and the leap to Abagnale's working with the FBI instead of running from it wouldn't have seemed so abrupt, he said.

For quite a while, I was obsessively listening to Butz's performance of "Don't Break the Rules" on my iPhone's iPod. You can see it on YouTube here. And sit your fat ass down—and click here—for a wonderfully fun interview with Butz on Side by Side by Susan Blackwell, whom I loved so much in [title of show].

*Could I be any more behind on my blogging?

**One of Tony's dentists*** has an office near our office, and he was going to come in to meet Missy, Joyce, and some of my other co-workers after a weekday-morning appointment a while ago. The appointment got postponed by the dentist until our really busy workweek, when I really couldn't take the time to show the boy around and have lunch with him, which was the other part of our plan. That started us joking at work that Tony was the equivalent of my "Canadian boyfriend." 

***Yes, the boy has more than one. It takes a village to prevent his teeth from imploding.

A Dog Named Scruffy and a Dog Named Nick

I've been spending a good chunk of time on petfinder.com lately. As I mentioned in my previous post, Rudy wasn't himself right after Emme vanished from his life. He's a little more chipper now, but I think a new little sister would cheer him up even more.

I started looking at adoptable dogs after Eugene asked me the other day about basset rescue groups that serve New York and I checked out their websites. Tony had given me the go-ahead to get another basset if that's what I wanted and the new dog got along well with Rudy. (Tony isn't a huge fan of Rudy's drooliness and basset smell. I gave Rudy a bath in our tub on Friday, so now he smells like milk-and-honey dog shampoo. And basset.) But for a little while now, ever since Emme got rather old and I started thinking about what dog I would get to try to fill the void of her absence, I've been picturing a scruffy little girl who looks like she came from the wrong side of the tracks. :-) A dog like the terrier-chihuahua mix who came into my Granny and Pop Pop's life when Tracey and I were kids. A dog whom my sister named Sweet Pea. Which was appropriate because she really was the sweetest little thing. 

And wouldn't you know it, one of the animal rescue organizations that serves the New York area, called Lil Monsters, has a little girl dog named Scruffy on its website. (That's her at left in a picture I copied from LM's site.) So over the weekend, I filled out the online application form and wrote that I was most interested in Scruffy but would like to bring my partner and my basset to meet their dogs and see which ones we hit it off with, if any of them.

Tony likes the look of Shy Guy. I like Olive, but she's still a pup and so might be too young for us to take on right now. I think Reggie is adorable, and he's a possibility, even though I'm definitely leaning toward a girl so we can add some female energy to our sausage fest of an apartment. Belle and Beau make my heart melt, but I don't want to bring two more dogs into our home and I wouldn't want to split them up.

I heard back from the guy at LM while I was at work yesterday, and he said he thinks Scruffy is pregnant. That wouldn't be a deal breaker, but it would certainly delay her time of arrival in our home. :-) I talked things over with Tony yesterday evening, and I made an appointment for us to meet the dogs at 2 on Friday afternoon. The shelter is in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is also where the group I got Rudy from is located.

Last night, I was looking at dogs again, because I couldn't help myself, and I went back to a listing for Nick, a corgi mix put up for adoption by Waggin' Train Rescue, that I had remembered seeing. (That's him at right in a photo I copied from Petfinder.) Just for the heck of it, I figured I should fill out an application and state my interest in him.

Jane, the woman at WTR who's overseeing Nick's adoption, called and then e-mailed me right away. (I hadn't heard my phone.) She had planned to move Nick to a no-kill shelter in New Jersey today from his current location somewhere in Pennsylvania, but if I wanted to take him in, she would cancel that transfer and have him brought to our apartment instead.

I spoke to her on the phone for a little while around 11 o'clock last night. She loved the fact that we have a basset—she has two—and she couldn't say enough good things about Nick. I said that I wanted us to meet him, but she nicely insisted that I would have to commit to at least taking him in as a foster pet if WTR was going to spend the money on bringing him here. (The website had said he was located in New York, New York. If it had said he was actually in Pennsylvania, I might not have filled out the application.) I told her I would need to think about it and would get back to her this morning.

Tony and I talked, and I slept on it and thought some more this morning, and I decided to stick with my plan of meeting the Lil Monsters dogs on Friday. I'm open to the possibility of bringing Nick into our lives, but I couldn't pivot so quickly from looking at a bunch of dogs and, perhaps, choosing one to having a dog brought to me that I had to commit to at least having live with us for a while. And I figured I would regret not meeting the girl dogs at LM if I didn't go see them first. I sincerely believe Jane when she says Nick is a terrific dog and she's certain he and Rudy would get along swimmingly, but I have to go with my gut that tells me Rudy would prefer a sister, not a brother. Nick is bound to be easier to go visit in New Jersey than he was in Pennsy, so that's always a possibility if we don't find our new best girlfriend at LM. And if Rudy and he create a bromance at first sight, we'll know Nick was the right choice and I'll know I filled out that application last night for a reason.

UPDATE later on Oct. 5: I spoke with Jane again today, and she said she would hold Nick at his current location until she hears from me after we meet the Little Monsters dogs. I told her I assumed we would either commit to a dog on Friday or know that none of them were for us.

Mike and Matt's B'Nai Mitzvah, aka the Multimitzvah

Matt and Mike's B'Nai Mitzvah weekend was so much fun, and there couldn't possibly have been a prouder uncle on the face of the planet than I was last Saturday.

Tony and I left for New Jersey a week ago Friday afternoon, only a few hours after getting back from the vet without our girl Emme. (If it hadn't been such a busy week at my job this past week, I would have gotten this blog post written sooner.) In a way, it was good to be away from home to take my mind off of the loss of my corgi baby. But it was unfortunate that we had to leave Rudy when we did. On the plus side, dogsitter Eric arrived a little while before Tony and I left for the train station, so Rudy wasn't alone at all that day.

As I noted on my Facebook page Friday night, Rudy has been mopey, clingy and whiny since Emme vanished from his life. About four months passed from the time Cody died to the time Rudy arrived. I suspect we'll have another dog (probably a girl and perhaps a mutt) in our lives in a much shorter time span because I think Rudy would be in a better state if he had a little sister to pal around with.

Tony and I almost missed the train we had told Tracey we were going to take. It wouldn't have been a tragedy if we'd missed it—there was another one not long afterward that would have arrived in Ridgewood only about 20 minutes later—but I didn't want to keep Tracey waiting on such a busy day for her and the guys. We'd had trouble getting a cab that didn't already have a passenger, and then the taxi got stuck in traffic on the not-so-long drive to Penn Station. And it was pouring rain to boot. We just squeezed onto the train before the doors shut, and we had to buy tickets from one of the conductors because there'd been no time to stop at one of the machines. I should have bought two one-way tickets to Secacus, where we switch to a different train that goes to Ridgewood after having started out in Hoboken, and then bought tickets to cover the rest of our trip from an agent there. But I was still flummoxed from trying to make it to the right track on time, with Tony pulling up the rear behind me at model-sauntering-on-the-catwalk tempo, so I requested two round-trip tickets to Ridgewood. The conductor had to figure out how much they were going to cost, and he took a long time punching a gajillion holes in each round-trip pass, all while muttering "Round trip to Ridgewood," as if it were the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. And he went off about it again to his fellow conductor on the platform at Secaucus. So from now on, when Tony and I want to remark that something crazy has just gone down, we'll have to say that it was totally a round trip to Ridgewood.

Dad, Jean, and Granny were delayed in getting to the Gerbers' house by horrible traffic on the Turnpike. They still made it there in plenty of time to have dinner and then to go check in at the rather nice extended-stay hotel in Wayne where all of us were being put up for the weekend by Tracey and David before we were all due at Barnert Temple for Friday night's service.

I was very impressed with both the service on Friday and the boys' ceremony on Saturday morning and with both of the temple's rabbis, Elyse Frishman and Rachel Steiner. When Rabbi Steiner saw the guys in their tallitot and yarmulkes before Friday's service, she took great care in saying they had done nothing wrong but she wanted them to wait until the next day to wear the tallitot publicly for the first time. Tony said that if a nun or priest had had to address a similar situation, the boys would have been told they were going to hell because they'd made such a horrible mistake and it would have been an opportunity for inducing guilt rather than a teaching moment. At the party on Saturday night, I told Tracey I found the temple to be much more welcoming than the church where we spent countless hours into young adulthood.

I was also amazed that when the boys were talking about their passages from the Torah on Saturday morning, they were able to express disagreement with certain aspects of the text. Holy cow! I can't imagine a 13-year-old Christian being allowed to openly show skepticism about any part of the Bible during a confirmation at the vast majority of mainstream churches.

The boys both did a fantastic job. They had a boatload of reading to do, in vowel-less Hebrew. And they presented themselves as the intelligent, kind, and articulate young men they are.

David gave terrific speeches at both the Saturday service and during the party, which was held at Preakness.

My Dad and I read a poem toward the end of the service. My part went as follows:

May the One who blessed our ancestors,
Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca,
Jacob and Rachel and Leah,
bless you on your becoming a Bar Mitzvah.

May you grow with strength and courage,
with vision and sensitivity.
And may you always be certain of our love.

We had a few hours to kill in between the ceremony and the party, so Tony and I got some napping and snuggling time in back at the hotel. I hadn't seen much of him that week because it had been the first of two consecutive weeks of closings at the magazine that month. Oy.

We had a blast that night. My favorite parts were the montage of photos of the guys set to music that was shown on a big screen and the candle lighting. M&M had written poems about important people in their lives that invited them to come to a table up front and light a candle on a cake. The poem M&M read for me went like this:

When it comes to uncles, you are really fun.
You are awesome and cool, and the woofers are #1.
We love the weekends in NYC.
Uncle Bill, come light candle #3.

And then I walked up to the table to the sounds of Lady Gaga's "Telephone" to light my candle. Granny lit her candle while Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" played.

Before the party, we all sat/stood for a whole bunch of pictures outside as the sun went down. Tony joked that we needed to re-create something like Preakness's 18th hole on our terrace. "Yeah, definitely a water feature," I said. "Rudy is the water feature," Tony replied. Ha!

The food was great, as always. Dad went off about how much he likes the turkey at Preakness to the guy who was carving it during cocktail hour. It turns out, that guy had cooked it, so Dad was able to give props to the chef who had earned them.

Also during cocktail hour, Dad and Jean confessed that they no longer like the taste of white zinfandel. Jean said it tastes like fruit juice to them, now that they've gotten accustomed to drinking better wine. I've won! And Beringer has lost! Woot!

The theme for the party was candy because Mike and Matt are the M&M boys. The centerpieces for the tables were all made from a different kind of candy, and whoever found a golden ticket under his or her seat got to take home the centerpiece.

On Sunday morning, after we had checked out of the hotel, we went to the Gerbers' for brunch. When Granny opened her purse to look for something once we were seated in the car, I noticed she had a bottle of Michelob Ultra in there. My Dad had bought her a couple of beers the day before, at $4 a pop, and he wasn't about to leave the one she hadn't drunk behind in the hotel fridge. So he told her to put it in her purse so she could have it with her lunch. Dad said he wished he'd been wearing his "Cheap-Ass Bill Hawley From the Sticks" T-shirt when the person who waited on him at the hotel told him it was $8 for two bottles of beer.

Here are some more pix from the multimitzvah weekend:

The commemorative yarmulke I wore on Saturday:

Another funny Granny moment had occurred on Friday night when she referred to the boys' yarmulkes as "turbans" in front of Rabbi Frishman.

There was a gift bag waiting for us at the hotel, including gluten-free stuff for my guy. We also got M&M T-shirts that marked the occasion:

Loads of balloons on the ceiling at Preakness:

The light-up balloon M&M's were really cool:

My place setting:

Matt and Mike having fun as sumo wrestlers. And not for the first time either:

The emcee did a great job and kept things moving and everyone having a good time. Which, let's face it, is important when you've got a party attended largely by white people. :-) Here he's dancing with Tracey:

Here's one of my favorite pictures of the guys, when they were 1 year old, in the photo montage:

And finally, here's my Special Chosen Person :-) —and the originator of the term "multimitzvah"—Tony outside on the verandah near a putting green: