Here are all of the reasons Sarah Palin should be considered for elective office:

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok, and How is the Food at Bacchus Bethesda?

Spoiler alert: these two questions have nothing to do with each other.

In the newspaper over the past few days, there have been articles about a currently married woman, who went to the home of her ex-husband and murdered his second wife and his son. Today there’s a story about an ex-priest, now well-respected domestic violence and anger management counselor who was angry that a car was blocking his parked car and pulled a gun on, and threatened, the two men in that car (who just happened to be deputy U.S. marshalls on some sort of stake-out).

What makes “ordinary” members of society engage in such anti-social behavior?

This brings me to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1970 film, “Warum Lauft Herr R. Amok?”, or “Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?”.

Herr R (R stands for Raab) is a most ordinary (one could even say ‘boring’) young German draftsman, who works in a nondescript office, wears white shirts and a tie to work, has an attractive wife and son, in-laws, an apartment, friends, and no clear interests (intellectual, athletic or otherwise) at all. He and his wife are clearly growing apart, as evidenced by the great silences that exist in their house. He tends to drink too much when out and grow, if not downright silly, embarrassing. He has an opportunity for a promotion but does not have the ability to close the deal. His blood pressure is a little too high, he smokes a little too much (so does everyone in the film), and he doesn’t know how to take a vacation.

One evening, he is sitting at home watching television. His wife is in the room, as is a friend of hers, and they are talking about an upcoming ski vacation that her friend is going to be taking. Raab gets up, turns up the volume on the TV, slowly picks up a heavy candlestick that sits on a living room table, and pummels his wife’s talkative friend, his wife, and then his sleeping son, to death. He then goes to bed.

By 8:00 the next morning, Herr Raab is back in his office. Nothing seems amiss. He works hard if silently.

At about 10:00 a.m., Herr Raab goes to the restroom…….and hangs himself.

The film was made very inexpensively. It is in black and white. There are no outdoor scenes. The acting was terrific – so good, it was, that it doesn’t look like you are watching a fictional film. It looks like the camera is filming real life, boring as it is, with understated and sometimes disconnected conversations and long gaps in the conversations. I don’t believe there is any musical score (or if there is, I sure didn’t focus on it). It’s like a fascinating amateur home movie.

But what to make of it? The critics seem to say that, like the folks in the newspaper articles I mentioned above, Herr R. was just an ordinary man, getting along in society in a common way, until one day he snapped. Perhaps this is correct. But I wonder if there might not be a broader message. Germany, that most conservative and society-conscious country, plods on in its staid, boring way until one day……..they decide to kill the Jews and, in effect, commit national suicide.

I don’t know what Fassbinder had in mind. Fassbinder made about 40 films. I have seen only this one. I know little about him, except that he made these 40 films in only 15 years, and died in his late 30s (1982) of a drug overdose. It’s a sad world.

But it’s not so sad if you are having dinner at Bacchus of Bethesda, as five of us did Tuesday night. An array of vegetarian appetizers (and one ringer, the lamb/beef sausage), and varying dishes of chicken, swordfish, lamb and more for the entrees, a variety of Greek pastries for dessert, along with the Turkish coffee (who says the Greeks and Turks can’t get along?). And some very good merlot.

I asked the waiter (who is the brother of the owner) what the wine was. He said he was embarrassed, but that it was Yellowtail 2005. I wasn’t necessarily surprised – but I didn’t know that 2005 was a banner year for their merlot. Yellowtail merlot is consistently a good bargain red, I believe.

Topless

In the heart of commercial Washington DC, on M Street between 18th and 19th, there is a topless (and bottomless?) restaurant/bar. It has been there for decades; I have never been inside. An old friend once had a law office in the building across the street. She once said to me “You’d be surprised who goes in and out of there.” But I have rarely seen anyone enter or exit, even though I walk by the front door almost daily.

On the outside, there is a small marquis that has a partial lunch menu (very standard American fare, as you would imagine), and the first names of the “girls” inside. The names are never Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. They are always names like Jasime, Tiffany and Sapphire.

And, there is always a well dressed man standing at the door. This is my question: why is he there? He is not big enough to be a bouncer; he is not handsome enough to be an attraction. In the summer he is wearing a suit (he does not look like someone who would wear a suit) and in the winter, he wears a brown topcoat, and sometimes has a wool cap on. He is part barker: “Hi, gentlemen, want to come in?” He is part friend of the local police, with whom he is often talking. He communicates (with someone) using a 1980-vintage walkie-talkie.

But he must have a more sinister function. He is not there to protect against suicide bombers, but he must be there to protect those inside against something. The question is “what?”

Yesterday, I saw something that I don’t remember seeing before. A taxi pulled up in front of the restaurant and a man got out of the cab and walked towards the door. I would guess that the gentlemen was in his 70s, perhaps even 80. He was short, clean shaven, had gray hair and blew in the wind, had on an overcoat. He was a little too heavy, and somewhat stooped. He walked with a cane. He made a bee-line towards the restaurant.

The greeter (I guess that is what I would call him) said “Are you coming in”. The man, looking serious, said “I am.” The greeter then moved towards the door to hold it open while, at the same time, talking into his walkie-talkie saying “Coming in, one, by himself”.

What activities inside did that set off? I wonder.

In Retrospect, a Busy Week (11 cents)

It didn’t seem that busy at the time, but there were three books, three films, a concert, a play, a musical, a snow storm, a book sale, two evening meetings, and a study session – - –

Three Books, all somewhat related. As we all know, many Jews had a rough time during the mid-20th century. I read of three, whose experiences were very different, but read together give you a good idea of the turmoil that enveloped so much of the Jewish world. First, I read a brief memoir, dictated by the late father of a friend, whom I am not going to name, who with his family was caught in their Polish home by the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, and who, as a teenager with his parents, was arrested and shortly found themselves facing a large iron gate with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” engraved above them. His mother was immediately selected out, and presumably sent to the gas chambers. He and his father, although placed in different groups, made it through the selection process, although his father disappeared from his group some time later and was presumably murdered, one way or the other. Our friend’s father lasted in Auschwitz and in work details sometimes connected with other camps, through the war years. His dictated story, not the work of a professional writer, gives one a taste of the terrible concentration camp world of the Nazis, and of how difficult it is to recollect and set down the memories of those experiences.

The experience of Yale professor Peter Gay (born Peter Frohlich) was very different. Gay grew up not in Poland, but in Berlin, the heart of the Nazi world. His life under Nazism started not in 1939, but in 1933, when Hitler became German chancellor. About the same age as the father of our friend, he found it possible to cope with life in Nazi Germany (sometimes even passing for German due to his physical characteristics) until Kristallnacht in the fall of 1938. He still attended school, and his father’s business (sales to stores of china and glassware) actually prospered, although restrictions on Jews abounded. He was, in a sense lucky. After the destruction of so many Jewish businesses and even more increased anti Jewish fervor, it was clear that the family had to leave and, after a few false starts, they made it, first to Cuba and then to the United States.

Yes, the German Jews were often the lucky ones – they had time to plan their exits, they had the ability to rely on relatives abroad, and although they were unable to take with them much of material value, they brought with them high degrees of education and the ability to assimilate into a broader society, something that Polish Jews in smaller towns were much more unfamiliar with.

Peter Gay did not have to live through the horrors and tortures of World War II; he left before the attack on Poland and the closing of the borders. Yet his experience was also representative of the Jews of Europe during the twentieth century, and it left its psychological mark on him.

The third book was “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit” by Lucette Lagnado, about her childhood in Jewish Cairo. Cairo was spared any fighting in World War II, thanks to the German defeat at El Alamein, but the seemingly somewhat idyllic life of the Jewish community in the Egyptian capital was affected by the war, and more so by the creation of the state of Israel, the abdication of King Farouk and the entry on to the scene of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Wars with Israel in the late 1940s and mid-1950s, riots in the early 1950s, and additional pressures in the 1960s caused by the increasing insularity of Islamic Egypt led to the emigration of virtually the entire community, no longer accepted or able to make a living in Cairo or Alexandria.

The author’s father, depicted as a solo entrepreneur, man about town in Cairo, was a defeated man by the time he emigrated first to Paris and the to New York. His own story is a tragic one, but the story of the Egyptian Jews, not often told, is a fascinating one.

I’d recommend Peter Gay’s “My German Question” and “The Man in the Sharkskin Suit”. If you are interested in other tales of Berlin’s Jews during those days, you may want to look at Peter Wyden’s “Stella” or Daniel Silvers “Refuge in Hell”. If you are interested in Egyptian Jews when there were such folks, also look at Andre Aciman’s “Out From Egypt”.

Well, the books took a long time. Let’s do the rest more quickly.

Three films. Well, I already wrote about “Menachem and Fred”, so that shortens things. One down, two to go.

“Antonia’s Line”, a Dutch/Belgian film, won the 1995 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. We saw it on VHS, although I assume you can get it on DVD as well. It’s an odd one, and I am told a feminist movie, although I wasn’t offended by any anti-male sentiment. Antonia returns with her daughter to her village in Holland after the war, and they start farming and becoming a part of this strange, rustic community. The movie traces the lives of Antonia, her mother, her daughter, her granddaughter and her great granddaughter, and Antonia’s attempts to humanize her village, to relate to the various eccentrics and misfits and treat them with kindness. Times of hardship and cruelty are balanced with a sense of beauty and the continuing rhythm of a saga that will never end, not even with the death of Antonia. It’s a singular and odd film, but one worth watching.

I would not say the same for “Halfouine”, a French/Tunisian coming of age film, set in Tunis in the 1960s. The 12 year old central character is played by the nephew of the director. Enough said.

A concert. The Tuesday concert at Epiphany Church featured members of a chamber music group, the Sage Chamber Players. Only two pieces were on the program. The first, Beethoven’s Eyeglass Duet for viola and cello, was very pleasant and played very nicely. The second, Brahms’ Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano in A Minor, was played wonderfully and is a chamber piece with which I had no previous familiarity (or at least no memory), but which is a wonderful piece to hear.

A play. Itamar Moses’ “The Four of Us” at Theater J, the obviously autobiographical two character play about the author and his friend Benjamin (in real life, Jonathan Safran Foer), and how Moses reacts to Foer’s success in marketing his first book. A series of sketches (the two at music camp as adolescents, in Prague for a summer break from school, in New York and here and there), all very clever and very funny. Can the play be faulted? Only a bit. There is a little unnecessary explicit sexual material, and as one critic said – this is a good two hour play, with a wonderful 90 minute play inside.

The musical. “Oliver” by the Har Shalom Players. Very nicely done for an amateur synagogue production. All of the music was good – the orchestra was first rate, and most of the voices (particularly the males: Fagin, Mr. Bumble, and Oliver) were the best. The acting could improve; the sound quality made it hard to follow some of the lines. But this is a show that is dependent on its many good and memorable songs, and they were all there.

Now, a race to the finish. (1) Who needed almost 7″ of snow this weekend? (2) There were a good number of nice books for sale at the Chevy Chase library at bargain basement prices, but they were all taken the first night (Friends’ night), so by the time the non-Friends got there, there was relatively little to be happy about (unless you like hardcover fiction that you have never heard of). (3) Highlights of the meetings: watching a friend’s slides of his trip to Israel (the meeting was that of a local support group for an Israeli university) and learning a little more about Jewish funeral practices (the meeting was of a group devoted to just that topic comprised of representatives of various congregations). (4) The study group session was interesting as always, as we trace the history of the State of Israel. This topic was David Ben-Gurion himself (unfortunately, he was unable to be present.)

Menachem and Fred (45 cents)

Heinz and Manfred Mayer spend their childhood in Hoffenheim, Germany, near Heidelberg, until the Nazis, under the local leadership of a man named Hopps, expels them from their house and starts them on a journey that will lead their parents to Auschwitz, Heinz to Palestine/Israel and Manfred to UCLA.

The brothers led very different lives, and had no contact with each other, although they were apparently aware of where they each were living. Manfred (now Fred), the older of the two, had kept the letters their mother had sent them from the Gurs concentration camp in Vichy France (before their transfer to the death camp), but was downsizing and asked his brother, Heinz (now Menachem), if he wanted them. This led to their first correspondence in almost 60 years, to their collaboration on a book based on the old letters, and finally to this documentary, where they not only met for the first time since the mid 1940s, but traveled to their hometown, to Gurs, to the orphanage where they were sent from Gurs, and finally so Auschwitz. Then, they brought their entire families from Israel and the United States to Germany sponsored, believe it or not, by the sons of the the very Hopps who evicted them from their family home in 1938.

The movie is called ‘Menachem and Fred’, directed by two Israeli film makers, and is moving, instructive and well worth watching. The DC premier was held last night at the DC JCC before a large and responsive crowd, who first heard a wonderful presentation by a representative of the Germany embassy and by a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum researcher.

The brothers’ reunion was very emotional, but they did not seem to be ready to be best friends. They still have resentment against each other. Their mother told Manfred to take care of Heinz. When Manfred, then in France, had the opportunity to come to the United States in 1946 (at age 16), Heinz (at age 13) then in Switzerland said that he did not want to, that he wanted to go to Palestine. Manfred said “OK”, and left his 13 year old brother in Europe. Clearly, this bred guilt, and resentment, and confusion.

Heinz, now an Israeli professor, living in Jerusalem, is leading a fairly religious life, and his two children and their families are West Bank patriots, still fighting a war. Fred, a retired space engineer, also has two children, each of whom has left Judaism and embraced Christianity (having married Christian spouses).

In one sense, both Fred and Menachem have made a success of their lives; in another sense, their lives seem confused and empty. I would not want to change places with any of them, at any generational level. The movie ends with: what would have happened to these brothers if Nazism never had occurred? And concludes with: you can’t answer such a question. That’s true, but it is interesting to think how different their lives would have been, but also to wonder if their personalities and peculiarities would have been any different at all.

“Sister Carrie”, “Takva”, Ruffino Tamayo, Good Hockey and Bad Thai Food

“Sister Carrie” is an old-fashioned, yet modern book, about a young girl, new to the big city, who slowly finds her way. She is 18, from rural Wisconsin, has a married, older sister in Chicago, comes to join her, finds that she is both treated as a servant and over-protected, and decides to set out on her own–without money or prospects. She meets a handsome smooth talking traveling salesman, Drouet, who treats her fairly well, sets her up in an apartment which they share, and things seem to be OK, until she meets Hurstwood, his married friend, and decides that he is more to her taste than her benefactor. Until she learns he is married…….

I don’t want to give away the plot of a book that I think you should read, but suffice it to say that, for the ten years or so that the book covers, Carrie learns to take care of herself financially, and become independent, and that her relationship with Hurstwood continues for some time, although Carrie seems to think that he was no longer married when he found a Baptist minister to ‘marry’ them, and that she had no idea that he had stolen thousands of dollars from his employer in Chicago before he tricked her into leaving town with him.

Hurstwood does fare so well, starting out as a successful manager of a bar/restaurant in Chicago, and ending his life in a Bowery flop house in New York. He is unable to cope with the world he has created by his very poor decisions, and she is able to grow into a world she never even dreamed about during her early years in a country town in Wisconsin.

There is a lot in the book about social class and capitalism (Dreiser being a socialist and progressive) and, yes, about feminism, although it isn’t called that, as Carrie learns the way of the world and how to make an independent place in it, something very rare and hard to do one hundred years ago.

Carrie is a survivor, as one would say today; Hurstwood is not.

Neither is Muharrem, the central character in Takva, a movie released in Turkey about three years ago, which tells the tale of a very humble, devout, unmarried man in Istanbul, spending his life as an “apprentice” to a distributor of burlap sacks, where he fetches the coffee, answers the phones, and generally runs the small establishment, and has done so since he was apprenticed to the owner by his father twenty years earlier. His free time is spent with his sheikh at a “lodge”, where is a devout follower of an Islamic sect that, according to the director, is not based on any particular sect, but close to the Qadali sect, one of many found in Turkey, but has been made a little more elegant and prosperous in the movie. His sheikh gives him a second job, to collect the rents and manage the repairs on the many rental properties which the sect operates and uses to fund its religious activities, throwing Muharrem into the throes of capitalist Turkey, and placing before him all of the ethical dilemmas that go with that – offers of bribes to get help with licensing and to obtain other favors, what to do when the tenants lose their job and cannot afford the rent. Muharrem is a very nice man (although his temper gets the best of him at times in his new position), and he cannot cope. He, like Hurstwood, simply disintegrates.

Most Americans are not going to see “Takva”, I know, but if it is available on Netflix (which I have never used), or you go to Potomac Video in Chevy Chase, it would be an interesting choice. Of the three Turkish movies we saw this week – one about an ethnic Greek in a small village pretending she was ethnic Turkish for virtually her entire life after the Greeks were expelled, and how she reconnects with her brother in Greece; the other a more typical modern film about a man who decides that it is time for him to move on from his long time relationship with his female companion, and realizes too late that it was a mistake – ‘Takva’ was the best.

Now to the art scene, but first a complaint. The District of Columbia, short of cash like all other governments, has decided that increasing parking meter rates, and increasing the times that parking meter payments are required, has complicated life here a little more. We were going to the Mall yesterday to see the 1970 Soviet film version of “Uncle Vanya” yesterday afternoon, only to find that the free Saturday parking near the Mall is no more. The problem is not putting money in the meter (that is an expense, but not necessarily a problem), but the two hour parking time limits, that would make a movie rather difficult. Parking on the Mall itself remains free, but at an even greater premium, and when we arrived downtown on a very crowded Saturday afternoon, we were unable to find a place to park before the film was scheduled to start.

So we drove home, but decided to stop at Meridian House, on 16th Street, to look at an exhibit of large graphics by Mexican artist Ruffino Tamayo. It had to be at least as good as the film. If you go to www.meridian.org, you can see what the exhibit is about. These are late works of Tamayo, all done after his 70th birthday, it would appear. They are large, and bold. They are lithographs done with a special process, which is explained at the exhibit, and printed on handmade paper. They are simple and colorful, and their titles actually reflect the content. You don’t have to know Greek mythology or Mexican cultural history or anything else, just to look and enjoy. The exhibit is free, and ends sometime next month. It has been there since October. The Meridian House museum is located in the house that belonged to Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer and it is where his daughter Katherine Meyer Graham grew up.

Good hockey – we went to one game and saw the Caps beat the Flyers, and then watched them beat the Penguins and the Coyotes on television. It is getting a little too easy, is it not? We Cap fans will wind up with big heads.

Finally, the bad Thai food. Not a major crisis, just a bad lunch. I had a business meeting on Friday morning near the Woodley Park metro stop and decided to get something to eat before I headed to my office. I stopped in Jandara and ordered a simple chicken fried rice. Which was fair – nothing to write about, so I won’t.

But the service was appalling – to get the order taken, to get the order served, to get a glass of water, to get the bill (something that never happened) all took an enormous amount of effort. I would suggest you stay away. And, I just went to the Yahoo Travel Guide, to make sure I was spelling the restaurant’s name correctly, and read the first review on that site: it was one I could have written, so I assume that Jandara can at least be proud of its consistency.

Yin and Yang: the Lubavitcher Rebbe and It’s Complicated Quebecois (3 cents)

First, the rebbe. When you think of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, you probably think of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the most recent holder of the title, who passed away in 1994, at the age of 92. No successor was designated, none was selected, and the post remains vacant today, although the Lubavitcher Chabad movement is as strong, or stronger than ever.

But I am not talking about this Rabbi Schneerson, but rather his predecessor Yosef Y. Schneerson, who was the father-in-law of Rabbi M.M. Schneerson and the sixth in the line of Lubavitcher leaders. (Like Roosevelts, Schneersons often tended to marry Schneersons; in addition to being father-in-law and son-in-law, the two rebbes were distant cousins. No incest here.)

Rabbi Y.Y. Schneerson headed the Lubavitcher movement from 1920-1927, first from his home in the Soviet Union, then from Latvia, then Poland, and finally from Brooklyn. In 1927, Rabbi Schneerson, along with a number of other religious leaders from various denominations, was arrested by the GPU (later the KGB) in Leningrad and, apparently, sentenced to death. He was imprisoned in Spalerno Prison for 19 days, his death sentence was repealed, he was exiled to the old Russian city of Kostroma (where a Chabad House remains to this day) and then, after only a few months there and following an exhaustive and fascinating international lobbying effort for his relief, he, his wife, his daughters and their husbands and fiances, and several of his followers were allowed to leave the USSR and relocate in Latvia, then still an independent republic.

In 1999, the movement published a book edited by Rabbi Alter B. Metzger, a professor at Yeshiva University, providing a narrative explanation of Schneerson’s arrest and captivity, excerpts from his diaries and memoirs, details of efforts to free him and related documents. The book is interesting both because of its content, and its structure, which is very atypical.

Y.Y. Schneerson was a very well respected religious figure, who did not plot against the Soviet state, but was determined to support orthodoxy Judaism as he and his movement saw it, and not let the state hinder its development. He had been involved in the movement his entire life, and had been arrested over a half dozen times earlier, either by czarist or Communist officials, although never before actually held in prison. Although no longer young in 1927 and suffering from a number of physical ailments, he was determined not to be bowed and he was a man of great faith and able to deal with whatever came his way.

Having said that, it is also true that, as the diarist of his own experience, it is impossible to know how accurate his description is. He describes a horrific prison system, one in which the least infraction is liable to be fatal (and where in fact you don’t need to do anything wrong to tortured or summarily killed). But he also describes a situation where he talks back to the guards and arresting officials (some of whom are Jewish), demands his religious books and articles, and goes on a hunger strike rather than eat the non-kosher food, yet comes through his captivity if not somewhat worn down, alive. But his description of the prison and his exile is fascinating to anyone who is interested in the Soviet prisons. And his description of his life, and that of his family, is equally of interest, whether or not you are a Lubavitcher follower or supporter.

That’s the yin. As to the yang, we saw a new French Canadian movie this evening at the Avalon, called Les Grandes Chaleurs, or as it is translated: Heat Wave. You probably have seen “It’s Complicated”, where Meryl Streep’s ex-husband Alec Baldwin (who has since remarried) begins to stalk and seduce her anew, achieves more success than he deserves, and brings everything he touches and everyone he has contact with into a high state of confusion and complication.

Well, “Les Grandes Chaleurs” is a Francophile clone, but here we have a social worker (who deals with juveniles in trouble with the law), whose husband has just died after telling her he has had an affair for 20 years or so. What she doesn’t know is that the affair has been with her sister, although her twin children (twenty-somethings) know as does the man for whom she works, but they don’t tell her. In the meantime, a now 19 year old ex-client, still a kleptomaniac, decides that he loves her (she is 52) and they have an affair, which the kids and her sister and her boss do not know about, although they find out at staggered times throughout the movie. Yes, it is complicated. It is also low budget, does not have a Baldwin or a Streep in it, but has some clever lines and appealing moments, as it moves back and forth between something approaching a movie showing real emotions and a French farce. And fantasy: you have a 52 year old woman who has spent years working too hard and caring for a very sick husband. He dies; she is relieved and guilty at her relief. But if she can convince herself that he has had a long time affair with her sister (that also takes care of latent sibling rivalry) and that every man in her life is in love with her (her 19 year old former client, her office mate and boss, even her husband’s boss), she can move forward. Maybe. As an additional plus, the scenes of Quebec City, Levis south across the river and the mountains to the north are beautiful.

It played the Avalon for one night only, part of their monthly French film series. Whether it will be possible to see it elsewhere, I am not sure.

What to do on MLK Day (2 cents)

I remember when Martin Luther King Day was the day we did something worthwhile. We’d go to memorial programs, we’d think good thoughts. Something.

Today, we went to a thrift shop in Fairfax County, a Vietnamese restaurant for lunch, and the Great Wall Chinese Super Market. Is this a bad sign, that we are, as they say, forgetting the reason for the season? Or is it a good sign that the holiday has become so much a normal part of the American calendar that we no longer feel the need to make sure we do something special?

Or did we do something special? The Unique Thrift Store on Gallows Road was having a 50% off MLK Day sale on all merchandise. This is an enormous store, and was very crowded. We went because a friend of ours lives near the store and suggested it as an excursion. I believe that between my wife and me, we bought over 20 items of clothing (all very nice, thank you), and paid a total of $50. I don’t know much about Unique Thrift, which has several stores in the Washington area. I do not believe that they are connected with a charity, but I might be wrong. But, in any event, they seem to have quite a business model, although finding something out about them using good old, reliable Google is harder than you might think.

Having wandered through the clothing, books, records, CDs, furniture and household goods for an hour or more, we walked over to the Four Sisters, a very (emphasize that word) good Vietnamese restaurant, where the tofu, lemongrass chicken, squid and vegetables, spring rolls and green papaya salad were top notch. For entertainment, I watched the two people eating at the next table – a man about, I would say, 70, short and rotund, and a woman maybe in her late 50s, short and probably on her way to rotundity, ate what looked like a very nice meal (I do not know what their relationship was – maybe spouses, maybe brother/sister, maybe even father/daughter), and drank to the very bottom a full bottle of red wine (they started the wine before noon, which when we arrived), and then asked the waiter for some more wine, which they got. Hope they are still alive.

The Great Wall grocery store is in the same shopping mall as the thrift shop. It is a very large store, obviously dedicated to an Asian clientele. Variety of greens – enormous. Types of mushrooms – towards infinity. Types of fish – more than in any of the fish markets or supermarkets in our part of town. And on, and on, and on. Yes, it is not glitzy, and the aisles are too narrow and the checkout lines look like Grand Central at rush hour. But the prices are good, everything looked fresh, and the variety of virtually every type of food was enormous. We didn’t buy much; this was an exploration. We bought some mushrooms, some tofu and dried persimmon (it might be our only chance to get dried persimmon), but thought we might go back and try to be a little more serious about it.

So, did we do justice to Martin Luther King Day? (I know the answer to that one. Don’t rub it in.)

Saved by Indique ($1.79)

This is about restaurants. Over the past few months, we have eaten out less often that our norm. I’m not sure why – perhaps the weather, perhaps to save a little money. Who knows? Perhaps it is because restaurants (or is it food) have seemed less interesting,

This week, however, we reverted to past practice, and I ate a number of meals in restaurants, mostly in restaurants that we have previously enjoyed. And the experience wasn’t the greatest.

For example, last weekend, we stopped by at Bethesda’s Shangri La, a relatively new Nepalese restaurant where we had enjoyed a meal shortly after they opened. We thought we had discovered a new hit restaurant. This time, ordering a Nepalese chicken curry and some vegetarian dishes, we were mildly disappointed. The food was fine, just fine. But it wasn’t spectacular and, although I would guess we will try it one more time, we probably would not go back, had we not had such a good meal the first time we were there.

This past week, we ate at two of my favorite restaurants in Washington itself. It was restaurant week in Washington, which means that participating restaurants (and there are many) offer three course lunches and dinners for $20 and $35 respectively. Tuesday night we went with friends to Le Chat Noir, our neighborhood upscale French restaurant, for probably the fourth time in the past year. Each of the other times, the food had been wonderful. This time, again the food was good, and probably worth the $35 per person. But again, it wasn’t spectacular. I had a salad with some spicy chicken on top as an appetizer, a cassoulet as the main course, and (believe it or not) I have already forgotten what I had for dessert. I probably ordered wrong – the meal was too heavy for me, and the cassoulet, although tasty, probably had too much salt, and other things I should try to avoid. Again, I am sure we will go back to Le Chat Noir, but not an additional time if the next time doesn’t match our previous experience.

I have to add one thing, however, in the restaurants’ favor: I received an email from Le Chat today saying that on Thursday they are having a pay-what-you-want three meal dinner, with all the proceeds going to two prominent charities operating in Haiti. I hope they do very well that night.

Last night, still restaurant week, we went with friends to another Indian restaurant, Indique on Connecticut Avenue in Cleveland Park. It was excellent, and made me think that I had not stopped appreciating good food out, that I just hadn’t found it recently.

It was interesting that, while Le Chat Noir kept its regular menu for restaurant week (you could order any appetizer, any entree, any dessert), Indique had a special menu. I had a spicy lamb appetizer and a fish stew for my main course, while everyone else had a vegetarian meal, and we all shared. Because vegetarian food is normally less expensive to prepare, and because the Restaurant Week price was fixed, they permitted you to get two entrees if you ordered vegetarian. So, for the four of us, we had four appetizers and seven entrees, along with dessert. And we each got a glass of wine. Could not have been better.

I should also add that I had an excellent lunch (salmon, green beans, potatoes) at the Iron Gate Inn, on N Street, one day last week with a friend. Talk about a place where the food is consistently good – this is it, although I don’t think I ever have gone there for supper. I also had a nice flat bread (with tomato, feta, spinach and carmelized onion) and a small Caesar salad at the National Gallery one day, which was light and just right. And I had a chicken/cranberry wrap (I don’t like wraps, so I just eat the innards) and a mango/papaya smoothie at Robeks – which was only so-so (but that’s all I expected), and only cost me about $6.50. I could figure out why it was that price – it seemed to me that the wrap was $5 and the smoothie close to $4, but I was assured that $6.50 was correct. So for the price…….

We will see what this week brings – maybe we should go back to Le Chat Noir and give a boost to Haitian relief at the same time. We shall see.

“Evenings at Five”

I wasn’t planning on reading much this evening, but picked up a very short book, “Evenings at Five” by Gail Godwin. I read it at one sitting, in record time, but slowly.

The book is only a few pages more than one hundred long, and several of those pages, in the first edition that I own, are simply illustrations. So we have a short work, one that could have been published in a literary magazine as well in book form.

Christina is a writer and her husband, a composer has died, and the book is an elegy to their relationship, and the story of his illness and death, and how she coped. It is a simple book, written in simple language. And it is quite beautiful and touching.

Yes it is fiction, but it is apparently highly fact based, as Godwin’s companion of 30 years, composer Robert Starer, who shares many personal characteristics with the Rudy of the book, had just passed away. So it is a very personal book.

A year or so ago, I read through Joan Didion’s similar book, “The Year of Magical Thinking”, which I didn’t appreciate nearly as much. It was not quite as elegaic. It did not draw me in.

And then I realized that there were other similar books that I have read, including Morton Kondracke’s “Saving Milly”, written when his wife was dying of complications from Parkinson’s disease. I have not read John Bayley’s book about Iris Murdoch, nor Calvin Trillin’s book about his late wife.

I think I will.