Mango Pudding Blues 3.0

CHROME DOMES

It is our fifth anniversary this weekend, and I can die happy now, having just last night eaten at a chi-chi French restaurant where they brought the main courses, without a hint of irony, under those big silver domes à la Bugs Bunny, which they removed with a flourish. Killer had duck, I had bison, both drizzled with absurdly delicious reductions. And we drank a wine from our favorite Canadian cult vineyard, Lailey’s. We’d had the wine before, at our last fancy dinner out, in fact, and Killer pointed out that it tasted even better this time, and we were forced, horrified, to the realization that it was the big balloon wine glasses we were drinking from. The insufferable wine snobs are right. “It’s true,” she said. “These stupid things really work.”

Now we’re off to the opera. Rigoletto. Ta ta!

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Thursday, March 25, 2004

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

We at Mango Pudding Blues would like to tell you that we are the kind who thrive on chaos and change, but we would be lying. In fact, we need a certain degree of civility and stability just to glue ourselves together and drag ourselves through the day. On the other hand, once we have made it to the plateau of stability, our relaxed delight begins almost immediately to corrode into boredom. And our whole lives we’ve thought that we’d work all the things like these out as we got older. But now we know that you never work these things out. They’re the dark strands woven into the tapestry of life. And we sigh to ourselves as we realize that we have to use them somehow.

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Tuesday, March 23, 2004

SAMPLES

So one day we’re waiting in line at the Starbucks and we’re talking about what to make for dinner that night and I spy the sample plate on the counter upon which there are three cubes left of a cranberry-white chocolate scone and so I scarf one. So there’s two left, and I’m about to gesture that she should really have one. But she’s talking, blah blah blah, and hasn’t really noticed the sample plate, and there’s nobody in line behind us, and nobody’s looking, and the cranberry-white chocolate scone is delicious, so I take another piece and there’s still one there to offer her. But she’s not paying attention. Blah blah blah. I smile. I wait. I am going to offer her that last delightful sample cube. Blah blah blah. Fuck it! I snatch the last cube for myself! And my sudden compulsive lunge for it causes her to notice what I’ve been up to, causes the memory of my ministrations, gathered subconsciously through the corner of her eye while she spoke, to come into focus. And as I’m stuffing the last cube into my mouth, she’s looking in grand mirthful horror at the sample plate, which I had failed to notice was not, in fact, a sample plate at all. Was in fact a dirty dish put back on the counter by some prior patron who tore his cranberry-white chocolate scone apart with dirty licked fingers and then abandoned its final three morsels.

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