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...Yesterday's court-tossed wedding bouquet was caught by me and thousands of others who will visit City Halls all over California in a state of "finally" and make it legal. Of course, the decision to allow queer marriage can be reversed by referendumb as soon as November. In the meantime, here's a quasi-update to my very last, coincidental post, "Gay Rice":

So, ladies and gents and everyone in between, why has it taken so long to have a pissy little gay wedding on network television? Yes, we're in California, not Massachusetts, so no wedding, just wedding simulacrum. Maybe, soon, they'll wake me in the nursing home: "Hey, Jeff, they're about to have a real gay wedding, and each and every parent is actually in the mosque."  No idea, but I'm relieved the justice system finally caught up with ABC-TV. I've always depended upon what William Blake once wrote: "What is now proved was once only imagin'd" -- even if imagin'd on Brothers and Sisters.

When that happens, I'll take Guess it's time to take a piece of my piece of chocolate donut out of the freezer.

Down the Aisle, Slowly

It took the supposedly liberal New York City mayor David Dinkins ages to come to his political and humanistic senses and order City Hall to issue domestic partnership certificates. That was January, 1993, more than 15 years ago, and it seemed late in coming even then. No money for city employee health benefits, previously promised, came with the mingy declaration; Dinkins was and will forever be an accountant. (Sample certificate is above. I don't know who the fine gents on this particular document are, although one is named Jeffrey.)

So, on March 1, the moment we were allowed, my eternally patient partner and I registered. In spite of my constitutional inclination to be first, we let two ladies in Teamster jackets precede us, so our certificate says number 2. We used off-brand chocolate donuts from a cart for our wedding cake.

I wrote about this before it happened for the Village Voice, where I worked, but for the life of me I can't find a copy of the piece anywhere to post and show you. It did include a stock wedding-shot with my very own face pasted over those of both the lacy bride and tuxedoed groom -- nutty, but it attracted attention. I was a restaurant critic at the time and genuinely anonymous, but I couldn't imagine a maitre d' who would rip out that queer item and tape it to his station: a restaurant critic could never be anything but a restaurant critic.

My article mildly scorned the idea of gay marriage. Why duplicate the broken-down, female-as-chattel cornerstone of bourgeois stability? Let my (sorry, our) registration be remonstrance to ...

Well, the piece advertised the political festivities of March 1, and that was that.

Why TV Counts

It's Sunday, Mother's Day, 11 p.m., and I have just watched the season finale of Brothers and Sisters, an ABC series I don't usually sample because my no longer eternally patient partner can't stomach the maudlin Sally Fields (me, I will always see her on a table screaming to organize a downtrodden shop) and wonders how the tremulous Ally McVeal can still make a living.

The episode was constructed around a gay-male wedding. Yes, it's a wedding; no, it's a ceremony; the sympathetic script goes blah blah blah. The main family is all wry and gooey with acceptance and love, while the other dad and mom, in an Arizona tract home, won't be bothered to come. "Try to understand we're not bad people," the distant father says to his son's groom-to-be, before secretly passing to him the Family Wedding Cuff-Links to give to his errant boy. It's a sniffle-evoking gesture, an absent parent's love in the form of two cold pieces of metal.

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So, ladies and gents and everyone in between, why has it taken so long to have a pissy little gay wedding on network television? Yes, we're in California, not Massachusetts, so no wedding, just wedding simulacrum. Maybe, soon, they'll wake me in the nursing home: "Hey, Jeff, they're about to have a real gay wedding, and each and every parent is actually in the mosque."

When that happens, I'll take my piece of chocolate donut out of the freezer.

Oh, don't think I didn't pump out real tears when the brothers and sisters toasted and hugged the two gray-suited fellows in love. Those tears aren't frivolous, not at all. They run down my cheeks to mark and anoint every scenario of hope that popular culture offers to my potential sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters. The minor generosity of this workaday script may have earth-shaking results when taken in by just that boy or girl. It will award brave and curious children with the pride of permission.

Even in its twilight, television has spectacular power to free our younger selves. What our parents do or don't do shouldn't concern us at all.

A Gay Marriage Reprint

Although I can't find my 1993 Voice piece, here's something I wrote (published May 23, 2004) for the Op-Ed page of the Philadelphia Inquirer the day after gay weddings began in Massachusetts. Again, TV is central:

Justices of the peace across Massachusetts opened for unusual business Monday at 12:01 a.m., and as is his wont, The Tonight Show's Jay Leno found a joke in it. A government office actually working when you need one, he wondered. Maybe we should all say we're gay.

The startling photos filled the covers of most newspapers the next day: the very first female couples and male couples being married, officially wed, in these United States.

Yes, civil marriages of gay citizens have taken place recently in San Francisco and elsewhere, but these are in legal limbo. There were even the reported half-dozen marriage licenses issued to same-sex couples by Boulder County, Colo., in 1975. But Monday (which also marked the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education) made history. Now, under law, these Bay State knots are truly tied.

I happen to be a gay man in my 50s. I came out just after Stonewall -- that's June 1969, in case you've forgotten, when furious gay men, drag queens and lesbians told abusive and corrupt police that they wouldn't take it anymore and stormed Greenwich Village streets. For many years I wrote, spoke and marched for what was then called gay liberation and is now called, more quietly, gay rights. My partner and I have been together for 27 years; we were, in fact, the second couple to register in New York's city hall as domestic partners, a concept I may claim some credit for originating.

Yet, when I saw these love-besotted folks and their friends and families grinning, hugging and crying on the network news, I was wonderstruck. The next day, at the newsstand, I was still incredulous. It may sound odd, but in spite of decades of wearing my gay heart and mind on my sleeve, the achievement of legal marriage for the likes of me is something that, until Monday, was literally unimaginable. It was as if I had been jogging along on some interminable gay-rights road and suddenly a bus with thousands of shoes tied to the bumper sped by. Just married. Just amazing.

It seems I am not alone among my gay-pride contemporaries in feeling this way about the reality of same-sex marriage. "It's beyond anything we saw as possible," Peg, from New York, told me. "We were just barely becoming legitimate, and then this... . It's like instead of renting your house, you own it."

My old friend and marching buddy Melvyn, in San Diego, agrees completely: Marriage was never in the cards. That domestic-partnership registration, so long-sought and hard-fought, is now the fallback position for those who previously wouldn't give gay rights the time of day is miraculous. We each recall the many times one or the other of us addressed hostile or queasy groups of students, librarians, police officers, trying to explain the ultimately ordinary facts of gay life, but actually serving as initial real-world exposures to a species our audiences knew only as artistic, pathetic, deviant, criminal.

Yes, weddings aside, much has changed. AIDS decimated the gay body politic and continues to ravage us as well as so many more. (Did the potent cocktail of ACT-UP activism and unavoidable compassion somehow make this marriage moment possible?) Gelded but successful Wills and Graces have opened the mass market to ever-queerer exemplars, finally normalizing - even if into burnished cliches - those previously demonized.

Opinions, apparently, have followed suit. If polls are true, most Americans 25 and under think gay marriage is cool, leading to the astounding conclusion that optioning this most basic family value to all is inevitable.

But a few of those benign teens will, in the next year or two or four, be tossed from their homes for declaring that they can't ignore the same-sex guy or girl next door. Some of them will be beaten or even slain; some will kill themselves. Schools will continue to isolate them, places of worship will exclude them, the military will use them and lose them.

Mr. Leno's writers, as usual, got it backward. Monday was the first time city hall opened to me. When, Sir, does saying I'm gay keep it from closing?

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Ankimo, a silken Japanese small-dish prepared from the scarce monkfish's hefty liver, gives up a rich, accordioned delight that we usually associate with love or art and rarely with death. First, there's the elegance of its miniature presentation. Then, with the slightest pressure between mouth and tongue, the steamed morsel becomes something neither liquid nor solid and takes hold in two places at once: your fragrance-poised inner nose, and your texture- and temperature-sensitive mouth, which is beginning to be fretful about when the luscious visitor will vanish.

As you fear, without warning, it melts and is gone ... to be replaced by a quiet, ghostly version of itself (a pedestrian term, aftertaste), which, if you don't nullify the process with a bite of something else, joins with the brand-new brawny memory of your first, swooning impression. Those two sensory partners will circle and circle, moving ever farther away, until in a day or two they leave behind nothing but words such as these.

I can only imagine that the potentially fatal liver of the blimpy blowfish, fugu, makes ankimo seem like tinned sardine. (Actually, I love certain brands of sardines and believe the modest fellows possess a formidable pleasure-soul.) Fugu liver has been described in gastronomical terms so hyperbolic that it leads anyone to question my constant assertion that serious pleasures are found in frivolous places. There's nothing frivolous here.

Japanese Roulette

You know fugu: it's Japanese roulette. When caught wild and not properly butchered (can you butcher fish?), the toxin in blowfish, especially in the reportedly delectable liver, will paralyze you and, with all your senses still active and screaming, retard and then halt your breathing and heartbeat. Imagine yourself as a pallid star in some Poe-pretending Hammer film, with a queeny Vincent Price gloating over your motionless demise.

Not all fugu has the same amount of toxin, and licensed chefs in Japan gain reputation through their skill in purifying the beast, especially the toxin-riddled liver, occasionally leaving just enough poison to create the sought-after tingling of the lips. But accidents will happen. In 1975, a fugu treat killed kabuki actor and gourmand Bando Mitsugoro VIII, who until that moment had been a "living national treasure." What a ruckus, national art murdered by national novelty. Sale of fugu liver was henceforth forbidden, which made its macho charm all the more potent.

You may have had your fugu memory refreshed by the news that it can be farmed in a manner that results in a toxin-free product, the poison being bred by what the fish eats. Because of this, old-time fugu masters have hit the ceiling, fearing that if risk is diluted, even the wild stuff will lose its social potency, and they their jobs.


Death by Theater

Restaurant critics are supposed to eat everything, even foods we may not like, but I have never eaten fugu liver, or the safer fugu sashimi -- and both have been listed on menus in my hands. Does that make me a culinary coward?

Hard to say: I was once almost done in by a Santa Monica curried oyster, and never forgot. There's risk in anything that goes into one's mouth, just as there's risk in whatever goes into one's mind. I had always thought that arts critics, especially theater critics, were cultural "king's tasters" or, even better, lifeguards (with a footlight tan) who would warn me of Broadway undertow. Really bad theater -- bad art of any kind -- can paralyze one's heart just as effectively as will an errant piece of fish. Yet Grease et alia do their damage slowly, without the thrill of personal jeopardy or any exceptional commensurate pleasure .

Relativists of the "I know what I like" breed may object to the bossy finality of critical judgment. But I have seen the harm done to those who have exposed themselves again and again to poorly trimmed theater and film scripts numbed by clichés, moldering musical warhorses, and cutesy, whatever's-available "thematic exhibitions" of art.

Should we critics continue to eat our fugu so that others may be safe? Yes, of course, but reviewing opportunities are fewer and fewer, just like wild fugu itself and its brave, though diminished, clientele. Most art, and criticism, fail not by taking risks, but by avoiding them. If we're not prepared to put ourselves on the line, we critics, and what we criticize, may just as well be farmed and neutered, too.

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If, as has been irrefutably shown, restaurants are theater, then it follows that food is part of the entertainment. Usually, when the marriage of food and arts is trotted out, the dog-eared Western menu automatically opens to glutton Petronius, food-face Arcimboldo, and sundry other library-cafeteria standards. But we 21st-century eaters out there should have our own edible cast -- and not so long ago, the nightly news, sourcing YouTube, provided not just one, but a "Spudding Taternacle Choir" of potatoes, in a video (by John Porter McMeans and Cheryl Wheeler) called The Potato Song.

Sure, a line from the lyrics -- "They have eyes, but they do not have faces" -- does link to the Franju film masterpiece, Eyes Without a Face, but that's another story. Boomers may also recall that potatoes do indeed have faces, male and female, if the dog hasn't eaten the plastic lips or mustache.

The video was used because, in case you didn't know, the United Nations has declared 2008 to be the International Year of the Potato. For some of us, every year is the year of the potato, but the U.N. honors the tuber now because the rice-wheat-maize cereal trinity is in trouble. Drought in Australia and marketing greed has left the developing world in a rice crisis. In the U.S., bakeries scrawl signs explaining that the elevated price of flour adds a buck a loaf; pizzerias are demanding four bits more a slice. Soybeans for fuel bump corn for feed. So someone in a moderately high place decided that what had been a naked commodity-trader fact should be dressed up and set on a cultural platform:

The world potato sector is undergoing major changes. Until the early 1990s, most potatoes were grown and consumed in Europe, North America and countries of the former Soviet Union. Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in potato production and demand in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where output rose from less than 30 million tonnes in the early 1960s to more than 165 million tonnes in 2007.

Therefore, potatoes are:

Food of the future. The International Year of the Potato is raising awareness of the key role played by the "humble tuber" in agriculture, the economy and world food security. But it also has a very practical aim: to promote development of sustainable potato-based systems that enhance the well-being of producers and consumers and help realize the potato's full potential as a "food of the future."

You'll never guess which country grows the most potatoes. Not the U.S. (fifth) or Russia (second). It's China. Are those spuds for McDonald's restaurants in Beijing, Shanghai? Partly, yes; more for export. But the un-yam is increasingly popular in inland Northern and Central China, used for recipes that make the most of the ingredient's long-treasured ability to straddle the flavor line between vehicle and passenger.

Potatoes are this year's rice.

 

Potato Madeleines

My father, who seldom spoke about his Brooklyn yute, told me that he and his roughie pals each put a raw potato into a tin can in which holes had been punched and strings attached. Then they added a burning piece of coal (!) or wood and swung the can around and around, sparks flying, until the skin was black and the white inside exploded. What kind of potato was it, I asked, how did it taste? He didn't remember, but said how much fun it was and that the potatoes were filched from the stand at the corner. Of course, I shouldn't do anything like that.

 

French fry dilemma: Nathan's or McDonald's? Fat, ridged, savory, enough flesh inside to scrape with your tongue and let the steam of fatted starch flood your mouth. Date: very early '50s. Coney Island, still festive, was close to where we lived. Nothing could be more special, a gift from Daddy just to me, but dozens of others, with identical smiles, are eating exactly the same thing -- a little boy's first lesson in social paradox.

Next lesson came in a car with richer relatives, on a drive to a brand new burger place, not an old, tired White Castle (whose multiple hamburger summaries I loved), but something jazzy and suburban, the first of its kind on Long Island. Here, take this ... and cousin Rusty pushed a hot bag bulging with shiny, skinny sticks into my face. When I delicately plucked out a single one, a bunch fell into my lap, staining my chinos. Heat! Salt! And a tease of my friend the potato waving goodbye. Date: later '50s, post-Elvis, pre-Beatles. Which fry was I -- or could I be both?

I had, coincidentally, just finished a book about the Great Potato Famine. Jackie O. kept her weight down and spirits up with a glittering supper of a single baked and slit Idaho topped with Beluga: tiny obsidian eggs growing on the edges of a big brown one. When I went to the basket under the San Diego sink to get a potato for one of my student-poverty lunches (should his father's son filch some caviar from the shop around the corner?), my hand felt something slimy. As I grabbed, the hard part collapsed, and the wild smell that erupted from the dark shocked me to near oblivion. How could something so predictable, so bland, become home to such complete and fetid corruption?

When I revived I saw that the surrounding potatoes were unaffected, and if I could forget how close they had been to the devil, would be boiled and buttered soon. Yes, I thought, still shaken, there's a lesson in this somewhere.

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Do Children Still Hunger for the Past?

My brother and I were early TV-babies, and the family's first set, a blond-wood Zenith, had a screen the size and shape of a salad plate. Although he did the usual little-brother things like bite me on the leg when he was mad, Les and I watched everything together, making fun of sitcom characters (like handsome but prim Mr. Boynton in Our Miss Brooks) or singing dirty-word versions of theme songs and jingles.

All that seems normal, but we also did something with TV that I really can't explain. When those jerky but wildly surreal Max Fleischer cartoons came up as afternoon kiddy fare, and Fred 'n' Gingery black-and-white movies were shown on New York's Million Dollar Movie or The Early Show (anyone recall its "Syncopated Clock"?), we'd both leap from the sofa and put our runny noses to the screen so we could make out the tiny Roman-numeral copyright date beneath the titles before it vanished. Then we'd scream the number, and the earlier the year, the happier we were.

That was in the '50s, whose contemporary Douglas Sirk-ish products could easily serve the same purpose now -- they're decades more distant than our antique trophies were -- to history-hungry tykes. But are online boys ands girls interested in pictures and sounds from the past?

A newspaper story jogged me into retrospection, the one in the Times last week about the ostensibly earliest recorded sound. When I began to comprehend that French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had produced sonic representations called phonautograms 17 years before Thomas Edison received his phonograph patent, and a team of "audio historians" converted the sooty images into actual sounds, I nearly fainted with the same copyright delight that had grabbed me as a child.

Phonautograms weren't playback-able, yet their ignored inventor deserved some sort of credit. And though there's reportedly no evidence that Edison knew anything about Scott, we are well aware that the American hero was an American thief of ideas; just read Wizard, Marc Seifer's fine biography of Nikola Tesla, or even the poetic libretto of the recently produced opera Violet Fire, to see how Mr. Light Bulb wrested credit and a fortune for the invention of alternating current from the gay, Croatia-born genius (at left).

I hurriedly looked online for a button, and yes! There it was, an 11-second mp3 file of a probably female voice singing "Au Clair de la Lune" that the detectives say was recorded on April 9, 1860 -- almost exactly 148 years ago.

In what type of room was it sung? In what color gown, of what rustling silk, was the vocalist clad? At just what time of day? A boy's inquiring mind wants to know.

And then I remembered something from those saucer-TV days, an episode from a science fiction series -- called, conveniently, Science Fiction Theater -- with a plot about a kidnapped scientist:

Enemy espionage obtains a record of a physicist's top-secret conversation with the Secretary of Defense in a completely sealed room. The secret of the leak lies in a bottle of ant poison containing a mysterious crystal -- a crystal with the power to record entire conversations!

"The Frozen Sound" first aired on July 29, 1955, and the program ended with something that has never left my imagination. Two scientists take a chunk of Vesuvius lava from Pompeii and place it in the ant-poison machine that frees the captured sound. They wait, and ... screams, shrieks, moans of a population burned and buried suddenly two millennia before. Their listening faces show an unforgettable hybrid of fascination and horror.

Decades of haunting yard sales and flea markets have led me to understand that I require dusty, worn, hand-holdable evidence that daily life existed before I was born -- even better if the original price tag, as it were, is still attached. I don't know why the mounds of traditional cultural evidence heaped under me, the world's books, art and music, never fully suffice. I have a modern, life-affirming desire to see the actual menu, and the bill, for The Last Supper.

Or a moving image, vital and seminal, of Isadora Duncan, drapery flying.

Or a sound, steeped in ghostly gray Parisian ether, of a still recognizable song. Who was she?

Now I have another button to press, and more of the proof of a lived-in past I seem to need.

Sascha Radetsky of ABT. He'll meet you outside.

Tight Deadline

There's a peculiar first-person piece in the latest issue of Newsweek, odd as much from an editing point of view as from a writer's or reader's. "Don't Judge Me by My Tights," offered as a "My Turn" column, is a credo by American Ballet Theater soloist Sascha Radetsky that can be summed up in one short swipe: Don't think I'm a sissy because I dance ballet.

Those limp, nancy cliches, he writes, have nothing to do with what he really does:

On an average day at the job, I handle lithe, lovely women, engage in duels and delight in the experience of an exotic locale. I move like a gymnast or martial artist and embody the vilest of pimps or the most chivalrous and passionate of lovers.

Yes, that's the beat beat beat of the jackhammers you hear in the pit.

And if I were you, great unthinking public, I'd be careful to keep any doubts to myself:

But for you out there who still feel compelled to malign male dancers with half-truths and petty stereotypes, well, maybe we need to step outside. I'll leave my tights on.

Jamie Bell as Billy Elliot

The Third Gay

At first I looked to see if a mistake had been made and the piece really came from a Newsweek "Last 25 Years" special issue. Billy Elliot, after all, was released in 2000 and won its three Oscar noms the next year. You don't remember this U.K. gem, one of the most appealing queer-stereotype smashers -- and dance-invigorating narratives -- ever on screen, in which a miserable working-class straight boy discovers his happiness and core self in an inescapable zeal for ballet? Well, neither does the Newsweek staff.

Editors, maybe there are ways to butch up this sort of tired stuff. Sure, defend the boys who want to dance. Yet make a wee effort and find a nongay toe-shoe guy who doesn't whine about moronic bigotry, but slaps it down with a pliant wrist instead; discover the guy who likes, even loves, to be taken for a sissy. How about a couple of lesbian and gay dancers to back him up? There's gotta be a George Clooney in ballet somewhere. ("No, I'm gay, gay. The third gay -- that was pushing it.")

If he really knows his subject, this winning fellow could also demonstrate how a great part of the magnetism of his vocation comes from activating the cross-gender power and sensuousness of bodies in motion, male and female.

By the way, Mr. Radetsky, no matter what role you take or costume you don, you can't strip from dance the surprise of erotic desire.

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Unforgettable TV phrase of the week:

"Yes, that was from my Joan of Arc cocktail line."

An Out There award not even worth the paper it isn't written on goes to the reader who can name the speaker and program.

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Someone, 20 years ago, suggested a discreet tattoo the site [sic, or pun] of which would alert the prospective partner to the danger of proceeding as had been planned. But the author of the idea was treated as though he had been schooled in Buchenwald, and the idea was not widely considered, but maybe it is up now for reconsideration.

-- from "Killers at Large: AIDS Carriers and Their Victims" by William F. Buckley Jr., National Review Online, Feb. 19, 2005

Many traditional foodways are at risk, and this sharp site focuses on an important one: Save the Deli. Scroll down and check out Alan Richman's 2nd Avenue Deli blog review for GQ: he nails it (which means we agree).

The old sign

A Tale of Meat

If you're not interested in a New York story, you can stop now. It may be annoying even if you are, because I'll be talking about a lifelong relationship with something a number of readers may never get to know -- which usually sounds like a brag.

No one ever said the 2nd Avenue Deli had the best pastrami. Most mavens pit Katz's on Houston Street ("Send a salami to your boy in the Army" -- the history-heavy sign dangles from the ceiling) against Langer's Delicatessen on South Alvarado in L.A. My own feeling is that, when you reach a certain, Shangri-La level of pastraminess, the sandwich directly in front of you is the best.

But yes, I cannot deny my fat expertise: For pastrami, it is indeed Katz's or Langer's, Langer's or Katz's. In some cases, the event defines the expert as well as the evaluation.

Two Critics

I went with my friend Daniel Young, a former restaurant critic of the New York Daily News, to the new 2nd Avenue Deli on East 33rd Street between Third Avenue and Lex. This establishment was founded on Manhattan's Second Avenue and 10th Street in 1954, which makes it a relative matzo-ball newcomer; little Jeff was already eating pastrami on seeded rye that year somewhere in Brooklyn, not far from Hymie's Highway Hi-grade Appetizers. I developed my career-enabling ability to differentiate flavors at that time by comparing one kind of mustard to another and quietly but precisely making my preference known. (It wasn't French's.)

The 2nd Avenue Deli moved reportedly because of an absurd rent increase, of the type that is forcing a nearby East Village trattoria, the excellent and hospitable Col Legno, to move -- or close! -- as well. Col Legno's still open, on East 9th Street between Second and Third; try the flask-cooked beans in olive oil with garlic and sage, fried artichokes, pappardelli with wild boar ragù, before they vanish.

Also, the deli's founder, Abe Lebewohl, was shot and killed in an early morning robbery in 1996, which made it hard to eat joyfully. Members of Abe's family opened the transplant in December.

Dan and I walked into a glass-walled anteroom. "Table or takeout?" was our efficient greeting by the man on the stool; when he got up to scout inside, he put his cup of something to drink on the seat. The deli doesn't take reservations, so we could employ Dan's trick: Don't arrive on the hour or half hour or even on the quarter. Come at eight minutes before, or 17 after, and you draw a better chance of being seated. (Sorry, Dan, I had to.)

Yet we still had to wait, so we stood as others came after us into the kosher aquarium, arranging their dignity and checking in. Whenever the interior door opened to let belching customers out, the hot-pickled-meat perfume from the jammed takeout counter flooded through, the best ad for "deli" ever created. (The counter is crowded because the servers pick up much of their orders there.) When we were kids, my brother and I wanted to bottle and sell that smell.

Suddenly I realized I was in for trouble: Whatever I actually ordered, I was about to be served a decent portion of mortality, pickle on the side.

Company

The stool-man made us an offer to share a table with another pair, and we agreed. The next two couples, offended, said no, but two guys bit, and in we went. The rectangular four-tops, arranged like booths, were tight as could be, and the fellows suggested that they take the outer seats because they'd be eating fast.

We thought: They have a curtain. What theater? It's far from Broadway. They don't look at all like a couple, or even gay, but who can tell.

Five minutes into their meal, one was trying to get the other to read a script by Al Carmines, the effervescent reverend who a while back ran the Village's Judson Poet's Theater -- I hoped it would be his 1973 musical hit, The Faggot. It was not hard to overhear.

Two critics, one meal, what to choose? I had eaten in the old version of this place dozens of times because I lived nearby and thought the food was rolling slowly downhill way before it closed. It took us just a few minutes to fashion a concentrated test: We would share a matzo-ball soup, then a corned beef sandwich and pastrami sandwich, flipping halves. Our mutual reviewing instinct demanded that we add an order of French fries.

Yes, I know, I know, the many touchstones we didn't touch.

As soon as the server realized we were not one party but a pair of deuces, she brought out mirror-images of the complimentary but mandatory plate of half-sours, sours, and pickled green tomatoes (two of each, two of everything, so no fighting); sides of the crunchy, not creamy, cole slaw, and something new for free: gribenes (GRIH-bin-iss), a monkey dish containing a scant dozen scraps of chicken skin fried in schmaltz. Bad even to think these resemble pork rinds. The usual recipe should include lookalike pieces of crispy onion, but I didn't taste any. I ate my few with appreciation more dutiful than passionate.

The broth of the soup was genuine but featureless. I sliced the light-beige tennis ball in half and gave it over. Not the worst, not the best ... but the cloud I was afraid of, a kind of time-transporting mist, began to form around my head. Then, bang on the table, meat and potatoes. We traded our almost identical sandwich portions carefully so the piles of ruddy slices wouldn't tumble. I saw Dan look at both and without hesitation choose corned beef first. His face disappeared.

Like him, I had no choice, and met my pastrami.

A Sandwich Life

There will always be those who want some kind of description that leads to a ranking, a rating. After we ate our sandwiches, Dan thought that the corned beef was better corned beef than the pastrami was pastrami, yet you could tell from his Cheshire grin that he was extremely pleased with both. Although the corned beef was well-colored (with saltpeter) and possessed the manifold edges of flavor that indicate a proper period of brining, we agreed it was slightly too mild.

I may have had better pastrami in my life, but sitting there I knew that I had crossed the snowy Himalayas and entered a serene, changeless realm where rating didn't matter. The breastlike softness of the bread as it chews into luxurious fat and the smoky, peppery, irreducible tang of transformed flesh ... and then the whole awakened, Mahler-like, by a clarion mustard ...

The pleasures of one's life are supposed to vary, to reflect and refine the protean person you are at each peak, significant time. But the pleasure of pastrami does exactly the opposite, forcing the older you, the older me, to acknowledge we are exactly the same ravenous, curious, sensuous beings we were at our first restaurant table, and will be until the final flecks of yellow and red are wiped from our lips.

Dan went uptown and I went down, hoping to meet again very soon.

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The two host-judges (foreground) and initial contestants on Make Me a Supermodel

Sincere congratulations, media scribblers, on a righteous strike.

During your absence, TV critics sneered at the temporary dominance of reality shows. But I had never understood their genre distinction, aware that those purportedly callow shadow-plays are scripted with the best of them. OK, semi-scripted. OK, employing a form of method acting, one without method.

I have praised the primitive, addictive, and unexpectedly sweet Project Runway in print before and, as it ends its fourth season, have no reason to recant. A fashion-design contest is the ploy, but the grabber is the obvious pleasure that men and women of all ages and sartorial preferences take in the making of something new to wear.

Project Runway contestant Christian (who may win) and his demanding prom-dress client

The Proms

Here's how a typical episode goes:

This week's design conundrum, a prom dress ... $100 and 20 minutes to run up and down the aisles of a photogenic bolt boutique and score the fabric of one's dreams ... two days to sketch and sew ... fit a high-school diva ... tears ... get her to makeup (sponsor one) and hair (sponsor two) ... second-act tears ... a teeny runway show ... "I was so relieved, my girl looked fierce" ... and finally, one guest and three regular judges choose their best and worst, embarrassing winners and losers both with expert clichés whose vapidity is surpassed only by their inconsistency.

Reality? The pictured emotions may be suspect, but emotions on the sofa at home are real as the sweatshops humming far underground. I dare you to be unmoved. (How many times have I lost such a dare?) And tell me, where can you find another program dedicated to the on-site creation of beauty?

Top Chef, you say, also on Bravo? I feature the appeal of food as much as the next aesthetic consumer, but that program hasn't found a way to get beyond knife glitz and schoolyard bullying.

Model Tease

I also can't get enough of the new runway show Make Me a Supermodel. ("Make me a malted." "Poof, you're a malted.") The youthful male and female contestants flown from Plano, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee (yes, he's the married twink prison guard) to share bedrooms in a Manhattan townhouse as they compete for the top spot are cute as glandular buttons. But they are "playing themselves" on so many levels of vacuous, Web-teen artifice, in front of so many simultaneous cameras, mirrors, and lights, that the result could have been put together by the Writer's Guild team of Albee-Pinter-Ionesco.

Somehow, a bracing bit of charm squeaks through -- and this week, for the first time, yours truly compromised his hard-won critical integrity by voting via computer for one of the three threatened candidates he most wanted to keep in the running. (It's gay-guy Ronnie, the only out contender. He's not doing all that well because the judges keep saying his look is too "All-American." Irony is not the show's strongest suit.)

A Runway contestant -- Christian again, who may win -- seeking inspiration

Both Paintings and Clothing Are Hung

In case you think you have reached the very bottom of the cultural barrel with these televised treats, you're in for a surprise if you click here. As you see, five Project Runway finalists are being led by mother hen Tim into the recently refurbished, overly praised Greek and Roman Galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's early morn and the place is empty, just like in a movie -- what a nice museum, to let them in before everyone.

"I've never been here," says sloe-eyed, open-faced Rami, a 31-year-old, Ramallah-born fashion designer from California, without a smidgen of bourgeois embarrassment. Each of the troupe is given a little silver camera and asked to choose an artwork in Antiquities, Euro Painting, or the Temple of Dendur that would "inspire" his or her next creation.

Rami is known to like draping, so, big surprise, he shoots Aphrodite. Soon there's an online vote about "Rami's draping addiction" -- 72 percent of respondents think he should drop the drapes. Who says classical education is dead?

Make Me a Superartcritic's ideal panel

Critics Next

I've been waiting for public television to roll out (on square wheels) its version of reality, but so far nothing has appeared. Variety recently reported that Sarah Jessica Parker is getting ready to pitch a show in which tyro artists would compete to make the best (most salable?) artwork. And the judges would be ....

But that reality sounds too real for PBS, so I suggest moving it up a notch and offering the gouty network a show in which I myself would be pleased to have a part: Make Me a Superartcritic.

Scour the nation for 10 fresh, aspiring, small-town talents who have dreamed about the glamour, recognition, wealth, and lobster-filled summer junkets that make a career as a famous art critic the most gratifying goal anyone might imagine. Set them up in underheated apartments at least two bus and/or subway connections from New York's Chelsea, epicenter of the international art world.

Provide meals for five days a week and see if they can cadge the rest at openings or parties.

It should be fun. Throw the kids out each episode to see a few shows, and have them come back with their best short, medium, and full-length reviews. Have them face a gantlet of bloodless editors at, say, Art in America. Have them negotiate with gallery bigwigs about that ethically delicate but lucrative catalog.

And the panel of judges? Perhaps in this case a mix: of distinguished artists, critics, and dealers. To start, how about Julian Schnabel (now that he needs movie critics, not art ones, he can be objective), Robert Hughes (cameras make him look better, not worse), and Leo Castelli (he's dead, but that won't matter). And for the first guest expert, who can better ascertain the true value of art and the importance of criticism than Sotheby's soigné auctioneer, Mr. "Rockefeller Rothko" himself, Tobias Meyer?

Yes, they're all males, males of a certain color, but this is the art world.

I think we could have a hit.

"Sold!"

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