Wry Martinis (9 page)

I would not be truthful if I said to you that our problems can be fixed overnight. But, my fellow Americans, today I say to you, if we do not start to fix them, they will fix us. And a fine fix we will be in then.

If I sound urgent, it is not because my feet are cold. Yes, it is early April and I am standing on marble, which gets pretty cold in early April in this great state of ours. But I do not shrink from this numbing sensation in my toes, because I know that it is still warm in America. America is the warmest nation on the face of the earth. To those who say our warmest days are behind us, I say, I have been to many warm countries. And there is no country warmer than the United States of America.

Often, as I have traveled the breadth and depth and width of this great, great land, I have been asked, “Who are you? What do you want?”

Today, I have an answer. Today, I say to you, I want to be that person.

They ask, “Do you have it in you to lead this country?”

The answer must be “I think so.”

For today I come not to divide but to multiply. Not to criticize but to cauterize. Not to annoy but to alloy. I come, finally, not to naysay but, to quote that great American Willie Mays, to say, “Hey.”

Friends—and even if you don’t like me, I like you—the time is not yesterday, or even tomorrow. For, as the Founding Parents so wisely said, “The past lies behind, the future lies ahead.” The time is now.

Yes, it is true that a stopped watch is right twice a day. But it is also true that it is wrong the rest of the day. My fellow Americans, with your help—and, yes, with your money, for I will need that, lots of it—I will wind the watch of democracy so that it will be right most of the day.

So, as I stand here on the steps of the County Lying-In Hospital for Women, this historic building where I was born, in the days when “illegal
aliens” meant little green men from outer space, let the word go forth. And then let it come back. And take a load off, as we Americans say. So that future generations will say, “They ran the good race, fought the good fight. And they knew what time it was, for they kept the watch wound.”

Thank you and God bless you.

—
The New Yorker
, 1995

Chipper:
An evil entrepreneur (Patrick McGoohan) devises a scheme to supply his chain of fast-seafood restaurants with fresh seviche by catching Pacific dolphins and processing them with onboard shredding machines. His plans are complicated by a marine biologist (Kurt Russell) who is convinced that seahorse hooves hold the secret to a cure for prostate cancer, and by a spunky salvage hunter (Jennifer Aniston) who has trained a pod of dolphins to find Amelia Earhart’s plane.

Emission Impossible:
I.M.F. agents (Charlie Sheen, Courteney Cox) set out to start a war between two ruthless Middle Eastern dictators (Martin Landau, Joe Pesci) by convincing them that they are impotent.

Exterminator:
When a pest-control specialist (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is accidentally transported back in time to the fourteenth century by a faulty supermarket checkout scanner, he decides he might as well try to catch the Norway rat that brought the bubonic plague to Europe. After offending the wife (Sandra Bullock) of a Venetian doge (Danny DeVito) by suggesting that the rat might be hiding in her dress, he persuades her to join forces with him against a corrupt ship owner (Alan Rickman) who is transporting the rat to Amsterdam under orders from an evil vizier (Patrick McGoohan) seeking revenge for the defeat of the Muslim hordes at the Battle of Tours.

Plight of the Osprey:
A Marine test pilot (Brad Pitt) is told not to worry when the control stick of his tilt rotor plane keeps coming off in his hands, but after a Defense Department procurement officer (Demi
Moore) tells him that the aircraft’s engines are powered by slave labor they decide to take matters into their own hands and Osterize the evil defense contractor (Patrick McGoohan) and his chief designer (John Turturro).

Maya:
A pre-Columbian archeologist (Ed Harris) discovers a runic horoscope predicting that the New York Stock Exchange will crash in seventy-two hours unless five hundred virgins are sacrificed to the god Chachacha. When he and the N.Y.S.E. president (Meg Ryan) realize they have little hope of locating five hundred virgins in Manhattan before the deadline—or, indeed, ever—they enlist the help of a legless computer hacker (Elijah Wood) and a Guatemalan shaman (Jimmy Smits) to outwit the deity and in the process make a tidy profit by shorting the market. Written and directed by Michael Crichton.

S.W.A.K.:
An orthographically challenged philatelist (Johnny Depp) advertises in the personals for someone of similar interests and finds himself mixed up with a stockbroker (Maria de Medeiros) with a penchant for oral sex.

No, Houston
, You
Have a Problem:
The crew of a U.S. space shuttle (Denzel Washington, Helen Hunt, William Baldwin), tasked with performing experiments to determine the effects of weightlessness on the mating habits of fruit bats, detects an asteroid the size of Liechtenstein on a collision course with the earth. A heated argument breaks out when Mission Control orders them to deflect the asteroid by ramming it with their craft.

Dwagonheart:
A tenth-century knight with a speech impediment (Keanu Reeves) must slay a mythical half kangaroo, half garden slug before a beautiful princess (Patsy Kensit) will make merry with him. But just as he is about to behead the repulsive creature it reveals (voice by Dick Cavett) that the beautiful princess has already made merry with all the other knights in the fiefdom.

Baywatch, the Movie:
A Chinese military satellite containing plutonium lands in the bay and starts turning beach babes and dudes into gnarly mutants.
Local authorities clash with the military over who has jurisdiction. As bureaucrats argue, it becomes clear that the lifeguards must remove the toxic debris themselves, using their bare hands and those orange lozenge lifesaver things. Lt. Hank Hunk (David Hasselhoff) and Tiffany Topps (Pamela Anderson Lee) find themselves in a race against time with a band of renegade Australian lifeguards, who plan to recover the satellite themselves and sell it to the Russian mafia so they can afford to buy imported beer.

—
The New Yorker
, 1996

“Hello, my name is Ralph, and I will be your server this evening.”

Americans were surprised when waiters began introducing themselves to their customers a few years back. While the custom has long been in practice overseas, it was late coming to our own country, and as with Pearl Harbor, we were taken by surprise.

Clearly some guidance on this New Familiarity was in order, and it was for that reason that I published my ground-breaking—indeed, seminal—book,
And My Name Is: Getting Acquainted With Your Waiter
(Dove Press; $22). The response was extraordinary. Since its publication five years ago it has been translated into sixteen languages, including British. The immense volume of mail, not all of it complimentary, prompted the publishers to ask me to undertake a second, revised edition, which will appear this fall.

Perhaps a bit of historical background is in order first. Waiters did not always introduce themselves, even in Europe. Hard though it may be to believe, it was virtually unheard of before the seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, the practice seems to have begun in that most civilized of countries, France.

The first recorded instance of it happening occurred in Paris in the year 1684. As soon as the Duc de Pentheville had been shown to his seat at the fashionable boite,
Haricot Vert
, a young man by the name of Ralphe de Villiers strode up purposefully to the nobleman and said, “
Je suis Ralphe de Villiers. Je suis votre garçon ce soir.
” Unfortunately, the old Duc was not progressively minded, and the wretched Ralphe was hanged in front of the
Haricot Vert
as the Duc and his guests were finishing their
pâte de lapin a la façon Suedois.

Ralphe’s body was left hanging as a warning to other waiters. Indeed, the incident seems to have discouraged further social experiments by waiters, since the next recorded instance of the phenomenon did not take place for nearly a century, until a bold would-be sommelier from Nantes named Jean de Nantes said to the Baron de Boudin, “
Moi, je m’appelle Jean. Et vous?
” Jean was summarily burned at the stake with the Baron looking on and declaring to the executioner that he wanted the impetuous young man “
Bien cuit
” (well done). But Jean’s death was not in vain. It was his death that sparked the riots that lead to the Second Edict of Nantes, and eventually to the French Revolution.

These are, of course, only two historical instances in a long line of gastronomic martyrs. The atrocities committed by the Turks, the Arabs and—sad to say—the English against waiters who dared to introduce themselves are, alas, as numerous as they are deplorable.

As I wrote in
And My Name Is
, the first and most obvious dilemma is whether to shake the waiter’s hand from the left or the right.
^*
But of the thousands and thousands of letters I received from readers of the first edition, most concerned the question of asking the waiter to sit down and join in the dinner.

The culinary world remains sharply divided on the issue, but I remain firm, maintaining as I do that it is just plain bad manners not to invite the waiter to sit down for a brief get-acquainted chat before ordering. It is true that in certain parts of France, notably the Camargue and the Dordogne, the practice is to invite the waiter to sit down for coffee or an
anis
or cognac
after the meal.
But the fashion of following the French in waiter etiquette is, to my way of thinking, overdone, given France’s deplorable history in the matter.

In an attempt to calm the waters that I have roiled with my advice in the first edition, I have slightly amended this section of the book to say that after the preliminary round of introductions, go ahead and ask the waiter to join you—
but only for a brief chat.
Simply make it clear that if the service is good, he will be invited back for coffee.

Many of the letters I’ve received ask the question, “What if the service is lousy?”

This is perhaps The Problem in social relations with waiters. There is no one answer, but as a general rule: if the waiter seems to be the sort of person one wants as a lifelong friend, then does it matter if the osso bucco ever arrives? Or that when it finally does arrive, it tastes like wet cardboard?

(One solution: if rotten service makes you agitated, bring along some Valium. One person I know always eats a full meal
before
going to the restaurant leaving him free to concentrate on developing a personal relationship with the server.)

On the other hand, if the waiter seems not at all the sort of person we want to associate with outside the restaurant, then I recommend being absolutely forthright. I.e., “Now look here, Giancarlo, or whatever your name is”—
that
gets them where it hurts—“if that osso bucco isn’t on the table by the time I count to
tre
, I’m going to beat you to death with this [obscenity] peppermill.”

One correspondent of ours says that’s how he introduces
himself
to the waiters. The downside is that many of them forget to introduce themselves to him. But service, he reports, is usually quite brisk.

That said,
Bon appétit
, and remember: developing a relationship with the person who brings you your food lessens the chance that he or she will spit on it in the kitchen.

—
Key West Restaurant
, 1986