Quote of the day: “You like to cook? Are there other men like you?”
That quote came from the Japanese friend of Jyoti’s Korean friend when we were sitting at Cafe Mozart in Manhattan, around 70th and Broadway. I had a tasty chocolate-raspberry-cheesecake concoction and an okay iced coffee; the others had even chocolatier cake constructions. The place is expensive, but worth a visit.
And at Cafe Mozart works a Serbian waiter Jyoti once referred to as heavy or even chunky. Ana and Constanza (and others?) disagreed with her.
And I do, too.
The guy has the type of body to which I would aspire; slender but with mass, slightly muscular. Jyoti’s complaint would seem to reduce to he’s not stick-thin.
We got to the cafe after a wonderful performance of the Sleeping Beauty ballet (Alastair Macaulay did not care for it, but did admit, after seeing an early or the first production, that it could be better the longer it ran) — my only major complaint came with the third, final act, which went on and on without much personality, even though the solos were a joy. The audience applauded a lot, but a number of people high up in the balcony area, where we were, left before the show finished, if not clogging the aisles at least turning themselves into a nuisance.
Behind us sat a mother and her young (8? 9? year old) daughter, who was quite petite and moved to the empty seat in front of me. From time to time she leaned forward and obscured a bit of my view, but nothing major. During the intermission she — the daughter — approached me and asked whether she was in my way. Amazing, even if the mother had suggested she do so.
Earlier in the day I did my laundry, and followed it up to a trip to the local Starbucks for a large iced coffee. I sat at a table, doodled, read, doodled, read and did a little people watching, but quite little.
Shortly after I arrived a stereotypically Japanese-goth-lolita looking Japanese woman, in her early 20s at the oldest, showed up and sat at a table near me. She almost seemed to hide her face and thus herself behind a pink brickish shopping bag on her table. Soon someone she knew, likely her boyfriend, arrived, and he had the air of the Japanese rebel from anime or movies, with his Asian-Fro — poofy like a ‘fro, but long and straight, hiding a bit of facial hair to give him that outlaw, Asian James Dean appearance. He spoke more than she did. Both were local. He played with his candy, telling stories with it; she sucked on a big red lollipop. Another woman, petite and with little standard fashion sense, stood at the counter awaiting her drink — she was dressed nearly as if she were auditioning for “Legally Blond” — and out of the blue he complimented her on her hat, which he said he loved. Later another women stood waiting for her drink and he asked about her pink-ish colored iPod. “I’m colorblind,” he said, “so I didn’t know until recently that iPods came in different colors.” Unless he’s colorblind in a non-standard way his claim has more holes than Swiss Cheese, but it was an interesting conversation starter. And finally, when they left, he showed a cookie his girlfriend had gotten for him to the barista, asking “Isn’t this the coolest cookie ever?”
He was a character, the type you find annoying but at the same time envy for his obnoxious freedom. And if he can get away with it, why can’t the rest of us?
