Broadway Manhattan

I have had -- at the very least -- hundreds of Manhattans in my life, but the most memorable one was consumed during the intermission of an off-Broadway musical called The Little Shop of Horrors. I had heard that the show was about a dentist and so thought it might be good, but it turned out to have very little to do with dentistry. Faced with disappointment like this (especially at the theater), I typically dream of Manhattans as a coping mechanism. Apparently the friend who attended the performance with me had a similar experience because as soon as the curtain dropped, signalling intermission, he challenged me to run from the theater lickety split with him, take a left and race four doors to a saloon he had noticed when we approached the theater originally. The further challenge was to make it to the bar, order a Manhattan, drink the Manhattan, pay for the Manhattan and then rush back to the theater and back to our seats before the rise of the second act curtain. This we did with such alacrity that we were actually able to have a genuine and complete (albeit condensed) cocktail conversation in the time allotted, during which we analyzed the successes (few) and failings (many) of the first act. We returned in time and experienced the second act, which was not any better than the first, as I recall. It is the presence of the playbill and the two tickets that brings to mind this story and I am speculating in telling it that despite the title here, "Spamalot", I doubt very much that the show in question would provide much sustenance to any theatergoer partial to spam. It sounds like a weak attempt to be clever. As for the image itself, its success probably owes more to the formal arrangement of the items on view than it does to their actual being.

Chekhov Manhattan

Sometimes to tell a story, simplest is best. Here's a tremendous example. Clearly our unseen protagonist is a person who understands the finer things in life: refreshment for the mind in the works of the great Russian humanist, Chekhov, and refreshment for the body in the form of a well-iced Manhattan. Looking more closely reveals that our hero is no wanton sensualist. The pages of the book have been thumbed practically through to the end. The drink has barely been sipped and, depending on the pour, may well not yet have been sampled at all. And yet the glass still retains much of its icy glaze. What might have been the sequence here? Did our reader, having nearly made his way through an entire howling Chekhovian winter, suddenly feel the chill pass through his shivering bones into his very soul? Having felt that deep chill, portent of death, might our traverser of the steppes have experienced the insistent, insurmountable need to reach out for the spirits and the shaker to construct a liquid shelter to envelope him and spare him the agony of the cutting trans Siberian gales? And now, having prepared his defense, where has he gone? Did the remedy come too late? Or has he merely wandered off to check on some unusual high-pitched emanation from another room. A harmless house sound. A beam or wall stud, creaking against the cold. Will the reader return to finish the drink? Or the drinker return to finish the text? We cannot know. We can only ... imagine.