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.