I slept late on Sunday and nobody made any smart remarks about it even, which was refreshing. After a Scarsdale standard morning meal (nova and cream cheese on pumpernickle) and a snail's pace race with 23-month Lily, it was off to the city for a (3:00) matinee (time for starbuck's chai and pumpkin loaf before; Delia had said in the car "we should get candy before we go to the theatre" and my mom and I looked at each other and laughed"). Hedda Gabler. I didn't think I'd ever read or seen any Ibsen, but about ten minutes into this I realized I had read it, although I can't remember when or why. It was good. Really terrific acting, and very theatrical. The play inspired intense discussion afterward about the meaning of the play, spilling over into other discussions about philosophy, etc. As we dealt with a logistics nightmare:

Delia had made reservations at Ruby Foo's, a trendy pan-Asian restaurant right down the street from the theatre, but it turned out they had us reservations for us at their other location, thirty blocks uptown. So we headed back to our garages to drive to the other location. Except that the garage my car was parked at had the most ridiculous. confusing system I've ever seen. It had taken us no time to park and get out, but they wanted us to wait in line for forty minutes while valet drivers zipped by at ultra-high speeds, before they could bring the car to us, and it turned out we had the wrong card and left the right one in the car, so that took even longer. Delia and Bobby and I took a taxi to the restaurant rather than wait for all of that, and we were there long before anyone else, thanks to non-headset-law-abiding cabbie. We ordered some preliminary dim sum and edamame. The food was pretty good, and I ate a lot of it; multiple orders of dim sum (alaskan snow crab siu mai, malaysian curry chicken potstickers, and the like), sushi party trays, pad thai, teriyaki, ad nauseum, the lazy Susan kept spinning around. I found room for dessert, and ordered one of the most elaborate menu items I've ever seen: Passion Fruit Crème Brulee Rice Pudding Napoleon with crunchy kataiyfi and Thai Basil syrup and tropical fruit sauce. It was confusing. But good. And there was a lot of dessert sharing, like for Bobby's massive chocolate cake slice (bigger than he was, probably.) A ten-person-round table is big, so I mostly just listened to the conversation at the other side of the table, about evil - is there such a thing? in reference to the play and to current events.

Back at 7 Paddington, Dan pulled out some videos from Dakar this summer. He narrated and fastforwarded through most of it, street shots and people goofing off and occasionally some of the recording sessions, but usually you couldn't hear the music, just the rapping. Good material for videos or a documentary though. Then I tried to post my entry from Saturday. I had written part of it on Dan's computer, transferred it to mine, and finished it on stickies. Had some trouble sending it back, so instead of posting it using his remote service, we (he) spent several hours trying to set up remote dial-up on my computer. Which should have worked, except that it didn't, several phone calls to Covad HQ and lots of fiddling and restarting and deleting extensions and so forth didn't help. So I sat there while he toyed with it and watched an interview with Kevin Spacey, a docufeature on Stockard Channing, a little bit of South Park (Jesus and Santa singing songs about themselves), and an episode of "I Spy," featuring a very young Bill Cosby. So I got to bed real late again (3.)

hey
little boy
do you want to know what's in my pocket or not
it's no toy
it's no gimmick
it's the chance of a lifetime