Saturday doings

There aren't many things that can prompt me to rise before 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning, but the prospect of a full Irish breakfast is one of them. Sadly, it's was not to Chief O'Neill's that I was heading but Nuphy's favourite gastropub, The Gage. O'Neill's charges $13 for its full Irish, which I think we can all agree is steep even for such a meatfest. The Gage charges $15, which is your surcharge for location³. At that price point, I expect everything to be flawless, which this wasn't--one of my over-easy eggs was over-hard. But the bread was outstanding, and they do know more-or-less how to pour a Guinness, even if they still give it too much head.

What were we doing downtown at an hour when decent folk are still in their pyjamas? Killing time before the Met simulcast of Iphigénie en Tauride at the Icon on Roosevelt. It's a nice cinema in an odd location (although I guess the setup is only really odd if you're expecting an urban arrangement on the Near South Side instead of the suburban one that predominates on that stretch of Roosevelt). And it was a good stodgy Met production--not as audacious as what the Lyric staged recently, but well-sung and well-acted.

I could listen to Susan Graham sing all day, and I'm getting used to hearing Domingo as a baritone. The acting's more important than the singing in Gluck's opera anyway, and they're both absolute pros at that. But Groves I'd rather listen to than see. He has this soft romantic face which melts with emotion at the drop of a note; Nuphy liked what it did for the bromance, but I found it terribly distracting otherwise. Perhaps I should've followed his example and had a cocktail in the lounge upstairs before taking my seat.

I'd been idly thinking of doing some shopping afterwards, but Nuphy had other ideas, namely checking out the new tapas place in his neighbourhood while he had two tapistas in tow. (A colleague of his from the Spanish Department joined us for the opera broadcast.) He hadn't down his homework, though, so we crashed the place. That is, the door was only open because there was a private party going on, but they generously seated us anyway.

All of this only came out later when the chef came to talk with us. I didn't notice him checking us out from the open kitchen, but suddenly he was across from me saying, "I know you from somewhere." In fact, it was the man behind Rique's in Uptown, a place where I had known-client status until he sold if off to a less-creative couple and went back to Mexico for a while. He told us he'd been cooking for oncologists until this spot opened up and he could launch something more ambitious than what I'd come to love him for.

I feel I owe Rique a full review, so here I'll wear my pretension beret for just a moment and say that the execution was flawless, but I had some issues with conception. After we wound down and went our separate ways, I had another experience that I might write more about later, an unpleasant encountre with a drunk on the northbound Halsted bus which prompted the question, "How do you oppose bullying without indulging in it yourself?"

By now it was coming on toward evening, so I dropped any ideas of getting any shopping down and headed home. It was awfully pleasant to be heading home at an hour when I'm usually just gearing up for my evening. As it was, I did have an evening planned but I needed to swing by the house first to grab some beer for my hosts. This also gave me the opportunity to check on monshu and make sure he wasn't dining on something hideous like hotdogs in my absence.

I narrowly missed the southbound 22, which gave me ample time to stand on the corner of Clark and Devon and try to puzzle out why Chicago's finest had Devon closed off east of the intersection. monshu and I had noticed flashing blue lights from our front room but didn't think much of it. We certainly didn't realise there were a mess of cruisers clustered near the market two blocks from our back door. Only much much later did I get the background story on this; at the time I just enjoyed the spectacle of know-better drivers thinking they could just swerve around a cruiser with a loudspeaker.

My destination was the home of SquareBear, who had a big Bear Game Night going on. Last time I saw him he told me he'd put me on the list and damned if he wasn't as good as his word. There were a smattering of old and new acquaintances, but mostly if was new people. To a man, they were quite affable and welcoming, to the point where I was almost sorry for spending most of the five hours or so I was there with my nose down in one game or another. In order they were:

1. Zombie Dice ("Baby craps with brains", as I summed it up)
2. The Game of Things (one of those guess-who-said this party game)
3. Mille Bournes
4. Zombies!! (which went on at least an hour longer than anyone was enjoying it because, dammit, we were going to finish it)

I can say that my longstanding Mille Bournes itch is scratched for the time being. We broke it by having one too many players for our practice hand, but--par Dieu!--I got to scream "COUP FOURRÉ" not once but twice, which is the only real reason to play the goddamn game in the first place.

So I was well and truly exhausted when I returned here after 2 a.m. last night. It feels like my cold may be coming back, but I'm provisionally declaring that worth it if so, since that's at least two ordinary weekends of incident packed into 18 hours.

ETA: monshu named this post since I've got no cleverness to spare.