I write this account of yesterday curled up by the pool with my second cup of coffee listening to the breeze in the palms, the bells on the wind chimes, and the gentle trickle of water over a four-four-tall black stone monolith fountain. I do not feel like I deserve this.
1) It was simply impossible to come up with new material for Etiquetteer yesterday, so I published one of the Lost Columns from earlier volumes, and then had my entire notify list bounce back due to some tech issues. #tedious.
2) The big event of the day was to get in a Lyft with a very friendly and chatty driver and go to Pinocchio’s for lunch al fresco with my friend Kyle, unseen since well before the pandemic, and just off the plane for a short stay in town. We got a table right at the sidewalk, bottomless champagne (they don’t mess around at Pinocchio’s), and a club sandwich for me. You can never go wrong with a classic. After so long we both had lots of news to share, and the conversation never flagged.
2a) Nor did it with the trio of ladies at the next table who were very eager to see what we ordered (which always makes me uncomfortable) and who I got to teach the Dickensian custom of “taking wine:” when you look meaningfully at each other, raise your glasses a tiny bit, and drink. With your pinkies in. Kyle totally backed me up that the eye contact is the most important part of this, which it is. They were actually a lot of fun.
3) I drifted in and out of the shops after lunch, casually searching for peridot jewelry, but not really finding anything that interested me. And of course I saw the famous statue of Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, which - why is it even here? That movie was made in New York.
4) In Palm Springs pool maintenance is a fairly constant topic, particularly heating, and I understood why when I came home and waded into the pool for the very first time, a bracing 58 degrees they told me. It was actually wonderful — for about 45 seconds, which was all I needed. The rest of the afternoon was spent on email and a little tete a tete with one of my hosts.
5) 6:00 PM cocktail hour featured a shaker of whiskey sours, some tasty little meatballs arranged by Walter Gropius on the plate, and a portable table lamp straight out of the Jetsons. Also a large moth, drowning in the last half of my cocktail. Not the sort of roughage I need in my diet. I fished it out with one of those bamboo cocktail skewers with a loop at one end and prayed the alcohol would kill of any residual cooties.
6) For dinner we drove to El Tropicale, a long-established PS restaurant that has significantly and beautifully expanded its outdoor seating in the back due to COVID. My hosts knew the staff well. An inclination to small plates led us to the bar menu and a) angus sliders, b) popcorn shrimp with remoulade (OMG, fabulous), and c) truffle garlic fries. Also, for dessert, a slice of “mile high” chocolate cake so large I thought it came from the rib of a cake dinosaur.
6a) The joint was jumpin’, as they say, and my hosts noticed one randomly assembled table of eight men that they said looked as though they were all staying at the same resort, met around the pool, and said “Hey, let’s go to dinner.”
7) From the hot tub after dinner I got to watch two lanterns like silk balloons floating over the surface of the pool and changing colors, one a couple seconds later than the other, from gray to white to rose pink to purple to deep red to blue to green and back to gray. A beautiful image for the end of the day.
