The Life and Times of Justin Vickers

I'd like to thank my mother for a delicious antipasto platter, baked eggplant, and polenta with prosciutto and local mushrooms.

On Friday Beki, Leslie, Dave, and I went out to dinner at a wonderful Italian restaurant in Santa Fe. We had reservations for 8:00 but didn't get seated until 8:40. They kept telling us it would be “any second” and never offered any apologies. This lack of courtesy caused me to take a page out of my mother's book on dining etiquette and ask to see the manager once we had been seated. I told him how disappointed we were and that our evening was not off to a great start. Ten minutes latter we had three free appetizers.

Other than the long wait and a close call that almost resulted in pumpkin ravioli in Dave's lap, it was a lovely meal. In addition to the above delights I had some of Beki's caesar salad, an appetizer of baked duck liver (which I ordered before I knew we were getting the free stuff), and an entree of trout wrapped in pancetta (bacon that hasn't been smoked). Everything was delicious and we spent a good two hours enjoying the food and shutting the place down.

On Saturday Beki and I had moved from Italian food to real Italians. We went to a party at a friends house were we spent time with a whole crew of Italian scientists. Nobody (including the Italians) is sure why there is this big group of them at the lab right now (they're all just visiting for a year or so). There were lots of non-Italians, but I spent most of my night talking about American and Italian literature and comparing the knowledge that Italians have of Italian history versus what Americans know of American history versus what Italians know of American history versus what Americans know of Italian history. It looks like Italians on Americans might be the winner. They could name the first few Roman emperors, but couldn't name the first president of the Italian republic (to be fair, they could name the first prime minister and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that the Italian government so strange and unstable that a lack of names is understandable). They could, however, name most of the first five American presidents and all of them after the second Roosevelt.

I spent most of the time talking to an Italian guy and an Italian girl with rather different view of Italy. The guy would say things like, “My father didn't drink wine, only wine” and the girl would say, “Yeah, but that's not really the way it is.” They both talked a lot with their hands and agreed that the best way to resolve a disagreement is to give someone pasta. There were also many exclamations of “Mama mia!”