Me Talk Pretty One Day: List 3

Roughly the size and color of a Band-Aid, the amusement floats on a shallow, muddy puddle of sauce and is topped with a sprig of greenery.

The diners have all been taken over by precious little bistros boasting a menu of indigenous American cuisine.

This is where the world's brightest young talents come to braise carmelized racks of corn-fed songbirds or offer up their famous knuckle of flash-seared crappie served with a collar of chided ginger and cornered by a tribe of kiln-roasted Chilean toadstools, teased with a warm spray of clarified musk oil.

Hugh's saffron linguini resembles a miniature turban, topped with architectural spires of shrimp.

I had ordered the steak, which, bowing to the same minimalist fashion, is served without the bone, the thin slices of beef stacked to resemble a funeral pyre.

Because I am both a glutton and a masochist, my standard complaint, “That was so bad," is always followed by “And there was so little of it!"

“I just couldn't," I say to the waiter when he recommends the white chocolate and wild loganberry couscous.

Bonnie was a dour, spindly woman whose thick girlish braids fell like leashes over the innocent puppies pictured on her sweatshirt.

Bonnie wasn't much of a shopper, but after a pronounced bout of whining, she decided she wouldn't mind adding to her lifelong angel collection.

I was mortified, but Bonnie was in a state of almost narcotic bliss, overjoyed to have discovered a New York without the New Yorkers.

The crowd was relentlessly, pathologically friendly, and their enthusiasm was deafening.

At the age of ten Amy was caught taking a fistful of twenties from an unguarded till at the grocery store. I was with her and marveled at my sister's deftness and complete lack of fear.

She meticulously charted the repetition of their shoes and earrings and was quick to pinpoint their mannerisms.

She meticulously charted the repetition of their shoes and earrings and was quick to pinpoint their mannerisms.

Dressed in a caftan and an appropriate white pageboy wig, Amy began phoning my father at the office. “Lou Sedaris! Penny Midland here. How the...hell are you?"

Were our father to accept Penny's offer, Amy would have known him as a philanderer...

“Anyone want to join me? Amy?" He extended his age-old exercise regimen from ten minutes to an hour and trotted in place while speaking on the telephone.

His epiphany was short-lived, and as the photo shoot approached, he began calling me with technical questions.

The makeup artist did a fine job. The black eyes and purple jaw were accentuated by an arrangement of scratch marks on her forehead. Pus-yellow pools girdled her scabbed nose, and her swollen lips were fenced with mean rows of brackish stitches.

Somewhere in the back of my mind is a dim memory of standing in some line holding a perforated card.

I remember the cheap, slightly clinical feeling it gave me, and recall thinking that the computer would never advance much further than this.

I was still living in Chicago when I began to receive creepy Christmas newsletters designed to look like tabloids and annual reports.

My job taught me that regardless of their purported virtues, computers are a pain in the ass to keep clean.

Due to my general aversion to machines and a few pronounced episodes of screaming, I was labeled a technophobe, a term that ranks fairly low on my scale of fightin’ words.

It might be different if he were flagging down a passing car or trying to phone for help, but typing, in and of itself, is not an inherently dramatic activity.

Their goal is to place the IBM Selectric II beside the feather quill and chisel in the museum of antiquated writing implements.

When told I'm like the guy still pining for his eight-track tapes, I say, "You have eight-tracks? Where?"

In reality I know nothing about them, yet I feel it's important to express some solidarity with others who have had the rug pulled out from beneath them.

I'm told the exact same thing later in the evening when the bellhop knocks on my hotel door.

They couldn't drink more than I did, couldn't write poetry in notebooks and read it out loud to an audience of strangers, and couldn't use the words flick, freebie, cyberspace, progressive, or zeitgeist.

Life might be difficult for a year or two, but I would tough it out because living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.

Soap opera characters make emphatic pronouncements.

My understanding was that, no matter how hard we tried, the French would never like us, and that's confusing to an American raised to believe that the citizens of Europe should be grateful for all the wonderful things we've done. Things like movies that stereotype the people of France as boors and petty snobs...

The house is located in a tiny hamlet, a Hooterville of eight stone houses huddled in a knot and surrounded by rolling hills decorated with cows and sheep.

I seemed to have reached my mid-thirties only to be known as "the guy who says 'bottleneck,'" the pied piper who convinces young people to lie in the road, the grown man who ignores the electric-fence warnings and frightens the horses with his screaming.

As an American abroad, you're bolstered by an innate sense of security.

As an American abroad, you're bolstered by an innate sense of security.

The next summer we went to France for six weeks, and I added another 420 words, most of them found in the popular gossip magazine Voici. “Man-eater," I’d say. “Gold digger, roustabout, louse."

Understanding doesn't mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It's a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive.

The teacher continued her diatribe and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult.