Category: hometown
The most talked about film in recent months, at least among film people, is the Iranian film A Separation. It won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and is a shoo-in for the Oscar. It is apparently so good that even The New Yorker's Anthony Lane liked it. I say apparently because I haven't seen it. I live in Broward, the county opposed to foreign films.
At some point we will drive down to Little Havana and see A Separation at the Tower Theater on Calle Ocho. We'll go to an Hispanic neighborhood to see an Iranian film.
On rare occasions we can catch a foreign film without leaving the county: out on Pine Island, or at the Classic Gateway (despite the fact that the theater's new name is reflective of its age, not the types of films it shows). The delightful Cinema Paradiso, just blocks from our condo, does show foreign films, but lately of a less serious nature. This weekend, for instance, instead of A Separation it is showing the Italian film Immaturi, which pretty much says it all.
The beauty of Ft. Lauderdale is that it's close to Miami but not so close that you get to know it like a native. After two decades I can still go down and discover something that's been around for more than 20 years.
Last week it was Burger Bob's. I loved the name (amazing what you can do just by reversing the normal order of two words). My friend David suggested it as a change from our normal lunch place Books & Books. (Two more B's, though here the reversal doesn't work as well.)
David directed me to the Coral Gables Country Club and we parked next to the golf course. The restaurant was attached to the pro shop, and seemed to be made entirely of glass, like something Philip Johnson might have designed on, well, his lunch break. We walked past Formica tables with red-cushioned chairs and then waited for one on red-cushioned stools.
Once we were seated, the attractive waitress took my order. She knew David's: one fried egg, grits and English muffin. David told me that she had had her wedding in the restaurant, and that he had been one of the guests.
Halfway through my excellent Reuben a couple stopped by to say hello to David, whom they called Zippo. They had been good friends of his parents. Both were 90. After they had gone, David told me that the woman's second husband had been the owner of the old Everglades Hotel. (He'd spend his winters in Miami and his summers on the French Riviera). Her current beau was a retired admiral. You don't meet people like that at the Floridian.
Yesterday at the gym I got talking to a man I had heretofore worked out with in silence. I told him I'd been away in California; he said his work would soon be taking him to Europe. I asked what line of work he was in. Equine dentistry, he told me.
It was 64 in the apartment yesterday morning until Hania put the heater on. It is bad enough having to get up at 5:30 without the added insult of a frigid bathroom. I turned it off before lunch.
Today the temperatures are supposed to get progressively warmer; indoors it is already 69. I would welcome these occasional cold spells if only I didn't have an aversion to heating. It seems to defeat the whole purpose of living in Florida. As does closing the windows, though they are closed at the moment. And I'm writing this in felt slippers, flannel pajama bottoms, and a flannel shirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt. I haven't shaved in three days, or washed my hair. But I'm not turning on the heater. And in a few minutes I'm opening the windows. I can always put on a sweater. I can make it through this winter.
My friends and old Sun-Sentinel colleagues John and Greg performed in the open mic portion of the monthly Songwriters Showcase at the Broward Center last night, interrupting the fairly steady stream of guitars with a little piano music. Like true professionals, they wanted a beer when the evening was over, so I led them down Andrews to Tap 42.
They knew it as Brownie's. Taking a seat in the garden, John remembered Ernie's (which is still around) as the place people would go - even the editor-in-chief - after Sunday afternoon softball games. Mention of the old Cajun House brought up more names: The Governor's Club, Banyan's (now Chima), Dancing Bear and La Brasserie (now YOLO), Bar Amici (M Global Tapas Bar) and the more recently departed O'Hara's. Most of the bars are replaced; the journalists aren't.
We drove down to Miami last night for dinner at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. Built in 1925, the building is one of the oldest in Miami, though last night probably marked the first time in its history that people arriving at its front doors were greeted with cocktails.
Inside, a table stretched from the vestibule to the altar steps, where it then ran into both of the transepts, creating a beautiful, candlelit T. The bishop, sitting in about the middle of the nave, said grace.
I sat next to an elegant octogenarian from Coconut Grove. The man on the other side of her, also from the Grove, told of how, as a boy, he and his father would walk to the woods a few days before Christmas and cut down a pine tree to bring home to decorate.
The woman told of her early life in the Grove without electricity and running water. (I realized that she had been born about the same time the cathedral had been built.) It wasn't bad, she assured me. "We didn't need air-conditioning. There was always a breeze. Until they built the high-rises."
Her husband had been an Episcopal priest, and a local leader in the Civil Rights Movement. "He was from Overtown," she said. "I always kidded him that he was from the ghetto, while we were from the 'suburbs.'"
The choir, which had been serenading us between courses, sent us away with "We Wish You a Merry Christmas."