Friday evening we drove down to Miami Beach for a program of zarzuelas as part of the Miami Classical Music Series, after which we went for tapas at Barceloneta in Sunset Harbor. Appropriately, everyone around us was speaking Spanish.
A string trio greeted guests to the grand reopening of the Cardozo Hotel on Ocean Drive yesterday and – after the ribbon cutting by Gloria and Emilio Estefan – a classical pianist played in the lobby. Perhaps now The Betsy won’t feel so alone.
We drove to Sawgrass Mills yesterday and while Hania went in to shop, I walked into Paul’s for a lemonade. A family of four got in line ahead of me: a very tall mother, an average height father, and two little girls. They were speaking a foreign language; it was close to lunchtime; I figured it would take a while. I told the mother I was just getting a drink and asked if I could go ahead of them. She gave me a reluctant nod and a face that expressed disapproval, and mild disgust.
Waiting to place my order, I listened closely to their speech, which sounded Slavic. “Where are you from?” I asked in what I thought of as a friendly tone.
“Russia,” the mother said unwillingly.
And then I realized the problem: I had done something that is probably forbidden in the code of Russian queuing etiquette.
I ordered my lemonade and paid for it as quickly as possible, with cash. “Spasiba” I said to the mother as I departed, and she answered with a barely audible grunt.
Friends from Ohio are in town, so yesterday I drove them up to Palm Beach, where they had never been. We crossed the Royal Palm Bridge onto the island and drove straight to The Breakers. We strolled through the lobby, gazing up at the vaulted ceiling, to the breakfast room, with its frescoed ceiling and view of the ocean.
Back in the car, we headed to Whitehall, the mansion Henry Flagler built for his wife, and took a stroll along the side to marvel at the giant kapok tree. Its leaves – seemingly a thousand or more – were dark green, and I noted how it looks even more impressive when it’s leafless.
From there we drove to Worth Avenue. In the rare book shop the small cards that give the prices of the books also carry a quote from the text, so people who can’t afford them (like us) can still get a sampling of their contents. Ducking down Via Mizner, we found the tombstone of Johnnie Brown, the “Human Monkey.”
Before leaving the island we drove south along the ocean until we came to Mar-a-Lago, the beautiful mansion built in the ’20s by the American socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post. It had been years since I’d seen the property, and now an enormous American flag hung from a flagpole.
Saturday night, after dinner in West Palm Beach, our friends took us to Grandview Public Market. We got our desserts and sat out on the deck, where a band, Upright Hootenanny, was entertaining the crowd. One middle-aged woman got up and started dancing in front of the “stage,” joined shortly by a white-haired woman in boots. I thought: That’s Florida – the farther north you go the more southern it gets.
But yesterday I joined my friend Greg at The Field on Griffin Road. In the middle of the main room, about nine people sat in a circle: pickers – guitars, banjos, a mandolin, a double bass, a Dobro – and two fiddlers. All except the fiddlers were of a certain age, and all were male except the fiddler on the end, who looked about 10. Her flowery skirt stood out in a ring of denim.
We had our last stone crabs of the season last night. They were delicious, made even more so by the knowledge that we won’t be able to buy them next week. Also, there’s something about cracking the ceramic-like shells that mimics the Hellenic joy of smashing plates.