We went to Myth last night for dinner -- hard to get a reservation there, so we kept it in spite of the fact that our dinner companion had a veterinary emergency and had to stay home consoling her wounded doggie. We were waiting at the bar for our table when some women came in with big bleached hair wearing skirts better suited for use as tube tops. I don't know about you, but I find it impossible not to look at women wearing spandex leopard print lingerie in the middle of a dining room. Every convex part of their bodies was Japanese anime convex; every concave part a weird brown wrinkly no-man's land between the attention-commanding jumbos front and back. The gents accompanying these blowup dolls were recently emerged from today's Tammany Hall, great groaning fat loads of men, old leering men, men in their 60s who gave the impression of massive exposure in international securities markets, ill-gotten gains, matrimonial betrayal. I suddenly realized the women were hookers. Which made the atmosphere there at Myth a bit weird.

Across from us was a Chinese anorexic with her Chinese anorexic boyfriend. You find anorexics at restaurants like these with suprising regularity -- anorexics don't necessarily dislike food, they just dislike their bodies after they have eaten food. She excused herself from the table after every course to go, presumably, barf up the tasty dinner before it got too acidic and sour with stomach bile. Anorexics often have enormous eyes, given their hollow cheeks. Boyfriend went to the bathroom after every course too. A match made in heaven.

Stewart became interested in the silk caftan worn by the woman across from us -- see how lovely, will you wear one of those? he asked. I've never considered myself a caftan or muu-muu candidate before -- Earth Mother, yeek -- I don't even like sarongs, to difficult to tie. But it turned out to be a sham caftan after all, just a beautiful scarf. A let-down. When I thought about it, he'd noticed other shirts with a lot of billowy fabricky sleeves, which his mother wore as a hippie in B.C. and thought this may be some weird Oedipal thing he was unaware of and decided not to buy shirts with billowy sleeves on them, ever.

After we commisserated with the waiter about the illuminated water gimmic pressed on him by the Norwegian water distributor, cocktails were served that were so strong as to impair our ability to order further drinks. The food was foodoo: pumpkin soup with duck confit, sweetbreads and crispy wonderfullies, salmon in a miso broth, beef cheeks, tender and kissable. Go there and eat, my friends, and when you leave you will be full, happy, poor, possibly drunk, and exposed to strange, alluring and distasteful individuals in the guise of other customers. Emerged, perhaps from their very own myths.

LINK | 10:46 PM | TB

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