My company conducts a semi-monthly raffle for which an employee can receive two tickets to a Broadway show or dinner for two at a fancy restaurant, tax and tip not included. Odds have it that the winner will be among the 300-some lawyers and lawyers’ minions who toil in our flagship Park Avenue office, not one of the 35 folks here on Eighth Avenue. But today I was selected for the dinner-for-two and the amount of praise and congratulations I received from my coworkers for doing nothing was on the par of winning a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Nobody here likes lawyers, much less lawyers’ minions.
Immediately, too, I was besieged with offers from lady coworkers to step in as my dinner companion. I am not a shallow man but I don’t want to dine with someone I work with; I get enough of them here at work. Plus, I guess I am a shallow man because several suitors would appear to rank eating within their top-three hobbies.
So I turn to you, my beautiful readers and allied tradespeople, with an offer to dine with me. Explain why you think you should be the one to join me at March or San Domenico. Reviewing your entries, I will ignore the fawning, select whomever I want and alienate most everyone. It’s all in good fun!
But first, a little about me. What should you expect from Jason as your dinner companion? All of this writing about meals here and you still may not have a clear picture as to whether I’m an Andre or a Wally when the dinner bell rings. Here are the facts:
- Don’t be concerned if I eat little. I don’t exercise so I don’t eat much, a health philosophy practiced by four other people in America.
- I have no idea how to select a wine, which will be fun because the price-per-bottle limit of my dinner-passes is $100.
- I will drape my napkin upon my lap prior to dining but during the meal you will catch one or more of my elbows resting on the table edge.
- I usually chew with my mouth closed and I don’t gesture with my utensils when making a point.
- Why, yes, I will try some of your entrée.
- Yes, it is delicious.
- Favored topics of conversation include current events, Manhattan news, celebrity sightings, movies, books, poetry, photography, art, music, computers and Cascading Style Sheets.
- If you’re going to discuss who got voted off the island or America’s top model or whatever it is TV fans are always going on about, I will feign interest but actually I will be gauging the symmetry of your eyebrows. Alternately, imagining you naked.
- I enjoy vicious racial humor, but only in the company of the race that’s being mocked, only after at least a two-week familiarity with that person and only if it’s reciprocated with a good cracker joke.
- When conversation lulls, I will ask my dinner companion to select and rank the most attractive people in the restaurant.
- I carry exact change and my Visa card has a reasonable credit limit so you should not be alarmed that it is illustrated with a photo of Lake Erie.
- For digestif purposes, I’m a Scotch man. Cognac is for rappers and pussies.
- As I’m leaving the restaurant, I’ll load-up on the free stuff at the register—mints, matchbooks, business cards, unguarded menus, little boxes of crayons—but I’ll try not to make a big deal about it.
- I may insert a toothpick into my mouth, but only after I have exited the restaurant and only because I think it makes me look tough.
- If pressed to complete the phrase “dinner and ------,” my first five free-associations would be “a movie,” “conversation,” “dessert,” “dancing” and “casual sex.”
- I like long walks on the beach. I usually take these alone at Coney Island, barefoot and head down like the “Jason is Sad” montage of my biopic, but really I’m just scanning the sand for broken glass and stingray barbs.
So what do you think? Who’s hungry?