Has someone in South Orange, New Jersey, been re-reading Dave Barry columns? Or perhaps not reading enough Barry? You might remember this bit, which must be at least 20 years old now:
We need to do something about this national tendency to try to make new things look like they are old.
First off, we should enact an “e” tax. Government agents would roam the country looking for stores whose names contained any word that ended in an unnecessary “e,” such as “shoppe” or “olde,” and the owners of these stores would be taxed at a flat rate of $50,000 per year per “e.” We should also consider an additional $50,000 “ye” tax, so that the owner of a store called “Ye Olde Shoppe” would have to fork over $150,000 a year. In extreme cases, such as “Ye Olde Barne Shoppe,” the owner would simply be taken outside and shot.
Because there on the main drag in South Orange, a village as prim and neat as Friz Freleng’s Granny, there’s a shop(pe) called in all apparent seriousness, “Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe.” Truth be told, it fits the setting well, with the weathervane-topped bell-tower nearby, the trees, the parks, the keysmith, the quaint train station we rode into, and something called the Old Stone House by the Stone House Brook. But both Vincent and I thought of the Barry reference and learned we’d both gotten into the writer in junior high and both secretly believed he’d gone downhill since those golden years.
Vincent, Megan and I were in Jersey for a potluck dinner thrown by our friends Toisha and Susan, who I met during our late-summer camping adventure and who rent half a house there, the other half of which is occupied by two old Russian ladies often found sitting out back sharing a jumbo bottle of vodka.
What an extravaganza: board games aplenty and a random but kingly expanse of food that included grilled brats and corn-on-the-cob, two kinds of couscous, Chinatown’s finest roast pork and duck (courtesy Vincent and Megan), mac-and-cheese and stuffed cabbage rolls (courtesy myself, via the fine folks at the sprawling Fairway in Harlem), mulled cider spiked with Captain Morgan’s, and a sweet-lover’s fantasy sequence of desserts, including cheesecake, carrot cake and a chocolate torte, prepared by a pastry chef in training.
The group was fun and one of the youngest attendees was Anna, who was, like, five or something. She wore a tiara and lugged around a toy golf bag that contained plastic clubs and golf balls. Vincent, whose facility with strangers I envy, immediately established a rapport with her, which he attributed to never having lost his sense of childlike wonder. But, dang, most everyone thinks that about themselves. I couldn’t even get Anna to loan me her clubs. “The ball stays here,” she said when I tried to swipe it for putting practice.
Vincent, on the other hand, walked around on his knees (“This is how we walk at parties!”) and had her doing the same, then engaged her with a question-and-answer game (“Where’s the party? Is it in the refrigerator? Is it in the garbage?”) by which time she was giggling and scooting around the kitchen floor like an inchworm. After surmising that he was great with kids and asking how tall he was (“6' 7". But I don’t smell the blood of an Englishman.”), Anna’s mom asked if Vincent would be available to babysit. The dude is good with kids; what can I say? Those of us who view children from a distance as miniature mutants turned to such opposite-of-childlike-wonder thoughts as, “Oscar the Grouch must have smelled terrible. I mean, he lived in a fucking New York City garbage can.”
Afterwards, Vincent, Megan and I took a train back east, then went further that way via subway, winding up at a Barnes & Noble employee’s birthday celebration at Barcade in Williamsburg. May I state the obvious? Bar + arcade = genius, especially to people of a certain age such as mine and slightly younger. There was, however, something initially unsettling about playing the same stand-up videogames I did at Ohio Skate in fourth grade, but while drinking a Jameson instead of a Cherry Coke. My Irish fuel didn’t help me advance any further in Dig Dug then I’ve ever been able to get (level 12) although it did seem to increase my Moon Patrol agility (level K on the first attempt).