Question: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

Answer: “That’s not funny!”

Sometimes when I’m writing on my blog, I’m speaking to every reader. Sometimes I’m speaking to a subset of readers. Sometimes I’m speaking to just one or two people, and sometimes I’m talking to myself. This is not unusual. All writers do this.

Sometimes what I’m writing is really written for one person, but I can make it interesting, in a subtle way that is not always palpable, to many other readers. So when I posted Monica’s joke (which is not really her joke but rather one on which she is carrying out a feminist analysis as part of her academic studies) on my blog, I was writing for a select audience, and that audience appreciated it.

A few other people decided that I was ruining The Internet and entered into a campaign to discredit me and take my voice away. It worked.

For about five seconds. Because most people got the meaning of the joke and the post about the joke, even though it was not meant for them.

And a small part of the more thoughtful, positive, and non-stupid audience subsequently organized to form a blog and a blog community known as Quiche Moraine, and last night we had our launch party (months after the actual start of the blog) and eventually we had a conversation about how that joke…Monica’s joke…had really started it all. What I want to do now is tell you a bit about the party, but really, this is not about the party. It is about the people who were at the party and what I think about them and how they relate to me. So hold on to your seats; this could get pretty scandalous.

Sometimes you know two or three or four people who are important to you for various reasons, but they don’t know each other. Last night a handful of people whom I’ve known for anywhere from many months to many years and who are very important to me met each other for the first time. Sometimes one has anxiety when that sort of thing happens. I didn’t. And it went fine.

John Funk was there, whom I only barely know, but I know his blog and some of his photojournalism work. He is actually one of the few people who have ever been allowed in the Blog Cave…well, actually, he snuck past the guards with his press pass. Last night, it was interesting to get to know him better, and to see how he interacted with Ben, because they both are into similar things such as cameras.

Ben was there, and photography did come up quite a few times. But oddly he didn’t take any pictures. There are some people who are photographers and some people who take pictures all the time. Ben is a photographer. He’s also a geek, so there was quite a bit of conversation about the new iPhone stuff. I think Ben may have been jealous of John’s iPhone.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should really talk about dinner first. To do this, I have to go back in time a few years to the very year that Azia, the restaurant where some of us stopped before the party, opened. Azia was then a new restaurant, opened in a location that had previously spawned many failures, but as I recall, everyone who knew anyone or anything believed correctly that the owners of Azia had the necessary magic touch, and that Azia would be a success.

There was a person who had become a friend in the academic context, but with whom I had never gotten together outside of that context, who wanted to meet with me to talk about important things going on in her life. I’m referring to Analiese Miller, whom many of you know via the blogosphere. So this one afternoon on a weekday, Ana and I got together at Azia to talk about important stuff and have our first drinks and food together. And that, by and large, has been the nature of our face-to-face relationship ever since: Talk about important stuff, eat, and drink. Sometimes we skip the food. But occasionally there must be cookies.

The reason I mention this at all is because back at that first meal, we ordered and shared a special seafood dinner kind of thing that you get for two or more people. We gorged ourselves on that, and we took home piles of extra scallops and shrimp and squid. Ana has not forgotten that meal, and she mentions it now and then, so I know it made a very positive impression on her, and here I speak of the seafood dinner, not the conversation.

So last night, when Ben and Stephanie and I got to Azia and were expecting Ana, but she was running late, I suggested that we order that dish as well as some organic wine if they had any on the wine list. This way Ana would be taken care of when she arrived, and we would not have to mess around. I am so incredibly thoughtful that I can’t even believe it sometimes.

It turns out that Azia no longer serves this dish, but that did not matter. Our waiter, who was excellent, simply arranged for the dish to be made and for a proper organic wine (I should mention that Ana prefers organic wine) to be uncorked. The dish was significantly larger than I remembered it, several feet in diameter (or so it seemed) and teeming with what looked like the day’s catch from a medium-sized trawler (but with no turtles). We were about halfway through when Ana arrived, and I know she appreciated the fact that we had arranged the dinner in her honor, even if we had already eaten most of it.

This was not the first time Ben and Ana had met because, it turns out, they went to the same grade school and knew each other there. Strange? Maybe, but I think Ben might be a member of the Conicidenti. (People to whom coincidences happen more often than…can be explained by probability theory. By coincidence of course.)

I also have hysterically funny internal thoughts about Ben and Ana in grade school. In my imagination they are identical to how they look now but very small and somewhat bewildered as little children usually are. This makes me laugh.

Anyway, this was the first time Stephanie and Ana had met, even though they have worked together quite a bit on Quiche Moraine, and I think this was a very comfortable first meeting because of that.

Near the end of dinner, Amanda came by. Remarkably, this was the first time Amanda has met Ana, and that was to me a fairly momentous occasion. You have to understand that at the time Amanda and I first met, there were three or four people in my life who had actually “been there for me” as the saying goes (and I for them as well) over the previous somewhat tumultuous year. If I came into Amanda’s life as not-too-damaged goods, it was because of Ana and a few other people being thoughtful of me, sometimes just amusing me, always listening to me, and occasionally telling me what to do.

And it was appropriate that we all met at Azia, because this is where Amanda and I had our first date.

It was actually part two of our first date. We had originally met in a professional setting, and I think we found each other interesting. We worked together (but in a group) for a couple of weeks, and at the end of that time, we both felt that we had unfinished business, things to talk about. So we had a brief conversation about that, and I suggested we meet in a day or two and talk. Since the weather that year was being spectacularly good (as has happened now and then in the Twin Cities), I suggested a walk around the lake. That would be Lake Calhoun.

So we met at the lake and walked around it a couple of times and talked. Mostly we talked about Amanda’s future. One of the things we talked about was her graduate prospects, and that conversation played a large role in Amanda’s decision to get a master’s degree, a degree that she is finishing even as I write this. So it is interesting to recollect that conversation between two people who did not know what was going to happen between them, and to realize that not only did that plan come to fruition, but that I ended up being part of it.

Nothing was mentioned at the time of Amanda having my child. But who knows, perhaps it was on our minds somewhere….

Anyway, at the end of the first walk around the lake, we felt we needed more, so we took another walk around the lake. At the end of that, we felt we needed even more, so we went to Azia for a beer. I will now confess something to all of you. At this point on that sunny afternoon, I was well along the route of being, as we say in primatology, “interested” in Amanda. So when we stopped at my car before going to her car to drive over to Azia, I grabbed something that I had stashed in the glove compartment, just in case, because one never knows, and put it in my pocket. One must always be prepared.

So we sat down at a table in Azia, and the waitress came over to take our order. I suggested the bow tie pasta with chicken to share. (At some later time, Amanda would discover Azia’s green curry and that would become her favorite.) I asked Amanda a question or two about her preferences and ordered her beer for her. We sat and talked and things were going quite well. After the food was done and the plates taken away and the beer mostly gone, I felt pretty good about how we were relating and finally had the confidence to show her what I had taken from the glove compartment and secreted in my pocket, knowing, hoping, that she would be…”interested.”

“Look at this,” I said as I opened my hand and showed her the object that rested on my palm.

“Oh, what is that?” was her reply, a bit of nervousness in her voice, possibly because no one had ever showed her something like this before, in a crowded restaurant on a first date.

“It’s a wildebeest tooth,” was my reply.

“Really? Like a ‘gnu’? Cool!”

“Not only that,” I said, now swaggering a bit, I admit. “It’s about two million years old!”

“Really!” Amanda’s eyes sprang wide open.

“It’s a fossil. I was bringing it into the lab to check for ancient phytoliths that might tell us about the evolution of diet. It’s from my excavation in Africa.”

Never has that line worked so well. She was hooked, I was hooked, and the trusty old fossil was put away never to be used again.¹

Well, that was the story of our first date, but let’s get back to last night’s party. When we finally got over to the Black Forest, we were a bit late, as is the tradition. Monica was there, as were Brian and John Funk. We managed to get a set of adjoined tables.

The conversation wafted and waned and wandered. Every now and then the people at the table would fall silent, as four or five individuals pulled out their devices and Tweeted. Every now and then some question would arise and two or three people would pull out their devices and Google it. I’ve never quite seen that happen before. It is, indeed, a whole new world.

Lizzie came to the party.

There are a lot of crazy people in this world, and I have no problem with that. But some people’s neurosis seems to be to make life hard for other people (on purpose), or their particular craziness just has that side effect. I can characterize my own life over the last several years (well, actually, since as far back as I can remember) in terms of which crazy people were annoying me, when they were doing it, and in what manner. And every now and then one of the crazy people goes away (or I go away), and my heart lightens and I gain happiness.

(The above statement is not meant to imply that I am not one of the crazy people.)

So Lizzie was at the party, and last night I realized something about her regarding craziness. If you pay any attention to my blogging, you’ll know that I write about Lizzie now and then. In fact, sometimes Lizzie is my main audience, although I don’t think she knows that. Lizzie met Ben, Ana, John and Brian for the first time last night, and she’s met Stephanie and Mike only once or twice each. Of course she knows Amanda.

So, why do I mention crazy people and Lizzie in the same set of thoughts? Lizzie and I get together now and then, and I ask her what is going on in her life, and I love to listen to her describe what’s up. She asks me about my life, and I tell her stuff. We do not do this by phone or email, only in person. Our lives have very few overlaps (though the ones that exist are clearly the work of the Coincidenti, like the link that goes back 15 years connecting Amanda to Lizzie).

The point is we have no complexities in our relationship. We just care about each other. And we have a common interest in rodents. But what is interesting to me, as I’ve come to realize, is that I’m pretty sure that Lizzie and I have exactly the same perspective on what is crazy and what is not, and I’m absolutely certain that she is not even a little crazy. She and Amanda share that. They are both perfectly normal with the most harmless and innocuous neuroses imaginable. This is probably related to the fact that they are both very quiet in groups. So when Lizzie came in (long after Amanda had gone home and as people were starting to file out), I sat aside with her and we caught each other up, and Lizzie gave me the gift she always gives me: a sense of calm and comfort. A sane sense of calm and comfort.

Stephanie was, of course, the other focal point (besides myself and Mike, as we are the Three Blogoteers that make up the core of Quiche Moraine) of the evening. But Stephanie is never a focal point by herself when she is with Ben (they are a couple). The two of them have at least fifty running conversations that are so spread out and complex that I have seen the two of them discover new things about each other three or four times in a given evening as their umbilical banter turns on and off with the broader conversation waxing and waning. Which is often quite entertaining.

I’ve spoken of Ana and Lizzie, both of whom I’ve known many years and with whom I share many (different kinds of) politics, intimacies, proclivities, dislikes, likes and the odd friend or two. (Well, they’re not all that odd….) But in many ways, I feel just as close to Stephanie and, to some extent, her partner Ben, even though I’ve known them for just about a year (or so). Stephanie knows some of my darkest secrets, and I hers (my only regret being that they are not more scandalous, but that is the writer in me talking), and I think we have come to trust, and increasingly to make use of, each other’s reasoning and thought process. I think we get along so well because she is a very scary person and I’m not scared by much. It also helps that we have slightly overlapping but largely complementary knowledge bases but with very similar sensibilities and, for lack of a better term, world views. That makes for interesting conversation, and this conversation plays out in the blogosphere in ways that I think many readers cannot imagine. When I write with Stephanie as my audience, as when I wrote with Monica as my audience (see beginning of essay, above), I usually get into a lot of trouble.

Mike came late and had to leave a bit early, and I kind of saw him in a new light last night. Although I’ve run into him a couple of times over the last month, those were in contexts that were very impersonal and artificial and may as well have not happened with respect to our friendship or work together on the blog. So I can somewhat artificially but still truthfully say that I’ve not really seen Mike since his blogging about the gubernatorial candidates had developed to the extent that is has. When Mike came in and sat down, I imagined him as a 1940s-style, very well-connected reporter who we may presume spent the day in private conversations with powerful people, digging up the scoop. I think that Mike’s essays are going to keep opening doors for him because they are well done and insightful, respectful and important, and (BTW) very well edited by Stephanie (and sometimes me). People are going to look back on his Quiche Moraine posts of this year (and probably next) as a way of grounding some of the conversations that are going to happen as we pick our next Governor next year.

Which brings me to Jim. Jim, a former student, worked for the Ashwin Madia campaign last year (as a staffer, not a mere volunteer as I did). From the moment I met Jim a couple of years ago, I liked him. He is a very serious, dedicated, totally-in-the-blood, grassroots, Democratic Party activist. This is what he does, essentially, for a living. He thinks and breathes politics. Over the next couple of years, I predict that Jim will become one of those people that politicians feel lucky to get to run their campaigns. By the way, Jim will have a series of guest posts on his role in the Madia campaign, coming up soon, on Quiche Moraine.

As usual, the evening ended with a whimper. Amanda had already left, as had Mike and Monica. We wandered out into the street, and John darted off in one direction and Stephanie and Ben in another. I made a quick plan with Lizzie to make contact later in the week for some business we have, and she rode off into the night on her bike. Ana and I walked to her car and promised to meet next week so she could take the next steps in writing regular posts for Quiche Moraine.

When I picked up my car in the parking lot at Azia, where I had carelessly left it when we walked down to the Black Forest, I thought about my old neighborhood, the new buildings that had been built here, the restaurants that were once new but have now become established. I thought about the centrality of the corner of Nicollet and 26th as a point of geography in my own experience. I have told you, over several essays, only a portion of the things that happened to me within a few hundred meters of where I stood unlocking my car. Some of it I can’t tell you because it is rather too painful to discuss. Some of it I have to tell you, because I can’t keep those moments to myself.

Stay tuned.

1. All kidding aside, it is absolutely true that I never showed my fossil to anyone other than Amanda.

In the email, she had asked for my time. She wanted to talk to me about a strategy for finishing her degree in anthropology, and she wanted to know whether there was some research that she could do with me. At the end of the email, she said, “Can we please meet at the Hard Times? I’d be more comfortable.”

To this day, even though Lizzie has been my student, then my colleague, and now is my friend as well (and still my colleague), and even though it has been many years since this particular email (how time flies!), I have never asked her exactly why she wanted to meet in the local anarchist coffee shop rather than in my office. But I don’t think I’ve needed to ask her that; I have a sense that I know why.

So I arrived at the coffee shop not entirely sure why I was there or what I was going to do or even exactly whom I was meeting. I had a vague idea of who Lizzie was, but it would be all too easy to get it wrong and mistake her for someone else or someone else for her. She was small, had red hair, and would be wearing black, as most of my students seemed to. Among the young women in the coffee shop, this ruled out…almost no one. So I went to the counter and ordered something, figuring that whatever needed to happen would happen. When my coffee was ready, I paid and picked it up and turned around and there she was. Maybe.

“Lizzie?”

“Yes. Hi.”

“Okay, then, let’s talk.”

And we walked over to one of the tables by the front window and sat down. Almost immediately a young man came over and sat down on a nearby chair and said “Oh, Professor Laden. Hey, I was in your class two years ago. Your human evolution class. I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I just wanted to tell you how great it was.”

I got the sense that Lizzie knew this young man.

“Well, I’m glad you liked it.”

I also got the impression that this young man was a regular in the Hard Times. He was probably one of the local anarchists.

“Yeah, it was great. I couldn’t’ believe the things you were saying. You totally changed the way I think about…everything…,” and as he said this, a young woman came over and sat down next to him, joining our little group.

I realized as this conversation developed that the reason these two kids had come by to talk was because Lizzie was there. Lizzie was with me, so they could come over too. I’d been in this very coffee shop countless times previously, and most of the young anarchist crowd were polite but avoided me unless they specifically knew me. No particular reason for that…other than that I was probably known to most of them as someone who taught at the U, and who may have been a bit intimidating (those of you who’ve met me know that I’m a big, scary guy with a mean face that most people avoid getting anywhere near). With Lizzie sitting with me, unharmed and clearly not intimidated, it was safe to explore, say hi, ask a few questions.

“Your lectures were totally awesome. They made me rethink everything. Everything. In fact, that is why I dropped out of college. Now, I mainly hang out here.”

Oh, great, I thought. I converted a perfectly normal young man into an anarchist. I wondered whether there was a particular lecture that did it…

“Me too!” Suddenly the girl was animated and involved in the conversation. “Some professor I had in some class three years ago. He was totally awesome. He made me realize that I did not belong in school and that I just needed to do my own thing.” Then she looked at me, rather closely. “But it wasn’t this one. It was some other professor.”

“Hmm, I wonder who?” I said, glad that I was not the only one who was busy ruining the entire system of education.

Now, the boy was looking at the girl with a quizzical look, and the girl was looking at me. “He had long hair and a mustache,” she said, remembering her wayback.

A moment of silence. Then the boy said to the girl, “Imagine him with long hair,” and his thumb pointed to me.

Lizzie chimed in, “And a mustache. A big mustache like a pirate.”

And the girl’s eyes widened and her mouth made a big “O”….

“It’s you!” she shouted. “You’re the one. You changed your hair, but it’s you!”

Oh, brother. Turns out I was ruining the entire system of education pretty much single-handedly.

Over the next few minutes, the two visitors wandered off and Lizzie and I were able to get down to business.

…Now, that scene you have in your mind, of Lizzie and me sitting across from each other at a tiny table in a dark and smoky coffee shop on the West Bank in Minneapolis …let it get all wavy and foggy and slowly fade away. Then it fades back in, but it is different. It’s still Lizzie and Greg, but now they are sitting next to each other at a bar, in a different but still darkish location, and the barkeep has just put a plate of Königsberger Klops in front of Greg and a plate of Wiener Schnitzel in front of Lizzie….

Greg had just been saying to Lizzie, “You know, the downside of knowing a blogger is that whatever happens…,” eyeing the Weiner Schnitzel, “…just might get blogged. Like this Wiener Schnitzel. I’ll probably have to blog that.” And verily, the Wiener Schnitzel was huge and impressive. Totally bloggable. “Plus, for some reason, I tend to write a blog post every time you and I have dinner together.”

“I did notice that,” replied Lizzie, with a measure of snark but not taking her eyes off of the Wiener Schnitzel–I assume calculating which parts to eat and which parts to load onto her bike for the ride home.

We were sitting in the Black Forest Inn in South Minneapolis, on Eat Street. The Black Forest is across the street from Azia and is also the location of a party PZ Myers and I threw a few months back for our readers, so some of you know this place. This establishment has been extant for a very long time and has a rich and interesting history.

To our right, as we sat at the old traditional bar, sipping the custom-made beer and munching on very authentic German food, was the famous Richard Avedon photograph. It seems that some years back, Avedon was a student at a nearby art college and came here regularly to hang out at the bar. At some point later on, he gave the owners of the Black Forest this photograph…a huge, almost life-size blow up of six or seven women, all Daughters of the American Revolution. They were sitting and standing around like they were about to get their portrait taken, or had just gotten their portrait taken, and they looked like a bunch of pretty tough broads. Most people who see this photograph, hanging behind huge sheets of Plexiglas off to one side of the rectangular, centrally placed bar, think it is a group of Germanic royalty. The women are wearing formal dresses with crown-like tiaras, and they all look very Germanic and stern. And their photograph is hanging in the Black Forest, which is otherwise adorned with myriad specimens of Germanic art and kitsch. But no, they are not Germanic royalty, just old-fashioned, upper-crust blue bloods from somewhere in the U.S.

Some time after the photograph was hung, a gentleman who at that time frequented the Black Forest and still frequents the neighborhood pulled a .357 magnum pistol out of his pistol-hiding place and put one bullet into the forehead of one of the ladies and another bullet into another lady’s chest. Bam. Bam. He double tapped the Avedon. The owners got really mad at that dude, and he is no longer allowed in the restaurant. I hear tell Avedon was not too happy about this either. The bullet holes are still quite visible, no repairs having been effected.

Anyway, Lizzie and I had gotten together for dinner very late on this Wednesday evening for a number of reasons. We needed to talk about some science and some personal stuff. We never got to all of the personal stuff because there was so much of it, with things happening in her family and my family and among mutual friends.

One of the things I wanted to touch on was this: We have a mutual friend who had gotten himself into trouble some years back and was now paying the price with an imminent stint in prison. I’ve given the details elsewhere. A few days before this dinner, I had gotten an email from him, and I didn’t think he’d mind if I shared it with Lizzie. For some reason I didn’t want to just forward it to her. That that didn’t seem right or respectful. So I had a printout which I let Lizzie read at the bar, before the dinner had been delivered by the barkeep.

What is relevant to the present discussion about this long letter with many things in it was this one part, which I shall paraphrase: “When I started to take your class, way back when, I was involved in these illegal things I was doing. But in your lectures, you showed me the value of science and scientific thinking. This totally changed my mind about everything, and I walked away from the life of an anarchist and decided that I needed to become a scientist.”

So. Anarchy 2; Science 1.

______________

There is another feature of that night’s dinner that I’ve decided to relate in a different forum. Here.

We needed to talk, to spend some time alone and in a fairly quiet, undisturbed location so we could discuss a mutual friend who had gotten into some very serious trouble. We needed to find out where we each were on the issue, about our respective mutual states; we needed to compare notes and remember details covering several years of time; we needed to talk about what had to happen next. And given our schedules, we needed to eat. Which is fortunate, because it was time for me to write another restaurant review.

It was Lizzie’s birthday. Well, two days before, but close enough. We’re close enough friends, Lizzie and me, but we don’t travel or live in the same social circuit. I’d never be at her birthday party. (Though actually she came to mine…which was only the second birthday party I’d ever had in my life, now that I think about it. But that’s another story.) Anyway, I said, “I want to take you someplace nice because it is your birthday,” and we went to one of my favorite places, Azia.

We’d been there before, and there is a reason this fact is rather strange when I contemplate it. A few years ago, Amanda and I went to dinner with Lizzie and the very same mutual friend I mention above. That fact was not on my mind when I proposed Azia (not consciously, anyway). What was on my mind was the char. We’ll get to that. That dinner, or more exactly our memory of it, would become part of this night’s conversation, because we both struggled to remember exactly why we four got together for dinner that night to begin with and where in the course of our various relationships we all were. Were we all friends like we are now? Or were we just getting to know our mutual friend? Was it a get acquainted dinner or a good-bye dinner? Eventually we figured out that it was a good-bye dinner. Which when I look back at it is rather sad. I’ll get to that too.

Azia is a fusion Asian joint once described as “Sacred Asian art meets James Bond Chic,” owned by Thom Pham. Thom opened this Eat Street restaurant a few years back on the local Corner of Restaurant Death. A sequence of restaurants had previously opened and closed at the corner of Nicollet and 26th, across from the Black Forest. Despite the poor luck earlier establishments had suffered, Azia ended up having great success.

We showed up early in the evening, and the place was pretty empty. I thought about telling the maître d’ that we’d like a quiet corner, that we didn’t want to be disturbed, that we were here to talk privately and eat a simple dinner. But since she was already steering us towards the ideal quiet corner, I kept my mouth shut and accepted the out-of-the-way booth. That made what happened next a little funny.

I should say that the service at Azia is usually super-excellent and sometimes not, but when it is not, it is never, ever bad. It is just sometimes a little quirky. This is a big place in a nomadic market, so while there is always a core group of servers, there is a certain amount of variation around the edges. Tonight’s server was a woman I had not seen before, who clearly knew the menu and demonstrated her experience quite nicely with the char. I’ll get to that in a moment.

But her style was not what we were looking for. From the moment we were seated, Lizzie and I engaged in our vitally important conversation. We had a mutual friend who had suddenly found himself in very very deep trouble with the law, and we had just heard about it. I knew he and Lizzie knew each other, but I did not know how well. I did not know if this was going to be a rough blow, a bewildering moment, or a case of serious annoyance for her. And I don’t think Lizzie could have known that for me either. So we needed to assess our states of mind and heart in relation to this important matter. And while we engaged in this opening round of discussion, I’m pretty sure the waitress came by four or five times to see whether we needed anything.

“Okay, we’d better make one decision, don’t you think? Do you want wine? What kind, how much? Okay, may I suggest the Faustino Rioja?”

Now we were ready. Our waitress came back and we ordered the wine. She checked both of our IDs and it was brought to us. I was grinning about having my ID checked when she walked away, and so was Lizzie.

“I think it was my sweater.”

We both laughed at the prospect that my simple black Woolrich sweater (purchased, by the way, in 1988, so the sweater itself was almost old enough to have a cocktail) would make me look decades younger, and then we returned to our conversation.

By this time we had firmly established the details and found much agreement about the basics of all the relationships. Both of us thought well of our friend, and we were very saddened by the current situation. He was going to go to prison for a long time, there was no way around that. And while we knew that it could have been worse, we still wanted it to be better than it was.

But that was not enough. We had to do more than order the wine because we were now on visit nine from our server. Now, you have to understand that we did not find this annoying. She was not being annoying. She was just being very, very helpful, and perhaps a bit lonely, because we were the only table seated at her station. Also, since I’m one of his oldest customers, Thom sometimes gives the secret hand signal to his staff to be extra nice. I think this night Thom may have had a fly buzzing around his head and accidentally gave the secret hand signal five or six times. So we made an important decision.

Pot stickers. Lizzie said pot stickers, and I asked her whether the details mattered, and she said no. So when our server came by, I ordered them pork and sautéed. These are the best pot stickers in town bar none, by the way.

Which reminds me. For one year, not long after Azia opened, I lived three or four blocks to the north of Azia, and almost every week, Julia and I would have lunch here. That was just after I had broken up with my sig-oth, who also lived a few blocks away but to the south. She (I’ll call her Georgia) had said to me “Hey, if you ever go eat at Azia or anywhere else in the neighborhood, let me know so we can avoid the embarrassment of running into each other. Especially if you’re with a girl or something.”

So the first time we were heading over to Azia, Julia (then about 9 years old) and I, I mentioned this to Julia and said, “Here, take my cell phone and call Georgia and tell her we’re eating at Azia. Don’t worry, she won’t answer the phone; just leave a message. We have this prearranged.”

So Julia speed dials Georgia and blurts out, and I was not expecting this, “We are going to Azia. You must not go there. Repeat. We are going to Azia,” like she was calling in an airstrike. So ever since then, whenever I went to Azia with a girl (Julia) I gave her the phone and she made the call.

Anyhow, I mention this only because of the pot stickers. Julia and I had pot stickers for lunch every week, and if we were hungry, we’d split an order of the Bow Tie Pasta, which can be ordered with any of several different “proteins” (as we seem to refer to animal tissue or tofu these days), which is perfect for two people to share.

To continue: Lizzie and I now moved on in our conversation to the more philosophical issues of why our friend would have done what he did. I wanted to know Lizzie’s personal feeling about this sort of thing. Our friend was going to prison for over political activities that would clearly be labeled by any court in the land, or any FBI agent, as terroristic. I hate that word, terroristic. But many people would take such an individual and write them off entirely because anybody who engages in any violent activities that can be labeled as terroristic equals Osama bin Laden, and there are no exceptions. I myself believe that life is more complex than that, and people are more complex than that. So does Lizzie. It turns out that we both feel that our mutual friend should very much not have done what he did, but that did not make us not care about him as a person, or love him less as our friend.

But that was not enough. It would never be enough to merely order pot stickers. Things were getting dicey. Visit fourteen was imminent, and I felt we had to do something about it. Now again, I say we were not annoyed. Our waitress was just trying to do a good job. We understand these things. Lizzie herself has been a server, and in fact for much of the time I’ve known her, she’s had at least a part time job in a restaurant. I’ve done that kind of work too, but not nearly as much and a very long time ago. Suffice it to say that we were far more amused, even endeared, than annoyed. But we had to act, so we did.

We consulted the menu, or should I say Lizzie consulted the menu (I have it in my head pretty much), and she was interested in the char the server had mentioned. So I urged us on in that direction. Lizzie also liked the looks of the Hot and Spicy Lemongrass Grilled with Field Vegetables. She wanted it with Tofu. She likes Tofu. This is a person I love and admire and think very highly of. So I overlooked the Tofu thing and agreed that this would be good. It turns out that Thom makes tofu taste good somehow. Who knew it was even possible?

With the pot stickers delivered and consumed, we made our order on the next pass of the server. Just then Lizzie excused herself to visit the ladies’. By the way, when you eat at Azia, the men’s is on the left, ladies’ on the right. It is hard to tell, so now you know and won’t be confused.

While Lizzie was gone, the server came by and folded her napkin for her.

The next step in our conversation was remembering details. For reasons I will not elaborate on here, I needed to have a pretty good picture of what everyone was doing, where, and when over the last six or seven years. It was helpful to speak with Lizzie about this. I became pretty certain that I knew each of them before they knew each other and learned how they initially became acquainted. I was very interested to hear that Lizzie had had dinner with our friend and his parents. In reconstructing events, I remembered that I was supposed to have dinner with him and his parents one day, and they called it off a the last minute. This was the same parental trip, so I guess I was jilted in favor of Lizzie Well, I can’t say that I blame them. I’d rather have dinner with Lizzie than myself too.

So the char came, and this is a big deal. The server is required to fillet the fish right there at the table. There are servers as Azia who do this in seconds, and it is brilliant to watch. Our server did not do it quickly, but she did it very skillfully. Everybody takes off the head and tail first.

“Do you want the head?”

“Of course. Best part, really.”

So she does not put the head in the discard pile. Other servers slice the top half off the fish clean off, then take out the bones, then fold the top half back on. Instead, our server opened the fish like the hood of a car and pulled the bone out. Interesting, and well done. Then the fish gets chopped sagittally into chunks.

At this point, most servers are done. They check whether you want anything else, and move off. Not our server! No. She placed some char on Lizzie’s plate. Then joined that with the excellent Wok fried veggies that come with the char, and applied the absolutely incredible to die for glaze. Then she opened the bamboo box that the Lemongrass was in and served some of that to Lizzie, opened the bottom of the bamboo steamer and gave her some rice. Then she gave me some rice, some lemongrass, some wok veggies, and my piece of char, thus reversing the order and making the mirror image of the two plates, on each side of the table, work perfectly. For the next several minutes, we ate and ate and ate. Lizzie quite literally dived into her food, she was clearly starving. That was fun to watch for a while, then I ate the eyeballs out of the fish head and started into my plate.

The rest of the meal, the rest of the conversation, was more mundane. We talked about other matters, we heaped more food on our plates, we got the check, we were introduced to a second server who had just come on duty, just in case we needed him, and as always, Thom came by to see if all was well. And we said, of course it was.

One of the nicer meals I’ve had. It turns out that the char and the lemongrass is a perfect combination. One of the saddest evenings I’ve had. It is not pleasant to contemplate a decade in prison for a person you care for. But all my time with Lizzie is good. I’m lucky to have her as a friend, and I bothered to tell her so that night.

Azia is on Eat Street in South Minneapolis. It is also the home of the Caterpillar Lounge and the Anemoni Sushi and Oyster Bar. Here is the web site.

My plan was to trick Lizzie into determining where we were going to eat.  This was going to be difficult.  Lizzie is a quiet, unassuming and thoughtful person whose first inclination would be to accommodate my (or anyone else’s) preferences in matters such as this.  It would be totally out of character for her to start out by telling me where we should go for dinner.  But I wanted her to pick, partly because it was her celebration and partly because of a quirk I have.  Sometimes I like to experience the preferences and choices of someone that I care for.  I wanted Lizzie to suggest where to eat, and I wanted to try her favorite selections off the menu and probably drink what she was drinking and so on.

I’m still grinning at the conversation.

“So, where do you want to go?”

“Oh, anywhere, I don’t care.”

(And so on and so on…via email, in person, for three or four days. Then, finally, we’re in the car about to drive off to…somewhere.)

“So, have you eaten anyplace good lately?”

“Yeah, I like this new Japanese restaurant off Lake Street.”

“Oh. So when was the last time you ate there?”

“Two days ago.”

“Oh. So you probably don’t want to eat there again right away.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Well, there’s Greek.”

“I could do Greek.”

“We could just go over to Eat Street and see what happens.”

“We could.”

“Maybe Azia or some place.”

“We could.”

“You want to eat in your Japanese restaurant, right?”

“It’s my favorite place. I want to show it to you.”

“What will we order?”

“Eel. It’s my favorite.”

“And what will we–”

“Sake. Of course.”

“Okay, lead the way.”

And thusly, we proceeded to Midori’s Floating World Cafe on 27th Ave in South Minneapolis. At the time we ate there, it was right across the street from the old Resources Center for the America’s building, and next to The Real CMF’s favorite restaurant (to which I had not yet been). Subsequently, Midori’s has moved a couple of hundred feet away.

We had one of the noodle dishes, a biggish bottle of hot sake, and some sushi.

As we were ordering, I remembered that neither of us had brought along our List of Endangered Fish: Do Not Eat wallet insert, but we tried to do our best by staying away from sea mammals and anything that was really expensive.

It turns out that Lizzie and I have pretty much exactly the same taste in sushi: It’s all good, but there must be eel.  We figured eel would be safe from an environmental point of view, but we later learned that we had that totally backwards.  Eel is one of the worst things you can order from the menu if you care about the planet.  Oh, well.  We learn.

I liked the fact that we were drinking hot sake.  I had not had that since being in Japan a few years ago.  In fact, I regaled Lizzie with a story about a fairly intensive foray into the world of hot sake at a bar in Kyoto.  Apparently, the custom in Kyoto is for young men to hook up with a particular small neighborhood bar.  These bars are all owned and run by women, who develop bonds with these young men and have a sort of motherly relationship with them.  So we went to the bar where two colleagues, both of whom work in Central Africa, had “grown up.”

Now, you have to understand that my Japanese is nonexistent, and my colleagues have hardly ever spent time in the English-speaking world, so their English sucked.  My host, a woman who had lived for years in the U.S., was with us, and her English was perfect. But the main point of this gathering was for us Africanists to spend some time together.  So, as it developed, Mother Bar Owner and my host (Hitomi) had a nice conversation about who knows what, in Japanese, while my two colleagues and I spend the evening reminiscing in KiSwahili. Much to the amusement of the occasional customer who wandered briefly into this tiny little establishment.

What was really funny was also too subtle for almost anyone to have noticed:  We learned our KiSwahili in very different contexts.  So, I was speaking with a Pygmy accent, one of my colleagues was speaking with a Chinese accent, and another was speaking with an Italian accent.  That was funny.

I have three things to say about Midori’s Floating World Cafe. 1) It has a very nice atmosphere, a small establishment with a simple lineup of unpretentious tables and a sushi bar, family run, staffed with excellent servers. 2) The food is quite good. And 3) the prices are very reasonable.

Lizzie is living in what we used to call a “crash house”…the sort of place I misspent a fair amount of time in my youth.  Her stories of life at home reminded me of my own stories, which made good comparisons, so I think we ended up making each other laugh a lot. Maybe we were a little boisterous, because when we got around to leaving, we were the only customers and the proprietor seemed really happy (to see us go?).

I highly recommend dinner with Lizzie. But since most of you can’t have that, I recommend that you try Midori’s Floating World Cafe in South Minneapolis with someone who makes you smile.

Midori’s Floating World Cafe is located on 2629 Lake Street, Minneapolis, which is a new location.

And speaking of sushi, this is the video of the famous Japanese Frilled Shark.

What sushi to eat, what sushi to avoid.