Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

Tom took a snapshot of the napkin from the Golden Unicorn If you are going to Chinatown for dim sum, I highly recommend going with someone who speaks Chinese. If you can't make that happen, take Matt. Our morning got going when the underaged hostess barked our number into her microphone (#118). I did a small inner fist pump. We were whisked into a three-banger elevator and taken up to the middle banquet floor.  I say the middle banquet floor because on a floor below us and a floor above us, diners scarfed down dim sum. I say banquet floor because the place was plush-- as plush as you can get when the floor is linoleum and there's gold lamé curtains and you're seated at a ten-top with two people you don't know who are already halfway done with their lunch. This was no backwater dumpling honky tonk. This was a major dim sum command central. Carts of dim sum flew at us from all directions. It was a frenzy. Up until that moment I had been going throu...

A portmanteau , in case you are unfamiliar, is when you take two words and smash them together so hard a brand new word plops forth from the wreckage. An example is "smog," which is the bastard child of sm oke and f og . Random shot of Pop poking a street sign. My Pop, reading a magazine or paper or something he randomly picked up off my kitchen table: "Fugly?" (no one says anything.) "What's fugly?" (Tom looks up, weighs the pros and cons of engaging, decides against it, goes back to what he was doing.) (Three minutes pass.) "Oooooh. It's a portmanteau! Ha ha ha. Fugly. Really clever. Fugly. You know, the f comes from..." (Props to Pop for speedy code cracking. Also bonus points for managing to drop the word 'portmanteau' into a statement concerning the word  'fugly.') (Three minutes pass.) "Ha ha ha. Fugly."

At our ice cream social on Saturday afternoon, I was lured into a conversation about china patterns. Translation: Laura asked me about my plates, and I swaggered right up to an overly large answer.  I buy my plates at flea markets. I got a whole bunch at that weird little auction in Boonton years ago. Whenever I spy willow ware , I'm sidling up to the table, trying to remember which brands are old and valuable and hoping the shop proprietor has suffered a bout of angina and left her unemployed idiot son-in-law in charge so I can dicker myself a big-ass deal. Willow ware is appealing because it comes with an ancient Chinese story, which is probably only slightly more ancient than yoga. And yoga , it turns out, bears a suspicious similarity to turn of the century Swedish gymnastics. Don't worry about it and follow my lead.  I choose to believe the marketing when the actual facts prove tragically dull. In the willow ware story, a princess falls in love with a low...