No I Don't Want a Beating

You know you made the right dining decision when the person making your food is also making sexual wisecracks with you. Tonight that happened when I went to Olio for dinner before the theater. I wanted to try the Beef and Bleu (rare Angus beef, bleu cheese, mixed greens, dried fruits, walnuts, red onion, roasted red peppers, tomatoes and a Parmesan peppercorn dressing) and enjoy it in the front window so as to have a view of the impending storm rolling in.

Owner Jason saw me with the menu and said hello, followed by a pointed crack about,"Long time, no see." And although I hadn't been in since January, as I told him, "I've eaten at your lunch cart twice in the past month. Does that count?" Obviously pleased, he admitted that it certainly did, so I got in line and placed my order.

Afterwards, as I was perusing the beverage case, I heard Jason call out to the girl who took my order, "Who ordered the black and blue?" I turned and identified myself and he said, "So you want a beating , huh?" That was definitely not what I was expecting him to say, but I played along, "Maybe it is." But Jason was even quicker than me and shot back, "Welcome to Olio, also known as Jason's house of S & M." Well done, Jason, well done.

And speaking of beverages, there on the shelf was Sprecher's root beer, voted by the New York Times as the #1 root beer for its "well-integrated flavors, soft carbonation and creamy texture." And while the Washington Post will always be my newspaper of choice, I trust the NYT when it comes to taste-testing 25 root beers. Clearly those Sprecher folks in Wisconsin know what they're doing with root beer, at least to my taste. As a complement to my black and bleu, it was perfect.

The salad itself contained an array of delicious ingredients but the standout was the hunk of bleu cheese bigger than my palm resting on the side of the plate. It was a Dutch bleu and a pocketed (rather than veined) bleu to boot. Pocketed bleus were more common in old-school French bleu- cheese making, according to Jason when I asked him about what kind of heavenly bleu this was. Crumbling it into my salad, my fingers were actually turning blue, which I was happy to lick off.

The storm arrived mid-meal with lightening and the rain came down hard, making for some excellent dinner viewing. I lingered as long as I could without missing the 8:00 curtain at the Firehouse. Playing tonight and tomorrow is "365 Days/365 Plays Revisited." It was a tribute of sorts to playwright Susan Lori Parks' project to write a play every day for a year. I'm prolific, but good god, a play a day? It boggles the mind.

Tonight's production was a theatrical/dance piece with nineteen vignettes, each paying tribute to a different one of the 365 plays. "At the start, there's always energy" one character said early on and there was plenty of energy all evening. From "trust life" to "the first constant: remember who you are," the pieces hinted at a bigger story with some danced and some acted.

There was even a piece about the intermission with one character asking another, "Do you get it so far?" and the other pronouncing, "It's very post-modern." (Note to self: isn't everything anymore?) That concept was perfectly rendered in the "2-for-1" piece in which one character said to the other, "Think I'll go pick up a gun. There's that two for one sale down the street. Want me to get you a couple?," to which the other carelessly responded, "Yea, sure."

The final search for the meaning of life had the entire cast crawling around on stage, with one girl shouting, "I found it...oh, never mind" and back they all went to examining the floor for answers.

As we all know, there's no telling where a person might find the meaning of life. For all we know, it could be somewhere as unlikely as Jason's House of S & M. One just never knows.