Got Me Some Tail

Southern met fantasy tonight, not once, but twice.

The unexpected began at the Roosevelt, where I ran into a friend and heard of her passage to India, got the latest local restaurant scuttlebutt from a cheap food lover and heard of the challenges of composing music for Tic-Tacs.

One of my favorite moments came when I was told that a friend, when asked the source of her recent hangover, had responded, "Karen."

Since I'm not the boss of her, I'm sure I don't know what she's talking about.

We ordered a bottle of Gabriele Rausse Vin de Gris (the one the winemaker calls a "happy mistake") at a mostly empty bar.

Bartender T got as far as telling us the first special - pigs' tails in a bourbon barrel teriyaki sauce - before we ordered it.

The Roosevelt's chef is the one who first introduced me to crispy fried pig's head many moons ago, so if he was offering up tail tonight, I wanted in.

The sauce was finger-licking' good on the outer thick crispy part of the tails while the inner fatty bits were just obscene.

Wisely, there were pickled veggies to balance the palate and no doubt help digest all that fat.

When all was said and done, we left a pile of little round bones on a sticky plate.

And went to the bathroom to wash our hands.

As the room began to fill up, we got our next dish, octopus fried rice.

Clearly the usually southern kitchen was having Asian fantasies tonight.

The fried rice had the freshest-tasting tiny sliced carrots and corn in it while the octopus was perfectly cooked.

And a great, big fried egg sat atop the whole thing, its bright yellow yolk imparting an unbelievable richness to the already-decadent flavors.

But two dishes in and we were already getting stuffed.

No fools, we followed such rich food with a lighter course to clear our arteries while we still had feeling in our left arms.

Roasted beet and watermelon salad with Caramont goat cheese and lemon oil was a refreshing break but it was the avocado mousse on it that took it over the top.

The creaminess of the avocado enhanced both beets and melon in an unexpectedly complementary way.

Over a discussion of noun and verb usage (no, really), we finished our wine while sharing a slice of Coca Cola cake, not because we needed it but because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Three layer cake after pigs' tails, why it's simply how it's done in the south.

That, or the wine was doing the ordering.

Best overheard conversation:

#1: I keep forgetting I'm in this country and want to say bonjour when I talk to people.

#2: Man, don't worry about it. Say whatever you want. This is America!

Honestly, I couldn't make this stuff up.

After losing my dinner companion to the daily grind, I made the cultural shift from Church Hill to the near west end and the Westhampton Theater.

I was there to see "Beasts of the Southern Wild," the Sundance grand jury prize winner and the one all the critics have been raving about.

It wasn't hard to see why.

The beautifully shot story of bayou folks who live on the wrong side of the levee used two first-time actors in the lead roles of father and daughter.

Watching non-actors carry a completely believable story about a Katrina-like storm that all but wipes out their tiny community was mesmerizing.

Mostly a hardscrabble story, at times it had a certain poignant humor.

When the father tells the little girl about her long-missing mother, he says, "She was so pretty, she never had to turn the stove on. She'd just walk in the kitchen and the water would start boiling."

Now that's pretty.

The movie's story of natural devastation and the resulting loss was wrapped around a fantasy element of nature being out of whack (Katrina being proof of that).

As a result, ice caps melt, ancient beasts are released from ice blocks and begin to roman the world, threatening even the bayou.

I'd be the first to admit I'm not much on fantasy, whether in books or movies. I'm more the non-fiction type.

But actually, there was so much honesty about the devotion of the small group of delta dwellers refusing to abandon their homes even after a mandatory evacuation, that I could swallow a few stampeding beasts as part of the plot.

And I'm glad I did. The moving story was unlike anything I've ever seen before.

Sometimes you need a little fiction to remind you of the basic tenets of life and death.

The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the whole universe will get busted.

I guess Sundance proves that the talented ones can make this stuff up...beautifully.