Lunch as Life Lesson

Timing is everything and never more so than at a restaurant.

Last night's rendezvous had yielded lunch plans with a husband and a bachelor after I'd raved about the chicken skin tacos at Don't Look Back in Carytown.

The only variable was whether or not they'd be on the specials menu today.

Score! They were.

Taking only my word as recommendation, they both got one along with other regular menu items.

A pro at this, I ordered two of them.

The minute our order hit the kitchen, we heard the call to 86 chicken skin tacos.

Apparently our order used the last of whatever chicken skin was in the house.

Sorry about latecomers' bad luck, but very happy to have made it in time to get what we came for.

Although the kitchen claims that all they use on their skin is salt, pepper and oregano, the perfectly seasoned tacos  (traditional style and not any of this gringo abomination) were a huge hit with my friends.

In fact, I got the sense that they were sorry that they'd only ordered one.

I had no such regrets with my double order.

With Scooby Do cartoons playing behind us, we talked about growing shitake mushrooms on a log, balanced ecosystems in Goochland and fish skin that tastes like deep ocean water.


My friend made fun of me for not being able to get up early enough on Saturdays to make it to the South of the James farmers' market.

And compromise my Friday night? Not happening, much as I'd like to experience the market.

We talked about Saturday's bachelor auction, "Single in the City," mainly because one of my friends is being auctioned off.

I gave him major props for his nerve; I'd been asked to be sold and said no, fearful I wouldn't be a hot commodity.

My other friend pointed out that the kind of multi-location date that I'd suggest would not likely be popular with many bidders anyway.

Really? There are people out there who wouldn't want to go somewhere for a drink, somewhere else for dinner, on to an art show and finish up with music?


Apparently not, so better I don't even try.

Once the boys finished their beers and we did a through examination of the excellent tequila menu, we moseyed down the block to Dixie Donuts.

Channel 12 had just left but it was clear from the small number of donuts in the case that lots of people had been in for their first day of business.

They had only three kinds of doughnuts left so we wasted no time in choosing five for the three of us to share.

A chocolate cake doughnut with dark chocolate frosting was covered in toasted coconut and we all got one of those.

We then split two traditional yellow doughnuts with chocolate frosting, just for the sake of research, of course.

The toasted coconut doughnut was a big hit with us all. The dark chocolate kept the sweetness of the toasted coconut in check.

We all agreed that a cake doughnut provides the satisfaction of a piece of cake in a way that no yeast doughnut could ever hope to.

For me, I also like the crusty edges of a cake doughnut.

As we stood there munching and rhapsodizing, a woman came in to buy copious amounts of doughnuts.

When she learned that everything in the case was all they had, she looked crestfallen. She wanted them and more.

"Go ahead and clean us out," the owner told her. "We're ready to close."

So every last doughnut in the case was scooped up into two boxes and for the second time this afternoon, we three breathed a sigh of relief to have ordered before the supply was depleted.

As she went to leave with her loot, a large man approached the shop.

"Uh, oh," my friend said. "Someone's not going to be happy."

When the staff showed him their just-created "Sold Out!" sign, not yet hung, his face fell.

"I've got a little boy in the car who's going to be mighty disappointed," he said sadly.

The woman with the two boxes immediately opened one and insisted he take a doughnut for the boy.

We almost cheered, but were too busy finishing up the last bits of the chocolate-frosted yellow doughnuts to do it without spitting crumbs.

Walking out as they prepared to hang the sign that will inevitably ruin moods all afternoon, we saw other people headed across the parking lot.

"Come back earlier in the day next time so you can try more flavors," they instructed us, mentioning peach cobbler and apricot.

Time and doughnuts wait for no man or woman. Older and wiser now, I won't risk a 2:30 p.m. doughnut run next time.

We'll just call today a learning experience.

Fact is, chicken skin and cake doughnuts are worth getting up a little earlier for.

They certainly guarantee that this someone is going to be happy.

Rousing the Gorgeous

If there's one way to pre-game for National Poetry Month, it's with chicken skin.

Follow me here: chicken skin is an indulgent, all-too-infrequent pleasure. Much the way poetry is.

So scoring them both in the same afternoon makes for a rare indulgence.

And while I was anticipating the poetry, the chicken skin was an unexpected delight.

At this morning's pancake breakfast, my favorite cellist had asked if I'd been to Don't Look Back yet (I think he wanted a recommendation).

I hadn't, but with plans to go to a reading in Carytown this afternoon, it immediately became part of my plan.

Does that make me easy to influence?

Nate's Frito pie is, in my considered opinion, a distinct guilty pleasure, so I wanted to see what he was cooking up since relocating from Jackson Ward to Carytown.

The transition was easier than I expected; behind the bar was a friendly face from Comfort, mere blocks from my house.

You can take the people out of J-Ward, but happily you can't take the J-Ward out of the people.

Just for the record, I did look at the menu, but once I saw the chalkboard specials, my decision was made.

I ordered  one chicken skin taco and one carne adovada taco, opting for the traditional preparation (cilantro, onion, and lime) on double-wrapped corn tortillas for both.

One bite of the chicken skin taco and I was telling a stranger that he had to order one, too.

It was his first time at DLB, so I figured I was helping. And he believed me and ordered one.

Following that crispy goodness, I dug into my long-marinated pork in a sweet adovada sauce and savored its completely different but equally as satisfying flavors.

When my protege's chicken skin taco arrived, he took a bite and gave me a slight bow of the head.

"God, you were right," he rhapsodized, closing his eyes briefly.

It's hard to be wrong about chicken skin.

A neighbor once invited me to lunch and cooked chicken skin in hopes of convincing me to date him (it didn't work but the skin was magnificent, crispy and salty).

With my belly full, I moseyed down to Plan 9 for Record Store Day.

The Garbers were setting up to play, I saw friends everywhere but made a beeline for the "Yard Sale LPs- $1-$2."

Flipping through the selection, they were all very much of an era and genre.

Maybe even the same yard sale.

Lou Rawls, Kool & the Gang, Teena Marie, Quincy Jones, Prince, The Time, Natalie Cole, Al Jarreau, George Benson, Weather Report, Santana.

Ah, yes, that period.

After food and music, it was time for poetry to soothe my savage beast. More accurately, I wanted to be read to.

As our hostess mentioned, Chop Suey's upstairs gallery provides a similar atmosphere to a living room tour, intimate and welcoming.

Every seat was taken and people stood in the doorway to hear Angela Vogel and Catherine MacDonald read from their award-winning first books.

Vogel's strength was her mastery of language; her ability at wordplay (puns, juxtapositions and innuendo) was mesmerizing.

It extended to the title of her book, "Fort Gorgeous."

"Wendy Grown" she described as using the voice of an adult Wendy Darling (from Peter Pan) to bitch about men.

Her humor came through in "Medicine Chest" about a guy who left his dogs with her family only to go off and rob a bank.

On the plus side, he did loan her family $1,000 of his loot.

As a wedding gift, she'd written "Poem for Your Wedding" with the line, "We pad into wedlock, unsure of the combination."

Afterwards, she observed, "Come to think of it, that's not a very good poem to give to people getting married."

In "The Claw" she begins, "Swinger, come hither. You'll shut my claptrap. You'll pound my sand" and ends with, "Love, I've got the teeth for it."

Teeth help a lot.

Truly poetry for the language nerd contingent, of which I proudly consider myself a card-carrying member.

And you know you're among other poetry geeks by the head-nodding that follows each poem.

The only thing that would have been better is if the crowd had snapped their fingers in appreciation of what we were hearing.

She was followed by Catherine MacDonald, whose "Rousing the Machinery" dealt with the poet's interior life.

She said she intended to read from her book and then do some new poems.

"Like most poets, I'm completely enamored of my new poems because no one's yet told me that they suck."

In "Unreliable Narrator," I found our common ground when she read, "I am someone who remembers what you forgot to say."

I am that person, too.

The poem after which her book is named began with a line from William Blake and a few Blake jokes that got the kind of laughs that only a poetry-loving audience could deliver.

Her imagery was evocative, as in "Lida at Work in the World," where she wrote, "Its mate in wild orbit nearby."

Several poems dealt with the imaginary travel that she does, like "Untidy Geographies" about her sister's years living in China.

"Russian Studies" was about her Russian History teacher, explaining, "At ten paces, you can't hear our words."

MacDonald finished with three new works referencing her middle class domestic life and the early non-fiction design writings of socialite/novelist Edith Wharton.

Sigh. Poets reading by an open window on a spring afternoon.

Linguistic acrobatics, Wharton and Blake on the same day as chicken skin.

Cue head nodding and finger snapping.