Bootleg Saturday Night

Denied last year, I was going to make damn sure it didn't happen again, even if it meant getting in line two and a half hours before show time. Which we did.

Henley Street Theater was doing their second annual Bootleg Shakespeare and this year's production was Titus Andronicus, that bloodiest of Shakespeare's plays, and one which I've never seen performed live (probably because it's rarely produced).

Last year a friend and I had arrived at Barksdale an hour and a half before curtain only to find all the tickets gone. This year my couple date and I arrived by 5:30 and stood in the fading sun of Willow Lawn to score tickets.

People were playing cards, eating everything from fresh kale salad to Five Guys burgers, playing guitar and singing, knitting and chatting amongst themselves to kill the time. Maybe they'd been denied last year, too.

Because we were near the front of the line, when the box office did open at 6:30, we had tickets in hand within five minutes. That left until 7:55 to eat and get back in our seats. The problem was our location; we were in that chain restaurant hell of Willow Lawn and I don't do chains.

So we hopped in the car and headed over to the Grill at Patterson and Libbie, sure we could get a quick bite and not feed the corporate machine. Since my last visit, they'd added umpteen screens so every game in the world can be on, but I just sat under the screen and never had to look at it.

Knowing that the Barksdale serves cake (tonight's were coconut and chocolate torte) during intermission, I ordered the excellent wedge salad (actually two wedges with loads of bleu cheese chunks and bacon, grape tomatoes, red onions and drizzled in balsamic) and finished most of it, feeling quite virtuous for a change.

Our early placement in line had yielded tickets in the center section of Barksdale, fifth row (also the last) so we were surrounded by the same people we'd shivered with outside. There's not a bad seat in the entire theater because it's so small, but a center vantage point gave us an excellent view of all the action.

Henley's creative director James Ricks explained the bootleg process of actors being given 30 days to learn their lines, told to bring their own costumes and props and show up at 8 a.m today for blocking. As he quipped, "So we hearsed, but not rehearsed."

And therein lies the charm of a bootleg performance; the actors are experiencing things as the audience is. Even the lighting guy told me he was winging it (and beautifully, I might add).

The play began with characters campaigning for emperor by spray-painting their names on hanging sheets, soon to be further tagged by another with words like "douche" for emphasis.

Because Titus Andronicus is such an incredibly bloody play, fake blood was a requirement and pink Silly String was the creative substitute found for it. When characters died, and they almost all did, their can of Silly String spurted and squirted as they gasped and shuddered to death.

During the first act, the cell phone of a woman sitting in the front row rang. Actor Foster Solomon (playing the evil Aaron), a pro whom I'd seen in countless Shakespeare productions previously (and he's always superb), handled it perfectly.

He glared at her, he tried to grab her purse and finally, he sat down on a nearby bench and waited for her to turn it off and put it away. The people around me said they were hoping he'd dump her purse out on stage and fully humiliate her, but he didn't.

The appeal of these productions is the brilliant asides that lighten the darkest scenes. After the off-stage rape and disfiguring of Lavinia, the perpetrators come back on stage, one shirtless and one in his underwear. After their uncouth crowing about what they'd just done, they head off stage, one saying to the other's back, "Put some pants on, dude!"

And, like any Shakespeare, there is the timelessness of the dialog.
She is a woman, therefore may be wooed,
She is a woman, therefore may be won.
Or should I have picked a line by Publius?

The two musicians (guitar and bass) providing the sporadic soundtrack leaned heavily (pun intended) on AC/DC and Ozzy Osborne (with one White Stripes nod; it was definitely my day to hear "Seven Nation Army") to convey the mood of the play. They also had to occasionally dodge a dying character.

Pumpkins substituted for heads, fists for severed hands and sex was simulated repeatedly. More than one actor had to call for "Line!" which was not surprising given the lack of rehearsal.

During the intermission the stage manager said that she doesn't get to enjoy seeing the production because of having to follow the script so closely just for that reason.

But the occasional forgotten cue didn't detract from the overall enjoyment of the experience. Toward the end, both actors and audience were getting a little punch-drunk with all the death and irony in the dialog and more than one "dead" body could be seen convulsing in laughter. Sometimes heads had to be turned away until smiles disappeared.

Luckily the audience didn't have to worry about masking our smiles. Considering that I had not been denied this year, I couldn't have wiped the smile off my face if I'd tried.

Then, too, wooing quotes always make me smile.

Blue Plate Special

I've got a friend who used to be front of the house manager at a local restaurant and after being unceremoniously dumped by her employer last year, took a job that requires being out of town for days at a time. It makes getting together tougher, so our plans tend to be last minute. As of last night, we were getting together today for lunch and she suggested the Grill at Patterson and Libbie, mentioning that she knew someone there.

Continuing the Freckles' tradition of a blue plate special, today's was liver and onions with mashed potatoes and string beans ($6.95). My grandmother would have ordered that in a heartbeat, but after the overindulgence of the past few days, I had to pass on that classic. Their other special today was chicken pot pie with a salad. It was a good day at the Grill for old-school food.

It turned out that my friend was too modest about "knowing" someone there. I arrived first and took a seat on the enclosed patio (the shade was partially up since it was sprinkling), surprised at how light the lunch crowd was. When the server saw my friend come in, there was much exclaiming. The two guys eating at the table next to us knew her and leaned over to chat; she later mentioned how attractive they both were, but in very different ways (something for everyone!). Three different servers from inside the restaurant proper came out to greet her. A customer walked in and recognized her at once from a former restaurant life.

It was fascinating, like being out with a celebrity. We've been out many times together, but some alignment of planets put a surprising number of long-time restaurant types in one place today. I just sat back and watched and listened. The anecdotes from rva restaurants past was positively fascinating; that's an incestuous world, for sure.

As I ate my spinach salad with pancetta, mozzarella, roasted red peppers and grape tomatoes dressed in balsamic, I imagined eating liver and onions...or even chicken pot pie. The kind of food that was showing up on diner menus with far more frequency, back in the days when all these people reminiscing first got into the restaurant business.

You know, back before balsamic ruled the restaurant world.

Whose Lipstick is That on Your Face?

I've been in a funk lately, thinking way too much about the past and the future, wanting to make things happen that I have absolutely no control over.

While I've been keeping busy my mind has been churning, trying to figure my life out, despite knowing how unlikely it is that I'll come up with answers or even any sort of a plan.

So much is in flux.

So rather than addressing life, I went out instead to enjoy it.

Tonight's adventure began by meeting a friend at the Grill at Patterson and Libbie for a bite to eat.

He wanted to talk about his life and his issues, which was great because it prevented me from focusing on mine.

Why is it so much easier to help a friend address his demons than it it to address your own?

He had the Philly chicken sandwich and I had the wedge salad (in an effort to eat lighter after all the extravagance of Sunday night) and he was agog at the transformation of the place from the old Freckles, a place where the two of us had lunched on numerous occasions.

We talked about how places like Freckles would soon be nothing more than a distant and quaint memory.

For a change, I did not have dessert but he tore into a piece of chocolate peanut butter pie with gusto.

Its light whipped texture kept the pie from being too rich or filling, but personally, I'm just not a fan of peanut butter messing with my chocolate.

Yet one more way I'm odd.

After my friend left for the movies (Copout, no thanks), I decided to walk over to Bistro 27 for a glass of wine and to experience whatever random people I might run into at the bar.

There was enough of a lull that Chef Carlos was free to chat and before I knew it, a plate of spicy calamari and polenta appeared in front of me.

"Something spicy for someone spicy," he told me.

So much for eating lighter, but the calamari was so good that who was I to watch my waistline when something this wonderful was sitting in front of me?

Before long a guy came in and he must have been a regular or at least a friend of the manager because we were introduced, in that way that happens when two frequent customers are the sole people at a bar.

Coincidentally, he's in video production, which was my former field back in the day when I was fully employed and not counting people by knocking on their doors.

He even mentioned an upcoming freelance job for which I sounded imminently suited and asked for my card, which I was more than happy to pass on.

I couldn't have hoped for a better outcome in meeting a random stranger...except for perhaps him turning out to be the love of my life.

Of course, as a friend recently pointed out to me, it's entirely likely that the love of my life is not a random stranger at all, but that's another story entirely.

Along with the manager, we had an enlightening three-way discussion of what makes a good boyfriend and I was told that sending flowers, giving back rubs, paying compliments and, ahem, pleasuring a girlfriend are the surefire ways to ensure your place in a girl's heart.

The discussion actually got a bit more graphic, but since you're probably not reading this blog for that kind of information, I'll let it go and you can fill in the blanks.

I was also told that sometimes a relationship needs to be revisited and that reuniting with a former love after a breakup can sometimes result in wholly different results, a consequence of the right person at the right time the second time around.

This is not something I've explored, but these two guys seemed pretty sure of themselves.

Of course, by this time they were also drinking tequila and rye (they did ask jokingly [I think] if I wanted to do body shots, but I passed), so I took their gospel with a grain of salt.

Not that I needed any salt, having already been told that I was the spicy type.

And I didn't need to be told that I wasn't going to appeal to anyone looking for safe or bland.

But for someone with an adventurous palate who knows how to be a good boyfriend (see Ron's Rules, above), the possibilities are endless.

Or as Eric, the regular, put it, "You have to want to do it."

I won't tell you what he was referring to, but it really applies to all of it, don't you think?

The Grill at Patterson & Libbie: No Brains!

I didn't know a lot of people who went to Freckles restaurant on Patterson Avenue, but I was a regular there for years because I worked nearby.

In the past five years, I'd been more of a semi-regular, but the staff always knew me (and my order) and I still saw a lot of the same faces that I had seen there for years.

Their breakfast business had a devout following, maybe because they were one of the few places you could always get brains with your eggs.

Or maybe it was just their price points.

The place had looked like a bad rec-room from the 70s with smoke-stained wails and ceiling tiles (with ads on them!), an obviously homemade bar and family and dog pictures everywhere.

The bathroom was literally a hole in the wall, barely big enough for a toilet.

The atmosphere screamed old school family restaurant and the owner and her son were almost always there, although in recent years, her health had deteriorated and all he wanted was to sell the restaurant and finally have a life independent of it.

The reason I kept coming back was twofold and probably unlikely to have mattered to anyone else in RVA.

I always got the chef salad (minus the ham and cheese) with blue cheese dressing.

Big deal, right?

Well, actually it was because the owner made the most amazing croutons, big and sauteed in oil with nothing crouton-like about them except that they began as bread.

They were barely crunchy because of how much oil they contained.

Secondly, she made her own blue cheese dressing and I use the term dressing loosely because hers was mainly chunks of blue cheese with just enough of a creamy binder to prevent it from being a bowl of cheese chunks.

It was the best blue cheese dressing I have ever had anywhere and I've eaten a lot of it.

So, with the opening of the Grill at Patterson & Libbie, I was naturally curious to see what changes had been wrought, both in terms of the interior and the menu.

A friend and I lunched there today, not sure what to expect, but hoping for the best since she lives in the neighborhood.

Let's just say the renovation is tansformative.

The blue pleather booths are gone, replaced by larger and lovelier booths,

The bar is no longer low-hanging and seedy looking.

There are even two spacious bathrooms.

The waitresses all appear to be seasoned vets and everybody was hustling.

With their patio, they're sure to be a popular destination now that the weather is nice.

Since there was no chef salad on the menu (no brains, either, and that's a real loss in terms of an offbeat breakfast option), I decided to try the wedge salad.

It wouldn't have croutons, but it would have blue cheese.

When our server brought it to me, it was two large iceberg lettuce wedges drizzled in balsamic and a side dish of dressing.

Looking at it as she set it down, she observed, "They forgot the bacon," which was funny, since it's a three-ingredient dish.

She hurried right off and returned immediately with a bowl containing five slices of bacon (a bit flabby to be crumbled, but a generous amount) and I realized that, oh! this was a deconstructed wedge salad.

No matter, I set about shredding my bacon and sprinkling it over my wedges.

The blue cheese dressing was quite good and by that I mean it wasn't as magnificent as Sue's, but it had a good amount of chunks in it, just not as many as in hers.

The dressing was slightly sweeter than hers, closer to the typical blue cheese dressings, but still better than most.

My friend had the three-cheese grilled cheese with coleslaw and got a side of mac and cheese.

It was the baked version; she deemed it quite good and she's a mac and cheese snob, so that's a good sign.

Looking around at the customers, I actually recognized a few from the Freckles days; others looked like neighborhood residents.

They don't have their liquor license yet, but they stay open until midnight Monday through Saturday (Sundays until 3), so I expect they will do a brisk business.

Entrees are served after 5:00 and not one was over ten bucks.

Whether or not they draw the fanatic breakfast following remains to be seen; they no longer have the center filled with tables they can combine to accommodate large groups.

They wisely serve breakfast until 3:00, so expect to see a carafe of syrup and assorted jams on your table if you go in for lunch.

And although there aren't any brains for breakfast anymore, they do have bologna (as well as city ham and country ham), so you can still have a non-standard side for your eggs.

I have to admit, I loved what Freckles represented.

Their inexpensive, old-fashioned way of doing business was downright quaint by the 21st century.

They even kept candy bars for sale by the register in case you needed something sweet to go.

When a regular need something and the staff was busy, we knew we could just go grab the cracker basket or a roll-up and they'd appreciate it.

So maybe the Grill at Patterson & Libbie is just the logical evolution of what a neighborhood place has to be these days.

I'll go back, but I'll also probably always compare it to what it was as Freckles.

Damn! Now I'm sounding like a Richmonder, always bemoaning change.

Luckily the blue cheese dressing didn't change too much.