From 4 x 50 details go here…
(A table set for four, resplendent with fine linen, wine glasses of many shapes, beautiful china.
WAITER
This is an amuse bouche from Chef. Day boat line caught muddled tuna sprinkled with a blessing of forty-year-old artist’s series Modena balsamic vinegar resting on a mattress of sesame wasabi vignettes.
JIMMY
It’s too simple! Send it back!
MIKE
Happy Birthday, George.
EDWARD
To 1946. A great vintage.
MIKE
Ever stop to think, how many more spring days will I have? How many more times to travel, make love, play tennis? This many sunny days, that many ball games, how many you have left?
EDWARD
Ever stop to think, how many more times will we have lunch with you, you keep asking these questions?
GEORGE
My tenth reunion, there was the parade of classes. We’re sandwiched between ’63 and ’73. We get started, pretty soon, for the whole march, the parade marshals are shouting, “Move it along ’68, move it up.” We get to the parade end, everybody’s supposed to go inside, listen to speeches. ’68 balks. ’63, in front of us, went right in, and ’73, behind us, all those investment bankers, plowed through us, they were like lined up in size places.
MIKE
Don’t you get it? We’re the aberration. A sidebar in American history. No relation to before or after.
WAITER
So, we start with the ’76 Blanc de Gris La Nul Puissanté?
JIMMY
Give us The Description.
MIKE
A saucy little filly, impertinent yet rewarding. Herbaceous hints coupled with tropical aromatics that yield to a barnyard finish of mushrooms, wet paint and manure.
EDWARD
So true. So very true.
MIKE
Why did they end, the sixties? It was so cool, so intense, why did it have to stop?
JIMMY
The war ended. All the college kids got back on their daddies’ tracks.
MIKE
Not all.
GEORGE
Even then lots of people didn’t get it — and they’re still pissed about it, want to get even.
EDWARD
They ended because we thought the world made promises to us. Then it broke them.
MIKE
When they ended. It was like moving out of a house you grew up in.
GEORGE
More like being evicted.
WAITER
This is chef’s signature almost-braised line-caught Bay of Riscay turbot swaddled in Patagonian steer marrow over a chattering of wheat hops sequestered in a spun pebble-ground indigenous tepary bean cloister.
GEORGE
Sometimes I think I should have served.
JIMMY
More wine?
GEORGE
In Vietnam.
MIKE/EDWARD/JIMMY
What?
GEORGE
I’m haunted by it. By not going, by going out of my way not to go. To pass up the one chance of our generation to have an experience so intense, so powerful. So clarifying.
MIKE
You’re glorifying it. Our generation’s “chance” was fundamentally corrupted.
WAITER
Here is derrière of warrantless pheasant poached in royal lotus honey secured in a bed of dandelion pollen smegma.
MIKE
We’re hemorrhaging money, nothing’s coming in, no clients, nothing from the writing.
GEORGE
How do you deal with that?
MIKE
Get stoned, beat off.
EDWARD
Ah. The classics.
GEORGE
And people question the value of tradition.
GEORGE
When I took the subway here, a kid asked me if I wanted his seat. I said no. He said, are you sure?
GEORGE
When we were kids — all those magazines, promising a future of mag lev trains, moving roadways, drive your car onto one, play Monopoly during the trip. New ideas, every issue, the Future! So… here’s the future. Cars are still cars, roads are just more crowded roads. We’ve gone from trying to make it better to just trying to make it.
MIKE
It was Peace, Love, Freedom, Happiness. Not Work, Mortgage, Money, Golf.
GEORGE
Our problem is, we didn’t make the choices in our twenties and thirties that other generations normally do. We grew up in a thought-you-could-have-it-all world, now we’re in a you-only-get-one-thing world.
GEORGE
Freedom is not just another word for nothing else to lose. Freedom is making choices when you have something to lose, whatever you decide. When you’re life is so built up you can’t just step through doors, you have to tear down walls.
MIKE
You know, it’ll never get any better. It’s repetitive stupidity syndrome.
EDWARD
What?
MIKE
(like an announcer in an infomercial)
Repetitive Stupidity Syndrome. RSS, one of the most common yet least diagnosed diseases in the world. Imagine, people get stuck in the same traffic jam every day. They know it’s coming, the planners know, yet — every day. But wait, there’s more. Every day planes are late for the same reason as yesterday. We vote for the same politicians who promise change every campaign, and change nothing once elected. Enduring the same dumb things day after day. RSS. Look for it. You’ll see it everywhere.
GEORGE
Seems like we went from building things up to taking things apart. Traded creating icons for Carl Icahns.
EDWARD
Inside I feel the same as I did ten, twenty years ago. But something essential changed, infinity contracted. Death’s popping up in the class notes.
WAITER
Here are florid sentiments of elfland venison with motes of Tuscan dust and Nile bulrush tapers roaming in heritage wheat kernels strudled through a matrix of double scuttled spaetzle remnants under a hirsute crème fraîche with a sea urchin stubble.
MIKE
Do we have to give up on changing the world?
EDWARD
We haven’t played touch football in ages.
MIKE
Years later, you turn around, realize, that’s the last time I did that. Had a beer at the White Horse, a midnight movie, seriously flirted–
GEORGE
Sex.
EDWARD
All night dance parties, road trips…
JIMMY
Riding the Cyclone, then hot dogs at Nathan’s.
EDWARD
Sex.
MIKE
Getting kicked by a cop during a protest.
JIMMY
Panicking when mom nearly discovers your stash.
GEORGE
Mine did.
MIKE
Wondering which was worse, prison or Canada.
MIKE
The generation that actually makes free love work — that’s the generation that will end war.
EDWARD
So what you’re saying is, we’re doomed.
WAITER
For dessert, we have a two-by-two tasting of granité of lavender infused litchi deduction under the protection of unstressed Molokai pineapple, and evidence of Managuan cocoa over Pyrenees rainwater baubles.
MIKE
I was looking at this book Danielle has. There’s an exercise in it to get rid of the double chin.
GEORGE
How about the double belly?
MIKE
You push your jaw forward, then up.
(he demonstrates)
EDWARD
Like Clinton in denial.
(The others do the same.)
JIMMY
Ooh. I think I pulled a jaw muscle.
GEORGE
My ears are ringing.
MIKE
It’s supposed to work, if you do it every day.
(They sit with their chins pushed out. The WAITER enters, looks at them, sighs.)
EDWARD
You’re right. If you look for repetitive stupidity…
WAITER
See why I wouldn’t miss this?