Blimped

Berkeley just seems to get weirder every day.

The latest thing is they have all these high-end restaurants right off campus. When I first came to work here in 1989, they didn't have any of that. I mean, there was the gourmet ghetto, but that was five or six blocks away. Now they've got these high-end places practically across the street.

I mean really high end. Cloth napkins and arugula high end.

Who ever heard of high end restaurants across the street from a college campus? When I went to DePaul years ago, there was a place just the other side of Fullerton called the Seminary Restaurant, a diner where the waitresses wore hair nets and there were plastic flowers in the windows that looked like they hadn't been dusted since Elliot Ness left town.

Or if you wanted take out there was this shack near the dorms where you could get a kielbasa on a bun and French fries, onion rings, that sort of thing. You used to have to race back to your room before the grease ate through the paper bag.

About the highest end place we had was this Mexican restaurant in the back of a grocery store a block away on Belden. The restaurant didn't have a liquor license, but the grocery store did, so they'd let you buy a bottle of Gallo Hearty Burgundy or a six-pack of Old Style in the grocery store on your way into the restaurant. Not sure it was strictly legal, but then neither was the St. Valentine's Day massacre, and nobody ever got arrested for that.

So anyway, my coworker Susie had her birthday at a high end restaurant a half a block from campus called C'est la Vie. She told us all to dress sexy. Well, sure. It's a high end restaraunt. I guess that makes sense. It's not like I'm wolfing down a big messy chile relleno and drinking beer straight out of the can. So I put on a Hawaiian shirt and casual slacks. At my age, that's about as sexy as I get.

Jeffrey, on the other hand, looked like something out of Out Magazine.

We'll see how sexy he looks when BART goes on strike next week, and we're hitching a ride to Berkeley with the guy who drives the burrito mobile!

And yesterday, just hours before the birthday party, I was spied on by a psychedelic blimp. Really. Came right past my office window. Not sure what to make of that.

Kurt "big daddy" True
1 july 2005