Another marvelous dinner at another friend's house. I think I will have new standards for making friends. Never mind scintillating conversationalist, entertaining storyteller, gossip-monger, political strategist. It will be: Do you love to cook? Are you great at it?
I hate to cook. You spend hours scraping, peeling, chopping, working your fingers to the bone, and everyone sits down, eats it all up, and what are you left with? Nothing but dirty dishes. I never understood it. Kids now up and out of the house - my kitchen is closed.
Last night: hors d'oeuvres out on the high patio with its twisted iron railing. Glorious weather. Then everybody inside for dinner. After dinner there was no removing dirty dishes. No, we removed ourselves, again, for dessert in another charming room, a glassed in porch overlooking a splendid free-form pool.
Take that, Hemingway. That's what I call A Moveable Feast.
Conversation? The most fun was telling our encounters with the police. Of course we were all innocent. Yeah? Tell it to the judge. Well, we did.
We learned about a legal technicality that is startling if true. One guest said he got a $90 ticket in the mail for going through a red light. He had been caught on one of those spy cameras, and the photo of his car with license plate was sent with the ticket. "Can you see yourself in the picture"? asked a non-lawyer. "Well, not me, but my car". Aha! It seems you can't give a car a ticket, only the driver. So you can go to court and say my nephew's friend borrowed the car, I don't know anything about a red light. We were skeptical. The guest, in a fit of virtue, said he'd pay the ticket, anyway.
So, readers, is that a legitimate loophole?
Of course this is book related. I mentioned Hemingway, didn't I?
--Florence
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