Everything Pairs with Hospitality

Guess what happened to me?!  Boy, oh boy, oh boy…it will be a challenge to make this seem food-related.  Since we only deal with delicious and pretentious edibles on this site, let me say right off the bat that the experience was more satisfying than, say, a proper three-cheese risotto.  I was drinking a Coke Zero at the airport when it happened.  There may be no decent food outside Dan-D cashews at YVR, but don’t let that stop you from picking up your friends and relatives there.  You never know what kind of social amuse-bouches await you in the terminals!


I had a pretty lazy Sunday yesterday, as my niece is in town on her vacation, which she wisely chose to spend with me, eating, in Vancouver.  In the morning, while she squeezed the last few drops of shuteye out of her holiday sleep fruit, I ate my last piece of frozen cake and drank a couple of Nespressos while watching the Food Network.  Around noon we ambled down the street and ate some unremarkable and un-Parisian crêpes with Swiss cheese and egg at Café Crêpe.  We walked in the broiling sunshine until we were both cooked to medium-well, then decided to hit a marina-side patio for a little Pinot Gris.  We were among other folks to have this idea in the 30-degree heat, and I noticed Bridges took the opportunity to add a zero behind every price on their menu.  Nonetheless, my Edmonton-native niece enjoyed the $18 personal pizza, her senses seasoned with seagulls and sea water.

As you can imagine, afterward I might have preferred to take a grape-flavored nap than to take public transit to the airport - where, incidentally, my mother was due to roll in around dinner time.  Plus, we were meeting a group at Maurya shortly after her scheduled landing, so to ensure the timely arrival of Indian food into everyone’s maw, it might have been safer for my Ma to take a cab.  But, as you know, I have impeccable manners; I hopped on the subway just so mum could see my grinning pie-hole at the gate.  It wasn’t so bad, especially since I took along Anthony Bourdain’s The Nasty Bits for the ride.  (Not surprisingly, I totally agree with him that Las Vegas restaurant-copies are vulgar and cannot possibly live up to New York originals.  And I haven’t even been to Vegas!)

Now that you’ve had your anecdote apéritif, I’ll get to the memoir main.  As my mom and I were leaving the airport, who was in our elevator up to the Canada Line but Ed Begley Jr.!  It was like finding a piece of okra in Campbell’s Vegetable Soup! I’m sure all of you know who this guy is, and I love him based solely on the fact the man rides a hybrid electric bicycle to power his toaster!  Now this is an idea.  Think about it - if you had to produce enough energy on your own to cook all your food, you would never be fat (in fact, you might even starve to death).  It’s an ingenious new angle on my own Chocolate Time Machine!!  Besides his reality-show about going green, Living With Ed, Begley has starred in such premium cuts of TV meat as Arrested Development (frozen banana, anyone?) and Six Feet Under (the series premiere of which, if you may recall, taught a valuable lesson in preventing serious knife wounds in the kitchen).  I love Ed Begley Jr.! I love okra!

Now, I should tell you, as a fragile and pretentious unknown, I avoid celebrities for self-esteem reasons.  Years ago, the company filming parts of The Assassination of Jesse James in Winnipeg considered using my Dad’s olden-looking office to shoot a scene featuring Brad Pitt.  One of his people actually came to check out the joint, like, for reals.   This caused quite a stir among the staff, and not a little dialogue focusing on What would you say to Brad Pitt if you got to meet him? Well, I can tell you, across many iterations of this conversation, to the disbelief of those proposing to congratulate him on his humanitarian  works, I continually insisted I would SAY NOTHING.  “I don’t know Brad Pitt!” I would cry, defensively. “I’m not going to crank out earnest chit chat while he assumes he’s better than me! I don’t care if I get to meet Brad Pitt- I would refuse to meet him!” And so on, and so on.  Truth is, I would love to meet Brad Pitt – I’d like to drink a bottle of Chianti floating down the Assiniboine River with him and Angelina.  But I’ll be damned if I’m going to pursue them.

In the elevator with Ed, the only thing natural on the conversation menu was around the pressing of the buttons- and, as you now understand, I would never say anything to a celebrity that wasn’t totally organic.  So I contented myself with the fact that I had even spotted EBJ, watched from afar as he walked to the subway, and ketchup-and-relished the fact that he was dressed down like a regular Van tourist on his way to JapaDog.  Yet at the platform I saw that Begley seemed flummoxed by the automatic ticket vendor.  At this point, what choice had I but to take a page right out of Brad’s book?  Humanitarianly, I ripped out a subway ticket from my carnet.

 “Are you Ed Begley?” I asked. 

“That’s me,” he replied, dead-pan, clearly expecting me to impose, or at least distract him from the tricky transit task at hand. 

“Here, take this subway ticket,” I offered, “I love your show, man!”

Begley was a bit baffled by me, but I led him like a little Cambodian tike over to the ticket-validator and got him set to go.  “How much is that?” he asked, “I gotta pay you for it.” Of course, I refused, saying I had to be able to tell people I gave super-green Ed Begley a subway ticket.  Then I marched onto the train, leaving him to his own devices.

He came and sat behind me and Ma. 

I think celebrities are like kittens.  They know they’re cute and you want to hug them, so when you ignore them, it messes them up psychologically and they end up in your lap.  I, devoted readers, may officially possess the power to psychologically disarm a kitten. Or, getting back to the metaphors of this forum, I should I say I know how to make a great soufflé.  Step back from the oven window and ignore that shit!

Or maybe Begley felt obliged.  Of course, it was a polite thing to do. Either way, I was stoked and we had a pleasant conversation about transit systems (and Vancouver's cryptic Zone divisions).  He seems like a totally nice guy and I hope he gets himself some Oculus and a little 100 Mile Diet while he’s in BC.
  
Maurya was fantastic.  Sweet celebrity anecdotes pair so well with spicy Indian.