You Forgot Poland Again

Lillet and I were to have a holiday Christmas celebration with Mega and a handful of other friends at a little trattoria on the Lower East Side this evening. But Lillet is still stranded at work and Mega and I are stranded in Brooklyn — she can't even get into Manhattan to see her best friend's newborn baby.

So I had to call our ringleader, Alessandro, a recent transplant from Italy, to tell him that the whole thing is off. He asked me what I thought of the strike and I said I thought that it was great because being inconvenienced by a rail strike might be the closest I ever come to living in Europe.

Be careful, he told me. Your president ... he is listening. But maybe you will be lucky and go to prison in Cuba instead of Romania.

The trattoria, Mangiami is excellent and very reasonable and I recommend it highly.