Less is More

I am not one of those whiners who goes to a restaurant, orders pasta, looks at a sixteen inch bowl overflowing with linguine marinara and whimpers," why do they give you so much?" I'm delighted that the restaurant understands that having paid $26 for ingredients that cost them $1.87, I appreciate quantity. On those rare occasions, when, having eaten half a buffalo for lunch, I can't finish my entree, I'm glad to take it home, refrigerate it and toss it in the garbage two months later. Only under threat of torture will I return to an establishment that charges me $30 for three scallops artfully drizzled with truffle oil and festooned with parsley. I go to a museum for art. I go to a restaurant for food. An ancillary benefit of eating out is charming company and scintillating conversation,but, in all honesty, I could have a better conversational experience at the 104 bus stop on Broadway and 43rd Street where there's less ambient noise than at most NYC restaurants. I remember only once being in the whiners' camp. Having just roughed it on a five day white water rafting trip on the Rogue River in Oregon, my friend, Jeanne, and I treated ourselves to dinner at the fanciest restaurant in Medford, Oregon. I ordered roast chicken. The waiter placed a gorgeous, fragrant eight pound emu before me. My eyes widened. In New York, where restaurant chickens could be mistaken for hummingbirds, the Oregon chicken would have fulfilled a culinary fantasy. Here, it was a nightmare. Even I could not eat more than five pounds of chicken at a sitting and, as I was staying in a motel without a refrigerator, I would have to leave over a good three pounds. It was a very upsetting dinner, the upset mitigated only by the fact that the entire chicken, with soup, salad and dessert cost $6.99. But Oregon is the exception that proves the rule, "less is less."
The rule for restaurants should not be confused with the rule that governs movies and plays. There, the rule is "less is more." No one except the film maker's mother wants to sit through a movie longer than 90 minutes and not even the playwright's grandmother wants to endure 3 hours and 20 minutes of brilliant theatre. "La Danse," a critically acclaimed documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet is a perfect example of a film made by a director who ignored the rule. At 90 minutes this work would have been a pleasant cultural experience. After two hours and 40 minutes, it was as appealing as an attack of kidney stones and infinitely more painful. "August Osage County," a Pulitzer prize winning play was, by the third hour, as enjoyable as receiving a tattoo on your nipple. You will note that the critics deemed both of the above, "brilliant," thereby confirming my theory that critics never actually sit through the productions they review. I'm not saying they don't attend performances. That would be fraud. No,they sit in the audience for 90 minutes, revel in the chef d'oeuvre, absorb the zeitgeist of the audience and depart to write the glowing review, unaware that after their departure, 3/4 of the audience will lapse into a defensive coma. Brilliance is simply impossible to sustain for more than 90 minutes. Isaac Newton was a genius, but how long did it take the apple to drop to the ground? Three seconds? And Albert Einstein? E=mc? How long could that have taken? An hour, max?
I am not naive. I know my rules will be ignored. I'd prefer my $14 glass of chardonnay to be filled to the top, but that won't happen. 4 ounces is the standard "pour," so I have to order two glasses and spend $28 for the equivalent of one normal glass whose cost to the restaurant was $1. I would like to go to a play or movie and walk out smiling, saying, "That was terrific. I enjoyed every minute of it." Instead, I will walk out, holding my head in hand, saying, "This movie evoked the three hours of agony immediately following the extraction of my wisdom teeth." But I'm optimistic that if you send this post to 10 of your closest friends and they send it to ten of their closest friends,ad infinitum, and nobody breaks the chain, we'll all have unbelievable luck, full wineglasses and short movies.