Saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on Broadway last week, great seats at a deep discount (who would have thought sixty bucks would ever seem like a bargain?). I think the enduring appeal of that play might be that married couples, who still make up a good portion of any theater audience, come out saying, “Well, maybe our marriage isn’t so bad after all!” The Longacre Theater does not offer booze at intermission and there were quite a few disappointed patrons at the first intermission, many of whom could have clearly used a stiff drink or two. Plenty of ersatz booze being belted back on stage, of course.

This production is indeed Kathleen Turner’s show. From her opening line (“God, what a dump!”) to her final answer to the question posed in the title, she rules what remains of that rundown roost George and Martha are doomed to inhabit. She looks like she has been in training for the role in years past, enjoying the pleasures life has to offer without frequent breaks for the gym, and her Martha has a blowsy quality that Liz Taylor’s lacked. (Besides, I could never understand how a woman who looked like Liz was doing languishing in nowheresville.) She owns the role and put Taylor out of my mind for the evening.

I wish I could say the same of Bill Irwin’s George. Though I liked the kinetic, almost Robin Williams quality of his jesting (seeing him trade bons mots with the hapless Nick was like watching McEnroe play tennis with the ball boy) and was won over by his abstract take on the disappointed, cuckolded “associate professor” (as Martha continuously reminds him) he let me down in the last act. That’s when you need George to turn around, to reveal that beneath the animosity is a deep well of concern for his wife — as Richard Burton does so convincingly in the film — and I wasn’t feeling it on Wednesday.

Maybe it was an off night, who knows? Wed is a matinee day and after going through that Walpurgisnacht twice the actors may be a bit spent (though Turner didn’t show it). The couple’s evening guests, Nick and Honey (played here by David Harbour and Mireille Enos) are rather hapless foils; though Enos makes the most of her role, milking it for the laughs the playwright built into it, I didn’t find Harbour sexy enough to raise the amount of steam that clouds the evening. All the great lines are in place (“But that’s all blood under the bridge”; “Georgie-porgie, put-upon-pie”) and the play stands up. But since Albee shocked Broadway with its first staging 44 years ago, a lot of people have copied his style; in how many final acts have you seen characters unmasked, forced to face their illusions, psychologically burned to the ground to face the harsh light of Truth?

The amazing thing about George and Martha is that they endure, even their marriage endures. Though Albee was about thirty when he wrote WAVW, it still seems like a young man’s play: fuck you, mom and dad! He even named them after the parents of our country. But as Nick and Honey learn the hard way, no one knows what really holds a marriage together except the two people bound to each other. It is a lesson for the young, and a humbling one.

Leaving Franny’s camp on Monday we stopped in the neighboring town of Liberty, NY for a quick lunch — only to discover water pouring into the car underneath the dashboard on the passenger side. I may not be one of the Tappet brothers but I know that’s not a good thing. After eating half an Italian sub while Peggy had a slice of pizza, all the while listening the an endless tale of woe by the guy in the next counter over (his wife had thrown him out the trailer, monthly disability checks were less than he used to make driving a forklift in a week, his father-in-law just plain didn’t like him) I found a gas station with a garage and had the problem quickly diagnosed. A hose running from the air conditioner was supposed to drain water and was clogged up, causing the small flood in the front seat. We elected to have him address the problem while cooling our heels in the garage’s waiting room.

There we encountered another sad example of local destitution: a young couple with a two-year-old child who were waiting for their own car to be fixed. They had their groceries with them — Fruit Loops, Oreos, large bottles of soda — and seemed unusually agitated. They were both rail thin, with bad teeth and seemingly no volume control: whether talking about the car or which soap opera to watch on the garage’s TV, they shouted at each other in an unenunciated mush of reproach that sounded to me like a parody of the family in Napoleon Dynamite. I lived in a number of redneck towns growing up, though none quite as destitute as Sullivan County seems to be now, and pegged them for a somewhat familiar brand of local loser. Until I got a look at the young mother’s bruised, scabby legs and realized the awful truth: They were meth freaks.

Not to sound naive. I certainly encountered a lot of speed freaks in my youth, at rock concerts and on the streets of San Francisco, especially in the Haight. And I have been reading a lot of press coverage about the nation’s meth epidemic, including the cover story in this week’s Newsweek but I thought of it as…out there. Like Oklahoma. But one look in this woman’s eyes — she asked Peggy for money after she said hi to her toddler — told the tale. The little girl was adorable: blond haired and blue-eyed, she could have come off a Sunbeam bread bag. She was also seemingly unmonitored by mom or dad. They kvetched like Job about everything while their daughter ran in and out of a rather dangerous environment.

Though probably not as dangerous as the one she faces at home. Of all the horror stories about meth addiction — a scourge that is literally sweeping rural America, like a white-trash crack epidemic — the worst are about the children. Neglected, abused, exposed to the worst sorts of depravation they are part of a new generation of the damned. The closing line of my last post, re the Pillowman, seems callous in retrospect. That play concerns an author who writes stories about children being abused, having witnessed the same thing happening to his brother. They’re both dead by play’s end, as those meth freak parents may be in short order. But the girl will live on.

Postscript: In Slate’s Press Box today Jack Shafer challenges the Newsweek piece saying, among other things, the magazine gives no figures for how many lives meth has actually claimed. I guess that all depends on how you define living.

My wife and I drove our daughter to Stagedoor Manor today, a theater camp located in the Catskills. Some of her friends had been before and now Franny was determined to try her luck on the boards. It turns out that the camp has quite a pedigree — both Natalie Portman and Robert Downey, Jr. are mentioned among the alumni which means she has an equally good chance of playing a stripper or becoming a junkie — and was the inspiration for the movie Camp, which I didn’t see.

As camps go the buildings were nothing special; my wife reasoned that the dank and depressing hallways and mildewed bathrooms were meant to give the aspiring thespians a reality check: Get used to it, kids! For all I know they take them into town on field trips and make them work as waitresses. Given the camps great rep (at the end of each three week session the kids mount several productions, a musical and a drama, that are supposed to be quite professional in appearance) there were quite a few bona fide stage kids in evidence. Voices were raised in song at nearly every corner — not, by and large, songs I wanted to hear but all sounded like current Broadway fare. There was a fair amount of air-kissing and squealing on the part of returning campers and that was just the boys. No actually, boys were in short supply (surprise) but any lucky enough to be straight would do quite well there, I reckon. The hallway in Franny’s dorm was adorned with a “Wall of Hotness” featuring pics of dreamy young barechested lads ripped from the pages of today’s teen mags. And no, the same photos were not on the walls of the boys’s dorm. You’re mean.

Speaking of mean, Franny looked a little freaked out when we left her. She is rooming with a friend who has been there before and she is down the hall from yet another old friend from school — but if you have a daughter in middle-school you know that such alliances are built on sand when you are twelve. I figure they will grow to hate and love each other several times over before we pick her up in three weeks time. Not for nothing did the three of them sing the song “Loathing” from the musical Wicked in her school’s last musicale. And boy, did they nail it. You would have thought they had a dry ice machine backstage.

I heard one girl telling a parent that there was quite a bit of buzz about what musicals were going to be performed but when asked she said no one cared about the drama. The Bad Seed might seem a little dated to these kids. I wonder how they would do with The Pillowman?

We went to Philadelphia this weekend to attend a bar mitzvah — excitement enough for any man you might say but we managed to tack on a meal at the Striped Bass. The restaurant’s chef de cuisine, Christopher Lee, was awarded this year’s James Beard Rising Star Award and I had met him in NY in June while doing the Citymeals story for Gourmet (see previous post). The Citymeals event itself, held in Rockefeller Center every year, is sort of like a food court in heaven must be, with relative newbies like Lee and Scott Howard whipping up little appetizers alongside such stalwarts as Charle Trotter and Susan Spicer. Lee’s offering was a tasty yet not terribly surprising appetizer portion of striped bass, which did nothing to perpare me for Friday’s meal.

While Lee may be leaning on the legacy of owner and mentor Alfred Portale (whose Gotham restaurant here made him synonymous with tall food) in presentation, there is a wacky and inventive side to his dishes that seems his alone. The flash-seared tuna I had, for instance (crispy on the outside, purple rare on the inside) was flavored with little bee-bees of basil “caviar” — I don’t know how he does it but trust me, it looks like green caviar but tastes like basil, and sometimes he does the same thing with mandarin oranges — and served with a small square of braised short ribs. (Oh that, you’re saying, yeah I made that for dinner myself last night.) To top it all off the whole plate looked like a page of Japanese caligraphy, complete with exclamation marks. I’m hoping Lee returns to his native New York and sets up shop someplace here.

The salmon I had at the party after the bar mitzvah was not quite in the same league but neither was it like unto a large pencil eraser, which is sometimes the case at such affairs. To be honest this is only the second bar mitzvah I have attended (Jews were is short supply in Auburn, California) so I don’t have much to compare it to. The service itself was more comprehensible than the last one had been, thanks in large part to my friend Jess Greenbaum who supplied me with crib notes ahead of time. The singing was not as elaborate as I had hoped and no one threw candy (they had at the previous bar mitzvah I had attended at the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn; perhaps they were trying to keep the kids in attendance on their toes). Our 12-year-old daughter Franny sat through the three-hour service with a minimum of fidgeting though afterwards she told her mother, “I will never complain about church again.”

The party was held in a banquet hall a few miles from the synagogue and the bar mitzvah boy, Elliot, got to enjoy the fruits of his labors: the envelopes filled with cash that caused Franny to consider converting. My questions here were of a more prosaic nature: What becomes of the cake in the shape of a Torah? It wasn’t with the other desserts. Or is it not a real cake at all? Elliot’s parents, Alan and Diane, live in Italy now and were enduring the culture shock of the familiar with joy and a modicum of irony. “The last time I saw you was in Rome, near Fellini’s old apartment,” he shouted at me as the band blew through a klezmer version of “Food, Glorious Food.” “Now we’re in ‘Goodbye, Columbus.'”

No goose carved from pate, though.

Yesterday I had lunch with chef Scott Howard, who after five years overseeing the well-regarded restaurant Fork in San Anselmo, California, is on the verge of opening his own restaurant in San Francisco. Scott was in New York doing a tour of restaurants in the name of research (my kind of fact-finding mission), I had been trying to track him down for a piece I’m doing for Gourmet on the “rising star” chefs who took part in this year’s annual Citymeals-on-Wheels event and he was one of the few I had yet to make contact with. We agreed to meet at the Spice Market, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s theme-park of a restaurant in the Meat Packing District.

I enjoyed meeting Scott; he was modest (especially for a fellow naming a restaurant after himself) and polite, exhibiting none of the sense of entitlement I have encountered in some up-and-coming chefs. But the real treat was his companion, the semi-legendary Cecilia Chiang, who opened the Mandarin restauant in SF in the sixties and has given lessons in Chinese cooking to Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl and Jeremiah Tower. Cecilia is both an investor and a consultant in Scott Howard (the restaurant, not the man) and as someone who has outlived both Trader Vic and Herb Caen, two of her original champions, she is a trove of SF restaurant lore.

Cecilia is in her eighties now though I would have pegged her for 70 in both looks and energy. We talked about the Yuet Lee, at Broadway and Stockton, where I used to dine after midnight back in my cab driving days. I told her I was there one night when the restaurant’s original chef caught someone who tried to dine-and-dash and beat him with a baseball bat. That was nothing, she said. She was there the night a Chinese gang member came in and killed the cook for his outstanding gambling debts. (This was late, too, after the Mandarin had closed for the night. “When you are running a restaurant you never have time to eat,” she said.) She also recalled Masa, the Japanese chef who took SF by storm in the eighties. He was killed, too — stabbed a hundred times with an ice-pick — also supposedly for owing money to the wrong people. The lesson, kids: Don’t cook and gamble!

For the record, neither chef thought much of the Spice Market’s fare, though both admired the road-to-Mandalay decor. Only one appetizer, an egg roll stuffed with mushrooms, stood out and the service was downright indifferent — strange, given that I had told the maitre d’ I was meeting some food luminaries for lunch. But Cecelia has seen it all in her time; as a child she endured the Japanese occupation during WWII and then fled, with her family, when Mao and his boys took over in 1949. Some relatives who remained were killed in the Cultural Revolution. What’s a watery ice tea compared to the Red Guard?