Many people, married or not, or not ever, are as disturbed by "Dinner with Friends" as they are amused.
All these disaffections came together with the putsch on June, 12, 1798, of that recidivist, general Daendels, in which he disturbed a dinner party of Delacroix and three members of the Uitvoerend Bewind, violating the diplomatic immunity of the ambassador by putting pistols to his chest.
It's a point she makes early in Somewhere Towards the End, her new book about the losses, indignities and compensations of old age: how important appearance still is, if only to oneself; not to risk, say, scarlet lipstick, which will run into mouth wrinkles and make a woman look, as she observes of an old friend with not-quite-cruel accuracy, like a "vampire bat disturbed mid-dinner".
I hope I am not disturbing your dinner.
"We are here merely to voice our oppo sition to a principle and not to disturb the dinner going on next door.
In earlier decades, she observes, bad lipstick could make an older woman "look like a vampire bat disturbed in mid-dinner".
She uses metaphor rarely and perfectly, suggesting, for instance, that scarlet lipstick can make older women look "like a vampire bat disturbed in mid-dinner".
She is grateful that modern make-up allows her to conceal a red nose without turning her into the garish 'vampire bat disturbed in mid-dinner' that old women with a penchant for scarlet lipstick once resembled.
She sighs for an old friend who "could never get it into her head that if she slapped on a lot of scarlet lipstick it would begin to run into little wrinkles round the edge of her lips, making her look like a vampire bat disturbed in mid-dinner".
Almost 60 (more than enough) of these mildly amusing pictures, with titles like "Extravagant Woman" or "Family Disturbed at Dinner," are on view (Johnson).
