In the succeeding weeks, I read the evolution of this extraordinary dinner party, attended by famous women from history, including Pope Joan and Bruegel's Dulle Griet.
Both times, I found myself asking a question that comes up increasingly often at the high end of American dining: How much are we willing to pay for an extraordinary dinner?
His extraordinary song "Dinner at Eight", in particular, which explores all of his resentment and love toward the father who left the family home, is the most visceral son-to-father lyric I've ever heard.
At the same time, though, my father was very distant from us and very hard to get to at all.' That relationship and that absence is at the root of many of Rufus Wainwright's own yearning melodies, he believes, but it finds its most poignant expression in the extraordinary song 'Dinner at Eight' on Want One which describes a confrontation with his father at a restaurant some years ago.
"She would weave this extraordinary time of dinner dances and the Hamptons — a time she recollects very clearly".
In an excerpt from "Tropic of Cancer," the narrator is so smitten with Germaine, an extraordinary trollop, that "after dinner we went back to the hotel again and took another shot at it.
She looked after her widowed mother, who lived with us nearly their entire married life; taught me how to read, write and do arithmetic; drove me hither and yon to play dates; and cooked extraordinary food, of which five dinners each week were expected to be Chinese.
But why miss the chance to experience a dinner of such extraordinary imagination, not to mention astonishing duration?
It was a bottle of the extraordinary 1990 vintage, brought to a dinner party by a friend some years ago, that made me experience true wine lust for the first time.
It is the focus of an extraordinary, week-long binge of parties and dinners, receptions and first views, after-parties and the type of after-after-parties that stretch into the next day.
