Rob Reiner, trim and affable in charcoal-gray leisurewear that set off his more-salt-than-pepper beard, eyed the menu's caloric delights before ordering oatmeal and berries.
In a corner suite on the 14th floor of an upmarket New York hotel, Larry David – in the west coast uniform of running shoes, baseball cap and impressive tan – is on the phone to room service, ordering oatmeal for breakfast.
He suggested that she order oatmeal because "it sticks to your stomach".
He ordered oatmeal with nuts and fruit and a cup of coffee.
I've been on a diet for a year, so I order oatmeal or an omelet, with coffee before, during and after breakfast.
The adults ordered oatmeal and an egg white omelet (it came with yolks, alas) but quickly preyed upon our daughter's fluffy waffle.
I ordered oatmeal with blueberries (delicious!), fresh squeezed orange juice and tea, all of which arrived in exactly 15 minutes, as promised.
He ordered oatmeal, which he said would double as breakfast and lunch, and spoke at a machine-gun pace that seemed more natural to him than the deliberateness he displays when he is behind a lectern.
When we met recently at the McLean Family Restaurant, in suburban Virginia, near the headquarters of the C.I.A. — one of many government agencies that he says require "radical transformation" — he ordered oatmeal with no milk or sugar.
One challenge of life on the Upper East Side will be finding someone who knows as much as Kolosakas about what the Mayor likes on his regular breakfast order, oatmeal.
This is Bellow's Augie March recounting how he fell in love with books: I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else — that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness, or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding.
