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Village Idiot |
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| Food fit for the dogs During the past holiday season, Sue and I went to a lot of cocktail parties and dinners. It's great to be in demand, and, thank goodness, Sue let me join her at a lot of them. It's taken years, but I now know many of the rules of etiquette -- which fork to use, not to drink out of the finger bowl, and the difference between a sleeve and a napkin. One guideline for a good dinner party used to be that you do not let a husband and wife sit together. The rationale being that, since they see each other all the time, separating them makes things more interesting for them and other guests. It gives everyone something to talk about on the drive home. Obviously, you don't want to be too strict about these kinds of thing -- after all, it's a party, not a spelling bee. Some couples should stay together, some should use their sleeves. It makes the rest of us feel better. But Sue did get me into one party that could have used stricter etiquette. Our hostess seemed to think eating arrangements should be human, dog, human, dog, dog, dog, human instead of man, woman, man, woman. When her biggest dog, Tiny, passed by the buffet table, licking most of the food as it passed by, our hostess must have caught my look of dismay. "Tiny's tongue is cleaner than a human's," she said in my direction. If she meant that as comfort, she failed. Just because it's cleaner than my tongue doesn't mean it's clean. It's like saying your broom is cleaner than my toothbrush. I still wouldn't brush my teeth with it. I'm not trying to sound anti-pet. I have pets myself and they're a big part of our dysfunctional family. I don't hold them to human standards, even extraordinarily low human standards. But shouldn't the hostess have stepped in? Or does she consider dog slather a condiment? I had a plateful of food in my hand. Wonderful food: holiday ham, turkey breast, cheeses, olives and salami. How did I know that was the first time the dog had licked the food? How did I know that he hadn't licked everything before we arrived and once again while we were hanging up our coats. A few other people started looking for table tops and coffee tables to put down their plates. Now, who doesn't have funny family stories of the family cat or dog found nibbling on the Christmas turkey -- at least I hope you do -- I'd hate to think we're the only ones that ever happened to. But still, I'd seen the dog do it and that made all the difference. If he had licked all the food out in the kitchen where I couldn't see it, I'd have finished my plate and gone back for seconds. All evening I watched the waist-high dog stalk the buffet table. Sometimes, when his nose went over the edge, a guest would haul him back and wag a finger in his nose and shamed, the dog would start eating off the abandoned plates of guests that had lost their appetite. "Don't they ever feed him," Bill said as he watched the dog lick a plateful of cocktail sausages off someone's plate in one big slurp. "His name's Tiny," I said. We were both at the bar getting loopy from drinking red wine on an empty stomach but we both figured Tiny couldn't get much of its tongue into wine bottle. We sure weren't going to taste the punch in the big bowl. Who knew where it had been? Bill and I watched newcomers approach the buffet table and load up. Should we tell them? Why spoil their fun? On the way home, I was about to tell Sue, who had been on the other side of the room all night, about Tiny when she said, "Wasn't that ham great? Some people know how to do a party right." |
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