What the hell is egg cream?
Jan. 16th, 2004 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deviWe braved a downpour to go and see Jonathan Lethem read from his new book last night. He reads very nicely, and sings well too despite apologising for his voice, and I stood at the back and dripped quietly, enthralled. Then it was time for the Q&A session.
This doesn't usually happen to me, but towards the end, a question leaped into my head. And it actually wasn't a bad question. It was something I really wanted to know his answer to. (He's that rare sort of writer, a literary type who uses sci-fi plot devices. I was going to say, "There's a school of thought who think science fiction can never be literature. What would you say to them? What do you think it has to teach us?") Three hands shot up, including mine. "Two more," he said, "you [a bald guy on the other side of the shop] and... you." Eep! Me! I'm sure he was pointing at me.
But a guy who was sort of in front and to the left of me jumped in. And I don't want to be a sore loser, but the guy asked a really boring question about JL's life in Manhattan, and JL went off on a ramble about how much he missed something called "Dave's Egg Cream".
Like I said. What on earth is egg cream?
Afterwards, Matt said he'd been thinking of asking the very same question. There was speculation about telepathy and who thought of the question first. It all hinges on whether thoughts are lighter than air, and thus float upwards, or are heavier and fall to settle on heads below the level of the original thinker.
Me, I'm for lighter than air, but then I would be.
Still. Egg cream! Humph.
This doesn't usually happen to me, but towards the end, a question leaped into my head. And it actually wasn't a bad question. It was something I really wanted to know his answer to. (He's that rare sort of writer, a literary type who uses sci-fi plot devices. I was going to say, "There's a school of thought who think science fiction can never be literature. What would you say to them? What do you think it has to teach us?") Three hands shot up, including mine. "Two more," he said, "you [a bald guy on the other side of the shop] and... you." Eep! Me! I'm sure he was pointing at me.
But a guy who was sort of in front and to the left of me jumped in. And I don't want to be a sore loser, but the guy asked a really boring question about JL's life in Manhattan, and JL went off on a ramble about how much he missed something called "Dave's Egg Cream".
Like I said. What on earth is egg cream?
Afterwards, Matt said he'd been thinking of asking the very same question. There was speculation about telepathy and who thought of the question first. It all hinges on whether thoughts are lighter than air, and thus float upwards, or are heavier and fall to settle on heads below the level of the original thinker.
Me, I'm for lighter than air, but then I would be.
Still. Egg cream! Humph.
What the Hell is an Egg Cream?
Date: 2004-02-16 06:04 am (UTC)The question is: "What the hell is a Dave's Egg Cream?" An egg cream can be made anywhere, any time, by anyone who has seltzer, milk and chocolate syrup. But no one, anywhere, ever again, can make a Dave's Egg Cream. For someone who is interested in the relation between science fiction and literature, you should have realized it was all about Dave's.
To give you an idea, I found this thread because I did a Google search for "Dave's Egg Cream."
I'm still a tourist in the City I was born and raised in. I'm a walker of the City streets. One night, in the middle of the night, in the drak time of the night, a couple of deals before dawn, I stopped at Dave's on the corner of Canal and Broadway. It had been there for years. When my father was a boy, and his father baked bread six days a week downstairs in a bakery on Essex Street, the marble counter at Dave's served up egg creams. There was a stinking hulk of a garbage truck and a police crusier and a cab. We all stood on the sidewalk and drank egg creams from soda glasses in the thick Manhattan night air.
It's gone and nothing can ever bring it back.