The ballet, with my friend Jay, who's on the board or
something, so we had seats close enough so I could actually
see what was going on for a change. A triple bill, which he
told me was less of an audience draw than the big multi-act
classics, by which I believe he means Nutcracker and maybe
Coppelia and Swine Flu, er, Swan Lake, and the like. He also
stated with some pride that his organization was on pretty
sound financial footing, unlike most of the performing arts
organizations on this planet.

We started with Nosotros by Stanton Welch, the artistic
director and choreographer. It was a tour de technical
force, but the story line seemed a bit tired: it went like
this: boy gets girl boy2 gets girl2 boy3 gets girl3 boy4
gets girl4 boy5 gets girl5 boy6 gets girl6. All to the
sometimes lushly romantic, sometimes martial, sometimes
chilling dance-of-deathly Rachmaninov Paganini Rhapsody,
which was given a decent performance, hampered by being
Procrusteanized for dance purposes, by the resident
pianist and orchestra.

Jardi Tancat by Nacho Duato, though much less my style,
being part classical dance, part folk dance, and large
part acrobatics in the Blue Man way, was more interesting
to me. Its story is, more or less, boy gets girl, boy loses
girl (or vice versa), girl becomes a bird or something out
of grief or insanity. This senza orchestra, the music
being recorded Catalan folk music by a powerful vocalist
whose name of course escapes me.

Jay figured I was hungry, and it was getting late, so we
missed Christopher Wheeldon's Carousel. Later we discovered
that 1. it's only 13 minutes long, so we might have gotten
to the restaurant by closing time, and 2. the Chronicle
gave it the only rave of the evening.

Be that as it may, we went to Little Pappas Seafood, an
ancestor of the Pappacito's, Pappadeaux, and the like chain.
Our waitress saw our ballet programs, smirked a little, and
asked how it was. Great, Jay said, but I shouldn't be the
one to ask. She made the expected inference.

Oysters on the half shell were fresh and briny, very good.
I also ordered fried softshell crabs (three, from the
squadron that ate Chicago, in a slightly too thick batter,
with Parmesan, which I think is a mistake) with asparagus
instead of fries - got to keep that boyish figure. The
crabs were giant and fresh and quite good, not enhanced
by the frying though. Asparagus was a mixture of thick
and thin spears.

Jay had gumbo followed by a Caesar salad adulterated with
lump (I originally typed the unfair "limp") crabmeat.
Pronounced it good.

Lungarotti Pinot Grigio, though a bit grapy and obvious, did
the job and went pretty well with all the food.