Comp City, North
We had a couple of gift certificates for the Metropolitan Grill due to expire soon so Hunnybear and I booked an overnight trip to Seattle. The night before, Hunnybear’s employer threw a big bash at a movie studio in famous Culver City, California, so I walked from Marina del Rey to Culver City and met everybody at Tony’s house where I poured lemon drops for the entire company prior to taking a school bus to the party. It was a jammin’ night. Hunnybear was wearing glasses in preparation for having her eyes zapped in a couple weeks so everybody was telling her how cute she looks in glasses. She looks cute no matter what. That’s the nature of Hunnybears. Around 11:15 I rested for a moment on a big foam cushion in front of the band. Then at 1 a.m. Hunnybear woke me up and said it was time to go so we called a cab. It took 40 minutes for the cab to come but eventually we got home four hours before we had to wake up.
We were on an Alaska Airlines $50 companion ticket upgraded to First Class with complimentary upgrades. We drove the white Pontiac convertible to LAX and parked in the Terminal 3 parking ($16/day). For two days it was the same price as taking a taxi both ways. Alaska’s ticket counter was a mob scene. We wheeled by people in the huge economy line talking about what compensation they were going to demand and made it to the empty First Class/MVP line. The worst checkin agent I’ve ever had reached out and took our tickets without breaking a conversation with a coworker. When she finally finished that conversation she stared at her terminal without looking up.
“Hello,” I said. She looked annoyed and said, “Do you want to axe me a question?” “No,” I said, “just ‘hello.’” She went right into the security questions. Hunnybear and I played serious and looked at each other as if racking our brains after each one. “Are you OK?” asked the agent. “Yes,” I said. “Do you always talk like that?” I explained that we were entertainers. Hunnybear explained that we were smartasses. I asked if there was a Board Room at this airport. Yes, she said, but it’s run by TWA. “Does that mean I can’t use it?” I asked. “Not if you’ve got those blue coupons.” Still unpleasant, she demanded two upgrade coupons from each of us and sent us on our way. The security line was 10 minutes long at Terminal 3 and the sensitivity was set so high that the rivets on my blue jeans set off the metal detector. This was one of the worst boarding experiences I’d ever had.
Fortunately that all changed on board. The stewardess was young, tall, blonde, and beautiful and gave us great service throughout the flight. It was a new 737-400 with leather seats in First Class. We had seats 1A and C. We took off a few minutes late. As usual for Alaska there was preflight orange juice, which we don’t like, but the stewardess brought us each a glass of water on request. Breakfast was disappointing: cold cereal and fruit with a biscuit. With no hot breakfast and no audio or video entertainment, Alaska is strikingly inferior to United on this route, especially when you consider the difficulties boarding. I asked the flight attendant if this was a Concorde, because I was scared to fly Concordes. She assured me it wasn’t.
We landed at Sea-Tac and taxied to gate C1. Having no bags to collect we wheeled up to the ticket counter to take care of a future flight. Alaska had no separate “ticket purchase” line at either LAX or Sea-Tac so we stood in the First Class/MVP line. This time we got a great, friendly, helpful agent who happily ticketed Hunnybear’s partner award on Canadian, a Business-Class round-trip from LA to Toronto for 30,000 miles, a great deal even though she had to be routed through Calgary and Vancouver. We vented to her about the LAX staff and wondered what had happened to my two favorite airlines, Alaska and United.
Hunnybear and I took the limo to town ($30 plus $5 tip). It was a gold limo formerly used by the Mirage in Las Vegas and had the logo still affixed to the interior upholstery. We felt right at home. Traffic was terrible on I-5 because of the Mariners game but eventually we got to the W Seattle at 4th and Seneca. For the third straight stay here, whoever was in charge of greeting guests who pull up to the hotel was nowhere to be found. We wheeled our luggage to the front desk without so much as a glance at or from a bellman. But as usual the front-desk staff was friendly and helpful. We got our choice of a deluxe room ready now or a junior suite ready later. Naturally we took the junior suite.
Lots of free food
By this time we felt like slurping back some oysters at Elliott’s so we walked down the hill and got a nice table inside. It was a but chilly in Seattle, only about 68, and our thin LA skins couldn’t take sitting outside. We ordered a dozen Westcott Bay Euro Flats, the world’s best oyster, and two blackened-salmon Caesars. The total came to $50.85 before tax and we had $50 worth of customer-service certificates so we ended up paying only the tip for lunch. After lunch we walked along the waterfront and up Wall St. to our old apartment. We stopped in at Tully’s, the world’s greatest coffee, soon to open in LA, and I got a double huge iced decaf americano, which they refused to let me pay for. I tipped them a million dollars as Hunnybear chatted and got the latest Tully’s poop.
Coffee in hand, we walked over to Seattle Center to check out the new Experience Music Project and our favorite, the International Fountain. There was a bit of a line to get into the EMP and since it was such a glorious day we decided to wait for another day to see it. Instead we camped out at the International Fountain and watched the kids playing and screaming down below, kind of a water-sports version of the Roman gladiators. They were having some kind of kids festival at the Center so the place was crawling with even more rug rats and strollers than usual.
After a while we took the monorail back to town ($1.25) and walked the rest of the way to the W. Our room was ready, a long but narrow corner room on the fourth floor with a peek of the water. The clerk apologized for putting us on such a low floor but I said there aren’t really any views from this hotel anyway so big deal. The junior suite was decorated like the rest of the rooms only more so. There was a striped chaise longue in a corner with an oversized floor lamp behind it. Windows were everywhere. Most importantly there was high-speed Internet access ($9.95). I phoned “Whatever Whenever” and got an Ethernet cable delivered in minutes at no charge. I plugged in and it just worked. What an amazing testimony to Microsoft engineering that what only a few years ago took $1000 worth of special software and a certified professional to set up now came plug-and-play, included free with Windows 98 by the evil consumer-hurting monopoly.
Hunnybear caught up on her beauty sleep while I caught up on FlyerTalk. Around 5:30 we took a cab over to the studio of John Sisko (
www.siskoworks.com ), one of Seattle’s most prominent sculptors, to see his brand-new work commissioned by the Seattle University Law School. It was my favorite work of his to date, a slender, rational-looking man focusing upward through a strange glass instrument he is holding. In addition to being a prominent artist and intellectual, Sisko works as a bartender at my favorite local hangout, Cutters, a couple nights a week, which is how we met. If you go to the bar there on a Sunday or Monday night you may find him there and you’d be in for a treat.
We enticed Sisko to come with us for an Emerald Drop at the W, where we were meeting Pluto for a drink prior to dinner at the Met. Hunnybear had been looking forward to the Emerald Drop for weeks. We had a couple rounds, then bid Sisko goodbye and headed over.
The Met
Keoke, the maitre d’, greeted me like a long-lost brother, or at least like a brother who was a big tipper. Long before I ever tipped him one dime, though, he had made such an impact on my dining experience here, and at Elliott’s before that, that I had him rated as the top Maitre d’ anywhere. I just love him—he takes full responsibility for everything that goes on at his restaurant. Our table wasn’t ready so he gave us a tour of the area being renovated (it was closed starting tomorrow for two weeks) and set us up in the bar with a bottle of champagne. After a few minutes we were escorted to a nice booth near the front, where I ordered the phenomenal beef carpaccio to start off.
We asked the wine steward for his recommendation for a pinot noir and he suggested a New Zealand wine. I raised my eyebrows but we tried it anyway. We all thought it was drinkable but not a $90 bottle of wine so I let him know. He insisted on bringing up a bottle of Domaine Drouhin Oregon pinot noir, one of the best, to replace it. Great service.
For dinner Pluto and I shared the chateaubriand, medium rare, while Hunnybear had her usual Petite Filet with peppercorns, rare. The meal was superb as usual although I though both meals were done slightly more than we ordered—not enough to send back, though. The crust on the chateaubriand was amazing. Keoke showed up with the world’s best dessert, the nine-layer chocolate cake, with his compliments. As usual three of us could not come close to finishing this monster. The gift certificate took a chunk out of the bill and Pluto picked up the rest with his Plutonium card before I could utter a whisper of protest. The Compmeister had nothing on me when it came to getting free stuff in Seattle.
We hugged Pluto goodbye and walked in the dying light back to the W.
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[This message has been edited by QuietLion (edited 08-13-2000).]