PRESS MOI FLESH...TOPPED BY A ROSE!

For my official birthday dinner this weekend, the hubby organized a get-together at one of the best restaurants in the Bay Area: Press St. Helena. You can tell it was a great time by the photograph above of the aftermath, taken by pro photographer and dinner guest Rhett Pascual who's shown below with his choice from the manifestations of Press' food philosophy:



The dinner did have a bump when the special bottle the hubby brought presented a deteriorated cork. Here's the sommelier working it out:



Fortunately, said special bottle survived its 50-year cellaring because it is the best port we'd all tasted from 1960:



It was so yummy that poet-raconteur Sandy McIntosh delivered the following poem in response:

First taste of this Port, 1960 Grahams,
and I'm taken elsewhere:
A curtain rises and behind it,
a dark girl, rose in hair,
familiar somehow, crowded with life,
turning in dance, glistening eyes,
whispering something -- what?

In summer, we love fireworks
Rockets in flight invite us to believe
we dissonant folk might finally agree
about something.
We share whatever that pleasure until
scent of gunpowder,
contrails of exhausted avatars
sinking into the river:
the end of such public intimacy.

But this wine
is private. I've tasted it,
found this young woman,
her scene, suspended for fifty years,
premiered tonight--roiling
on my private, personal tongue-stage,
until, show over,
her intimacy dissolves
in sugar contrails.

Wooo-hooo! Ultimately, the Chatelaine's birthday would not have been complete without ... a poem! Thank you Sandy! And thank you all, weekend guests: