Comfort Me With Martinis
Quantum Mechanics Explained

Our friend Hal shares a passion with numerous globetrotters. Hal is in search of the world's best martini. As some people in the world don't know what a martini is (often a bartender will produce a glass of sweet vermouth), sometimes you have to show them, just as Hal did in a jungle lodge in Borneo, where he took over the bar and shook out four frosty, giddifying goblets of the silver potion.

Martinis are a comfort thing, harkening back to the innocent silliness of James Bond, the Rat Pack and Dorothy Parker with her claque of erudite boozers huddled in self-congratulation at the Algonquin. I don't even particularly like martinis, unless the place and time are right. Martinis are at least 50% theatre.

There is certainly some cache' in having a martini on a veranda in the heart of Borneo, but my preferred haunts are the dark, retro, somewhat sinful watering holes in America. Visit the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel in New York late on a weekday afternoon and see Gotham the way it must have been 30 years ago. The "Social X-Rays," the scrawny society dames of Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" with their excess skin tucked surgically behind their ears hold court there with their pals, their 5th Avenue shopping bags blocking the aisles.

A new favorite haunt is the Redwood Room of Ian Schrager's remodeled Clift Hotel in San Francisco. Thanks in part to preservationists, Schager didn't Schragerize the Redwood Room too much. It is said to be paneled from the wood of a single redwood tree. Like the Oak Bar in New York, it is one of San Francisco's classic watering holes. The last time my wife and I visited, we met a couple who had returned to the Redwood Room on each wedding anniversary for the past 40 years. With its remodel, the Redwood Room has returned to being a "theatre of the martini" sort of place

As a martini drinker, I am a rank amateur, but the place that embodies all of what I think martini drinking is all about is Piero's,one of Las Vegas' most venerated watering holes. It has the elan of an old mob hangout (the movie Casino was filmed there). Where else does a guy with a limp nicknamed "Little Joe" meet you at the door and ask you "Waddya want?" then graciously treat you like a high roller (even though he knows you're not). The martinis at Piero's are the size of Lake Mead.

Last month my wife and I flew on US airliner for the first time since September 11th, to Las Vegas. We arose at 3:30 in the morning to get to the airport and through security checks for an early flight. By late afternoon and after a nap in our room, we were still frazzled. We went to Piero's at dinner hour and I ordered a martini (my wife abstained knowing the danger of little sleep and alcohol). After I had drained Lake Mead to about half way down the Hoover Dam spillway, I started slurring a few words. My wife giggled. She had never seen me in such a state. I stopped without finishing, knowing I was losing it...but happily, I started to giggle as well.

Then came my explanation of quantum mechanics using napkin rings. And what about Shrödingers Cat, the notion that a cat can be alive and dead at the same time until, of course, you look at it? Our pair of felines Max and Moritz have, of course, proven that theory time and time again. Had I been there, with Shrödinger, Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg (who was uncertain about the principle in the first place), lord knows where we would be today. <G> :)

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