Friday, April 10, 2009

Ruth Deming shares tips on stealing napkins

Scott and I ate at Angelo's Restaurant in Southampton, PA tonight. In addition to dining on a luscious meal with our favorite beverage - ice-cold water - we were given plenty of large white napkins to wipe the pasta off our mustaches.

After we paid our bill at the table, I tucked the extra napkins in my jacket pocket to transfer them later on to their new home: the glove compartment of my car, subsequently named the Napkin and Extra Sunglass Compartment.

I must confess I was desperate for good napkins. Earlier today I accompanied a friend to the Subway sandwich joint where the food looked so awful I just sat and watched her eat. The woman behind the counter had given Julie a heap of napkins and I asked Julie's permission to take them with me for the Napkin Compartment of my car.

But the Subway napkins are terrible! One entire side is filled with colorfully inked Subway ads. If you use them to blow your nose - or write yourself notes - you'll get a whiff of the printer's ink which might, for a delicate soul, knock them into unconsciousness, as if they were "huffing." Again, tho, I was desperate, having been down to my last 2 Dunkin Donuts napkins.

You can be sure that when Tiffers and I did our display case for National Poetry Month I did the ole napkin trick. "Did you know," I wrote on a Starbucks napkin, "that we do indeed write poetry on napkins....Once upon a midnight dreary"

Did I bring home any napkins from Oklahoma? Good qvestion, she said in a Yiddish accent. Unlike her children, the blogger is one-hundred percent Jewish. OF COURSE I DID! A nice assortment of Prairie Kitchen napkins and Denny's napkins tucked away in my backpack for safekeeping.

Ruth's Imported Napkins is the name of my new business. But what's this sitting on my desk right in front of me? A pecan-colored assiette (napkin in French, my god, what a mind you have Ruthie - absolutely useless!) from Manhattan Bagel in where else Willow Grove, PA, a reminder of our post-Bipolar Lecture meal paid for by none other than State Representative and Iraqi veteran Tom Murt, the only Republican I ever voted for besides Abe Lincoln.