We had dinner at Sam’s Bar and Restaurant on Sunday night before the 7 o’clock showing of “Gladiator II.” Dinner at Sam’s with both my children followed by a brand-new Ridley Scott movie: Life probably won’t get much better than that. Ridley Scott is turning 87 next week; how many more blockbusters can he have in him?
Sam’s is the place we go for a special treat, when someone’s feeling blue, or to mark a minor family occasion, a birthday, a new job, or grade-school graduation. Sam’s isn’t a favorite because of the pizza — indeed, no one ever orders the pizza — but because it’s like stepping back into midcentury America, with that neon sign, the polished bar up front and wall of liquor bottles, and the vinyl-upholstered booths. One of the nice waitresses recognizes us and knows our order. Teddy, a comfort-seeking creature of habits, always orders rigatoni Bolognese. Nettie gets linguini with white clam sauce (the best in town) and I get shrimp Parmigiana, broiling hot. On Sunday, the kids ordered gigantic Shirley Temples with straws and maraschino cherries for old-time’s sake, but I just had a glass of water instead of my usual cocktail. The waitress expressed slight concern: “No dark rum and Diet Coke tonight?” No, no, I said. I didn’t want to risk dozing off during “Gladiator II.”
Truth be told, my teenagers were less than excited about going to the cinema to see the new Ridley Scott, and only agreed to join me because I guilted them a bit. “It was my birthday last week,” I said, slightly irrelevantly, pouting with a special pouty-baby face that I know has the persuasive power of annoying the hell out of them.
There is almost always a line for a table at Sam’s, but the Thanksgiving-week crowds hadn’t materialized yet when we got there before 6 to find half the seats empty. The holiday lights were coming on, one by one, in the storefronts of Newtown Lane and we barely fit into the booth in our big, puffy down coats, which we were wearing for the first time this winter.
We invented a table game while we waited for our dinner.
We called this game the Good/Bad Game. There were two rounds. In round one, the Bad round, you had to go around the table in a circle, thinking about your own character flaws, your own sins or failings, and describing one character flaw that might need improving. Then, for the second round, the Good round, you had to go back around the table again pointing out excellent elements in everyone else’s characters, their better angels. For example, for my Bad, I said I needed to stop having such a hot temper and to stop shouting at my children in full ballistic mode so frequently about dumb stuff like not picking wet towels up off the floor. The teenagers agreed, and they were eager to add addendums to my list of my own Bads, pointing out, for example, that I might also reflect on my habit of texting them angrily in all caps like a lunatic, because no one’s mom uses all caps as frequently as I do.
Nettie, at 17, got into the spirit of the Good/Bad Game and reflected as she sipped her Shirley Temple that perhaps she was old enough to stop trash-talking other teenage girls. Talking trash about other people could be fun, it was true, but it only left you feeling depressed in the end.
Teddy, at 15, thought hard but couldn’t come up with anything notably wrong with his own character, only suggesting after much pondering and prompting that perhaps sometimes he is a procrastinator. (Nettie, as older sibling, said this didn’t count and that his character flaw was that he suffers from a dose of teenage-boy narcissism. They agreed to disagree on who was the narcissist.)
In the Good round, I highlighted all the signs of emerging sound character and maturing personality a mom likes to reinforce in her children over shrimp Parmigiana with a side of spaghetti and red sauce. My kids are hardworking, generally cheerful, and devotedly loyal to friends. They both have brilliant smiles that light up a room, Teddy’s smile shyer and sweeter and Nettie’s smile more charismatically blinding, but both smiles heart-warming. I waxed on. Teddy can engineer the cleverest and most surprising solutions to any tricky problem, and Nettie has an artist’s knack for self-expression and a good singing voice. They accepted these compliments calmly and without comment and told me, in turn as we went in our circle around the table, that my Good trait is being generous to others.
I’ll take it.
After dinner, we located the missing holiday week crowds at the movie theater. There was quite a line for popcorn. “Wicked” is a hit and so is “Gladiator II,” and “Moana 2” promises to be a hot ticket, as well. This is good news for us, moviegoers. Some teenage girls speaking Spanish were buying pink (for Glinda the Good Witch) and green (for Elphaba the Wicked Witch) plastic commemorative “Wicked” soda cups.
“Gladiator II” was epic fun. It features killer baboons, a pair of syphilitic evil brother emperors camping it up with white face powder and a scene-stealing pet monkey in a miniature toga, sharks swimming in the Colosseum, and some highly entertaining side characters, including Tim McInnerny as the groveling Senator Thraex and Matt Lucas as a swishy-but-bloodthirsty master of ceremonies. The kids gasped in horror when brave warriors fighting for the “glory that was Rome” were slain by the crossbow arrows of the Praetorian Guard, and they tolerated my too-loud praise of Denzel Washington in the role of Macrinus, a trader in human flesh and the most magnificent screen villain since Daniel Day-Lewis’s Bill the Butcher in Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York.” You really must see Denzel Washington in this role. You must. I insist.
Rome may fall, but Sam’s and the Main Street cinema are forever.