Born Too Late: The Supper Club

There is a continual assault on the English language. The intertunnel, and especially typing with your thumbs into a Portable Pandora’s Portmanteau, has led to the destruction of many words, including “led,” which is now misspelled lead uniformly. It’s right up there with vise/vice, loose/lose, and spelling et cetera “ect.” If you point out any of these errors, you are immediately enlisted in the shutzstaffel. Language evolves, you’re lectured. It never occurs to the lecturer that it can also devolve.

So lately the hipsters have glommed onto the term “supper club,” and want to use it to describe ghost kitchens, or informal meals shared by a group of people who use “deck” as an adjective. I won’t have it.

You see, instead of resurrecting a perfectly good term like supper club and debasing it, they should resurrect supper clubs, period. Our parents and grandparents got to go out to eat once in a while and hear live music and turn their ankles dancing. I wish we could.

But as the losing coach said, and I paraphrase, “Larry Bird isn’t walking through that door, and neither is Michel Legrand, or Sacha Distel.” Michel went to his reward after 86 busy years, and is no doubt waving down from a cloud on high to the lava pit his agent is doing the backstroke in. Sacha exhausted himself by trading in Brigitte Bardot for an Olympic skier, and checked out at 71. If he didn’t die happy, he wasn’t paying attention.

I don’t know about you, but man, I could go for a big dose of Gibson L-5s, ruffled shirts, shop-class glasses, and scat singing right about now. And a veal parm with a salad in one of those pressed plywood bowls. Oil and vinegar from the cruets, baby.