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.
9 Responses
Went to a supper club/playhouse many, many years ago. Saw Eva Gabor in … something. With Yul Brinner, too.
The roast beef was OK.
Jayzuz, Ed, your delivery made me laugh.
I once heard dinner theater described as an insult to both the cook and the playwright.
Back in the unlamented 20th Century, Earl Holliman had a dinner theater on San Antonio’s northside. The productions were extra-mediocre, kind of like democracy “…the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” And Tex-Mex was the one and only haute cuisine in the Alamo City.
Don’t even get me started on restaurants with deafening sound systems, bougie menus, and customers dressed like hobos who’d rather phub their dates than cut a rug. Maybe the 20th Century wasn’t so bad at that.
My comment about the roast beef being OK: I would have been at the time probably 10 or 11, and at the stage of “as long as the food doesn’t get away, it’s gonna get eaten. And seconds.”
And my sister informs me it was ‘The King And I’. (With Eva Gabor…)
Last time I was there both northern Minnesota and Wisconsin still had some nice supper clubs, with some of them still putting on a monthly or even weekly prime rib night for a reasonable price. They might all be long gone now, but I remember them fondly.
As far a language devolving, don’t get me started on the misuse of the word “decimate”, which now is used to mean “utterly destroy” rather than its original meaning of eliminating 10%. Arrgghh…
Well, you’re technically right there, which is the best kind of right. Of course begging the question is the granddaddy of all ruined expressions.
Supper clubs are still a thing in Wisconsin, as are Brandy Old-Fashioneds, be ready for the “sweet or sour” question. Prime rib and fish fries are two excellent reasons to go. Usually liv music, I’ve never heard of plays done there.
Hi Tom- Thanks for reading and commenting.
Yeah, dinner theater is deader than disco. But it’s nice to hear you can still stain a tie with your chicken and shells while listening to music, even if you have to go to Wisconsin to do it.
Now, it’s not QUITE dead. Here in our little corner of NW Wyoming the big tourist town (10,000 people) has a dinner-and-a-show place:
https://www.thecodycattlecompany.com
It’s for tourists, which means the food’s not all that good and is really expensive, but there it is. We’ve got some friends who have performed there, and they said that they had a hoot doing it (plus a free meal…well, kitchen left-overs).