CSotD: Excuse me, I ordered the joyous celebration of life …
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Between Friends is always good reading, and I like the current arc, where Susan is in the midst of a deep dithering period and Maeve has become the voice of reason.
Mostly, I like the idea that Sandra Bell Lundy has created characters with enough nuance that, while the idea of Maeve being "the voice of reason" on some topics is either horrifying or hilarious, she certainly is qualified in this sphere.
In real life, I don't think we choose our friends based on their areas of expertise, but there are zones in which we genuinely listen to them and zones in which we nod agreeably because we like them.
As for sending back the wine, I'd put that in the "it depends" zone. If I ordered a wine I knew — a chardonnay, a sauvignon, a shiraz — and it turned out to be a poor example, I'd be willing to send it back. If I ordered a wine I'd never tried before and I didn't like it, I'd be inclined to think that I shouldn't order that kind of wine again.
Which could mean that I'd eliminate that wine based on one glass that might have been a lousy example. The balancing factor being that, within a few weeks, I'd have forgotten which wine it was that I decided I didn't like and I'd be willing to order it again.
Of course, if I wasn't familiar with the wine, I'd have asked the waiter about it. Or read the ridiculous, uninformative blather on the menu about hints of blackberry, whiffs of chocolate and threats of rich, colorful sunsets over the valley.
Quality-of-wine issues remind me of when my son got out of basic training at Great Lakes and we were staying at a motel across the parking lot from a Red Lobster. Now, Red Lobster is just Denny's with seafood, but there was a sleet storm and getting anywhere was difficult, plus, after weeks of chowline food, he thought Red Lobster sounded pretty good anyway.
So he and his brother and I slip-slid across the parking lot ice to Red Lobster and ordered dinner, and I asked the waitress for a glass of their house red. Which she told me was unavailable that night because they had run out of carbon-dioxide capsules for their wine-dispensing nozzle.
File that one under "dodging a bullet."
It seems like a technologically updated version of those long-ago days when we all read "The Sun Also Rises" and watched "Zorba the Greek" and then ran out to get wineskins so we could squirt the wine in a stream into our mouths in a joyous celebration of life.
The modern version being to order wine at the bar, and then open your mouth as the bartender, shooting from the hip, would hit you with a blast from 15 feet away. That's some joyous celebration of life right there, bro.
And, BTW, I don't think either Zorba or Jake Barnes would have put Lancers, Mateus or Bali Hai in his wineskin anyway. This goes back to our recent discussion of "if you're old enough to buy it, you're too old to be drinking it."
And you sure as hell can't send back a glass of Mateus because it wasn't good.
However, none of this is why I was so struck by today's Between Friends.
I just love that third panel. I have no idea how long the pause is, but the inset while Susan ponders her wine and her options creates a break that is brilliantly "right." Not only does it stop time, but it creates a separate point of view as if we had entered Susan's mind — it's a tiny graphic internal monologue, delivered without words.
Sandra may not have considered any of that. But when instinctive choices consistently deliver this kind of result, well, that's why you can teach someone to draw but you can't teach them to be an artist.
And now let me nag you again about DailyInk.
On DailyInk, I got to see the strip full-size. If you follow the link to the linked site to view it for free, you'll see it shrunk down to the same useless postage stamp you'd get if you saw it in print.
There's little enough excuse to deliver print content in a crappy format that undermines your investment in attempting to attract and please readers, but there's none at all for serving up on-line content this way.
For twenty bucks a year, you can get comic strips in a pleasing, pop-up free, full-size format. That's the cost of a midlevel bottle of wine.
Reading it for free is the equivalent of having the bartender squirt it into your mouth.
And I say that not just for Between Friends and other contemporary strips, which are at least drawn with the knowledge that they will be printed in miniature: Imagine the indecipherable blob of ink today's vintage (1953) Rip Kirby — available on DailyInk — would be in a modern newspaper.
(If you click on it, you'll see it in the size I read each morning):
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