I’ve been in rehearsal this week for a reading we’re doing on Friday. It’s a fun piece called “Old Jews Telling Jokes” based on the website of the same name. All this is to say that this week I’m a working man, a nine-to-fiver, so bye-bye to my indolent life. No time now for shopping at Eataly after my caffé macchiato with the crossword puzzle; no time for noodling away at the stove in the afternoon, sautéing pretty vegetables for Jill’s dinner while hooked up to a Sangiovese drip. No. I’m a working man. Punch that clock.
But today I fell into one of those time warps that New York offers up when you have no particular place to go. I’m on my break; it’s drizzling; I have an hour to kill. Our rehearsal hall is on Eighth Avenue in the high Thirties – a bit of garment district, a bit of spillover from Forty-Second Street — tons of places to eat and not one of them calling me. I walk in the rain over to Ninth Avenue, which never lets me down. Ninth Avenue is a Baghdad bazaar — good, bad and everything in the middle. I love Ninth Avenue. I walk past this little place with a menu board out front. It’s called Capizzi, a little joint, sitting in the shadow of the Port Authority bus terminal. It’s essentially empty, some people at a table in the back – maybe it’s the staff having their lunch. It’s 4:00 in the afternoon – the rush was over. But there’s something; I walk by it three times; there’s something about this place.
The Big Dog and I lunched this afternoon at 
The Upper West Side just joined the world. Move over East Village; now us UWS Jews can sneak out of synagogue on the High Holy Days and chow down on steamed pork buns without leaving our own neighborhood.
If you have been to Russ and Daughters you know that they have 5 kinds of salmon, the best smoked fish, many flavors of cream cheese and then you have to pick a bagel, toasted or not: lots of choices and combinations. I had worked out the fine details of what I would order. I had one shot at it as we were on a tight eating schedule. Not every minute over a 5 day span, a few minutes here and there. I could study all I wanted but until I saw what the various salmon looked like on that day it was only a guess.
It is not every day that I meet a furry friend on my travels through coffee shops. Normally, I find a heart shape design or a leaf, or a flower in the foam of my cappuccino-- a symbol of my barista's or baristo's skill, passion for his or her art, and hope to make my day that much better. But last week, after returning to 