To their credit, my parents were never of the mind to keep me at an arm’s length when it came to food and happy food-related gatherings; it probably stemmed originally from my aunt — my father’s sister and a most fastidious woman who, even now, in her nineties, looks like a much more attractive version of Ann Miller — who believed with ever fiber of her being that children should be involved and included in the Process of Dining. If she and my uncle were going out, very often my cousins would be going with them. If there was wine on the table for the grown ups, there was a thimble-sized glass at each child’s place. It was all very stately and educational and enlightening. We all grew up knowing what fork to use when, and how to use a soup spoon without trying to jam the whole gigantic thing into our mouths, and we all loved her acts of inclusiveness.

But once I went home — it being the Sixties and Seventies and all — my generally liberated parents took this to something of an extreme, and I often wound up having long, exhausting, cigarette smoke-clouded dinners with parents and their friends who included our neighbor Ann, a lovely Norwegian woman, and her husband, a magician predisposed to pulling nickels out of the ears of his adult dinner companions; Larry and Jean — she was the daughter of Ben Blue, whose claim to fame was playing a drunk in spaghetti westerns through the 1940s; he was a Brylcreamed school teacher with a roving eye that landed, invariably on young teenage girls; and Alan and Janice — he was in advertising and in possession of the longest set of muttonchop sideburns I’d ever seen, given that he was married to a gorgeous English woman who had been one of the original Vidal Sasoon hair dressers in London. There they’d sit, in our dining room, dipping bread, fruit, and various kinds of flaccid meat into a cheese-filled, brown Dansk pot that sat hovering above an alcohol gel flame while I watched, too young to take part without igniting my long hair or some part of the nightgown I was wearing. By the time someone had speared a piece of bread for me and dunked it into the now lukewarm and hardening melted cheese — my mother always forgot to add the wine so the cheese wound up with the consistency of spackle — I was no longer interested, and instead pulled the bread off the end of the prongs and fed it to our Airedale, Chips, who was lounging under the table, trying to get close enough to goose Janice when no one was looking.

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