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| Friday, 01 February 2008 00:00 | |||
Bring Me the Head of St. ValentineThe hearts are up and Cupid is out and that means the lovers next door will be returning from their romantic dinner. It’s the big night out – the one she’s been waiting for - and if you live in a thinly walled apartment like mine, it also means you’ll be up for hours banging on those walls in the hopes of obtaining some peace and quiet. Now, I don’t want to go into too much detail about those sounds emanating from the apartment next door - The Cad doesn’t like to delve into the private affairs of two people - so let’s just call them the sounds of St. Valentine’s Day; you know, the combatative screech of a woman, the crash of dinner plates, of doors being slammed, of furniture being kicked about, of a lummoxy man insisting, ’you said you didn’t want flowers this year,’ and occasionally that of a small yappy dog emerging from under the bed to harass the battling duo. Yes, this is St. Valentine’s Day – the day we set aside for lovers around the world and, paradoxically, the most unromantic and quarrelsome day of the year. Nevertheless, despite the cynical eye I’ve long cast on the observance, I’m actually looking forward to this St. Valentine’s Day, for instead of being crammed into an overpriced restaurant and being forced to blow a week’s pay on overpriced flowers, I’ll be happily alone in an overpriced London on assignment for The Cad. Certainly, the reader is going to believe this an odd turn for a man who considers himself to be a helpless romantic, but I can firmly aver that whenever a woman expects a man to be romantic, even the best of us is going to fold. So, to you ladies, I should like to save you and your man some grief this year by telling you it can’t be done. To force a man to be chivalrous and amorous on February 14 simply because it’s St. Valentine’s Day, is…well, it’s akin to going up to a stand-up comic and ordering him to ‘be funny’. Okay, bad example, given the quality of stand-up comics these days, but I’m sure you get the point. As for St. Valentine, he seems to have been a bit of a comic himself, having played a rather grand practical joke on every man who has ever forgot to make a dinner reservation. The reader will have noticed by now that I still refer to the holiday in its laic rather than secular form and that is due to my Roman Catholic upbringing. It’s an old habit and one I know I should break because even the Catholic Church has disowned the entirely enervating observance. It was back in 1969 that the church expunged St. Valentine's from its calendar of feast days and that was undoubtedly because it started to feel guilty about promoting annual thoughts of uxoricide amongst its flock. Despite the decision, it was at Our Lady of Immaculate Housecleaning, the Brooklyn grade school of my youth, that the nuns remained fairly adamant about the honoring of our martyrs, and if at any time we lapse into the now politically correct Hallmark usage of Valentine’s Day, they would take from a reliquary a sacred yardstick with which to beat our backsides. In the days before the observance, they would also remind us of the miraculous tale of the saint. The backstory we always received was that St. Valentine was a Roman priest who secretly married couples in the days of Christian persecution; the reality is that there were three men who have been bestowed the title of St. Valentine, and though they lived at different times and in different towns, they all seemed to have met with an identical fate. For their religious convictions they were imprisoned, beaten, stoned, and summarily beheaded, and yet today I feel every one of these punishments falls short of what the men actually deserved. In fact, had I been the emperor of ancient Rome I probably would have added to that list: eye-gouging, thumb-pulling, skin-peeling, the forced viewing of every episode of Sex and the City (whilst in the company of a biologically clock-ticking woman of particularly nasal timbre), and, just to be didactic, having every able-bodied male in the empire line up to kick them in the groin once daily and twice on Tuesdays. In the end, if the three Valentine men were granted sainthood for suffering, then every man who has had to endure the rigors of his day deserves the same honor, lack of miraculous evidence notwithstanding. For his own miracle (a posthumous miracle is needed for canonization) it seems St. Valentine took his cue from The Boss himself. After Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee, He and his disciples were taken aback by the size of the crowd that followed him up the hill to hear his sermon. Wondering how they were to feed the multitude, He performed the miracle of the loaves and the fish; that is, He took two average fish and five loaves of bread and turned them into a feast for five thousand people (‘They promised us snacks,’ one can imagine was the common complaint amongst the crowd.); similarly, St. Valentine took five-thousand couples and fit them into a sixteen-by-nine Italian restaurant. ‘Get ‘em in, get ‘em out, and put an extra table by bathroom,' he said to the owner of Montefusco’s, a small bistro in Bay Ridge, and thus profits rose greatly and all was good in the land of Brooklyn. It was this very miracle, however, that did lead to the one St. Valentine’s dinner I recall with great fondness. ‘This year we’re having dinner at home,’ I said to my girl who readily agreed, and so instead of preparing for another angst-ridden evening in a jammed restaurant, I spent the afternoon roasting a duck, whipping up a berry sauce, mixing a batch of cocktails, chilling a bottle of champagne, and turning my living room into a romantic nook for the two of us. A coffee table and keyboard stand were converted into an intimate dining table complete with linen, reasonably priced flowers, and candles, and when everything was ready, I got installed into my tux. During dinner, my girl’s eyes continued to dazzle me as they had for years, and from the hi-fi, Maurice Chevalier crooned the wisdom of another era. ‘Love can come to everyone,’ he sang as we danced, occasionally tripping over the affections of my cat, and I had to agree with him that while I did have to pay for the duck and the champagne, the best things in life, like a bustle-free Valentine’s evening at home, are indeed free. Later, the neighbors did have to gently knock on the walls to get our attention, but I’m glad to report it wasn’t for the crash of plate or slam of door. Gentlemen, my suggestion to you this year is to get out your aprons. Kind regards, Jack Newcastle Publisher, Editor-in-Chief The Cad
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