(click on the image to see a larger version)
This one was started by Tim with the guy looking out at us, the viewers. The rest of it was filled in over the next couple weeks. There were a couple little white out sections, and I can't think of what was underneath them. I do know that I whited out the lower left corner because I had the vision to draw a bird on her birdhouse. The TV set on the snowman is a mystery though. One of my favorite characters is the Wee Willy Shakespeare guy. He would fit right in at the Cafe Loup. The original owners of the Loup were art lovers and literature nerds. They had a vision that if you could get the literary crowd to come to the Loup, then everyone else would follow and you would have a successful restaurant. They were right, I guess because we are still open 34 years later and the literary crowd still comes to the Loup. I don't know who came first, but over the years, we have had a ton of high profile writers come to the Loup and become regulars. My favorite is Gay Talese. An impeccable dresser and overall great guy, Mr. Talese continues to dine at the Loup and recently praised it in the Wall Street Journal. I know exactly what he wants most of the time, so when I see him come in, I get his martinis ready and an order of shrimp cocktail into the kitchen. That way, by the time he gets to the table I am there with his martini. He really appreciates this small gesture and we always have nice conversation for the rest of the evening. He's my kind of celebrity. Christopher Hitchens used to come in all the time as well. He was great, as a customer, because he used to keep drinking. Bottle after bottle of wine and then scotch after scotch. He would hold court at table 33 for hours on end, his speech growing more and more slurred as the night went on. He used to come in with his buddy Salman Rushdie a lot, back when Rushdie had a bounty on his head. I never met Rushdie, but waited on Hitch a couple of times. Along with writers come all of the other parts of the literary spectrum. We have so many editors, publishers, poets and writers in the Loup every night that I could go on forever just writing about them. For instance, the editor of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" is one of my best customers. I didn't even know he had edited it until one day he came in and Tim had left his copy of the book up front. He commented on the book and I said, "Did you read it?" and he replied, "I edited it." So, I asked him some questions about the book and he said that Franzen is one of the most remarkable writers. He said that Franzen is the only writer he has ever read that doesn't use dangling modifiers. Every other writer unwittingly uses them, but for one reason or another, Franzens sentences are usually perfectly structured. Good to know, I say, although I have never read him, so I guess it's something to look forward to. That was a dangling modifier, I bet. I wonder what some of these literary people would say about this blog. I'm sure they would be appalled at the structure of the sentences, the informal tone, the typos, and all the crappy adjectives. Good thing they don't read it! Does anyone?
Wikipedia describes the Dangling Modifier:
A dangling modifier, a specific case of which is the dangling participle,[1] is an error in sentence structure whereby a grammatical modifier is associated with a word other than the one intended, or with no particular word at all. For example, a writer may have meant to modify the subject, but word order makes the modifier seem to modify an object instead. Such ambiguities can lead to unintentional humor or difficulty in understanding a sentence.
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