Judy: "So fancy! What did you say this kind of food is called again, Kenny?"
Me: "Italian?"
Paul kept trying to Olive Garden down all of the entrees on the menu ...
"Instead of this Bucatini all'Amatriciana stuff, can I get spaghetti with marinara sauce?"
... and no one could pick a wine off the list of 1,000.
Carol: "Can I have the house white?"
[Eye roll] "We don't really have a house wine."
Afterward -- at all of 8 o'clock on a bright and beautiful evening, most of their first-ever in New York City -- we strolled through Washington Square Park a few minutes before asking if they wanted to take a walk through the Village. Five seconds after saying yes, Paul and Gary started acting extremely put-out and began to repeatedly ask "how far" we were from the subway. (I'm not sure what these other big plans they had were, but they were awfully worried about getting there.) By the 30th time they asked (with Carol now joining in), Michael had had enough and shoved 'em down the stairs at 14th Street. (That's a walk from 8th Street to 14th -- the little blocks -- and I get to see Mom once or twice a year.) That it wasn't the exact same subway they had arrived on sent three-quarters of them into TOTAL PANIC mode, and by then Michael vowed to never speak to any of them again. (We're slated to go with everyone to a Broadway show on Tuesday.)
Mom was the only one being fun and wanted to stay, but her back was hurting -- Gary told Michael "major surgery" was imminent, but he also told me and Mark that there was a "75 percent chance" that Mom would die on the operating table when she went in for a routine hysterectomy in '83, so I took this with a grain of salt -- so she headed back with the Eloy Bunch.
All in all a good night, except for Gary asking me at the beginning of dinner if he and Mom had "anything to be worried about" in my book -- and letting me know that he has a lawyer lined up just in case.