Having contributed $150 each to the StG dinner at the Cheese Mountain restaurant, Dearest Readers, I can't help but feel that you deserve a more detailed, accurate account of the night of August 18, 2007, than that perfunctory sketch provided by Sean yesterday.

With Sean's tale my beefs are many. Yes, I wore a hat. But nowhere is it mentioned in yesterday's post the exquisiteness of that hat; nowhere the softness of the felt, nowhere the pathology of the hatter (madness). Furthermore, Michaels is milquetoast, sure, and Beirne is PG 13, but the utter baseness of my banter is by no means given its due. At one point while guessing what Sean had been up to since I'd last seen him, I overzealously pronounced the name of a sexual act, bringing on a sudden silence at the table next to ours. My hot cheeks flushed, and I considered while pouring myself another glass of wine whether I'd had enough. Of the red wine, Sean wrote several truths: the bottle hailed from Italy, and my father is Canada's ambassador to that country. However, contrary to Sean's report, that coincidence did not go unmentioned. No, after I excused myself under the false pretense of needing to go to the bathroom, I slipped into the kitchen and angrily explained to our waiter that the next time I set foot in Cheese Mountain, I expect to be walking into a literal mountain of cheese, or, at the very least, a hill of meat and cheese, and did he know that we wouldn't be paying for the wine for reasons related to diplomatic immunity. He responded that the restaurant's name, La Montée de Lait, translates more accurately to 'The Ascension of Milk.' A scoff and then my wordless reply: the presentation of a PhD thesis co-authored by Sean, Dan and me, entitled "On the Subtleties of Literary Translation Lost On the Common."

Dan looked awful. Haggard and pensive and twitchy. He wore a ridiculous tie. I would have worried had I not been utterly engrossed in my first course, tacitly inspired by Anaximander's genesis story, a duck liver stuffed to the gills with rabbit. Course two: sweet cheese gnocchi in a bacon broth, which, as Sean later explained, I should not have slurped from the bowl. Sean and I shared a diverse plate of cheeses - some soft, others hard, some new, others old, some mild, others sharp. None, of course, were as sharp as the two ivory handled knives that briefly graced our table, and with which, sweating, we intensely imagined skinning zebras on the steppe. For dessert I outordered my companions, choosing the poached peach with a palette-cleansing sorbet.

After our final course, we undid our belts, put our bellies on the table, talked and laughed and shouted and embarrassed each other. All thanks to you!

Sean's right that the three of us have never dated one another, that we've never made out, but in his insistence that our relationship is entirely unromantic, methinks the author doth protest too much ...

Before we left to catch a late showing of Supermalades, I asked the band to play our song.

The Elgins - "It's Been A Long Time"

Each of us with arms around the others, boy did we dance! The other diners held their breath, then applauded, panting, while, hand in hand, we three of StG skipped out the door. And so it was that we traveled to the theatre, all the way across Montreal.

Feist - "1 2 3 4"

[Buy The Elgins, Feist]