Dinner at the Malibu

Oct. 12, 2013 

We had dinner at the Malibu Diner before taking in a movie Friday night. Oh, not the Hoboken Malibu, or the theater tucked under the 14th Street Viaduct. This Malibu was on 23 rd Street in Manhattan, just a block or so away from the theater.

After missing an off-off-Broadway play last week because of the foolish notion I could take a bus via the Lincoln Tunnel (which turned out to be jammed) and get there on time, I took the PATH to New York instead.

Not having to walk up the hill from my house to get to a bus, I was actually early. I met an old copy editor from the paper on the train, one those strange coincidences since I was reading Mark twain’s Roughing It on my Kindle and saw a typo and thought of her.

I decided to get off the train at Christopher Street and walk up to the park at 31st near Madison Square  -- an old routine that allowed me to meander and take in the sights I usually missed when in a rush to get somewhere like a show.

I always take pictures of the world I wander through, knowing that the next time the place might not be the same.

Then seated in the park, I wrote as I waited, just as I used to do at the foot of the World Trade Center towers all those so many years ago (talk about things vanishing) at which point we strolled back to 23 rd Street for dinner and the show.

The diner was a classic, one of those bygone days NYC diners with stools and counter running from the front along one side, booths along the other with tables in the back. It had a classic menu, too, full of salads and wraps, and very little of the disastrously unhealthy stuff New Jersey diners usually offer. We had chicken wraps and a house salad that put spring into our step even as it filled our stomach. But any of the other items on the substantial menu would have pleased as much. We had to take a doggie bag home (but not for the cats but for next day’s lunch) and we left paying a bill that didn’t always take our shirts.

The people serving us actually treated us like they appreciated our business, something I hadn’t experience in the old days in NYC when I worked there.

And between healthy food in our stomachs, money still in our wallets, and a sense of well-being for having been treated with respect, we welcomed a relaxing movie – even if it was filled with the usual anxiety of Woody Allen.