I received a spam e-mail today, the title was:
Eternity of Your Love
The wedding reception took place on the sixth floor of a nondescript building in the Garment District, amidst wholesalers and warehouses and shuttered-up garages. Dressed-up people clustered in the narrow lobby waiting for the single elevator. Upstairs there was a spacious universe of brick and wood. A guest book, coat check, everything. Those potted trees with the thin, bare branches.
Right outside the elevator where the guest book was there were candles everywhere: table, floor. One caught the corner of Sean's coat and he went up in flames, requiring the assistance of a kind stranger to save his lining if not his life.
The waiters brought out tray upon tray of hors d'oeuvres, every last one laid upon a thin disc of cucumber.
Some guests chose to eat the cucumber too, grabbing the entire arrangement sloppily, the cucumber squirming on their thumbs, making two, three, four tries at it with the waiter stiffly standing by until they wrested the thing off its surface and popped it quickly in their mouths.
The hors d'oeuvres presented a narrative from the ordinary to the bizarre, a culinary adventure into absurdity. We began with scallops wrapped in prosciutto and mini quiches and lamb chops and then there was French toast on a stick and chicken livers smothered in molasses and caramels in rock salt and pickled fish eyes, cherries with blood pudding and raspberry-mutton sorbet; peach goulash, whale blubber soup, soy cake with deer antler butter, fried radishes and live ants stuck in honey.
Or so it seemed.