There is a French restaurant in Georgetown called La Chaumiere that I've been wanting to try for a few years and tonight I finally went. I was going to see the movie "Julie & Julia" that is, in part, about Julia Child's formative years in France and I thought it would be cool to have dinner in a French resaurant beforehand. La Chaumiere is a small, intimate restaurant with a rustic and cozy feel to it. The food is very good. I had an emmenthaler cheese souffle to start and followed that with the venison medallions. Plus a couple glasses of champagne. Why not?
I took the unforgivable step of skipping dessert so that I would have time to stop by an ATM and get to the movie theater on time. When I got to the electronic kiosk at the theater to buy my ticket, I discovered that my debit card was not in my wallet. Cue moment of minor panic. I decided I must have neglected to take it out of the folder thing the bill was in at the restaurant. I started heading back to La Chaumiere when it hit me that I'd still had the card when I stopped by the ATM, at which point I realized that I'd gone off and left my card in the machine after taking the cash. Ugh.
I wasn't too, too worried given that there was no one else around the ATM when I went, it was inside the bank foyer rather than on the street in the open, and I believe ATMs are designed to suck your card back inside if you forget to take it. My card wasn't there when I got back to the ATM, and this is where buying an iPhone came in handy. I used it to get on my bank's website and find the number for reporting a lost or stolen card. There hadn't been any activity on my card since I'd withdrawn money, and they went ahead and cancelled it and sent me a new one. Phew.
By that time I'd missed the 7:15 show, but there was another one at 8:15 so I pulled up the map on my iPhone, found the nearest Starbucks, went and got myself a mocha frappucino, and did the Wall Street Journal crossword puzzle on my phone to pass the time. If it's possible to love a little hunk of metal and plastic, I'm coming to love my iPhone.
Back at the movie theater, the lady at the ticket counter recommended heading straight to the auditorium to get a good seat because it was looking like the show was going to sell out. Great recommendation, and something I wouldn't have gotten had I used the electronic kiosk rather than dealing with a person. The show did turn out to be packed and a lot of people who came in after me had trouble finding a decent place to sit.
The movie was very good. It has two storylines, both of which are based on real events. One is about Julia Child discovering French food in post-WWII Paris, learning to cook, and putting together her groundbreaking cookbook. The other is about a woman who decides to prepare all 500+ recipes in Julia's book in one year and blog about it daily. The plotlines echo each other in several regards, much in the way that the subplot informs on the main plot in Shakespeare. The first hint of this is in the introductory scene for each character when we see Julia drive by the Eiffel Tower in Paris and Julie drive by a rusty water tower in Queens.
Although their lives are very different on the surface, the two women's stories share many of the same elements. Each is trying to find something to do with her life, something more than just what she's done in the past and something more personally meaningful than just another way to pass the time. Each finds the answer in French cooking. BTW, don't go see this movie when you are hungry. I can only imagine it would be torment.
The Washington Post movie critic made a big noise over noting that the Julia Child scenes are more compelling than the Julie the blogger scenes. How insightful. Let's see, Julia Child and her husband are portrayed by Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci. Who'd have guessed that their performances would outshine those of Amy Adams and the anonymous guy who plays her husband? There's some rocket science for you. I enjoyed both storylines. So go, see this movie and have a fun night out. Just make sure you eat beforehand.
(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)
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