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Dear friends, while I sit here and compose both an interesting list of things to do this weekend and an interesting way to tell you about them, I am turning the reins over to my pal Walt, who, due to circumstances beyond all control, was unable to join the guestblogging party whilst I was in Arkansas, but who had something to say all along.  This is just too fine not to share, and Walt has graciously allowed me to share it with you.  Thank you, Walt.  Without further ado...

Dear Tony Randall,

My regrets about your recent death.  I hope everything went well. 

I wanted to meet you.  They say you greeted your fans with rock-steady good humor, that you could regularly be seen walking down 8th Avenue or straphanging in the 1-9 train, and it’s easy to imagine a brief, friendly encounter outside your former castle, the Beresford. 

Bakerina has a story about her Mom and a friend eyeing you at some function, working up the nerve to approach you, and you reacted with a preemptive twinkle and said, “Well, what are you waiting for?” Even your verbal cadence was a combination of grammatical discipline and humane flair that I found amusing and deeply admirable.  Someday I hope to be more like you, that is, capable of explaining the proper rules, big and small, with rock-steady good humor, and also capable of bursting out with, “Well why the hell not?”

So Mr. Randall, I’d like to propose an idea to you.  The idea is that people should lie while they eat. 

I think it’s a good idea. 

I do research on how social relationships sometimes are pre-coded into architecture and furniture.  Food is personal, for one thing, fraught with emotion and memory and guilt and unspoken pleasures.  For another thing there are damn few things harder to change than kinesthetic subroutines.  Once you’ve programmed your body for years to take a shower the same way, or drive to work the same way, or reach for the light switch, your body’s habits under the skin are tough and persistent.  So, Tony Randall, both because the subject of food is personal and emotional, and because lying to eat would mean changing a basic three-times-a-day human physical subroutine, put those things together and there’s a 0% chance that any American alive today (no offense sir) would ever make a habit of it. 

I still think it’s a good idea. 

Lying to eat?  Some tender-brained people might argue our forefather Og stood while eating, or God forbid squatted on a sharp rock, therefore that position is natural, and therefore the best.  This kind of mental hopscotch forgets that Nature doesn’t have our best interests at heart, and anyway, Og’s lifestyle choices are as open to review as yours or mine, even if we knew the first thing about Og, and we just don’t.  He might have eaten at a dead run for all we know.  Og is no model of suavity. 

Other people might say, look, this is a matter for Science.  It should be easy to examine the human body and extrapolate backwards into the optimal dining position, the position easiest on the stomach, the best for digestion.  And it’s true, the human body is engineered to amazingly consistent specifications and does exhibit amazing design integrity, if you overlook its having no clear purpose, so this is not a totally dumb idea.  Not totally.

Unfortunately, Tony Randall, the more you look closely at ergonomics, the less you know.  We’re skating on a thin, thin, thin layer of Wissenshaft here.  The best and most comprehensive book about seating, by Dr.Galen Cranz of Berkeley, concludes that the best chair is one a backless stool, because the spine assumes a healthy proper ‘S’ shape on a backless stool.  She calls for more research on the topic, which in English means, “we just don’t know.” The best and most comprehensive book about sleep, by the great Dr. William Dement, says the basic research into the best sleep surfaces has not been done.  Wissenshaft just doesn’t know.  The mattress companies aren’t particularly interested in finding out.  Another thing Wissenshaft does not know is the optimal physical position for eating.  You’d think that the stomach would work better when not compressed, but, shrug, who knows? 

A few cruel busy restaurants make you stand at counters, of course.  Orange Julius used to, I think.  These stand-up counters come up to about 46 inches off the ground, which is nice in one way – no kids in the store.  But my feet hurt. 

Most other restaurants in the western world silently and smugly assume, in that way that furniture silently and smugly provides you with social choices, that your dining experience happens in a workstation – comfortable upright seating, lots of flat surface at 28 inches off the ground, task-oriented lighting, manual tools and supplies on the table.  Dining room furniture for homes forces us into the same task position.  At this standard diningstation the furniture wants you to sit up straight at a 90-degree angle and lean forward and attend to your food as if it eating was a task. Look around some time – restaurants contain some great workstations, which may be why I leave restaurants with such a feeling of accomplishment. 

But I really don’t like to think of dinner as a task.

What would happen if those chairs tilted back?  Is that better?  Instead of 90 degrees, and rocketing past the insulting 3 to 5 extra degrees of “relaxation” in an airline seat, let’s just tilt back on the horizontal axis back to 115 degrees and have dinner.  (It’s hard to go past 100 degrees and concentrate on business, but you get reflective and relaxed; back to 135 degrees, halfway back to supine, you start feeling removed.) I predict there’d be a thunderous shift in the economy away from restaurants, whose patrons would require more floorspace and would physically relax and stay longer, pressuring their sales per square foot, and towards dry cleaners from all that dropped gazpacho.  Also I predict a run on nosehair clippers.  This is more relaxing than the diningstation, maybe, but probably not the best way to eat. 

Jesus Christ.  If you take Jesus Christ as a model of suavity, you’d lie down for dinner.  (Some people are turning to him for dietary advice, so I don’t see why this is much different.) The Last Supper was probably taken in a semi-recumbent position, stretched out, leaning on one elbow, on a couch, with pillows.  This helps to understand John 13:23, which is otherwise sort of puzzling.  And it sounds rather pleasant to me.  Jesus Christ himself deserves no extra credit here, since people had been reclining for meals for centuries before and afterward; according to Rudofsky, the Romans had a standard built-in dining configuration called a triclinium, three angled platforms on three sides of a low square table.  There’s a good example in the House of Caro in Pompeii.  For centuries this was the natural, inevitable, unquestioned way to have dinner. 

Of course, Mr. Randall, it’ll never happen in America.  It seems too dangerous.  I suppose there’s some danger in lying around on the floor with food, on pillows, some danger in leaving your less flexible cohorts behind, some danger in not exercising proper command and control of your food.  Some danger in enjoying yourself too much, like the Romans did, maybe tangling with a friend and maybe blurring the distinctions between lying and being laid (I knew you would help me keep that straight, thank you). 

It would be a change of habit, and therefore immoral, to relax and linger over a lovingly prepared dinner in any kind of sensual way, so maybe we shouldn’t talk about it anymore.  As much as I’d like to hear you burst out with, “Well why the hell not?”, I realize those days are gone. 

So please forget I said anything. 

All best to you.

Walt