Last night my best friend and I found ourselves sans our respective significant others. Though Tammy and I became friends in high school while we were both perpetually single, since then we’ve never been single at the same time, and as a result it’s been more difficult to find time for just the two of us. She got married this past fall to a guy named Neal who, among other things, brews his own beer. More importantly, Neal’s the kind of guy every girl hopes her best friend will marry. So it’s okay that when I see Tammy it’s usually in conjunction with Neal — but it was still great to get a chance to have a girls’ night out.
In high school, Tammy and I frequented the now-defunct Mandarin Restaurant on the Carlisle Pike. It was in the boat-shaped building that now houses a mediocre Mexican restaurant. This and Taco Bell were probably our favorite spots. Anyway, I guess we’ve left behind the days when Taco Bell constituted a nice dinner, because last night we tried a Chinese place neither of us had been, Ho Wah in Lemoyne. Those of you who’ve been there probably know that Ho Wah doesn’t really constitute a “nice dinner” either, but, as I gather everyone else in the area knows already, the food was very good. I’m not sure how it differs from other Chinese food, but I do know it was better. Or at least that I enjoyed it more. (As a side note, I should mention that most West Coasters don’t like East Coast Chinese food, claiming it to be inauthentic. It might be, but I prefer it to the supposedly authentic West Coast Chinese.) It would, however, probably be better for take-out than for dine-in, as the service was pretty poor: I never got my soup, the entrees took waaaay too long to come out, and we had to make eye contact with the server several times before she gave us an opportunity to ask for boxes.
Ultimately, though, we did make it out of there with our leftovers and headed down to New Cumberland to the West Shore Theatre to see The Holiday. Before you say, “You saw what?” let me remind you that this was a girls’ night out. It was the perfect girls’ night out movie — predictable and sweet. And co-starring Jude Law. That’s important.
But more interesting to me than Jude Law was the overtly self-referential nature of the movie. Part of the movie is set in LA, and one of the main characters produces movie trailers. So right off the bat you’ve got elements of a movie about movies. Not that unusual. But there was also a character, a retired screenwriter, who named elements of the movie — in movie-speak — as they were happening. And there was the scene where the movie — which, at least at the West Shore Theatre, began without previews — interrupted itself with the green screen that alerts the audience a preview is about to be shown. What I’m saying is that this movie, in most ways just a typical romantic comedy, made a point to frequently remind the audience that this was a movie. Add to this the basic premise that by watching enough movies and living someone else’s life for two weeks you can change your own life — well, I think this may have been the first mainstream overtly postmodern romantic comedy I’ve seen.
This is not to say that it was, in any way, an intellectual or even thought-provoking film. But it did have Jude Law. What else do you need?
, by Richard Powers, which just won the National Book Award, indicating that it must have been a mediocre year for literature, because while I enjoyed the book, Powers’s tendency toward florid prose would keep me from giving it any awards), and picked up 
at Barnes & Noble. This was a much better book, albeit slightly less, erm, intellectual. It’s about a woman who decides to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s 
in a year. This is a woman who clearly cooks a lot more obsessively than I do. But she inspired me.
, because I happened to have it with me in the car when I decided we just had to go to the grocery store.