Beautiful Miranda and I were rendered blissfully gaga by the New York City Ballet’s performance of Jerome Robbins’s “I’m Old Fashioned,” at the end of which the dancers emulated, without merely imitating, the steps of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, whose performance in You Were Never Lovelier was projected on an enormous screen. Then, finally, the dancers turned their backs to the audience and raised their arms toward the towering cinema eminences in salutation, thanks, and homage.
    “Wow,” I said, when we were seated at a table with a couple of perfect Rob Roys.
    “Wowie-zowie,” said Miranda, endorsing, without merely repeating, my assessment.
    Near us, a nutritionist was drinking a Cosmopolitan and picking at a salad. A pressed sandwich stood waiting. I am not one of those people with an uncanny knack for picking out the nutritionist in any crowd; I identified her as a nutritionist because she was explaining to a red-faced couple seated at the table between hers and ours that she was going to deliver a lecture on nutrition within the hour and because she was pressing on them a poster showing a food pyramid, printed in bright colors on heavy paper, suitable for framing.
    “Now you don’t have to come to the lecture,” she said.
    She drained her glass, and a waitress, swooping the glass away, asked, “Another?” The nutritionist nodded once, emphatically.
    The man in the couple glanced at the food pyramid and said, with a wink, “I don’t see any Cosmopolitans.”
    The nutritionist gave him an impish look, stopping short of sticking her tongue out at him. “I don’t usually drink like this,” she claimed. “I don’t usually eat like this, either—but I’ve got stage fright.”
    The waitress brought her second Cosmopolitan. The nutritionist knocked it back like a frat boy doing shots. She pointed her finger down at her glass and batted her lashes. The waitress laughed and went to fetch another.
    The red-faced woman, presumably the wife of the red-faced man, left for the ladies’ room. As soon as she was gone, the man reached across the short space that separated him from the nutritionist and placed his paw on her hand. “You shouldn’t have stage fright,” he said. “You’re charming, intelligent, well-spoken, and very attractive. I’m sure your audience will be enthralled.”
    “Wowie-zowie,” whispered Miranda, “I think his Viagra just kicked in.”
    The nutritionist’s third Cosmopolitan arrived. The red-faced couple left. The nutritionist began making cute faces at an Asian girl of about three. The girl began whimpering, then screaming.
    “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” Miranda asserted.
    “I certainly could,” I said.
    “But could you make it believable?”
    “Definitely,” I said, raising my voice above the child’s.