The Proust Wake of 1995

Mid-November of 1995, as the fourth issue of Proust Said That neared completion, plans for the 73rd anniversary Proust Wake did as well. The 18th, the day of Proust's death and my birthday, fell conveniently on a Saturday, and once again we would commemorate the day at John Wickett's amazing Museum of Exotica, one of the city's little known visual treasures.

Months beforehand, I began thinking about what to do at the 1995 wake. In 1994 we had stunned the guests with a cooked-up seance, as described in issue #2; Stuart Magrum, dressed and made up as the dead Proust (an admirable likeness) hid in one of the aeries of the museum with a single glass of wine, a long cardboard tube to speak through and a cranky old ridgeback for company until I could get the seance underway. On the main floor of the museum, I spent nearly two hours greeting the arrivals and getting the accomplices and innocents to join me at the seance table. Silence fell in the room, and the lights dimmed. I called several times for Proust to speak to us, and finally Stuart replied, script in hand. I asked questions about death that had been engineered to be perfectly answered by quotes from Remembrance, and Stuart read them with utter panache and a very believable accent. At the end of the questions, Stuart/Proust read that all this conversation was making him feel perfectly alive, and he descended the ladder into a mass of thundering applause.

Well, what could I do to top that? The seance was clearly a one-shot experience. Stuart emailed to say that he was willing to resume his Proustian disguise and lie in state for a while, since at least that way he could hear other conversations. He gave up on the whole thing when he heard there was no coffin to contain him, and declined to shave his goatee again just to lie on a table.

My real first choice for an alternate entertainment was chamber music. I begged John, my housemate who cajoled me into starting the Proust Group, to bring some of his chamber music friends to play. He said he'd try.

The week before the wake, I called Bonny Doon Vineyard to say that my friend Nancy Denney -Phelps and I were on our way down to get a few cases of their Grenache, Clos de Gilroy, the official beverage of the Proust Support Group since it has Marcel's portrait on the label. But unlike last year, before the article in Proust Said That about this wine and the Bonny Doon home page were read by thousands of people on the Internet, the vineyard was totally sold out. They gave us a list of every place in the city that carries it and wished us luck.

We went to the biggest place that might have it, and they were sold out. From their pay phone we called every other possible source, and found them all sold out. I was throwing a hissy-fit; how could I host a Proust wake without Proust wine? Nancy, clever and resourceful, has a genius for solutions; "I know," she said. "We have a bunch of labels we got at Bonny Doon the last time we were there. Why don't we buy something else, soak the labels off, and put the Proust labels on?"

We bought a few cases of a potable cabernet. It wasn't that lovely, fruity grenache, but we knew perfectly well that no one was going to protest a free glass of anything, and after a few, not notice any difference at all. I took the cases home and soaked them in a tub of warm water.

If I couldn't have a seance in which to charm my friends with the words of Proust, I thought about serving only foods that had been mentioned in Remembrance, and adorning the buffet with the quotes that mentioned each dish. Even though I've had a catering business for years, I was hard pressed to create a menu that would work; in the end, I settled for madeleines, of course, the pink biscuits that were more expensive in Combray, the architectural chocolate cake served at Gilberte's teas, the ham that Francoise called "Nev' York", the caviar that the young narrator refused to eat, served with a lovely cream cheese fish and crackers, another cream cheese structure mixed, as the young narrator loved it, with strawberries, all the vegetables adored by Albertine, and sold by vendors in the street, and the remedial spice bread consumed in great quantities by Swann.

Several people did much to help me with this catering extravaganza: Miss Lisa Archer, one of my favorite conspirators in the art of parties, made one of the dishes, and our friend Monroe Pastermak, an excellent baker, came for an afternoon of making madeleines, bringing his own favorite recipe. The night of the event, Monroe surprised me with a huge batch of madeleines from an even better recipe, which you will find on page 25. My housemate Lance, who did the grand cover for our third issue, also surprised me with a beautiful collection of folding cards with the quotes about the dishes, topped by a cutout diamond emblem containing Proust's initial... and my name, P. On the afternoon of the event, others would come to help with the last of the preparation: Miss Lisa, the radiant Miss Harley, and the grand Shelley Johnson of Burt Children's Center, who had hired two strong young men for the wearisome hauling and clean-up. But for the most part, most of the days, and very long nights before the event found me in the kitchen, gearing up to serve more than a hundred guests.

Every few hours I went into the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen and chipped away at the labels on the soaking wine. It didn't take too long to realize that the labels on this fake vintage were made not of paper at all, but of plastic, and very strongly affixed. Plastic! One evening Lance and I stood staring down at the problem bottles, and he told me that he's read in a book of home brewing that ammonia helped in soaking off labels. I went to the corner store immediately and got some, and added it carefully to the water, taking extreme care not to get anywhere near the corks.

I was down to three days before the wake, and the labels were still not coming off. During those long waits in the kitchen between the filling and emptying of the oven, I'd grab a bottle and pick at a corner of the label. If I picked long enough, and lifted in the right direction, the entire thing would come off. After several hours of picking and pulling, I had removed them all, leaving a thick layer of glue on the bottles. The glue had affixed a label that was tall and thin, so there was no hope of using it to attach the Proust labels, which were short and wide.

A few days before the wake, the last issue of PST #4 was very nearly done, and it seemed ridiculous not to have it ready for the occasion. The last article was finished, the photos scanned and placed in the waiting spots. Only a bit of embellishment and some proofreading remained to be done. I had read every word of it so many times that I was hopeless as a proofreader; my eyes no longer saw the glaring errors, and I had already asked my cohorts for too many favors. About 24 hours before the event my friend Marilyn Wann, the charming publisher of Fat!So?, took me to her favorite copy shop to run off a few proof copies to put on the PST table at the wake. The gentleman who helped us at the counter asked if he could try on my lipstick.

After the wake, I had a chance to read through the one proof copy that had not disappeared, and found the ghastly errors. To this day I have no knowledge of who got them, and am still slightly embarrassed.

Any caterer can tell you that the 24 hours before a big and elaborate party are the busiest, when all the things that must be perfectly fresh are prepared. The night before the wake I spent 10 hours in the kitchen, and as I waited for things in the oven to be ready, I made exasperated and failed attempts to remove the glue from the wine bottles with nail polish remover, or by scraping with knives or other implements. Two of my delightful young friends, Mercedes and Jane, sat in the kitchen watching me. "Will we be as driven as you are," they asked, "When we're your age?" "No," I said, "I was born driven."

Mercedes tried to remove the glue with her odorless turpentine, to no avail. Jane tried some other noxious artist's material, but only succeded in spreading the glue into wormlike blobs. I had to give up, and live with the fact that the glue would remain.

It was only a few hours before we'd have to leave for the site. The lovely dress I was borrowing from Dr. Edwina Pythagoras was delivered by Danger Ranger, who arrived in the costume of the day's earlier social event, the surprise birthday party for our friend Flash, known out at the Burning Man as the ever-welcoming "Papa Satan", proprietor of McSatan's Beefstro, where you could get a burger and a beer. Out there in the Black Rock Desert, described in the article about Burning Man in issue #4, there is literally nothing, other than what we bring; commercial enterprises are not encouraged, but of course, in the manner of most evolving human communitiies, they are springing up. Flash and I, friends of the project and fundraisers, were the only two highly visible proprietors: he ran the bar and grill, I the cafe. We had a friendly rivalry to see which of our establishments would stay open latest, in the nocturnal fashion of Marcel P. How curious that we should share this birthday.

A couple of hours before we would load up the vehicles with the catering for the wake, hopeless to find a last-minute solution to the glue on the unlabeled wine bottles, I snatched the rubber cement off the table where I'd been laying out PST and began to apply the Bonny Doon labels over as much of the glue as I could cover, while I waited for the last things in the oven and chopped the last crudité. I had done about four of them when it became clear that there was a problem: the rubber cement changed the color of the label to battleship gray. Fortunately my housemate Lance was passing through the kitchen just at the moment when I was gasping "Oh, no!" repeatedly. "Hold on, wait a minute," he said, and disappeared into his studio, returning with some obscure and highly professional substance. He applied it to one label, and attached it to the bottle perfectly. He did a few more, then disappeared quietly with the substance while I was preoccupied with the oven. It wasn't until we needed to begin loading the van that I realized that all the bottles hadn't been done, and sent the convincing Miss Harley to find Lance.

It was six o'clock. The strong young men who were coming to haul down the hundreds of pounds of food, wine, props, trays, linens, glasses, fish molds, tomb rubbings and portrait of Proust by Dean Gustafson, silverware, prep tools, and copies of Proust Said That were due to arrive. We nibbled on the pizza Harley got for us, our only hope or opportunity of dinner on a night of catering a nocturnal event, and waited. In the next half hour, Shelley tried to reach her hired hands, and 45 minutes after we began to wait, we couldn't wait any longer, and carried it all down the four flights ourselves.

Entering John Wickett's Museum of Exotica, even laden with huge and heavy boxes of catering gear, suffuses me with wonder. I always see something I've never seen before, and can't tell if it's because it's new, or because I have never spotted it among the other million objects last time I was there. John Wickett is always welcoming and full of tales, even when, like that night, he had a broken ankle and was a bit slower getting up and down the ladders.

We began to set up the bar and buffet table, with about 90 minutes before the guests would arrive. Seconds before the first ring at the door, Lisa caught photos of the nearly-finished table. Minutes later, the museum was full of wandering guests, the men mostly in tuxedos, the women in a lot of formal black. The lights were dim over the opened bottles of faux Clos de Gilroy, but the guests, looking at each other's finery and the splendiferous surroundings, wouldn't have noticed the glue on the bottles anyway.

Would there be chamber music? John still didn't know; it would depend on which of his friends showed up with their instruments. I saw two of his friends carrying them by mid-evening, but not enough for a quartet, and everyone was too busy socializing to play.

In theory, we were supposed to vacate the museum by midnight, but John Wickett finds my friends too interesting to send home. He himself climbed up a ladder into the secret entrance to his adjecent house and dressed for the occasion, and was deep in conversation at the theoretical closing time. Well after midnight the wine was pretty much gone, and the food supplies diminished, and this year, unfortunately, there was no absinthe for the late-night revellers. Guests were beginning to depart when my housemate John, and Nik Phelps of the fascinating Clubfoot Orchestra, sat down to play duets, reading music neither one had seen, ever or in years, at about the hour when the Poulet Quartet was summoned chez Proust to perform the work containing the little phrase.

Chamber music, so elegant and formal in a concert setting, takes on a delightful lightness of spirit when played among friends. Nik and John are both superb professional musicians, but free to express the moment as they pleased; John, momentarily lost in the sheet music, made us all laugh by saying "Where the fuck am I???", rolling his eyes wildly, but not missing a note. In a later piece, John and Nik exchanged glances, and Nik, during a quick lull in his part, said "are you sure you want to play THIS one?"

For the first time in days, I spent an hour seated, listening to the music. When the bravos and applause finally stopped, it was time to rise again, to break down and pack up the spoils of catering, and begin planning the Proust Wake for next year.

Late the following afternoon, John sailed through the kitchen on his way home from an afternoon of playing chamber music with some friends, and found me immobilized at the kitchen table. "Now I'm absolutely sure," he said, "where the little phrase comes from. We played it today, Saint-Saëns D-major sonata, number 3. It will be played next year at the wake... for sure."

P Segal