Hallmark: The Gathering

It really doesn’t take much these days to make me feel old and out of touch. Last night I arrived in Kansas City, MO for a seminar. After a day spent trying to get into Atlanta and then trying to get out of Atlanta, I arrived late and was forced to seek sustenance at the crappy sports bar in my hotel, where, despite the total lack of ambience, I got a highly serviceable burger and a decent local microbrew for $6.42, which is roughly 20 percent of what The Worst $34 Room-Service Meal in History cost me in Reykjavík. While I was enjoying the Cheapest Hotel Restaurant Meal in History (oh, and I was), the woman sitting next to me at the bar struck up a conversation. (It’s a very friendly town.) Turns out she’s here with her 18-year old son, who is competing with thousands of others in a Magic: The Gathering tournament. First prize is 25 large. I was truly impressed, not the least because I have almost no idea what Magic: The Gathering is. I know it’s some kind of fantasy roleplaying game that requires sitting around late at night doing things with cards. I certainly have nothing against that. I just don’t know what it is. I thought I was pretty up on what the kids these days are doing, what with the fact that I watch MTV and all. Apparently this is yet another phenomenon, much like that thing a few years ago when college kids were running around in sewer drains doing something or other and occasionally dying, of which I was not informed. I can tell you this in an authoritative manner about the afficionados of this pursuit: they are running around my hotel lobby wearing ball caps and backpacks and acting squirrely and engaging me in smart-alecky conversation in a way that shows they do not accord me the proper respect due my age and station. Kids these days. Then again, I am half in the bag and not wearing socks.

I’ve just noticed that the PA in the lobby is playing a Muzak version of “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.” This is clearly an attempt to drive the gamer kids to bed. Or me. Either way, it’s working.

As for Kansas City (“The City of Fountains”), you’ve heard the phrase, “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes”? Surely it was coined here. In the space of an hour today we went from clear skies to lowering skies to glowering skies to the hardest downpour I’ve seen in years to clear skies again. At the end of the seminar I had every intention of walking out to find a barbecue restaurant recommended to me by the airport shuttle driver, but after this afternoon’s display, I was afraid to set foot outside. Luckily, downtown KC has one of those modern utopian skywalk systems which allows you to traverse from hotel lobby to sterile, bullshit mall to hotel lobby (the mall is owned by Hallmark, for heaven’s sake) without ever setting foot on the pavement or mixing with the hoi polloi. I had to venture the last half-mile actually out of doors, but soon found myself at the BBQ joint in question. It turned out to be a big, slick yuppie hellhole, with a waiting list. When I went into the men’s room and heard the theme from “Sex and the City”, I quickly turned on my heel and left.

This turned out to be a good thing, because I then went to the other restaurant suggested by the shuttle driver, the Hereford House, the dumpiness of the outside of which cannot begin to hint at the wonders to be found within. There I had what is basically my perfect meal: a martini to start, a tossed salad with blue cheese, a medium-rare steak with herb-garlic butter and mashed potatoes, and a Talisker single malt scotch to finish. The meal reaffirmed my conviction that I really was meant to be an advertising exec in New York. In the ’50s.