People weren’t eating sufficiently. In an inspired state I got up and began a commedia, wherein I rifled our larder for every canned and jarred delicacy I had been hoarding, these constituting the analog to Nelson’s Riesling, undoubtedly. I’m not absolutely certain I knew what I was doing. But it was symbolic language saying All right, if you won’t eat what there is then what about this? and this? and also this? You prefer to just drink, but will you when you see this and this and this? The joke ultimately was on me. I thought I was putting out a shaming overabundance of food, but drinking makes you hungry and virtually everything seemed to go — the mandarin orange segments, the anchovies, the hearts of palm, the white plums, the fig paste. These were treasures. Only toward the end did people seem to notice what lengths I had gone to. No one commented on how utterly miscellaneous the spread was.