'Elegy to the Void'
Blue Nights is a haunting memoir about the death of Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, at the age of thirty-nine, death from an infection that began just before Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack at the dinner table. Quintana’s death was not sudden. It was not at the dinner table. It involved four intensive care units, four hospitals, two coasts, and twenty months. The Year of Magical Thinking , Didion’s account of the time following her husband’s death, described her frantic disbelief in the possibility of a world without the man she’d been married to for almost forty years. Blue Nights is something quite different. Blue Nights describes Didion’s descent into the inevitability of living in a world not only without her husband, not only without her daughter, but, finally, without hope. The book is possessed by an immeasurable, unrelenting despair. And it is alive with what is lost.
15th Annual Crab Fest
Parking: Free ValetIn a short amount of time, Baby Ray’s has begun to make a mark on College Point. In an effort to fill a niche in a neighborhood saturated by delicatessens and pizzerias, Baby Ray’s is definitely the beginning of a rebirth in College Point’s culinary scene.
On Friday and Saturday evenings, Baby Ray’s already boasts the need for early reservations. This fact alone, in my book, gives rival area restaurants a run for their money, in a race to become this year’s local top spot for a fine fix of surf and turf.
Straight out the box, the German-style décor of the family-friendly restaurant transports you directly to Europe. Instead of schnitzel and sausage though, Baby Ray’s (named after owner Adam Copp’s 3-year-old son) gives guests a wealth of options for those looking to either wet their whistle or sufficiently stuff their stomachs.
On entry, remnants of what were once a part of the New York City’s German-beer-hall capital, located in College Point in the 1940s, can be seen all around. From the bar’s artisanal handmade stained glass lights illuminating the private booths, to the hand-painted flowers adorning the rafters, to the large stone open-face fireplace warming the entire dining room, the restaurant is seeping with Teutonic tradition.