I had thought for a moment that it was a little odd that I might decide to sit down at 12:31 am on a Sunday night to write out an entry, especially considering my fragile psychological state at present and that getting enough sleep might be good for my mental health. But then I thought, no, this is about par for the course. In fact, it's a little early.

Again I've broken one of my primary rules when it comes to eating pizza. I ate pizza in a place that serves food other than traditional Italian fare with the possible exception of beef patties. Heading out on Friday with a number of co-workers I went to a restaurant called Pfiff in Tribeca (35 Grand St. near Thompson).

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Oh Christ where was I? Ya see folks, keeping up this diary isn't all fun and games. To be frank it's a lot of work. Mind you I realize that it's a responsibility that I've set up for myself, but being that so many other parts of my life are completely out of whack right now it's hard to take the time to remember all the minute details of my pizza eating sometimes. So I stopped writing that last bit about eight days ago and now have to return to it. Okay, so here goes:

Yeah, I broke one of my primary rules, blah blah blah. We were at this place called Pfiff, sending a co-worker of mine who had been unreasonably fired off. She chose the place, and so after work a number of us headed down to Tribeca en masse. The place was quite pleasant, although I could hear my wallet whining about the large bill certain to be forthcoming. "Calm down," I told it " we're just going to nurse a single glass of wine and then bow out gracefully." That was indeed my plan, but somewhere along the line my plan went way askew.

The person we were sending off was a lovely woman with one of the most fascinating faces I've ever seen. Angela is beautiful, and this photo I took of her on our lunch break several weeks ago can't begin to do her justice. For one thing, the photo is way too damn small. Angela is around the same size as most other people. However, whether or not it's a positive trait she's also one of those people who when presented with a menu and a table full of people such as she had before her, begins to order vast quantities of food. Appetizers really, but plenty of them. And then, oh? the food has all been eaten? let's order all of that again. Oy vey. Did I eat. Folks, you don't even know how I ate that night.

The many items on the menu had included among them three small pizzas. Mini-pizzas we might call them. One of them was something or other, one of them was sort of a standard marinara and one of them was heaven. What was it now? I remember mostly there being goat cheese and diced sauteed onion on top of it. The onions were sweet as well, and served to cut the sourer flavors that can be evoked by much goat cheese, rounding the entire flavor out deliciously. I knew I was sinning against you dear readers, but I'd been led down the garden path by this impish (pixie-ish?) woman and a glass(es) of what was surely a lovely Shiraz. Wait, was it a Cab-Shiraz blend? The marinara pizza was just a mini-pizza to me. The other one has been erased from my mind by a deluge of the above mentioned red wine and the glare coming off the memory of that onion/goat cheese pizza.

Somehow, with all the class that this place had I'd like to say that it was very much to their credit that things didn't feel stuck up or awkward. Every time another person walked in and wanted to join us at the table they accommodated us without the slightest hassle. The laid back atmosphere in the place may have something to do with the fact that the restaurant is called Pfiff, but I think that the crayons and the large sheets of drawing paper covering the tables are primarily responsible. Of course we made use of the crayons and the paper. Christ, most of us were/are members of an unmentioned cosmetics company's creative department. I can't draw for my life though, a no-talent which I displayed readily to anyone sitting near me. I also mentioned my long-time plan of going to Central Park with a drawing pad and an easel and putting up a sign that read "Portraits Drawn 25¢ No Talent Whatsoever" to my anyone who now found themselves sitting near me. Angela, trapped in the long seat that lined the wall on one side of the table, decided to offer me my first commission. Actually, my first commissions, which were, as I recall, for the low low rate of 10¢/ea. I don't know how she talked me down, but as I described earlier, impish, pixie-ish, etc.

So I got to work. Actually, I may have done the first one, of her, before the actual commission came through. The one of her is the largest one on the page, done almost entirely in red although its surface was marred later with an orange crayon by the portrait's ungrateful subject. The one to it's right is a self-portrait and the one to its left is a profile of Jack, another co-worker. Frankly I think that that is the best of the lot, although the one I did of Michelle was coming along nicely when we had to leave. The problem with doing portraits of people as they sit around a dinner table involved in animated conversation is that they 1) won't stay facing the same direction for a consistent period, and 2) they probably don't want you to draw their bloody portrait in the first place. Think you've had a hard time getting some friends to let you take their photo? Try doing an impromptu portrait.

So that's really the only place that I ate pizza that night. Mind you there were plenty of other sorts of food that made their way up and down the table, and I managed to eat my fair fill. Of course, when the bill came my wallet gasped and refused to speak to me for the rest of the night.

A number of people seemed to be wanting to head into Williamsburg to see our friend (okay, and co-worker) Jaime's husband's gallery opening. How did we all get there? I think I managed to convince everyone that it would be quicker to take the subway and by some miracle we had few delays getting from Tribeca to Willliamsburg. We found the gallery and went in to see the show. Jaime was glad to see us and so was Ravi (her aforementioned husband). His work consisted of photographs taken of several landscapes that appear in Warner Bros. cartoons. To clarify, the photographs were of these landscapes appearing on a television screen. I'd seen one of them before, Jaime has a polaroid of one of them (a desert landscape from Road Runner, I presume) on her desk in an odd sort of frame. These were blown up much larger, and to be honest, although I enjoyed them, I felt that they were somehow more impactful on a smaller scale. Seeing them blown up as they were seemed to make them out to be more than what they were somehow. On a smaller scale they have a kinship with the holiday snap shot and are quite charming and appealing. At a larger scale they seemed to try to align themselves with painted landscapes, and that is a relationship that I don't think holds up.

I remained relatively unimpressed by the rest of the work in the show, barring that it may have taken an enormous amount of work to construct or create. There was one room with two videos being projected simultaneously into the corner formed by two abutting walls. Each was a video shot of the gutter, the camera moving forward at an even pace. The scale of the curb, the gutter and the objects that rested in it were much enlarged and that was momentarily interesting, but then what. On the right wall the gutter appeared in the right side of the frame and on the left wall the gutter was on the left. The camera was continually moving towards the corner of the two walls in both shots, so that the vanishing point was never visible and more of the gutter kept appearing from the invisible vanishing point. The rest of the work seemed still more pointless to me, there were some items, mostly firearms and such, that had been removed from their packaging and their carrying cases and replaced by duplicates of such made meticulously out of cardboard. Then there were also a few pieces resembling larger architectural constructions which were painstakingly constructed out of matchbooks and the like. Fun to look at for a moment, fun to imagine "Heh, what would happen if I just pushed this with my toe here" or "Imagine what it'd look like if we set it on fire!" but beyond that not so very interesting to me. But all you kids reading this at home should keep in mind that I'm a pizza critic who can't draw worth a damn, not a critic of fine art. I just don't want you going around saying "Man, that pizza diaries guy hates everything!" It just wouldn't be true.

Okay, so then we decided to go and have something more to eat, because Ted, Angela's former boss showed up just as we were all leaving Pfiff and still hadn't eaten anything. (Now does this sound strange to any of you? Angela is being fired ("let go") and her ex-boss is coming out with us. I don't know what to make of this, and can only surmise that the firing came from higher up the ladder and not from him. That place is full of wacky mysteries.) So Angela wants the five or six of us remaining to go to some tapas place. Most of us had already eaten by that point but figured that there'd be drinks and we wanted to stick around anyway because Jaime and Ravi were going to have a small party a little later at their apartment. So Angela leads us all along to Allioli (291 Grand St. btwn. Havermeyer & Roebling). I don't remember exactly why I was hanging back from the rest of the group outside, I think I was making a phone call, but I noticed the review in the window and when I got to the table I asked them "Do you folks realize that this place has a Zagat's food rating of 27?"

Of course, by the time I sat down Angela was already in the process of ordering tapas for the entire table. Actually, it was more like tapas for about two tables. Oh, and sangria. Let me make a note here about the sangria at Allioli. It isn't cheap. It's very good, but the pitchers are no bargain. The cost is the same whether you're ordering by the glass or by the pitcher. And we should know, we had at least three pitchers and I guess I was sort of counting out the glasses. Well, when the first pitcher arrived and it only served so many glasses before it was finished I was sort of suspicious. But forget the pitchers of sangria. (Although I should mention that we did see the normally staid Ted scooping the saturated fruit out of the bottom of one of the pitchers with his hand so he could eat it. Maybe he was just hungry.) The food was extraordinary. In spite of the fact that I'd already eaten more than my fill at Pfiff, it seemed that I was going to have to make room somehow for still more food. See, I have this thing about really good food. And I mean really good food, alright? It doesn't come my way that often, and especially not in situations where there's plenty of it to go around and it just keeps coming. So when it does, I will ignore whatever pain I may be suffering and eat until I really can't take anymore. My tablemates couldn't believe that I was considering having dessert after all we'd eaten (the figs wrapped in serrano ham is a must) but with that wonderful café con leche sitting before me I really wanted to continue with a lovely goat cheese mousse or something further from the menu. Somehow, I was talked out of it. Damn those fools for convincing me I was already full! That wasn't the point.

My wallet would have disagreed. In fact, when the bill arrived this time, my wallet appeared to be asphyxiating. It was a troublesome sight, and the knowledge that I'd gone to the bank earlier that day to make a withdrawal really wasn't making the sight of my empty billfold any easier to take. Oh well. It happens I guess.

At Jaime & Ravi's party co-workers started dropping left and right. I think I had a conversation with the girlfriend(?) of one of the other artists in the show (the matchbook guy, I think) in which I insulted his work. I didn't find out until afterwards and then I couldn't really remember if I'd put my foot in my mouth or not. It's really such a common occurrence, so I'm never quite if I'd said the inappropriate things I'd been thinking or no. Well, he can hit me at their next party. I managed to stay until very late, uncertain as to why I'd not been kicked out yet. Ted and Michelle and I all danced in a feverish circle holding hands at Michelle's insistence, which included grabbing both our hands and starting to run in a circle. Finally I decided that I should head on home but I didn't have any money. "Don't worry," said Michelle, "I'll loan you enough to get home." Of course then when she went to get her wallet it turned out she only had seven dollars. So I borrowed the money from Jaime and got in a taxi and went home.

Oh patient reader, how can I ever thank you for having read so far into this account which concerns pizza only cursorily? In spite of the fact that I've been trying to avoid eating much pizza lately in a vain attempt to shrink my mid-section, I promise that the next of my exploits here described will contain mention of a trip to a real, perhaps even famous pizzeria.