Concessions

Pioneer Square’s Sake Nomi is mostly a retail store—artfully
appointed shelves of rice wine with funny names (“Drunken Whale,”
“Frolicsome Emperor,” “Monkey’s Lament”) and pretty labels, rustic
little pottery sets for sake-specific purposes—but it also has a
bar, and the bar has a TV behind it, and once in a while, the TV
shows movies. Usually, the owner told me, they screen movies with
an obvious sake connection, but this past weekend it was The Big
Lebowski. He justified it with the observation that a glass of
cloudy sake looks kind of like a White Russian. Touché,
sake man. Touché.

Watching a movie in a sake shop is less than ideal. A sake shop is
not a movie theater. Sake is not popcorn. Patrons (there were
approximately eight of us, making it a weirdly intimate living-room
experience, if your living room were strewn with sake bottles) perched
on tall, lumbar-liquefying stools and sipped cloudy sake samplers. I
hadn’t seen The Big Lebowski in a few years, and it wasn’t as
good as I remembered—less expansive, more dated (that said, it’s
still better than, oh, 100 percent of the movies I watch on a weekly
basis). The sake, though supremely tasty, gave me a headache. That’s
about all I got. I would be pleased to buy sake at Sake Nomi in the
future. I do not want to watch movies on its TV, however.

Speaking of headaches, Natasha Richardson fell down. Then she
died. In between, she got a headache.

Richardson—blond, likable, European—occupies a weird
blind spot in American popular culture. When the news of her accident
surfaced (while taking a beginner’s ski lesson in Quebec, she fell
down, hit her head, was okay for a bit, got a headache, and then DIED),
half the people I talked to had no idea who she was. One friend
thought it was Miranda Richardson who died. Another, Natasha
Lyonne. Both admitted, sheepishly, to feeling “less sad” once they
realized it was some blond, likable, European lady. That blind spot is
a shame—Richardson may wind up more famous for falling down and
then dying (but seriously, WTF?) than for her body of work. That’s too
bad. Elegant yet accessible, she occupied that reassuring feminine
space between sexy and motherly—like, come to think of it,
Maureen O’Hara in the original The Parent Trap, a role that
Richardson reprised in 1998. (Earnest Parent Trap reference!)

I have trouble with sincerity. But you know who doesn’t? People who create and comment on YouTube video tributes to dead
celebrities. I’ll let them have the last word: “Why have beautiful
people to die so early? I don’t understand this.” “omg dats soo sad
like she was in da parent trap and… dat just sad man!” “Her
Everlasting Beauty And Eternal Light Will Cocoon The World In Her
Rememberance.” “I loved her.”