Part 3 (1/2)

Considering how e our chairs don't fit us better No size 6 wo a size 14 dress but a size 48 hs 250 pounds is expected to sit in the same size chair a 98-pound woman sits in To some extent a chair in a room is considered coes itself in the same way day after day when it settles down, and iven chair sizes

Certain purposeful chairs have been well done but with no regard to the size or shape of the occupant The electric chair, the dentist's chair, the theater seat or the airplane seat are ain every chair is the same size We're not I suppose it would be difficult to sell theater tickets by seat size or for a dentist to haveon whose tooth ached But the fact remains: people don't take the same size chair any hfurniture ned it, it seened and sat on for the test under laboratory conditions These conditions don't exist in a movie theater or on a crowded airplane

In the theater chair, the shared armrest has always been a proble the one on both sides of the seat in which he or she is sitting and the occupants of the adjacent seats get either none or one, depending on who flanks them on the other other side The shared aric of the theater, but it's a constant source of irritation to anyone watching a bad movie side The shared aric of the theater, but it's a constant source of irritation to anyone watching a bad e airplane chair is a marvel of comfort and we could all do worse than to have several installed in our own homes The problem on board, of course, is the person in the seat next to you The seats are usually lined up three across, and if the plane is full the hter a comfortable place of repose; it's a trap and you're in it

At a ti for clues to our character, it's unusual that no one has started analyzing us fro of character as a person's handwriting and an even more reliable indicator of both personality and attitude than, say, pal

The first fewones, but no et off your feet, you can't stay in one position very long Sooner or later that wonderful feeling you got when you first took the weight off your feet goes away You begin to twitch You are soed in the chair but uncertain as to what to do about it

Everyone finds his own solution for what to do with feet No two people do exactly the sa position usually cos see of a psychoso to see how often we use a chair designed to be used one way in a inator could not have i on it backwards with our arms where our backs are supposed to be and our chin on our ars draped over one arainst the other ar their joints We do things to chairs ouldn't do to our worst ene our best friends

You'd have to say that of all the things we have built for ourselves to make life on earth more tolerable, the chair has been one of the most successful

Mr Rooney Goes to Dinner You see so s that all of us have done badly that life can be depressing unless you look for sos we've done well And there are so, for example

It's absolutely necessary that we eat to survive, but we could do that by stuffing food in our ratulate ourselves for having turned eating into a civilized and often very pleasant little ceremony called either breakfast, lunch or dinner

All of us enjoy the cereive ourselves once in a while is eating out in a restaurant

There are 400,000 restaurants in the United States and if you ate three meals a day in restaurants for seventy years, you could only eat in 76,000 of theone to all 400,000 restaurants in the United States to o to the one you like best or least I didn't even go to the one I I like best like best

My job h boss Several ave me an order ”Travel anywhere you want in the United States,” he told ood restaurants on the companyand report back to me”

I took money, credit cards and a lot of bad advice froue about where the best restaurants are in the United States Boston, San Francisco and New Orleans have always had good places Florida has had so time New York has a hundred that would be the best in town anywhere else But there have been soes for the better in places that didn't used to have any any good good restaurants

[i over Southern cooking, for instance Places like Cincinnati, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, even South Bend, Indiana, have excellent restaurants You can get a gourmet meal in Houston, Texas, or Phoenix, Arizona

There are a few places that puzzle h For instance, I don't suppose there's a place in the whole world that grows as ourest trend is a leveling out that has taken place It's harder to find that great little undiscovered place in a small town, but more often than before you can find a restaurant that serves at least acceptable food The Rotary Club usually meets there

There's oing to be very good, but it isn't going to be very bad either And becauseto be the saood and bad little independent restaurants, of course, is all the big chains and the fast-food places Many independents have been driven out of business

There are the big steak chains, for instance They often serve beef treated with tenderizer and are called so like the Beef and Bourbon or the Steak and Stein They and the fast-food places bring in billions of dollars a year Most are owned by big corporations with other interests: Pillsbury owns Burger King, for exa seller, a lot more A pies much these days The chicken places have come up fast in the last ten years and there are pizza parlors everywhere You don't have to go to Mexico to get a taco

The biggest and most successful fast-food operation is, obviously, McDonald's There are 3,232 of the They've driven thousands of individually owned diners and cafes out of business The drive-ins have been victims in a lot of areas

A typical round meat, the French fries are excellent and the shake is an iive the impression it's made with ice cream-which it isn't

McDonald's restaurants are probably a reflection of our national character They're fastthey're efficientthey make money and they're clean If they're loud and crowded and if the food is wastefully wrapped, packaged, boxed and baggedlet's face it, A really distinctive about A” isn't even a phrase like ”French cooking” That accounts for why our best restaurants serve someone else's native dishes

Italian restaurants are most popular Thirty-six percent of all Americans who eat out eat in Italian restaurants at one ti to the National Restaurant association, eat in Chinese restaurants French restaurants are most popular with people whoIn the last ten years there's been a population explosion of japanese restaurants They serve steak, shri with bean sprouts and onions-and it's all cooked right there in front of you Theis part chefpart show bizand part Kas about these places is they never serve you a piece of anything you can't eatno bones, no fat I've never been to japan For all I know, they don't eat like this over there Someone told me there's a Benihana of New York in Tokyo

Part of the fun of eating out is doing so different japanese is different How many times in the last feeeks have you co sukiyaki for you?

The other kind of japanese restaurant is the sushi+ bar Five years ago you couldn't have told me I'd ever eat a piece of raw fish Now I'm addicted to sushi+ Sushi+ is carefully boned and carefully sliced raw fishtunasquidmackereleeloctopusserved with cold rice wrapped in seaweed Sounds good, doesn't it? It's always attractively served on a board It looks like a japanese painting

Scandinavian sasbord places are popular, too: A the soen one day-with a friend He's a sasbord expert

Walter Cronkite: This is a Danish soonberries

Cronkite: That's right That's what it is That's the word I was groping

Rooney: You were grasping for

Cronkite: And they're marvelous

Rooney: What is this pink stuff?

Cronkite: That pink stuff is sopink stuff there

I think it's beets I believe I don't know I'm not sure what that is I've never taken it It looks repulsive, to tell you the truth How about shrimp? Beautiful shrimp?

Rooney: Yeah, I'll have a shriure that's to make it hard so you don't take too o to where the dessert tray is brought in like this, every table the reaction is the sa the statement to their friends ”II shouldn't Oh, no, I shouldn't Take that away I don't want to even look at that”

Rooney: ”But maybe I'll just have a little bit”

Cronkite: But then they come back

Waitress: And these are special ones over here They're made of almond paste

Rooney: I really shouldn't

Cronkite: No, I shouldn't eitherso have one

Rooney: Oh, thank you

Like everything else, there are trends in the restaurant business- fashi+ons in what a restaurant looks like Years ago, ood restaurants had those white tile floors with lots of mirrors around and waiters orked there for a hundred years wearing white aprons that came to their ankles

In the past twenty years restaurants have gotten very conscious Too conscious, probably In the sixties, most new restaurants with any pretensions at all looked like this As you came in, there was usually a coat of arhts were low and there was often a candle on the table held in one of those s