If he chooses to remain in his seat, he is condemned to a dreary auditorium lit by glaring overhead lamps without music, lemonade, or even the bonbons that once were sold by pretty girls in the aisles. The entr'acte itself is usually about six minutes long, just of sufficient duration for a down-front patron to get to the rear gangway and have a cigarette smoking female burn a hole in his dinner suit. The only sane regulation in the New York theater code, the one against smoking inside the house, is one that is universally and shockingly disregarded. At the end of the show he must pay blackmail to a runner to secure a taxi, a form of competitive endeavor and expense made necessary by the limousines of half a dozen Hollywood exhibitionists which are parked at the carriage entrance to the inconvenience of all.
Contrast this evening of haste, shoving, and bad manners with the pleasure of attending a play at, say, the Geary Theater, where, at the moment this is being posted, Harvey is available to the polite audiences of the town with Rudy Vallee in the title role.
Curtain call is for quarter to nine, an hour which makes possible dinner either at home or at one of San Francisco's public restaurants where, pleasantly enough, it may be reported, there is a very considerable revival of good dining. The theater lobby is entirely free of the vacuous loungers and autograph nasties who scream and jostle their betters at New York first nights. There is a six-piece orchestra performing valiantly in the orchestra pit, and it will continue to do so under the guidance of a concert master who is obviously on good and familiar terms with many of the patrons at each entr'acte. Downstairs, and available without hurry or battling the elements at the fifteen-minute intermissions, is a spacious three-man bar.
This is play-going as New Yorkers can remember it before a highball in a theater became felonious and before the requirements of labor unions made it impossible for an honest fiddler to make a living at his occupation. New Yorkers can read this and weep or, taking arms against a sea of troubles, wire for a suite at the Palace or the Fairmont and rediscover a way of life which still combines graciousness and urbanity in an age when both are at an almost inordinate premium.
In this department's role of, as it were, a non-tearoom specialist, it gives us pleasure to be able to report, and favorably, on a couple of new abodes of the gustatory muse in the Far West. The first of these excellent premises is the Bonanza Restaurant in Virginia City, a vicinage which, since the great days of the Comstock, has been without eating places of any sort save a lunch counter of deplorable aspect and kitchen practices inherited directly from the Borgias.
The Bonanza is one of the three or four habitable mansions in Virginia City still surviving from the great, spacious days of the sixties and was, in fact, the Comstock home of the powerful Louis McLane, first manager of Wells Fargo's Virginia City branch. An imposing three-story stone house with lordly staircases and sixteen-foot ceilings (simply hell to heat in winter, they say), it is surrounded with its own lawns and flowering shrubs, a great luxury in this desert country, and is separated by a magnificent wrought-iron fence, also dating from the sixties and a veritable museum piece, from the Virginia City home of Roger Butterfield, brightest light in the Nevada literary firmament.
The Bonanza is open for luncheon and dinner and strictly by reservation, since its dining room can accommodate only sixteen or twenty guests within range of its perpetually burning fireplace. The entire setup is de luxe, limited, and, for Nevada, expensive, although New Yorkers who pay five and six dollars for a filet mignon three inches in diameter will not protest the usual ＄3.50 price tag on Nevada filets weighing upward of a pound per portion and averaging three inches in thickness, not diameter.
The Bonanza is the dream child of Mr. and Mrs. Halvor Smedsrud, who have leased the mansion for a term of years from Virginia's famous Catholic Church founded in the sixties by Father Manogue, lit the premises with gas and candles with a gratifyingly non-tearoom effect, and installed, in the galoshes closet off the front parlor, a door-wide, one-man bar presided over by Douglas Moore, Yale '41, crew haircut, “Whiffenpoof Song,” and all. The effect is a slightly demented and altogether satisfactory atmosphere of Chapel Street and the tables down at Mory's laden with Norwegian smörgaåsbord and populated by the ghosts of Jim Fair, Darius Ogden Mills, and Adolph Sutro along with the more tangible, cash-paying guests.
Pinterest
