Mezza Luna, Melville

Sunday, November 03, 2002

Service: * * * *
Food: * * *
Ambience: * * *
Babe Count: * * *

I've just arrived in Melville from Parkmore, where I've been eating Alfred and Gowrie's chicken samoosas. In my boot is an amazing gift. Alfred has painted an exceptionally perceptive portrait of me. In return, I've given him the last remaining print in my first rubber stamp edition. I'm still going to give him his pick of a charcoal drawing.

Damon has SMSed me. "We're at Mezza Luna!" it says. I get there and sit down.

Karl Kikillus is sitting at the next table, flexing his gym-built shirt sleeves. "Classic biceptual," I say. The word rhymes with 'bisexual', and refers to a class of guy in love with his own upper-body strength. And yes. It's a word I coined. So please use it, and make it find a place in the Oxford Dictionary.

I'm with Damon Berry, filmmaker extraordinaire and puppeteer for Takalane Sesame Street, and his girlfriend, Wendy New, singer songwriter with New York edge.

Wendy and I start singing the happy birthday song to Damon.

He blushes, stands up, and does a big-voiced, "I love you both!" and we all hug. It's starting to feel like a threesome until my innate mischievousness kicks in.

"Hey," I say in a stage whisper, pretending not to look at Karl Kikillus, once a tv star, hero of Popshop, the music video program that ran on South African television in the eighties. "Isn't that Martin Locke???" Martin Locke was also once a tv star.

Damon and Wendy break down into giggles, and I'm saved.

Maria, our Bulgarian waitress who also happens to be a fully qualified dermatologist by day, brings a surprise -- an enormous chocolate brownie in melted chocolate sauce, with scoops of vanilla icecream. One lone candle sways in the breeze. "Wish!!!" says Wendy, and Damon blows. We all eat the cake. Me especially.

Now I have to break to explain something here... Heidi, the babe I'm falling for in Somerset West, has sent me an email telling me that I must focus more on the waitresses in my Coffee-Shop Schmuck columns. She fears that readers will be bored hearing exclusively about her. So...

Maria is short, has long, frizzy/wavy dark brown hair, and brown eyes. She's really very shapely, with a neat, protruding bum, and pert breasts. Her nose is slightly bulbous in a cute, eastern European way. "I came from Bulgaria when I was twenty-two," she says.

"So you became a dermatologist here then?" asks Wendy.

"No, there. I finish school when was sixteen. I study. My father not pay. He say I must pay. When I am fifteen, I come back from swimming trip with school, and I see bags packed in flat. I say, 'Are we going somewhere?' They say, 'No. We are leaving. You old enough now to make living.' They leave. I work. Now I am in South Africa. Work four nights here. And have practice in daytime."

Phshew. What a... uhm... uh... progressive family she came from.

When Maria flits back to the kitchen to bring me my roast vegetable pasta (which, by the way, turns out to be rich, nicely cooked, heavily loaded with olive oil, tasty, tangy, enjoyable), Damon says, "The Somerset West girl sounds like a better bet."