Valentine's Day

I hope you all had a lovely Valentine's Day. After my morning yoga class with Bob, which he characterized as being "the Valentine's Day Massacre," but which was actually a bracing series of standing poses, I went to see "Noises Off" with Richard. I had a voucher for a ticket, but stupidly had not called to reserve a seat for this performance. Luckily, I believe in going early, and we were able to get him the last seat, a row back and to the right from me. There are really no bad seats in that theater, so it went well.
The play started off as a typical bedroom farce; the only trick was that it was presented as a play within a play, and the program gave us a phony cast description and advertisement for the play within a play, "Nothing On." After the first intermission (there were two), we thought the play was funny but a bit ordinary.
However, things went wonderfully haywire from that point. In the second act, we got the behind-the-scenes pootah with only an occasional peek through the windows and doors at the play we had already seen performed in the first act. The third act was back out front, but all pretense at presenting the play had gone out the window. The actors raced around, flinging platters of sardines and basically giving up on the play. We talked afterwards about the amazing timing they had to have to present an impression of that degree of bad timing. It was really terrific!
Then we walked down the street, thinking we were back east in February rather than in mild Orange County, CA. The wind sliced through us like a machete as we waited on cold corners for the lights to turn. But the Vietnamese restaurant we went to (can't recall the name--Saigon something... perhaps Grill?) was wonderful. I have been there before. It is usually empty at dinner time, and this was no exception, but as usual, the meal was fabulous. They have a free hand with herbs. The charbroiled fish sported a fresh green covering of dill, besides the platter of rau ram, Thai basil, mint, and cilantro, dipping sauce, and rice noodles. The seafood eggrolls, with their own platter of herbs, were wonderful, completely non-greasy and crisp. Wrapped in cool romaine leaves and dunked in the dipping sauce, they were my idea of culinary heaven. I should really find out their proper name and recommend them. Suffice it to say that they are on Sunflower and Bristol, across the street from South Coast Plaza.