As plans go, it was standard Friday night fare, but perfect in its simplicity. Dinner at the famed and tiny Kebab Cafe, lauded by Astorians as the best place to get middle eastern with the added hilarity of the charismatic owner, Ali. Nine o’clock movie, Sin City, at the Astoria Kaufman Theatre. The theater was at the southern end of Astoria, and Kebab Cafe was on the southern end of Steinway St., right nearby, according to the superpages map I diligently checked before leaving the office.
It was when we turned onto Steinway, at 7:30, that the alarm bells started ringing in my head. Western Beef? Autobody shops? Where was Kebab Cafe? Where? WHERE?
The first domino fell.
I got on the phone, called information, all the while insisting that I’d seen the map online, that I knew that it was at Northern and Steinway, knew that fact to be true even in the very face of reality as we stood on that intersection with no cozy Kebab Cafe to be found. Information put me through to cheerful Ali, jovial wonderful proprietor of the middle eastern foods I’d been craving all week (tabouleh! falafel! pita!), and he said, yes honey, we are at Steinway and 25th avenue. Eight avenue blocks from where we were.
The second domino fell.
I looked at my watch. I did the math. I whined to Stuart, who was proposing everything short of teleportation to stop me from being sad about Kebab Cafe. We’ll take a bus! A cab! We’ll…
The third domino fell, and with it, furious little tears threatened to leap out of my eyes. I fucked it up, I moaned. The date we’d planned to celebrate the beginning of a weekend, the beginning of spring, our neighborhood, good news at Stuart’s job … I’d fucked it up! And Stuart, holding on to the thread of my rapidly disheveling calmness, looked stunned. Helpless.
And that’s when I stopped. That’s when I turned around the childish Good Ship Tantrum and stopped. And as we started to walk west again, towards a casually hip diner we knew near the theater, as my breathing got long again, I tried to explain to the man next to me something that he probably already knows – that plans are always more than plans to me.
A plan, in a life as erstwhile-chaotic as mine has been, has been like a liferaft, if that wasn’t a sad and tired metaphor. But it is, so I’ll explain it this way, the way I did as we walked slowly to the diner.
Magazine editors have storyboard walls for each upcoming issue. They take pieces of paper and design each page, laying down the artwork. It allows them to move pages around, reconfigure feature stories, but they’ve got the stories and the artwork there all along.
I have a storyboard too. For every evening I plan, for every weekend I look forward to, every trip, every life event, I automatically storyboard it. How I picture it going, who will be there, sometimes down to what I want to wear. It’s like a catalog of my evening, in small happy frames. And when I see an evening a certain way, I come to rely on that process of unraveling the storyboard as it occurs. I take pleasure in it, as if life were a movie and I was watching it play out happily.
But when something happens, something I didn’t plan, it’s as if some mischievous imp dashed into my calm and collected warroom, grabbed my storyboards off the wall and delighted in tearing them to shreds with his devilish little hooves. Nevermind that he doesn’t have opposable thumbs – he just ruined my movie!
And that’s when the tears start. And the useless whining. And the utter inability to go with any kind of flow I didn’t evaluate, price, and approve beforehand. And what I finally realized standing on the corner of Not There and Other Way, what finally swung into the frame to save the day from yet another one of my pouts, was how inherently selfish it was. How inherently self-centered it was to get upset when my perfect plan didn’t work.
Because there were – if you remember – two people standing there. Two people who’d been looking forward to middle eastern food and the jovial Ali. And only one of them was throwing a tantrum. The other one – Stuart – was completely robbed of the chance to be maturely disappointed because of the mammoth snit I was throwing. When one person is overreacting, the other person must underreact. And at the look of helpless despair on Stuart’s face, I finally started listening. It’s okay, he was telling me. Let’s go to Cup Diner, he suggested. We’ll plan another evening around visiting Ali, he promised.
And right there, on the corner of Steinway and Northern, I threw away my tantrum. I tossed the ruined storyboard out the window, told the merciless little imp who preyed on my need for organization to go stuff himself, and I put down the snit. We had lovely burgers at Cup Diner and enjoyed every minute of Sin City.
And when we got home, I realized that storyboards can change. That I can reap the benefits of my need to plan and organize – always knowing a good restaurant in any neighborhood and having a stable of laid-back weekend diversions – as well as enjoy the detours and where they might take me. Because when I got home, I read in the newspaper that there’s a famous old mansion at the northern end of Steinway.
It’s right near Kebab Cafe.
Maybe we could go this Friday night.
What would I wear?

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