We lived in a barn in Verbier, Switzerland for a week.

We were the guests of our friends Jill and Victoria, the latter of whom owned the barn. A rustic and ancient looking structure from the outside, the barn had been converted into a luxurious home of multiple conveniences on the inside. It was also walking distance to one of the most famous and exclusive ski destinations in the world, which would have been helpful to me had it been winter.

Carol and I decided to thank our hosts by taking them out to a concert at the Verbier Festival, and then a late dinner. Verbier is old European money come to be entertained, and an evening of classical music brought out the smoking jackets. It also brought out women of a certain age willing to spend any amount of money on clothes and jewels and surgical procedures, in vain grasps at their long-vanished youth. And most curiously, I stood at the pre-concert bar beside a woman in her sixties seemingly dipped upside down in a vat of orange dye. She may have been a redhead in her younger days, but her bouffant was dyed an unnatural shade of bright orange. This would not have been terribly striking except that her face was the same colour. The woman must have used a sunless tanning lotion, the kind that promises golden bronze, and delivers carrot orange skin. She wore a shiny, fitted, orange leather jacket, and carried a matching orange purse. The enormous stones in her earrings and rings, each an inch square, were pale orange as well. She had an orange woollen scarf artfully tied at her throat. Smart silk pants (guess the color) led to her screamingly orange pumps. She looked confident that all of the colours of her ensemble matched. No argument there. I also felt confident that my blue jeans matched my black golf shirt…we were living out of our backpacks for the summer, so my concert-going choices were limited. Beside the pumpkin lady and her ascot-wearing consort, I feared I looked like an English country bumpkin.

We settled into our seats as the enormous orchestra warmed up. I was already hungry, and dinner was a long time to come. After the first movement, the featured pianist was introduced, and with a theatrical sweep of his tuxedoed arms and tails, he slid onto his bench. What followed was a virtuoso piano performance, completely overshadowed by his elaborate and exaggerated arm gestures when his fingers weren’t touching ivory. He raised each hand over his head with a flourish, paused for effect, and crashed them down on the keys as he grimaced in mock ecstasy. Over and over again. His shoulder length hair was flying in disarray, and his bow tie quickly untied itself. Giggling, I realized he reminded me of Bugs Bunny playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody in the famous Looney Tunes’ cartoon lampooning concert pianists. I couldn’t look at Carol, knowing that would release my pent-up laughter. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her shoulders bobbing up and down as she silently suppressed her chuckles.

After an intermission armed with plastic flutes, sipping cheap champagne at Dom Pérignon prices, my hunger had taken on a personality of its own. That personality was cranky, desperate, insistent. My hunger became a high-maintenance, attention-seeking child, who I tried to ignore without success. To add to my discomfort, the second half of the program was a long, long section of a Wagner opera. I like opera. I own many operatic recordings. But Wagner operas seem a bit ponderous to me, and always make me think of another Bugs Bunny cartoon, “What’s Opera, Doc?,” and Elmer Fudd’s immortal refrain, ‘Kill the waaaaaaabbit, kill the waaaaaaabit!” It was not lost on me that this was my second Bugs Bunny recollection in one evening, but I should not have been surprised. Most of my humour comes from cartoons, Seinfeld, School of Rock and Superbad.

Back to Wagner. When you don’t know the opera, there isn’t an English translation, it’s 10 p.m. and you haven’t had dinner yet, it can be a bit challenging. I found it difficult to concentrate. Several times the male and female leads reached dramatic and dizzying heights in their operatic parries. Each time, I thought their characters would soon die so we could all go to dinner. But no, they refused to die. After each elaborate crescendo, they would whisper/sing the next few bars, hug a bit, and then take us on another emotional, ear-splitting roller coaster. We snuck out before the encore, exhausted and famished.

A short drive away was an upscale Relais & Châteaux restaurant. The host looked us up and down, and I heard an audible sniff as he considered our casual clothes. It was 10:30 p.m., and there was no way I was leaving without dinner. I was prepared to make a bit of a scene if we were refused, but we were tremendously relieved when the snooty host resigned to seat us. His grudging acquiescence may have been related to the European recession and the paucity of diners at that late hour. Of the three other occupied tables, two had dogs roaming around their owners’ feet. It’s not that I don’t like dogs….it’s all the sniffing and nuzzling of my body’s private areas that I find off-putting. I have seen dogs many times in restaurants in France, usually in family bistros or outdoors. But this was a Relais & Châteaux, where I thought I could be spared the eau de chien while I nibbled on la braserade de bœuf, my 60 dollar main course. An interesting Swiss staple, la braserade consisted of raw slices of beef, some sauces, and an individual mini barbecue placed before me. Sixty bucks and I had to cook it myself!

The interesting meter experienced a sharp uptick as a party of four was seated at the adjacent table, extremely close, in the near-empty restaurant. The elderly gentleman sported the standard Verbier blue blazer with shiny buttons of the moneyed set. An ascot, of course, which matched the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. But in a rare doubleheader for me, he was the second person I encountered that evening wearing bright orange dress pants. He distinguished himself from the carrot lady by belting his pair barely south of his armpits. The man’s attractive wife/mistress was at least 30 years his junior, smartly dressed without a shade of orange to be seen. They were definitely paramours, pawing each other in a decidedly un-father/daughter manner. Rounding out the party of four were the couple’s two poodles, a bit distressing for hyper-allergic Carol. As soon as the couple was seated, the haughty host brought the dogs a large water dish, and I was surprised that it went on the floor, not the table. As it happened, it wouldn’t have mattered, since the dogs spent the next two hours jumping on and off of their owner’s lap, nibbling food from his plate. Well, not the entire two hours. Part of the time the poodles were either barking or begging. Carol spent those two hours sneezing. The waiter treated the dogs much better than he would treat children. Unlike their Italian counterparts, French restauranteurs don’t want parents to bring their children to dinner. There are usually no highchairs available, because toddlers do not belong in restaurants. Your host will sneer a bit when you arrive at a restaurant with children, even those as beautifully behaved as my own. However, when you bring your poodles to dinner, they roll out the canine red carpet.