Supper

This year I had one of my best Christmas Eve dinners ever. Maybe it's because it unfolded in such a leisurely fashion--a little eating, a little dancing and listening to music, a little nibbling, a little conversation. And repeat. Watching the sunset, admiring the ring around the moon. We started about 4 p.m., shucking five dozen kumamoto oysters and watching the light fade over the horizon as we sipped a 1996 Fleury Champagne followed by a 2004 Muscadet. Bruschetta was involved too, lavished with olive oil, ricotta cheese and fresh roasted red bell peppers.

I had always intended to get to one of the private, invitation-only supper club events held after closing hours at Rosso Wine Shop in Glendale. When I saw the notice that Raj Parr , the ebullient wine director for Michael Mina Restaurant Group, would be there pouring his Sandhi wines at a supper last night, I reserved a spot. When we walked into the shop just before 7 p.m., owner Jeff Zimmitti told us to grab a glass and poured us a white Burgundy, the 2010 Maison L'Orée Bourgogne Blanc, of which Parr made just eight barrels.

The Young Folks Urban Farmers return to Diep Tran's Good Girl Dinette in Highland Park for a family supper fundraiser on Dec.17. This will be the second year that the American-Vietnamese diner will host the fundraiser benefiting the group's hillside school farm project at the Los Angeles Leadership Academy. Started by Julia Carr and Daniel Lawler in 2010, Young Folks Urban Farmers is a collective of young people looking to influence the way Los Angeles eats through community involvement and interest in urban agriculture.

If there's anything better than fixing food you love for people you love, it's having them sing songs you love for you when you're done. That's a roundabout way of explaining how I got two-thirds of the Flatlanders to play for me on my birthday. The story starts long, long ago in a place far, far away (well, back in the 1970s in Lubbock, Texas). It seems like several lifetimes ago, but back then I was a sportswriter at the local newspaper. It's kind of odd to say anyone is lucky to be in Lubbock at any time, but I certainly was lucky enough to be there at a magical moment when the local music scene -- always thriving -- was absolutely amazing.

It's Sunday night. You can go out for Chinese, order in or ? radical idea ? cook. Some of you might get lucky and have a friend invite you over for homemade Korean barbecue or a paella. Whatever the plan, Sunday is for relaxing, for sneaking in a last dose of pleasure before the Monday-to-Friday blues start up all over again. That's why they call it "Sunday supper" as opposed to the more formal "Sunday dinner. " Lately, some of L.A.'s best restaurants have been tapping into that desire for something simple and delicious on Sunday night by offering prix-fixe suppers.

Hundreds of tourists lined up outside Milan's Santa Maria della Grazie church on Good Friday as Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece "Last Supper" was reopened to the public on a restricted basis. The exhibit had been closed to the public for two months while officials studied ways of protecting the tempera painting from pollution.

You live in a large and diverse city. You love the idea of its many worlds. But you rarely leave your own neighborhood. And your friends are more or less like you. How do you meet those who aren't? How do you breach your own borders? Marissa Engel, 35, of Hollywood long pondered these questions. Then, last December, she took action. "Host a meal in your own home," she wrote in a post on Craigslist. "Make new friends and have a dinner party without spending anything!"

Dipping its cup in the free-flowing vitriol of our current political discourse, Stacy Title's "The Last Supper" proposes a kind of Kevorkian Dining & Debating Society: If you don't like your guests' politics, put them out of your misery. As pure concept, "The Last Supper" seems a natural for sketch comedy. Or even a short film--Title's "Down on the Waterfront," by the way, was an Oscar nominee for live-action short a few years back.

Flazey, the gluttonous grouper that ate $5,000 worth of his tankmates in an Illinois pet shop, has eaten himself out of house and home. Terry Haley, the aquarium store owner from Lansing, Ill., has grown weary of the insatiable fish and plans to release it Monday in the ocean off Ft. Lauderdale. The fish's expensive tastes attracted the attention of the media last May and even earned it an offer to appear on "The Tonight Show." But Haley refused to take the fish to the studio.

Fereydoun Jeyrani's "The Last Supper" is the latest fiery feminist protest film from Iran, and Jeyrani has shrewdly expressed his sentiments in a brisk, appropriately tempestuous melodrama with an effective flashback structure. In tone "Supper" goes right up to the precipice of going over the top, but in his own way Jeyrani demonstrates the firm control and discipline that Todd Haynes brought to "Far From Heaven."

This year I had one of my best Christmas Eve dinners ever. Maybe it's because it unfolded in such a leisurely fashion--a little eating, a little dancing and listening to music, a little nibbling, a little conversation. And repeat. Watching the sunset, admiring the ring around the moon. We started about 4 p.m., shucking five dozen kumamoto oysters and watching the light fade over the horizon as we sipped a 1996 Fleury Champagne followed by a 2004 Muscadet. Bruschetta was involved too, lavished with olive oil, ricotta cheese and fresh roasted red bell peppers.

The Young Folks Urban Farmers return to Diep Tran's Good Girl Dinette in Highland Park for a family supper fundraiser on Dec.17. This will be the second year that the American-Vietnamese diner will host the fundraiser benefiting the group's hillside school farm project at the Los Angeles Leadership Academy. Started by Julia Carr and Daniel Lawler in 2010, Young Folks Urban Farmers is a collective of young people looking to influence the way Los Angeles eats through community involvement and interest in urban agriculture.

I'm visiting with my mother, and she is trying to describe the dimensions of the strawberry patch they had back on the farm in Nebraska. Big enough that you could pick enough berries to make strawberry shortcake for 25. One of the hired hands just loved strawberry shortcake, she remembers. He'd ask my grandmother, "Mrs. Jones, could we have strawberry shortcake for dinner?" "If you pick 'em," she'd answer. It must have been a sweet relief from harder work, picking strawberries in that patch under that unwavering blue sky, filling a deep basket with those crimson berries.

It's hardly a Trump Tower-like effort to put together a hot night life space. Sure, there's the licensing, staffing, furnishing and promoting, but it's usually something that can be done in a couple months. Unless, of course, you inherit a monster like the one that sits at 1439 Ivar Ave. in Hollywood. Nestled behind Amoeba Music, across from the ArcLight Cinemas structure, the yawning, 18,000-square-foot space has seen several incarnations come and go, and now it's been reinvented again as the super club Lure.

You live in a large and diverse city. You love the idea of its many worlds. But you rarely leave your own neighborhood. And your friends are more or less like you. How do you meet those who aren't? How do you breach your own borders? Marissa Engel, 35, of Hollywood long pondered these questions. Then, last December, she took action. "Host a meal in your own home," she wrote in a post on Craigslist. "Make new friends and have a dinner party without spending anything!"

What is a portion size to Elizabeth and Tim McCreary? It could be eating an entire box of macaroni and cheese with hot dogs mixed in or sharing a bowl of guacamole made with six avocados. "Sometimes we'll have five to six tacos each," Elizabeth McCreary says. "It's so unhealthy. " Like many people, the McCrearys, who live in Corona, have a tough time figuring out how much to eat at meals and snacks so they don't blow their calorie budgets. Faced with little time (he's a network engineer and she's a managing paralegal)

I'm visiting with my mother, and she is trying to describe the dimensions of the strawberry patch they had back on the farm in Nebraska. Big enough that you could pick enough berries to make strawberry shortcake for 25. One of the hired hands just loved strawberry shortcake, she remembers. He'd ask my grandmother, "Mrs. Jones, could we have strawberry shortcake for dinner?" "If you pick 'em," she'd answer. It must have been a sweet relief from harder work, picking strawberries in that patch under that unwavering blue sky, filling a deep basket with those crimson berries.

The Conrad cartoon of April 12 had a strong whiff of the sacrilegious in its depiction of the Last Supper (with a disciple saying, "Great concept! Let's hire a PR firm and polling outfit to design our marketing campaign"). Holy Thursday is the feast day of the Eucharist, the center of the Mass, which, in turn, is the re-enactment of the Last Supper. The bishops' PR contract with Hill & Knowlton may be fair game, but to lampoon a sacramental mystery in the process is no joke at all. The bishops' public relations campaign focuses on abortion.

Making Supper Safe Why We've Lost Trust in Our Food and How We Can Get It Back Ben Hewitt Rodale: 265 pp., $24.99 The statistics are shocking: "More than 200,000 Americans are sickened by food every day, and each year 325,000 of us will be hospitalized because we ate contaminated food. Most tragically, over the next 52 weeks, 5,194 of us will die from a foodborne condition. " As sobering as these numbers are, Ben Hewitt is no preacher; his goal is to understand how, in spite of improved technology, regulation and medical know-how, we have become persistently in danger of being sickened by our food.

— In 1994, Stephen Sondheim's "Passion" beat Disney's Broadway musical version of "Beauty and the Beast," its closest competitor, in the race for the best musical Tony Award. "Beauty and the Beast" collected only one trophy — for best costumes. But in the days after the award telecast, Disney's Broadway musical brought in a record-breaking $1.6 million in sales while "Passion" managed a fraction of that and closed six months later. "It just goes to show you what a best costume Tony can do for you," one insider quipped.