Jaleo, the tapas restaurant, has been around since 1993. When it opened, nobody knew what tapas were and the waiter’s opening remarks about “small plates” were probably informative. There have been plenty of new restaurants in D.C. since then, and Jaleo has filled up with tourists and conference attendees. It is still one of the best restaurants in the city. It’s where we can get a real Spanish gin and tonic flavored with herbs, lemon, and juniper berries, structured around a big ice cube. There is a cold garlic soup with grapes and almonds, and for the vegetables, you can have grilled asparagus with pimentón, and a Catalan salad of warm spinach and raisins, and they mix Spain with the mid-Atlantic in a crab salad with diced vegetables that tastes like coleslaw.

This was not a good day, and the world may have changed in ways we don’t yet understand. Yet for the record, there is still plenty of laughter and entertainment and human ingenuity to go around. After dinner we went to see a production of The Taming of the Shrew directed by Ed Sylvanus, who makes his plays interactive and usually gives the audience something to eat. During the intermission, we went up on stage and were invited to have miniature slices of cake as we watched the characters sing wedding songs and pretend to do ill-advised things after having too much to drink. This was the first Taming of the Shrew I’ve seen where I found Katharina’s final speech convincing, and it was certainly important that it was an all-male cast. To surrender yourself so completely to someone else is a horrible prospect, of course, as long as it’s a result of gender inequality or coercion; but to give up everything of your own free will and completely trust another person to guide you through the world, who wouldn’t want that?

(Photo: Swamp, southern Maryland.)

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