Thursday night, we, the entire RegenAxe clan, braved the cold and went to see the Garden Glow. The Garden Glow is the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Christmas lights display. This is a new event for the garden, which is normally content to celebrate the holiday season with a room full of model trains and poinsettias. This event has been going on for a while and actually ends this weekend. That and the cold made for a rather uncrowded tour last night. The photos shown here are selected from the exterior lights. Later I’ll do another post on the interior of Henry Shaw’s house. Shaw is the garden’s founder. His house was decorated for the season by various garden groups.
After the Glow, we decamped to Mangia, an Italian restaurant on South Grand. During most of dinner the boys held a running dialog about Warhammer and Warhammer 40K, two miniatures based war games that they like to play. This left Anne and I still out in the cold, relegated to making snarky comments about the relative merits of ultra-marines versus aquamarine and don’t get me started on cerulean blue. Eventually, we were able to wean them off topic and Dan started telling us about his work at Otis.
He told us about the job application process, which culminated in a panel interview that included the department head. Dan is in fashion now, although he seems to have fallen into this field much in the same way as the character Andy from “The Devil Wears Prada” did. This department head is no shark like the Miranda Priestly character, but she does seem to swim in the same waters as the likes of Anna Wintour, her Otis job interview panel included Edith Head. LA is about nothing if not about name dropping and here am I doing it too.
Dan’s best story is one he heard from one of his other co-workers, a former retired Marine. Visualize Chesty Puller to drop another name. The Marine was racing to get to work on time, when he notices next to him at the stoplight his boss, the department head. Not wanting to get to work after her, when the light turns green, he races ahead only to get plowed into by a DWI. His last memory before waking up in the hospital is of his boss bodily hauling his ass out of the car, getting his blood all over her Prada suit.