Let them cook

In the seminal Casablanca, there is a classic moment when the Humphrey Bogart character is asked how he ended up there. Bogie, doing laconic and world-weary as only he could, replies, “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.” When Claude Rains’s iconic Captain Renault purrs, “Waters? What waters? We’re in the desert!” Bogart’s response is simple. “I was misinformed.” This exchange occurred to me when I recently visited Bordeaux, a city with awe-inspiringly beautiful architecture, some of France’s most stylish places to shop and eat, situated teasingly close to the beaches of the Atlantic coast. Yet if you attempted to tell anyone that you’d come to Bordeaux for history, couture or coastline, you’d get the Bordeaux version of “What waters?

We were somewhere around the Palazzo when the drugs began to take hold. Unlike Hunter S. Thompson, though, we were surrounded not by imaginary bats but an amiable crowd of agèd hippies. Our destination was the Las Vegas Sphere, to hear Dead & Company. The venue itself eschews the definite article, but it’s futile. No one says they’re going to Sphere. It’s too much of a destination. It needs the definite article. Security was rather lax, though the price of tickets plus the age of the average attendee greatly lessened the chances of anyone showing up with mayhem on his mind. After going through a metal detector, where we are instructed not to empty our pockets, we headed up the stairs to find our seats.