You know you wanna :)

So, quite a few years ago back, my friend Richard and I decided to splurge, and make a visit to Windows on the World, the fancy restaurant at the top of the no-longer-existing North Tower of the World Trade Center. We were just penniless college students visiting from Vermont, (one of us must have just gotten a birthday check or something), and we definitely felt a bit out of place in this expensive restaurant full of well-dressed, affluent Manhattanites. (Now that I think of it, most of them were probably actually tourists, but we didn't know that then.) Trying to be sophisticated, we ordered champagne (you could drink if you were over 18 in some states in those days) and sushi. It was the first time I had ever eaten sushi, and I loved it! Every little tidbit was delicious, and different, and the presentation was quite artful. I remember I looked at this one, a little green mound on a sculpted piece of carrot, and thought to myself, "Mmmmm, I wonder what this one will be like?" So I scooped it up and ate the whole thing in one bite. Well, of course, it was a mound of pure wasabi! It burned my mouth and my esophagus horribly. I was in agony, and I must have looked a mess, with a red face and tears streaming out of all my visible orifices. Richard, who was only a friend (yes, I do have male friends), not a date, gave me this acute look of pity and vicarious embarrassment that I can remember to this day. There was no water on the table, so the only thing I had to wash this megadose of wasabi down with was champage, which is not exactly the ideal beverage to chug. Richard tried to flag down a waiter, but they were either too snooty or too busy to attend to the needs of a couple of rubes like us. Finally, Richard got up and rustled up some water for me, and eventually my body temperature returned to the normal range. Still... if I felt unsophisticated when we walked in, you can bet I felt even worse when we walked out!