DAVID'S LONELY PLANET

Dinner parties in Paris can be dreary affairs full of bombast and xenophobia. All reasonable efforts are made to conceal these ugly traits but no one is ever fooled for long.

With that said, I would rather endure a month of Sundays with a table full of Frenchmen than an hour breaking bread with North Americans.

The politeness is enough to make you wish you were sitting next to a skinhead with bad teeth.

I don't know how my dear friend David Schoffman does it. He must have the patience of a snail.

At a typical French dinner party there is rarely any music playing in the background. If there is it is typically something either lugubrious like Shostakovich or jingoistic like Debussy. In the States hosts always feel obliged to soften the atmosphere with some barely audible jazz, typically something canonical and old. It's as if the musical clock stopped ticking after A Love Supreme. 

 Then there's the small matter of the food. Let's just face it: Americans have little respect for crustaceans, butter and beef and too much respect for the Food section of The New York Times. Their tin, tone deaf palate for wines only compounds the offense but that's an entirely different indictment.

But getting back to Schoffman, whenever the poor guy finds himself at a table with people he hardly knows his foot invariably lands in his mouth. He once told a Los Angeles collector of "a certain age" that her taste had atrophied with her surgically frozen face. One hostess was asked why she let her 19 year-old daughter dress like a prostitute only to learn that the young woman in question was unrelated to her, had come to the dinner as her brother's date and that in fact she was a prostitute.

Schoffman is extremely maladroit around people and I suspect that if he could live his life again he would have been happier as a thief.

Or if not a thief than a recluse with a tidy little trust fund.