That’s word of the week — it’s pronounced vor-FROY-dah and it means the intense anticipatory joy of looking forward to future joys. It’s German, and it seems weird to me that English has borrowed schadenfreude and not vorfreude — so I’ve borrowed it myself and plan to use it a whole lot.
I discovered it yesterday when a German fan emailed me to say that his copy of My Real Children had arrived, and used it as a subject line.
The trip so far has been really great. Yesterday afternoon we went out to lunch with Warren and discovered a really excellent gelateria, Dolce Gelateria near the Christopher Street subway stop. It’s really great — equivalent to Fous Desserts in Montreal and as good as all but the very best gelato places in Florence and Rome. Also, they had something I’ve never had before and Ada had only had once, olive oil gelato. It had all the delicious richness and taste complexity of olive oil, and the creamy sweetness of gelato. Incredible. We plan to go there again on Thursday after BEA, and I commend it to your attention if you are in New York.
Also, in the same neighbourhood I discovered the US’s strategic cheese reserve, and a very cool Czech bistro with excellent spaetzle, and an awesome fun letterpress place with terrific original things. (You know what I love? Everything has a website now, so you don’t have to memorize everything. I just found those to share with you by googling what they were plus “Greenwich Village”.)
I mentioned Dolce Gelateria in the questions after my reading at the Word, a lovely bookstore in Brooklyn. One of the great things about this tour is getting to visit thriving indie bookshops, and it just makes me happy to see them. Last night’s reading went well and was a ton of fun. Ada sang, I read and answered questions, Ada sang again and then I signed. This not only gave the attendees more variation than just listening to me, and excellent thematic music, but it had the unexpected bonus of energising me during the process, so that I was far less exhausted afterwards than I usually am, so that was great. We plan to repeat this fun program at other bookstores, so for those thinking of coming to the Wellesley Books reading tonight, there will definitely be music. After the event we had dinner in a neighbourhood bistro with a few friends, and that was lovely too.
And today we are zooming up to Boston.
And I feel such vorfreude for the rest of this trip!