Maybe Arthur Had the Right Idea...

We seem to have a table problem with our Wednesday night dinner trips.

You remember those Wednesday night dinners... I've mentioned 'em before in these pages. Regular trips to El Rodeo. Been doing it for almost 19 years now. Hardly ever missed a week. The attendance has fluctuated, but our group has included (at one time or another) me, Charles, Brett, Chris, Ralph, Allyson, Trish, Ed Thomas, Lanny Lathem, Buck, Chrissy, Taura (Lanny's wife), Markay (Chris's wife), Susan (although it's been many years since she's made the trip... she hates to eat that late), Patrick Key, Whitney, Jared, Bobby Politte, Amy, and a few other occasional attendees such as Randy Satterfield, Ward Batty, and Nick Pastis.

The group began with Charles, Chris, Brett, me, Lanny, and Ralph. Six people who've known each other for a long time. Over the years, other people have joined us while others have left, creating a slightly dynamic membership built on a relatively stable core.

For a long time, seating was stable as well: the core would sit together, since the meals were built around our friendship and our interest in catching up with one another. But as attendance has grown, the size has made it difficult for one end of the table to hear the other. It might not sound like much of a problem, but it's sometimes frustrating because the seating arrangement now frequently spreads the core group out along the table, where we can't really talk to each other.

Don't really know what to do. We don't have "assigned seats" as such, but I think it's been a couple of months since Brett's even been able to hear anything that Chris or Charles had to say. A round table might not be a bad idea... except that it might be of sufficiently large diameter that those on one side would have trouble hearing those on the other side anyway!

We'll see what happens over the next few weeks; I'm sure that a solution will be make itself known...