At the Hollywood Booth at Crown and Anchor Pub with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

At the Hollywood Booth at Crown and Anchor Pub with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One of my favorite places to celebrate my birthday when my daughter Florence was little was the English Crown and Anchor Pub in downtown Monterey, California.

I do not like to eat cake for my birthday, but dearly love curry prawns (jumbo shrimp) over basmati rice with a Newcastle brown ale to drink.

There are many other selections on the menu that rotate with the season as well as pantry favorites such as:

-traditional fish and chips with coleslaw

-steak and mushroom pie

-lamb shank with ratatouille

(Thank you cookbook author Claudia Roden for popularizing this delicious dish for the British through your BBC show on Mediterranean cuisine, which resulted in your informative cookbook Mediterranean Cookery.  The photos allowed people to identify ingredients in markets.)

-prime rib with Yorkshire pudding

Bread pudding is always on the dessert platter, so I get that with ice cream and real whipped cream on top.  I do not eat like this every day, so I can enjoy meals like this about once a month without liposuction.

I skip coffee at the restaurant, but I like the combination of coffee, Jack Daniels, milk, and whipped cream that I make at home.

The ambience at Crown and Anchor is mostly nautical with its color drawings of ship battles, facsimiles of signed treaties, hammered brass plates with English pub scenes, Beefeater ale steins, and a tall statue of an English castle guard, complete with a towering black hat. 

I smile sweetly and laugh that one of my English ancestors was the captain of the ship Naiad, which was part of the British fleet that beat the combined fleets of the French and Spanish navies under Napoleon at Trafalgar, Spain.  I have mixed ancestry and I have researched all of them.

I looked at Florence and said, “That statue of an English guard is a good ‘photo op,’” I said.  Laurent took a photo of her by it.

“You need to have a good ‘visual’ to get yourself on TV to promote your films and TV shows when you grow up,” I said.

“You can practice photography with your iPhone,” I continued.

Laurent showed Florence the different functions on her iPhone: photo, video, microphone recording, and GPS coordinates. 

“Daddy studied photography in school when he studied engineering.  He can probably build those things.  He also taught teens how to do photography at a summer camp in France, too. 

Anyways, if you use the panoramic, you can make mom look really fat.  If you use the zoom, you can make my nose really big.  If you use that button, you can get video.  This how you turn on the microphone,” I said.

Part of the reason I showed her this at Crown and Anchor is that all the lawyers, judges, police, media peeps, and other Monterey notables have money, but don’t know how to use the technology.  They probably have to pay for classes at Apple, too.

“Take a video of me going into the London telephone booth,” I said to Florence.

“Normally no one is allowed in the telephone booth, but if you film quickly, I can sneak in and out of the booth before the owner notices,” I said.

So, Florence and I pretended to be going to the bathroom and I ran to the telephone booth.  Florence was filming as I popped in the telephone booth and waved my hands at her.

“Eh, nobody’s allowed in the phone booth.  Not even stage mothers pretending to be producers,” growled the bar stool chorus.  I smiled at them and pranced out of the phone booth.  You never know if Clint Eastwood could be at the bar in disguise.

Laurent tries to keep a straight face about all the stage mother politicking, especially when Florence or I make reservations for the “Hollywood Booth” under the large, ship model of the Titanic.

I showed Florence how to use the Internet Movie Database to calculate how profitable a movie is.  Big sales do not mean big profits, if your production costs are high.

“Those Harry Potter films might not be as profitable as people think, if you look at the production costs,” I told Florence.

Florence wanted to be an actress and wrote J.K. Rowling to be an extra in one of the Harry Potter films.  Her agent wrote back saying that only British actors were used in the films.  I thought that was discriminatory as heck.  Hollywood employs people from all over the world on its projects.  I fell out of love with the Harry Potter books at that moment even though I read most of them.

(Florence wrote to some other TV series that were on fan fiction and got a Scandinavian TV show to come to Monterey and film a show about a Scandinavian love boat cruise.  They hired her as an extra, so she got paid and SAG points.  You do make your own opportunities as Jon Bon Jovi sings about in his song It’s my Life.)

“Don’t feel too bad.  I think she does not have rights to Harry Potter merchandise,” I said.  I was wondering if she signed away electronic rights, too.

“Why is merchandise important?” Florence asked.

“You can make more money on it than ‘the art’ you produce.  Your creative work becomes a publicity vehicle.  I wonder if Fifty Cent got his stage name that way,” I said.

“Also do not build huge lists of people you do not know on social media or get a business page, if you want to grow an audience.  There are stalkers all over social media.

I am very unpopular at work for insisting that the FBI website for Internet safety be put up on the library webpage, and that librarians be trained in how to report suspected child abuse,” I said. 

Ho-chi Minh passed a lot of information this way in restaurants and bars I learned when I lived in Chicago.  I just loved having an English Bulldog restaurant for the same reason where you can even buy a Beefeater Stein as a souvenir.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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