Indeterminacy 64

On the way back from New Haven we were driving along
the Housatonic. It was a beautiful day. We stopped
to have dinner but the restaurants at the river’s
edge turned out not to be restaurants at all but
dark, run-down bars with, curiously, no views of the
river. So we drove on to Newtown, where we saw many
cars parked around a restaurant that appeared to
have a Colonial atmosphere. I said, “All those cars
are a good sign. Let’s eat there.” When we got in,
we were in a large dining room with very few other
people eating. The waitress seemed slightly giddy.
David Tudor ordered some ginger ale, and after quite
a long time was served some Coca-Cola, which he
refused. Later we both ordered parfaits; mine was
to be chocolate, his to be strawberry. As the
waitress entered the kitchen, she shouted, “Two
chocolate parfaits.” When David Tudor explained to
her later that he had ordered strawberry, she said,
“They must have made some mistake in the
kitchen.” I said, “There must be another dining
room in this building with a lot of people eating
in it.” The waitress said, “Yes. It’s
downstairs and there are only two of us for each
floor and we keep running back and forth.”

- John Cage