Play Dates by Leslie Carroll Read Free Book Online Page A

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    We’ve got a nice little group for Happy Chef’s Chinatown food tour. Me, Mia, wild-and-crazy-Gayle, and a delightful couple from Colorado, Bud and Carol Tate. Bud’s a Mets fan, believe it or not, so I take an immediate shine to him. And Carol throws pots—I mean, she’s a potter, not someone with a violent temper—so we’ve got some common ground in art appreciation. Zoë, who loves playing with clay, would throw a fit if she knew. Although she’s got her own ceramics activity after school today. I check my watch and realize I’ve got only a little over two hours before I have to pick her up at school and then drop her off at Our Name is Mud to make pottery with one of her friends from the Museum Adventures program.
    Gayle seems to be the kind of person who would get along well with anyone. She’s refreshed her tequila thermos this afternoon, but Happy Chef, a.k.a Charles, reminds her that everyone but me will be walking for nearly four hours and the pit stop locations may have negligible sanitary conditions, so Gayle stashes the thermos in her purse, after graciously offering everyone a round, nonetheless.
    As we head across Mott Street, I catch a whiff of something

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    Leslie Carroll
    delicious that smells like frying dumplings, become immediately hungry, and ask when we’ll hit the first tasting stop, whereupon Charles leads us to a tiny shop on the one-block-only incline that is Mosco Street. The Fried Dumpling House, fittingly, sells only fried dumplings. The shop is smaller than my bathroom. Mia looks at the place and quips, “You’d have to leave the store to change your mind.”
    As our tour progresses and we are treated to more of the native tastes, sights, and smells of one of the city’s oldest and most exotic neighborhoods, I become increasingly impressed with Happy Chef’s range of knowledge of the area, its history, and its culinary treats. As I say goodbye to everyone, needing to skip the end of the tour so I can get up to Thackeray on time, I tell Gayle that this is the polar opposite of yesterday’s tour with Mason-Dixon Barbie.
    “You shoulda heard Claire,” Gayle crows to Charles, stretch-ing my name into a sizeable diphthong. “She kept correcting the tour guide. She really knows her stuff!”
    Mia corroborates Gayle’s testimonial. “Add this to your ‘what I do well’ list, Claire. Why don’t you try to get a job as a tour guide?” she asks me. “You’d be a natural.”
    “I’d be happy to coach you,” Charles offers. “So long as you stay out of Chinatown!”
    A Happy Memory
    by Zoë Marsh Franklin
    When I was little, Mommy and Daddy took me to the circus every year. I was scared of the clowns because they were noisy.
    When I was five we got seats right in the front and a clown came over and honked a horn at me. He made me cry and Daddy PLAY DATES
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    bought me cotton candy to make it better. Then we were all laughing, Mommy and Daddy and me, because there were other clowns who weren’t noisy with little dogs dressed up like people and the dogs were smarter than the clowns and it was silly. And it was so fun.
    And then the man with the elephants came over because, before, he saw I was crying. He had a baby elephant named Lizzie.
    The man gave me some peanuts to feed the baby elephant. He said that elephants have feelings just like people. Like when another elephant dies they get sad. I liked feeding Lizzie so Mommy and Daddy bought me a whole bag of peanuts and Lizzie ate them all before the circus started.
    The man said if we came to see him after the show was over he would give us Lizzie’s auto graph. So at the end of the circus Daddy and Mommy took me back to see the man with the elephants and he gave me a piece of paper with an elephant footprint on it. And he said in case I forgot who the footprint belonged to, he would write Lizzie on the piece of paper.
    I still have the paper with Lizzie’s footprint and her name on it. That day when we went to the