Eggs, Pancakes, Bacon, Sausage, Hash Browns and Coffee

Still More New Music

There was this place. It's gone now, so don't bother looking for it. All you'll find is chic clothing boutiques. But once, long ago... it was something.

In Cambridge, across the street from Somerville and a few blocks down from Arlington, there used to be a place called "Vic's, the Breakfast King." Like many breakfast joints, Vic's had specials. And regulars. And ill-tempered cooks who chain-smoked.

But unlike most breakfast places, Vic's was only open from 2am until 8am. They knew their target audience: kids who'd been to clubs and weren't ready to go home. Drifters who had nowhere else to go. The occasional trucker fresh off a haul from points west.

When it opened, there weren't many places to eat in the middle of the night in Boston. Naturally, the hipster crowd flocked there. And the larger wannabe hipster crowd. And then the so-unhip-they-may-actually-be-hip crowd, led by Tip O'Neal, longtime Congressman and Speaker of the House. Whenever he was in town, Tip would show up 15 minutes before closing and buy everyone coffee. (I never saw this happen, but it was in the Boston Phoenix, so it had to be true.)

For months, I wandered by during the day. I peered in the windows at the old banquettes and the wallpaper left over from the Eisenhower administration. And I dreamed of the fascinating conversations that must take place there every night. Surely Vic's was some kind of magical place.

If I could only hang around until 2am (or get up really early), I could experience the magic.

It took months, but I finally made it in. So at 2:30 one morning, a friend and I straggled up the street, drawn by the yellow neon sign with the giant cracked egg on it.

From the street, you couldn't tell anything was happening. But when we walked in, the place was packed. We got the only open booth and tried to drink in the atmosphere. But no one wanted to talk to us. Maybe the magic started later.

So we ordered. Some cholesterol-laden stack of greasy food and syrup. Not gourmet, but great bang for your buck.

And the jukebox was playing something vaguely familiar, but hauntingly hard to identify. Looking around, I realized it could be any time in the past 40 years. The crowds would look the same, the food would be the same, and the decor at Vic's would be the same.

I half expected to step out into the street and find it was 1958. But it wasn't.

And I went home and slept a heavy, carb-laden sleep.




Freddy and Francine, a duo consisting of two people not named Freddy or Francine, makes the type of sweet music that seems to have come unstuck at some point in the past and gently floated down the years until you noticed it.

Bianca Caruso and Lee Ferris began writing and performing together a few years ago, but you could close your eyes and swear these songs date from 1968. Or 1973. Or 1989.

Maybe it was their song playing at Vic's that late night years ago.

But I'll never know. Because a few months after my only visit, Vic's closed for good. The neon sign with the cracked egg came down. Some Yuppie in Lexington bought it and put it in his basement above the original bar the Yuppie had bought when his favorite punk club closed in 1982.

Last year, I was visiting Boston. And I found myself walking down the block, trying to figure out exactly which boutique clothing store had once been Vic's. But I'd waited too long. The memory had faded and the magic was long gone.

I was about to give up when I looked down on the sidewalk and saw a single tile among the concrete. It had a cracked egg on it. I looked around for someone, anyone to tell, but no one was interested.

Maybe, just maybe, I thought, I should wait on that spot. Surely Vic's would reappear at 2am and I could walk through the door, wade into the crowd, and hear that song again on the jukebox.

But...

I had a plane to catch. I had things to do and places to go.

And sometimes maybe it's better to let magical places live on in memory instead of trying to force them into a world where they no longer fit in.