The List

September 14, 2003 1:10 p.m.

May I tell you about our specials? This evening we have an exquisite braised pheasant in a decadent mushroom sauce...

A list of those, living and dead, who are On the List, who possess perpetual entrance beyond the Velvet Ropes to the Cafe and the Table. You may occasionally glimpse their ghosts knocking back Pernod and slapping cheeky waiters. In no particular order:

Anais Nin
Henry Miller
D.H. Lawrence
Jorge Luis Borges
Sylvia Plath
The Pablos--Picasso and Neruda
Lawrence Durrell
Milorad Pavic
Virginia Woolf
T.S. Eliot
Lewis Carroll
Gertrude Stein (and Alice, of course)
Federico Garcia Lorca
Ezra Pound
Anna Ahkmatova
Marina Tsvetaeva
Clarice Lispector
Umberto Eco
Emily Dickinson
Italo Calvino
Vladimir Nabokov
The Brothers Grimm
Diane Wakoski
Walt Whitman
William Shakespeare
Oscar Wilde
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Homer
Jack Kerouac
Sei Shonagon
Sappho
Charles Baudelaire
Arthur Rimbaud
ee cummings
John Keats
George Byron
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Leo Tolstoy
The Bronte Sisters
Geoffrey Chaucer
Issa
Basho
Buson
Victor Hugo

Allen Ginsberg and Ernest Hemingway are on probation, but provisionally allowed when they keep their hands to themselves.

And of course, Catherynne Valente, Cristina Chavez, and Rene Seagraves live here. The bar has threatened to cut off their tab.

This list will grow. Any nominations are welcome.