Rosenbush Café

Gesundheit!: Femme Cloud Sneezes Nose Off (Copyright © MIFW-B)

apologies to the Medici, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Jay Ward, Max Ernst, Anais Nin and anyone else living, dead or animated who may or may not be easily offended by the eXisTenTiaLNihLisT

When Baldassare Cossa was elected Pope John XXIII, in 1410, he could never have imagined he would one day find himself sitting in the gardens of Rosenbush Café and sipping a glass of herbal tea while kicking back with his friends, the Medici. With “the God’s Bankers” Giovanni and Cosimo having complete control of the papal account which hardly made the other Florentine families pleased they had to spend their money somewhere and so Café de Rosebush offered catering for a reasonable fee:

All are welcomed, living or dead, real or imagined, good or bad, hip or dip so long as they are willing to accept magnificentia.
We pay you for your generosity and grandeur.

They insisted we renovate to resemble a medieval establishment and Renaissance city and Cosimo de’ Medici knew Filippo Brunelleschi was finding work difficult since he was still insulting all the wrong people convinced their unorthodox genius to place a dome on Rosenbush Café!

“If we can sponsor a pirate for a pope, we can handle a maverick architect,” exclaimed Cosimo, who bought another round as the restaurant began attracting the attention of Dadaist Max Ernst, erotic author Anais Nin, linguistic philosopher Noam Chomsky and Rocky, the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle, the moose, among others.

Of Brunelleschi, Chomsky opined: “He was a linguistic contortionist with the confidence of Da Vinci, the unorthodox style of Frank Lloyd and Bucky Fuller on steroids while contributing a cognitive revolution of classical liberalism under the guise of the Cathedral of Florence…” before we realized he was drinking our Alice’s Wonderland Specialty Tea, containing magic ‘shrooms, meant for Table 16 with Hunter S. Thompson, Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. Joyce Brothers and Helen of Troy.

Oop.

Max was really taken in by Anais as he drew hybrid lion-headed men while she eloquently described the wonder of penises and Venus from the Delta. As the two influential and visonary talents celebrated their insightful illusions to allusions through eclectic nomadicism (ok, maybe it isn’t a real word) and Dadaism spiked with artistic license or perhaps a learner’s permit to enlightenment.

Luca Albizzi was still happy to be friends with Cosimo and the Gonfalonier of Justice paid for continuous rounds on the house until our well-stocked wine cellar was soon an empty basement but thankfully Mr. Peabody and Sherman, used The Way Back Machine to restock from across the millennium; la passione per il vino italiano!

I was surprised at how much vino Bullwinkle could consume and even more shocked to learn he had once had a fling with Natasha while Boris was unconscious in another room. “It was her accent, especially when she said ‘moooose.’”

Rocky added, “Yeah, that was after we wrapped our 1961 record, Rocky the Flying Squirrel & His Friends, where they sang ‘We will double, single and triple cross, our very closest friends!’ She was always hot in that slinky black dress and no underwear and Bullwinkle couldn’t contain himself. Remember Sherman got drunk and disappeared and Snidley Whiplash caught him in the bathroom of the recording studio? He had earlier raided Nell Fenwick’s hamper. Dudley Do-Right never understood what an adolescent cartoon boy would do with Nell’s used panties!”

“Yeah,” recalled, Mr. Peabody, “Snidely ended up in Frostbite Falls and got elected Consigliere. Sherman ended up turning tricks in the French Quarter, poor bastard. Woof.”

Bullwinkle: “And Nell became a nudie model and moved to Venice to write her memoirs: ‘Distressed Damsels on the Canadian Railroads’. Dudley fell off his horse and broke his neck somewhere in the Northwest Territory.”

“Those were the days,” signed Rocky.

The Birth of Venus: Botticelli ode to Quattrocento

When Botticelli was commissioned, by the Medici, to paint “The Birth of Venus” he could never have known his wonderful pagan mythology of desire would one day hang mysteriously over our courtyard inspiring all who entered to strip naked and jump into our Fountain of Youth.

“Goddesses like Venus bring us the Eros of fertility and we must obey her without question,” Dr. Brothers says, trembling, as she and Hunter Thompson douse one another in honey. “H-her hand, covering her…you know…with the long golden hair is symbolic of passion without apologies.”

Physical passions met decadent paths of uncertainty when unexpectedly the Dominican monk, Savonarola, entered the Café, destined to whip and torment himself into a frenzy of disturbing moralizing fanaticism especially towards any visual art that wasn’t religious. Fortunately, we still had some special tea left and Dr. Leary and Chomsky held him down and forced the potent hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms down his throat under he saw the light at the end of his tunnel of love and he traded his disdain for lascivious nudes for a set of French Postcards, compliments of Anais, and disappeared into the darkest corners of out garden never to be seen again.

According to Lorenzo de’ Medici: “Nothing like a great psychoactive substance to subdue the inner beast of over zealous religious incarnations.”

One by one, our guests all quietly faded into transparency, the men taking on the head of a faun, like the ancient satyr-like figures once chiseled from marble by Michelangelo Buonarroti and the women becoming Venus incarnate before all vanishing into wisps of smoke.

What will brunch be like this afternoon when the Wright Brothers entertain the Montgolfier Brothers on blind dates with Lucrezia Borgia, Lizzie Borden, “Fear of Flying” author Erica Jong and Rapunzel?