“I’ve been admiring your tie.” It was hardly a memorable line if not for the person who said it to me. I stood, napkin in hand, to ease her path as she and her dinner companion left their cozily adjacent table at Manhattan’s Café Luxembourg, a favorite restaurant of mine on the Upper West Side where I’d taken my assistant for her birthday. Half an hour earlier, the maître d’ seated us mere inches away from their table, and as my assistant settled onto their shared red banquette, I politely tried to keep my focus on her. And, yet I…
