During a late-night dinner date at Pastis with my vivacious red-headed friend from prep school, we were enjoying our champagne cocktails and feeling particularly unwilling to pay for a third round. After re-locating to the bar, a pair of deranged thirty-something bankers eventually insisted upon buying two bottles of champagne for us and our two girlfriends.

In my red-headed friend’s sudden tipsy haste, she managed to separate the top of her champagne flute from the stem in one clean break. Only twenty minutes later, the odd phenomenon happened again. I am a firm believer in signs, and it seemed symbolic on some level.

Outside for a breath of night air, my Swiss friend and I chatted with two other gentleman strangers. They were European, so my Swiss friend remarked on the American-girl penchant for hopping off to the bar with no cash or credit card in tow, expecting to be showered with les boissons gratuites upon arrival. The Swiss girl doesn’t engage in this rather dated behavior evocative of AMC’s period drama Mad Men. She prefers to pay for her own cocktails and forego the accompanying awkward feelings of obligation to strange, as in “unfamiliar,” men. Of course, some women simply accept a free drink and deflect any of the drink’s potential symbolic value. Maybe these are the truly modern women who are willing to use their feminine wiles to their advantage (?).

And maybe a champagne flute is just a champagne flute. Broken or not.

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