Moon Over Wyoming

Once upon a time there was a little eatery in Manhattan called Moondance Diner that was down on the corner of 6th Avenue and Grand St., near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel that, sometime in 2007 (seemingly overnight), disappeared completely. Not the Tunnel; the Diner. Not that I noticed particularly, it was just another hole in the ground and it’s difficult to miss something when you don’t notice it’s gone. But now that the mystery is solved I realize there was a mystery and now I, in retrospect, miss it.

I remember Moondance because it was always open and it was always, well, just there, sort of a beacon of familiarity on the way home, sometimes worth a stop in the wee hours of the night. It served milkshakes and malts and burgers and fries that were greasily adequate for restoring brain function(s) after the intake of too much liquid, unspecified herein. I also remember Moondance giving “taco soup” a culinary blow that was never recovered, although the dish might not have been a good idea in the first place. The place had been around for 80 years or so, and it didn’t get any press until word got around that it had employed both Jonathan Larsen (the creator of Rent), and Spiderman’s girl friend in the first movie of that franchise.

Well, guess what, Moondance Diner is now in LaBarge, Wyoming (pop. 600) and will reopen on Jan. 9, 2009. In 2007 it was scheduled for demolition but Vince and Cheryl Pierce, perhaps in a fit of Midwestern lunacy, saw it for sale on a Website and bought it for $7,500 and had it towed 2,000+ miles to Wyoming. So it really did disappear overnight. In 2008 the couple ran out of funds and, a double blow, the major winter weather trends in Wyoming gave the structure a good crunch, collapsing the roof and walls. Luckily the original sign had been put in storage.

Well I guess it’s lucky anyway, because they have forged ahead in LaBarge and will be open for business in a couple of weeks. I can’t judge if this endeavor was a good investment but it couldn’t have been any worse than the Ponzi scheme that has brought a large number of big time financial wizards to their knees. I wonder if that taco soup is still on the menu.