Commander-in-cheap visits Taj Mahovel

Jeff Yeager is a rangy, garrulous guy who, by LOSING a contest looking for tightest wad in the greater D.C. area, found himself dragged into a television studio, and lionized as the Ultimate Cheapskate.

Note to Jeff: technically speaking, as the second stingiest guy, aren’t you the penultimate cheapskate, no?

I’d found a story about him in the ‘Comical’–the local paper (which we cancelled yesterday, which will free up 400 clams per year and more than an hour EVERY DAY of time lost to paper-perusing) –he puts his own jam into the glazed doughnuts…or some such thing.

It was somehow so tragic (someone likes jelly doughnuts? Instead of panna cotta? Sorry, personal lprejudice) and yet so funny I had to write the man and let him know how cool it was that he was proud to go on the record as frugal, cheap, tight, name your insult. Me, I’m hella generous but it has to happen without money cos that is the one thing I ain’t endowed with. Some kind of allergy, I’m sure.

Anyhow, wthin the year (the year I’m supposta be producing splendid book) Jeff was doing a book tour (NO I’M NOT JELLOUS) and S.F. was part of it. I can’t recall how, but the Navy had asked him to drop in and give a presentation (perhaps on how to get the cost of the basic screwdriver down from $336.00). And Charlie and I were within hailing distance.
Charlie marked his calendar, I marked mine, we both anticipated the visit in our different ways… (dread/ joy).

And over a leisurely three course meal in the light drizzle under the roof of the ‘habitat’ he learned about how it’s done here at Taj Mahovel: time-rich and cash constrained…living the good life as cheerfully squalid denizens in the land of compulsive consumption.

Pozole. Radishes. Wilted nettles and very fresh picked chard. And orphaned apple crisp.

In about a year, this feast will be written up in his new book The Cheapskate Next Door.

Now it’s a year later, and performer/writer Sandra Tsing-Loh has given a small nod to us in her article The Frugal Divorcee in The Nation.