Back in Spain I referred to Valencia orange juice as the nectar of the gods. Well, we have now found its counterpart, Bolo do Caco, the food of the gods.

When we discovered Bolo do Caco being baked and sold on the streets of Funchal, it looked so good that we just had to buy a loaf and take it back to our apartment for dinner.

It’s a flat, circular bread that’s shaped like a cake, which explains the “bolo” part of its name (“bolo” is Portuguese for “cake”).

It’s traditionally cooked on a caco, a flat basalt stone slab, which explains the second half of the name.

The ingredients are pretty simple: flour, yeast, salt, sweet potato mash, and water. But somehow, in a way I can’t begin to comprehend, those simple ingredients are combined and transformed into something incredibly delicious, a decidedly doughy delight.

It’s usually sliced in half and slathered with garlic butter, but it can also be eaten as the bread in an octopus or steak sandwich.

Bolo do Caco is good. Damn good. So good, in fact, that Jamie and I now buy a loaf every day and take it back to the privacy of our apartment, where we wolf it down and then fight each other for the scraps like a couple of hyenas tearing into the carcass of whatever the lions have left over.

Like I said, it’s really good.

I used to have a business associate who was a liar. A horrible liar. He would lie about anything and everything. Needless to say, this trait did not make him a good business associate.

For example, one time he left very late for a client meeting and told our receptionist to call the client and tell him that he’d had a flat tire on the freeway. The ol’ “flat tire on the freeway” story became standard operating procedure for him, the excuse he used whenever he was running late.

A few months later he was late for another client meeting and demanded that our receptionist make the same call.

“What are the odds,” the client said to the receptionist. “The same thing happened to him a few months ago.”

Lying comes naturally to some people, but it’s very difficult for others. I would like to think I fall into the latter category.

The reason for this little preamble will become apparent soon enough.

I made our Funchal, Madeira hotel reservations in early February. For those of you uninclined to do the math, that’s six and a half months ago.

We didn’t want to stay on the outskirts of the town nor up in the hills above the city. We chose our hotel (which shall remain nameless for reasons that shall also soon become apparent) because it was right in the heart of Funchal. We made the reservations six and a half months in advance because we wanted to make sure we could stay exactly where we wanted to stay.

So I was quite surprised to receive an email from the hotel reservation manager the day before our arrival. It read:

“Good evening. We inform you that due to a last minute situation regarding an overbooking in our hotel. We have to relocate you to another Hotel for the two first nights. On the 27th August you return to our Hotel. Our transfer will pick you up and bring you to our hotel. If you have any doubt regarding this situation please don´t hesitate in contact us. Thanks for your understanding.”

I immediately Googled the other hotel and found that it was 1.8 miles outside of town.

Well, as you can imagine, I did have some “doubt regarding this situation” and per their suggestion, I did not hesitate to contact them.

In an exchange of emails with the reservation manager, I expressed my considerable displeasure and pointed out that whatever overbooking had occurred, it had occurred long after we made our reservations back in February.

They responded with another email that offered to upgrade us to an even nicer hotel. Another quick trip to Google told me that this hotel was in the hills 1.5 miles above Funchal.

I again expressed my displeasure and told the reservation manager that I wanted to speak to the manager.

The reservation manager asked for my telephone number. A few minutes later my cell phone rang. The reservation manager apologized, but said no rooms were available. Jamie claims I raised my voice, but my recollection is that I remained completely calm. In fact, it was an almost zen-like calmness, if my recollection is to be relied upon.

As the reservation manager continued to insist that we could not stay at the hotel of our choice, I suddenly blurted out, “You must honor our reservations. It is our 25th wedding anniversary and staying at your hotel is the one thing my wife wanted most. That’s why I made the reservations so far in advance.”

This was a blatant lie. 100% balderdash. Our actual anniversary is April 22. We’ve only been married 17 years and we’ve only known each other 22 years. I do not know where this blatant untruth came from. It just spontaneously popped out of my mouth. Unplanned, unpremeditated, unexpected.

Lie or not, it stunned the reservation manager into complete silence. “Let me get back to you in a few minutes,” she finally said.

Well, a few minutes later I received an email telling me that someone else (someone who I’m sure had made their reservations long after we had) would be booted from the hotel and moved to one of those other alternative hotels that had been offered to us. And then, to top it all off, the reservation manager told me that we were being upgraded to a suite and that we would receive a special gift from the hotel upon arrival.

When we arrived, the hotel was everything we had hoped for. The location was ideal. The suite was exquisite. And the free gift was a 25-year old bottle of champagne with which we were to celebrate our special wedding anniversary. In other words, everything was perfect.

There’s just one problem.

Jamie now wants to celebrate our wedding anniversary every April and again every August.

I don’t know if you saw the news, but actor Jay Thomas passed away yesterday in Santa Barbara.

You may remember Jay for his regular role as Reno DaVinci on Mork & Mindy. Or for his regular role as Eddie LeBec, Carla’s ice hockey playing husband, on Cheers. Or for his ongoing role as Jerry Gold on Murphy Brown. Or as his starring role as Jack Stein in Love & War. He was also a long-time very successful morning DJ in Los Angeles and New York and more recently on Sirius XM.

But I remember Jay as the star of two series of commercials I wrote — one for El Pollo Loco (a California-based chain of Mexican chicken restaurants) and the other for Santa Anita Thoroughbred Racing.

A couple stories worth telling about my experiences with Jay:

When we conceived the El Pollo Loco television and radio ad campaign, we asked the casting director to bring us voices with personality. We wanted an announcer who brought a little something extra to the campaign. Probably a hundred different voiceover actors “read” for the campaign — meaning they tried out by recording a script we had written. The casting director then put all those recordings together on a cassette and my partner and I sat down and listened to all of them.

There may be more tedious chores in advertising than listening to 100 voiceover guys read the same script over and over and over again, but I cannot at this moment imagine what they may be.

After a while all the voices began to sound the same. One hundred different, but similar voices reading the same words, but trying hard to add their interpretation of “personality” to the script. We were beginning to give up hope of finding the actor we wanted when the casting director said, “OK, now this next one is a little different. It’s not what you’re expecting. Do you know who Jay Thomas is?”

Of course we did. Jay had for several years been a very funny, caustic, quick-witted and highly-rated morning DJ in Los Angeles. My business partner and I had serious doubts that this guy could possibly give us the “read” that we wanted.

But we listened. And we were blown away. We both laughed out loud because Jay’s audition, the personality he brought to the campaign, was pure Jay. It wasn’t what we thought we were looking for, but it was different and it was great. Really great.

So Jay Thomas became the voice of El Pollo Loco.

Which brings us to the next two stories.

Having this unique personality as the voice of El Pollo Loco meant I had to write scripts that were far different than anything I’d ever written for McDonald’s or Burger King or Pizza Hut. They had to be written with Jay’s unique personality in mind.

Jamie claims the funniest line I’ve ever written was in an El Pollo Loco commercial. The company’s roasted chicken was far healthier than the greasy, fatty fare offered by KFC, its main competitor. So I wrote a commercial called “Secret Blend” that started with Jay saying:

“I just ate lunch at that place that cooks its chicken in a secret blend of herbs and spices. But I have a question: Is grease an herb or a spice?”

Yeah, that’s a pretty funny line, if I do say so myself.

Recording sessions are often long, tedious affairs in which the voiceover talent reads the same script over and over again while the ad agency writer/director tries to direct him/her into giving it exactly the performance that was in the writer’s head when the script was written. It’s not unusual to do dozens of takes and re-takes and to require lots of editing to make it come out the way you hear it on the radio.

But when Jay did an El Pollo Loco recording session, he usually nailed it in two or three takes. He’d be in and out of the studio in ten minutes. He could read a script exactly like I heard it in my head when I wrote it and he always brought a 60-second script in at exactly 60-seconds. Not fifty nine and a half, not sixty and a half. Sixty seconds exactly.

After our first recording session, I complimented Jay on how he had managed to get it so right so quickly.

“It was easy,” he said. “Whoever wrote these scripts really understands me and has nailed my personality perfectly.”

That’s one of the nicest compliments I ever received in my advertising career.

Another Jay Thomas/El Pollo Loco story:

The company wanted a commercial advertising a 12-piece chicken offer that they had named “The Really Big Deal.” I wrote the commercial, and although I don’t recall the exact copy, it said something about someone who was “hungrier than a lumberjack who’s been Dancing to the Oldies with Richard Simmons.”

The client’s Advertising Manager was appalled. “We can’t mention Dancing to the Oldies or Richard Simmons,” he insisted. “He’ll sue us.” So I was forced to change the copy to read “hungrier than a lumberjack who’s been dancing to that old music with that crazy exercise guy.” Clearly a much weaker line, but the lawsuit shy client refused to budge.

We got to the recording session and Jay read the copy but stopped when he got to that line.

“Wouldn’t this line be funnier if we changed it to, “…Dancing to the Oldies with Richard Simmons?”

“That’s the way it was originally written,” I said. “But the client is afraid they’ll get sued by Richard Simmons.”

That’s when Jay said one of the most surprising things I’d ever heard.

“Well, then you hired the right voiceover guy. Richard Simmons and I were best friends growing up in New Orleans. He’ll never sue because he’ll think it’s funny that I’m the one saying it.”

What are the odds?

We recorded it the original way. Neither Richard Simmons nor his lawyers ever called to complain, and El Pollo Loco sold a whole lot of chicken.

UPDATE: JULY 14, 2024. Richard Simmons died yesterday and while reading his obituary I noticed that he was born on July 12, 1948. I looked up Jay Thomas birthday and discovered that it was also July 12, 1948. So they were not only childhood best friends, they were born on exactly the same day. Remarkable.

Now let’s move forward a few years.

I was working on a television campaign for Santa Anita Thoroughbred Racing and wrote a series of funny TV scripts that featured a knowledgable male horse race fan explaining the sport to a ditzy woman. I wrote them with Jay Thomas in mind.

Unbeknownst to any of us, he was a horse racing fanatic. He loved to bet on the ponies. So he was thrilled to find out we were going to shoot the commercials at Santa Anita on an actual race day so we could capture the roar of the crowd and images of the horses breaking out of the starting gate.

I said earlier that recording a radio commercial often takes dozens of takes, but TV commercials can be even worse because there are so many more variables when you add a video component. So each shooting day requires a much larger crew, many different takes and many different set-ups for each different shot that is required.

Every time we had a short break, Jay would disappear. It got to the point that it was delaying the production, so the producer finally took him aside and asked where he was going between shots.

“Every time we take a break I run over and place a bet on the next race,” he said. “And I’m having a pretty good day because I just won $1200.”

When we broke for lunch, Jay announced that he would join us as soon as he cashed in his $1200 winning ticket.

We finished lunch, but Jay didn’t return. We waited and waited and then waited some more, but he was still missing in action. We sent people out to find him but they came back empty-handed. The clock was ticking and we were beyond the time allotted time for lunch in the production schedule and the star of our commercials was nowhere to be found.

Panic was beginning to set in when the door suddenly burst open and Jay sauntered into the room with a huge smile on his face.

“Sorry for the delay,” he said, “but my math was a little off. I didn’t win $1200, I won $12,000 and when you win that much they make you go to a special office and fill out a bunch of paperwork for the IRS before they’ll give you the money.”

We all laughed and congratulated him on his good luck, but told him he had to stop making bets or we’d never get the commercials completed before the sun went down.

“OK,” he said, “I’ll make you a deal. I promise not to make any more bets if you’ll promise not to tell my agent I won this much money while I was working because he’s gonna want his 10%.”

That was classic Jay Thomas.

He was one of a kind and the world will miss him. But I know that wherever he is right now, everyone around him is laughing.

And since we’re delving into deep thoughts here, always remember the immortal words of philosopher Soupy Sales:

“Be true to your teeth and they won’t be false to you.”

A glass of port in one hand and a plateful of chocolate in front of her — in Jamie’s mind, that’s just about all it takes to be Portuguese.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, are a couple shots from inside the incredibly beautiful Majestic Cafe, often called one of the world’s most beautiful cafes.

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When we were researching this trip, I saw photos of an incredible beach on Spain’s northern Coast, Playa de las Catedrals, or in English, the Beach of the Cathedrals.

It seemed like a perfect name for a beach that was home to a series of immense natural arches that looked like flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral.

This was something I really wanted to see. So I talked Jamie into taking a day and night away from our stay in Porto and substituting a four hour drive north to see the beach. The key phrase in that last sentence was “talked Jamie into,” because she really loves Porto and wasn’t really crazy about the idea of taking a day out of our stay there.

To make a long story short, we did it, but probably shouldn’t have. The weather sucked — it was gray and cloudy and rainy. The arches were far smaller and less impressive than they seemed in the online photos. There were more people on the beach that you’d find at Disneyland on a busy summer day. And, on top of everything else, our hotel was, well, let’s be generous and say it was not the Ritz Carlton.

This is what the professional photos look like. Perfect light, perfect clouds, perfect water. The arches look spectacular. And huge. Let’s not forget huge.

But this is what our reality looked like. Gray, rainy skies. Just enough sun and hazy clouds to blow out the sky. And people. Lots of people. And to add insult to injury, the arches look kind of puny.

Once again, the professional photographer had perfect light, perfect sky, a perfect water. And all those people seem to have fled the beach as if the professional photographer had leprosy.

We must look like the very pictures of health, because all those people who fled from the leprosy-carrying professional photographer have returned in full force.

Playa de las Catedrals may not have been everything I had hoped for, but there were compensating factors that made it pretty damn great.

Are you familiar with the term Coyote Ugly? If not, please allow me to explain it via the old joke that originated the term:

Late one night a drunken guy meets an attractive girl at a bar. They hit it off. They go back to her place and he spends the night. He wakes up the next morning and she’s lying sound asleep on his arm. Now sober, he looks over and sees her in the daylight and realizes that although she seemed hot when he was drunk, she is actually so remarkably ugly that he chews off his own arm in order to get away without waking her up.

That’s what’s called Coyote Ugly.

Well, Porto is not Coyote Ugly. It’s just as beautiful in the light of day as it is in the dark of night. We showed you photos of Porto at night a few posts back, so we figured it time we show you some daytime shots.

(Sorry about the hazy skies in some of the shots, but they’re having massive forest fires just outside the city, making the skies a bit brown.)

Everything in Porto revolves around the Douro River which bisects the city.

Towering churches rise above the rest of the city’s skyline.

In fact, you might even say that church towers dominate the city.

The city is filled with squares and every square is built around a fountain.

Either that’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa or my camera angle was slightly off. Bet on the latter.

These narrow alleys were built to make it easier to defend the city. One man at the top of the alley can defend it against an army.

Many buildings — even just ordinary homes — are decorated with exquisite exterior tiles.

No, we didn’t take this photo. It’s far too good for us to have taken.

This is the Majestic Cafe. To no one’s surprise, it is often called one of the world’s most beautiful cafes.

And this is what The Majestic looks like on the inside.

This is Porto’s dazzling Livraria Lello bookshop. The then penniless J.K. Rowling lived in Porto in the 1990s and Livraria Lello’s staircase was  the inspiration for the Hogsworth library in the Harry Potter books. We didn’t actually get inside because about a thousand wacky Harry Potter fans were lined up about a block down the street.

Porto City hall. No, seriously, this is the city hall in Porto. Don’t know about you, but the city hall in my home town was a squat one-story building just this side of condemnation.

And just when you thought Porto couldn’t get any more beautiful, here’s a shot of Jamie on the Douro River. Ignore the Coyote Ugly guy sitting next to her.

Porto is renowned for having some of the world’s coolest street art. If I had to guess I’d say dozens (maybe hundreds) of buildings have had their previously empty, boring walls enhanced by the works of world famous street artists. None so famous that I know their names, of course, but that probably has a lot more to do with my ignorance than their prominence.

No more words necessary. Enjoy.

The next one is my favorite. I don’t know much about art, but I know I like cats.

Try to imagine the average Portuguese citizen coming home after a long day at the office and saying, “Hey, honey, I’m feeling a little too chipper tonight. Let’s go out to dinner and get depressed.”

And that brings us to the subject of Fado, Portugal’s most popular type of music.

Almost every restaurant in the country has a sign out front that says, “Fado tonight.” We were curious because we didn’t know anything about this type of traditional Portuguese music, so we chose a restaurant at random.

The word Fado is Portuguese for “fate” and the music features sad tunes and lyrics. No, not just sad. Mournful is a more accurate word. It explores feelings of resignation to fate, melancholy and loss — permanent, irreparable loss — and the damage it inflicts on your soul.

In other words, do not expect Katy Perry to show up on the Fado Hit Parade.

The music is sooooo sad that you don’t need to speak a word of Portuguese to understand the gut-wrenching emotion it expresses.

The restaurant we selected had two female Fado singers who were accompanied by two guitarists. The first singer performed two depressing solos and then went out into the street to smoke cigarettes while the second singer did two even more depressing solos. They alternated back and forth all evening, each one trying to drag the diners further into an emotional abyss.

By the time dessert is delivered to your table, you’ll want to use your steak knife to slash your wrists.

That’s how sad it is.

Our previous João, the Lisboan tuk tuk driver, was a handsome devil who charmed my wife with his suave Latin demeanor. But this new João, this new charmer, was even worse. He charmed her with his words.

Suspecting nothing, we walked into his chocolate shop on Rua das Flores, but I quickly understood that we would not be leaving until his shelves were empty and his bank account was full.

His opening words were, “Men do not care about chocolate, but the women, when I speak of the chocolate, they glow.”

“As mulheres, elas brilham.” The women, they glow.

That’s not a sales pitch. It’s poetry.

This new João was a sweet-talking, chocolate-tongued seducer of women. I cannot imagine a member of the fairer sex strong enough to resist his chocolate charms and sugary sales pitch.

He talked. Oh, how the sweet-toothed son of a bitch talked. He talked about where the various chocolates come from, the special flavors he mixes in, and how they caress the tongue and free the soul.

He took my wife by the hand and had his way with her credit card while I stood there and watched.

Yes, I was financially cuckolded by this young chocolatier, but he was so good at it that I felt nothing but admiration.

Well played, João. Well played, indeed.