Anthony Bourdain — “RoadRunner”

This beautiful broken man was all of us

This past weekend, I watched the documentary about Anthony Bourdain — “Road Runner” and was enthralled by it. As a decades long fan of both the man and his work (I remember reading “Kitchen Confidential” years ago and loving it), and of course, like so many, I was also a fan of his show on CNN “Parts Unknown” and he always seemed to me this ultra version of the NYC “hip cool guy” and in many ways, he was, I think. I just adored him, truly.

While watching the documentary, though, I began to feel sleepy and began to drift off, while still listening to it and there was a moment (like so many other poignant and also quite disturbing moments in this documentary as well) that quite literally, upon me hearing it, made me sit straight up in bed with a gasp.

And it was this: one of the assistants who worked with Bourdain on “Parts Unknown” said of him: “Tony was such a romantic in everything he did, the way that he approached life, people, experiences. His life was tinged in such romanticism that, for him, the inevitable reality was always going to be a disappointment to him.” WOW. This was the statement that made me sit bolt upright in my bed because it describes me to an almost uncomfortable extent.

Later in the documentary, his friend David Chang makes mention of how “Tony was…