Dignified and trim at the age of 93, Claire Oesch reigns at the Café des Artistes bar, a place she has had a relationship with since the 1940s first as hostess and girlfriend of the bar owner, and later after the bar changed ownership as a guest.
By the time she immigrated to New York from Switzerland, she was already 30, having lost a husband (an Olympic bobsledder) and a baby girl (who drowned while in the care of her grandparents). She took a life out of an Ingmar Bergman plot and transplanted it into the Cole Porter songbook.
Although, she is the only patron of the bar to have a bronze plaque donated by her friends there that states simply "Claire Oesch's seat." Or to have every few years "a wealthy financier, one of the admiring throng, close down the restaurant and give a black-tie dinner in her honor..." She works full time as the hostess of the private dining room at Bank Julius Baer on Madison where she is "as much of an icon there as she is at the restaurant."
I want to age with the same quiet old dignity at Botanica passed out on one of dingy couches rescued from the Salvation Army for $45 buried underneath a pile of $2 PBRs.
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