Lobster Dinner Ornament

This lobster ornament arrives already plated: a bright red glass lobster set on a clear dish with lemon wedges and a scatter of garnish beside the tail. The body is mouth-blown in a single piece, the dish and its trim shaped in the same heat before anything sets, and the shell color built in passes so the claws hold their edge from across a room. A metal cap and hanging loop finish it, and at two and a half inches across the whole dinner settles onto one branch without tilting. My aunt Verna orders lobster the way other people file paperwork, deliberately and with a bib she brings from home, and she has opinions about drawn butter that she shares with waiters who did not ask for them. TIFF keeps an entire preservation operation running on the principle that somebody has to take unserious things seriously enough to keep them, which is more or less the whole argument for a glass shellfish supper hanging on a tree.