A cup of hot coffee, please.

"I'll have a cup of hot coffee, please." Is that such a difficult order to fill?  Well, yes, apparently; if you live in New England, and you don't want to drink out of a paper or styrofoam cup, and it's winter!  Because in winter, all the china cups are as cold as the ambient temperature, which is pretty cold, so no matter how hot the coffee is to begin with, as soon as it hits that cold cup, the coffee is , at best, warm.  Thus Peter, Marash Girl's father, was always left asking the waitress (at his weekly Marriott "guys" luncheon,) if she could bring him a cup of HOT coffee!  No one figured it out, really.  They kept saying, but the coffee is hot.

But it wasn't.

And finally, at the Public House in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, Marash Girl had her first truly hot cup of coffee, hot even after adding cream.  And why?  Because it was clear that the Publick House had heated its china coffee cups BEFORE pouring the hot coffee into the cups.  And oh, was that coffee good!  Father Peter would have loved it!