[title type="h5"]Tuesday, May 12, 2015.
Pre-Cruise Dinner With Eat Club @ Bistro Orleans.[/title]
Twelve days from now, the Marys and I will depart for London, from which we will sail, three days later, around the Iberian peninsula and into the Mediterranean Sea. There we pay visits to seven ports before reaching Rome. We'll stay there for three days, then come home.
Forty-four people are joining us, and near as I can tell they are the most sophisticated bunch we've ever traveled with since we started these Eat Club cruises in 2002.
Even more surprising is that we had perfect attendance for the dinner we always hold in New Orleans a couple of weeks before we depart. As I gave my spiel, it became clear from the questions asked (and not asked) that these people are comfortable with cruising.
We have many few familiar faces. That's great news for me. It means that my main duty will be buying the first round of drinks on the first evening, and dining with them who wants me to dine with them throughout the cruise.
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Grilled oysters.[/caption]
We held the dinner at Bistro Orleans, where I have had pretty good luck over the past few months since it took over the former Crozier's. They have a private room big enough for sixty people. They gave us a good price on a four-course dinner. If I had known what kind of attendance we would get, I would have upped the ante on this one.
While visiting with the Eat Clubbers, I had the grilled oysters, but missed the shrimp remoulade. Then fried oysters with spaghetti bordelaise, which I have loved before. I seem to have been luckier than the average customer tonight, because not everybody was happy. I'll go higher up the scale next time.
A couple who traveled with us many times in the past--they're so loyal that they even came with us to Chicago on the train, which is a real test of their friendship--has decided that they want to have one really spectacular dinner on this trip. They are reserved (I think) at Alain Ducasse's famous and extremely expensive restaurant in Monte Carlo. They want to invite me and Mary Ann as their guests to dine in this place on their nickel. We gave a tentative yes, but MA wants to look over her magazines to see just how swank it is. (Must be a clothing issue.) My fingers are crossed. It has been a long time since I dined in a hyper-deluxe French restaurant.
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[title type="h5"]Wednesday, May 13, 2015.
Prom Night Plus 48 Years.[/title]
On this date in 1967, looking for something to do to fill in an evening after I was stood up by my date to the Jesuit Junior-Senior Prom, I drove all around town in my rickety 1960 VW Beetle from six until well after midnight. Before I was even an hour into this utterly ad lib program, I knew that something about it would remain with me forever, as a marker between boyhood and manhood.
And indeed it has. Every year I think about it. Some years, I re-enact the night, to the extent possible. Many of the streets, landmarks, restaurants and other businesses have ceased to exist.
My best work in this regard is developing a playlist of the music of not just the period, but that exact night, May 13, 1967. I have managed to procure all of the top forty, and some seventy-five of the top one hundred. I have an addition to the playlist this year: "The River Is Wide," by an obscure group called The Forum. Because radio stations back then always slipped oldies into the mix, I have a few of those, too. I also insert the very jingles that WNOE and WTIX (the rock stations of the era) used at that time. The radio guy in me considers these five hours of music a work of art.
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Hamburger at New Orleans Hamburger & Seafood Co.[/caption]
The only remembrance of the day today was driving with Mary Ann to the New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company for a burger dinner. On Prom Night, I ate four hamburgers, but both of the places involved are now long gone. We listened to my music program, which begins with Paul McCartney singing, "I was alone, I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find there." What an apt lyric for that night.
Two years from now, I will stage the fiftieth and final revisiting of Prom Night and kiss the observance good bye. I have lived too long a life since I was sixteen, and Prom Night has slipped far down the list of my most important days.
The hamburger was good, but I don't especially like those very thick hamburgers that are the vogue these days. But as such things go, the NOHASCO does a good job--although I think their fried seafood poor boys are better.
Mary Ann thinks the whole Prom Night thing is borderline insane. She says I should never tell the story to anyone. Anyone? I'm well into writing a book about it.
