A Super Bowl Party For Two.

[title type="h5"]Sunday, February 2, 2014.[/title] I almost always spend the late morning and early afternoon listening to Jonathan Schwartz's radio program of American standards on WNYC in New York. I have to limit my listening, though. If I listen too much I start unconsciously picking up his style and bad habits. He's good, but I don't want to sound like him or anyone else. Not that I haven't borrowed from my predecessors. Jay Andres, for example. When my 1936-vintage, three-foot-tall console radio with its old, oversize tubes still worked, I listened to his all-night show of light classical music on WGN in Chicago. I was in my early twenties and listened to as many guys like that as I could, hoping some of their sound would rub off on me. When Jay Andres gave the top-of-the hour station identification ("the legal ID," as it's called in the broadcast biz, and it really is required by law), he said, "WGN Radio, Chicago." His use of the word "radio" made a distinction between that venerable AM flagship station and WGN-FM and WGN-TV. Actually, that legal ID was slightly illegal. The law says that there can be nothing between the call letters and the city of license. But I like the rhythm of it, and have used that syntax throughout my entire thirty-six years on the air. I don't know anyone else who does. Jay Andres died four years ago at eighty-six, some twenty years after his last broadcast. And as if that weren't boring enough. . . we return to Jonathan Schwartz. One of the many unique shows he airs is an annual program on Super Bowl Sunday. Throughout its four hours, his show features baseball-related music almost entirely. He's not only a baseball fan, but a Red Sox fan--even though he lives in New York. "Sounds like your kind of guy," Mary Ann said, when I apprised her of all this. To add further complexity to this minutiae: Now and then I send Jonathan a note about the music he plays and other matters. He read one of them on the air, including the part where I wrote, "Tastefully yours, Tom Fitzmorris, WWL Radio, New Orleans." Thereby tying him with a gossamer to Jay Andres. I'm writing all this while the Super Bowl is on. I have only one reflection on the Super Bowl: Peyton Manning's bad luck in today's game is bad gris-gris for his having storming off the field without shaking the hands of the Saints after they beat him in the Super Bowl. (When was that? Around 1985? Seems long ago.) Mary Ann's plan to cook a bunch of new dishes for her Super Bowl party hit one snag: no guests. That's what happens when you wail until a few hours before a party to invite people. (I had the same problem once, but learned my lesson long ago. As a result, I never instigate parties.) Not even Mary Leigh or The Boy were here. But when MA gets something in her head, nothing will keep it from happening. She got right to cooking three dishes, most of them a bit complicated. She also asked me to stay away, save for when it was time to eat. [caption id="attachment_41147" align="alignnone" width="480"] Nachos.[/caption] We began with a plate of nachos, with slivers of beef, cilantro, tomatoes, and a lot of pepper jack cheese. Good enough. But how can anyone eat nachos and then go on to eat much of anything else? [caption id="attachment_41148" align="alignnone" width="480"] Three-way chicken wings.[/caption] The second course was chicken wings with three different marinades and sauces. The best of them was a straight-ahead Buffalo-style recipe, using Tabasco's new sauce made specifically for this purpose. The crumbled blue cheese over all is what made it go, but the pepper was good, too. Second best had no sauce. The wings had just been salted and peppered, then fried with no other coating. Chicken-flavored chicken, then. Very tasty. Third place went to a batch that was first fried, then slathered with some kind of barbecue sauce. I couldn't say I liked the sauce. It also suffered from having been the first batch cooked. By the time I was called it had become cold. [caption id="attachment_41149" align="alignnone" width="480"] Burger kebabs.[/caption] The third dish was kebabs made with ground beef. When she told me this, I said that she had the makings of Middle Eastern kafta. Missing, however, were cracked wheat and parsley. She wound up just making meatballs, then lining them up on the skewers. I wasn't hungry enough to try these, but when I had one of the meatballs for a snack a day later, it tasted all right to me. The commercials on the Super Bowl broadcast were entertaining. We both liked the dog spots--Mary Ann the one in which a dog and a horse have an unbreakable friendship, I the story of the dogs with the heads of a Dobermans and the bodies of Chihuahuas. But what products were these commercials for? We can't remember.