Sunday, October 30, 2016.
A Wedding And A Birthday, Same Day, Same Time.
I launch the day with my singing gig at St. Jane's, then finish the Saturday errands that didn't get done yesterday--which is to say most of them. I wonder when I will have time to get my car washed. It's been overdue for weeks.
Then I flipped a coin. Heads. It means that MA and I will drive to Slidell for the three-o'clock wedding of my longtime radio producer Mindy. She started working with me on the Food Show when she was all of seventeen, putting in the commercials and theme music where they belonged, letting me know who's waiting to go on the air, and pressing or turning the incomprehensible buttons or switches exactly right. from Day One, she performed all the tasks as if she had somehow connected into my brain directly. She was the best producer I ever had, and I had some very good ones over the show's 28 years.
A few years ago, she decided to move on and took a job with a law firm. I've heard that she's at least as good at that as she was as queen of the audio board.
Her wedding and reception takes place at Palmetto on the Bayou in Slidell. The services are on the lawn next to the restaurant, on a perfect day for the weather. The food is very good and served in abundance, with great crab cakes, crawfish pies, shrimp remoulade, crawfish etouffee, and much more along those lines.
Mindy's sense of humor is part of the reason she's as good as she is at everything she touches. The music for her wedding and the decorations on the lawn relate to comic-book superheroes. Mindy walked up the aisle in her bridal whites serenaded by Darth Vader's theme from Star Wars. I asked the disk jockey who chose such a laughable, foreboding tune. He said that Mindy picked it out personally. That, I believe.
After Mindy's nuptials, we raced to our other three-o'clock engagement: Chef Gunter Preuss's eightieth birthday party at the Preusses' apartment in the French Quarter. Gunter and wife Eveline Preuss have been friends for decades, from the time when he was the defining chef of the Sazerac restaurant at the Fairmont-Roosevelt Hotel. He opened his own restaurant--the Versailles--in the mid-1970s. It was a consistently brilliant, classic Continental (now there's a descriptor we haven't heard in a long time) restaurant, good enough to rival the Caribbean Room across the street--which was in its heyday then. After some twenty years at the Versailles, Gunter bought Broussard's, which he would operate for almost thirty years.
We were almost two hours late for Gunter's birthday party. I figured that a few people would still be there, and I was right. The Preusses' two sons, along with a number of friends I'd never before met. All the restaurant V.I.P.s had already come and gone. Frankly, there aren't many living practitioners of Continental cooking still alive.
What kind of food would a man like Gunter have for his own birthday party? Mary Ann wondered, looking forward to doing a little more eating. I knew the answer without having to ask. There would be nothing. Off-duty chefs--let alone long-retired ones--have no interest in cooking if it's for their own celebrations. A few desserts and bottles of wine, and that was it. For a guy who proved himself as well as Gunter did, there was nothing more to be said beyond congratulations.
Monday, October 31, 2016. Halloween.
I'm still tired from all of yesterday's activities, my fatigue amplified by the Presidential election next week. Already, I've read several articles about the degree to which Americans are thoroughly tired of it all. Except, perhaps, for Mary Ann, who is a political animal. She thrives on all the dirt.
We have lunch at New Orleans Food & Spirits, which has become the standard lunch spot on Mondays, as I have reported here more than a few times.
Today, I have the pecan-meuniere catfish again, and again it is a superior plate of food, even though the catfish is farm-raised.
Chorus rehearsal for the NPAS aggregation is on low power, what with our hyper-energetic conductor Alissa Rowe's taking the night off so her kids could go trick-or-treating. She's a fun mom, too.
I haven't eaten since the catfish. On my way home I stop for an ice cream sandwich (a poor boy, it could be called) at a convenience store which will always be in my mind Time Saver #40, the extinct local chain's first North Shore store. How is it that data like that remains firm in my mind, while incomparably more important info is not always there when I need it?
