Thursday, December 31, 2015.
Old Year Adieu. New Years Eve A Deux.
For weeks, Mary Ann has talked about what she might want to do for New Year's Eve. The options are few, unless I embarrass a restaurateur (and myself) by trying to swing some weight around. All the great eateries are booked up, as I tell everyone else in our boat.
She keeps coming back to the Windsor Court Hotel as a venue. Her first idea was to spend the night there, and take advantage of the various packages the hotel has been advertising. But the hotel is fully booked. Her next idea is to more or less sneak in and pretend that we're really hotel guests. But everybody who comes to the door at the Windsor Court is treated like a guest, so that's legit.
I am on the radio until six. She picks me up and we pull into the hotel's courtyard and garage. We are surprised to see few people there. We check the front desk one more time about a room, but no dice.
We walk around the hotel's gigantic Christmas tree. It's probably the largest indoor Tannenbaum in any New Orleans restaurant, with the possible exception of the one at Antoine's. It has an O-gauge model railroad running around its base. I have never seen this train inoperative.
We ascend to the second floor and the Polo Lounge, at the entry to the Grill Room. Polo is pretty well filled, but there is flux among the customers, and we shortly take over a sofa just big enough to feel roomy, without leaving space for anyone else. We will remain there almost all the way until midnight, grazing from the bar menu and drinking harmlessly.
The place feels very comfortable from the outset. Tom Hook, the regular pianist in the Polo Lounge, plays a range of music from ragtime to the Great American Songbook. I could listen to this guy all night.
At eightish, a new musical corporation takes over, with three instruments and a young singer by the name of Robin Barnes. If she stays around town, she will become as famous as any other jazz singer active today. Her range of tonality and timbre have me spellbound. Even Mary Ann--who is not what you could call a music lover--thinks Robin is spectacular, not just in her music but in the way she relates to the audience. I have my usual reverie about how I could possibly perform a duet with her, but she is way out of my league.
The eating part of the evening pleases MA greatly. Nothing here will stuff her or me. We begin with charcuterie, most of it variations on ham, although there's a brasaola in there too. MA has a club sandwich, and I get truffled fries. The latter bring the only disappointment of the evening: these are not fresh-cut fries! In the Windsor Court? MA, who puts herself forward as the arbiter of taste when it comes to pommes frites, find this scandalous.
But everything else contributes to a lovely evening, one in which we feel warmer to one another than we have in a long time. But isn't that what New Year's Eve is for?
I have been short on sleep and have been catching up on walking for the past couple of days. The sofa in the Polo Lounge is so comfortable that for a moment I fall asleep, pitching forward enough to alarm MA. This proves to be the Salvador Dali Alarm Clock Effect in action. Dali used to take one-second-long naps by putting a coin into his right hand and letting his arm hang down over a coffee cup. After a few moments, he falls asleep, and the coin falls into the cup, waking him up. I am a connoisseur of nap-taking, and this sounded like a form of torture to me. But I can say now that the trick really works. When MA saw me lean forward, she reached out to stop me. But by then I was already awake--wide awake, in fact, and fully refreshed.
When it turns eleven, MA decides that it's too cold to stand by the pool and watch the fireworks over the river--if, indeed, the pyrotechnics can even be seen from there. She hatches a new idea. Wouldn't the fireworks be amazing to see from the middle of Lake Pontchartrain? So we pay up our bill (a little over $100, so we have paid our rent on the sofa) and depart for home. MA forgets to turn around and look at the fireworks until we make it to the Causeway's sixteen-mile marker. She pulls into the crossover, and finds that we have gone much too far. We can see the fireworks, but on a very small scale. Most interesting is all the action along the lakefront in Metairie. Hardly a dark spot could be seen over there.
We decide that this was a fine way to welcome the New Year. Not that we will ever do it again. But now we can say, "Remember the year when we sat in the same sofa at the Windsor Court for five hours and saw the fireworks from the Causeway?"
Windsor Court Grill Room. CBD: 300 Gravier. 504-522-1994.
We ascend to the second floor and the Polo Lounge, at the entry to the Grill Room. Polo is pretty well filled, but there is flux among the customers, and we shortly take over a sofa just big enough to feel roomy, without leaving space for anyone else. We will remain there almost all the way until midnight, grazing from the bar menu and drinking harmlessly.
The place feels very comfortable from the outset. Tom Hook, the regular pianist in the Polo Lounge, plays a range of music from ragtime to the Great American Songbook. I could listen to this guy all night.
At eightish, a new musical corporation takes over, with three instruments and a young singer by the name of Robin Barnes. If she stays around town, she will become as famous as any other jazz singer active today. Her range of tonality and timbre have me spellbound. Even Mary Ann--who is not what you could call a music lover--thinks Robin is spectacular, not just in her music but in the way she relates to the audience. I have my usual reverie about how I could possibly perform a duet with her, but she is way out of my league.
The eating part of the evening pleases MA greatly. Nothing here will stuff her or me. We begin with charcuterie, most of it variations on ham, although there's a brasaola in there too. MA has a club sandwich, and I get truffled fries. The latter bring the only disappointment of the evening: these are not fresh-cut fries! In the Windsor Court? MA, who puts herself forward as the arbiter of taste when it comes to pommes frites, find this scandalous.
But everything else contributes to a lovely evening, one in which we feel warmer to one another than we have in a long time. But isn't that what New Year's Eve is for?
I have been short on sleep and have been catching up on walking for the past couple of days. The sofa in the Polo Lounge is so comfortable that for a moment I fall asleep, pitching forward enough to alarm MA. This proves to be the Salvador Dali Alarm Clock Effect in action. Dali used to take one-second-long naps by putting a coin into his right hand and letting his arm hang down over a coffee cup. After a few moments, he falls asleep, and the coin falls into the cup, waking him up. I am a connoisseur of nap-taking, and this sounded like a form of torture to me. But I can say now that the trick really works. When MA saw me lean forward, she reached out to stop me. But by then I was already awake--wide awake, in fact, and fully refreshed.
When it turns eleven, MA decides that it's too cold to stand by the pool and watch the fireworks over the river--if, indeed, the pyrotechnics can even be seen from there. She hatches a new idea. Wouldn't the fireworks be amazing to see from the middle of Lake Pontchartrain? So we pay up our bill (a little over $100, so we have paid our rent on the sofa) and depart for home. MA forgets to turn around and look at the fireworks until we make it to the Causeway's sixteen-mile marker. She pulls into the crossover, and finds that we have gone much too far. We can see the fireworks, but on a very small scale. Most interesting is all the action along the lakefront in Metairie. Hardly a dark spot could be seen over there.
We decide that this was a fine way to welcome the New Year. Not that we will ever do it again. But now we can say, "Remember the year when we sat in the same sofa at the Windsor Court for five hours and saw the fireworks from the Causeway?"
