Friday, April 30. A Bright Day. La Cote Brasserie. Until the day she gets married, there will not be a day for Mary Leigh that shines as brightly as this one. She's out of school except for her exams next week. But went in to talk with her math teacher about a few sticking points in calculus. While there, she received an e-mail message from Tulane University informing her that she has been accepted for the incoming freshman class next fall. She only applied three days ago! Her recommendations and records must have been as impressive as I like to think they are.
She was ecstatic. All the pieces of her hastily-arranged plans for the near future are fitting together as if they'd been in the works for years.
On top of that, it's Prom Night. The Jesuit Prom, which unlike her own school's prom (a crawfish boil) is a real prom, with prom dresses, corsages, and a date wearing a tuxedo. Just the date she was hoping for, a young man of very substantial achievement at the school I claim as my alma mater. I have not met him or even seen a picture of him, and I am not permitted to say any more about him here.
I am thrilled, too. Her attendance at the Jesuit Senior Prom removes another chunk of the main unfinished business in my life. I was thrown out of Jesuit after my junior year. I wasn't doing any schoolwork at all, and I deserved that fate. In 2003, when Jude entered Jesuit High School, aside from being very happy for him I saw it as a sort of redemption for my sin. It got me back into the Jesuit community, where I have been active ever since. Even though Katrina moved Jude permanently to Georgetown Prep--a Jesuit school even older and more distinguished than the hallowed New Orleans institution--I have been able to hang on to be of service to my old haunt on Banks Street.
Now my daughter is going to the prom I was denied, with a guy who by all accounts is exactly the kind of person Jesuit is famed for educating. Yes, I know there's a little mental illness in these ruminations. But I can't help but feel great satisfaction about it all.
Meanwhile, Mary Ann was indulging in her own odd ideas. Since it made no sense for Mary Leigh's date to make the trip across the lake to pick her up, the only way MA could get an eyeful of the couple was to lurk in the bushes near the home of the young man. Which she did, in contradiction to Mary Leigh's strong restraining order to stay the hell away. She thought she'd got away with the secret surveillance, but as she was leaving the area the couple doubled back to pick up some forgotten item. A few minutes later, this text came though on MA's iPod: "Did I just see what I thought I just saw?" In capital letters.
Mary Ann told me all this as we had dinner at La Cote Brasserie. It's a good thing we decided to go there. One of the other possibilities that had entered both our minds was Mike's East/West, Vicky Bayley's return to her first restaurant on St. Charles Avenue. If we had gone there, it would have been a nuclear disaster. Unbeknown to us, that was the restaurant where Mary Leigh's date had reserved a table with nine other couples for the pre-prom dinner. I don't even want to think about what Mary Leigh would have done if we had marched in there.
I arrived first, having only to walk a block from the radio studio to the restaurant. I had a Sazerac at the bar. The good part of it was that it was a double. The bad part was that it wasn't well made, with the bitters heavy and the sweetness missing. I would regret the size of the drink later.
At the table, Mary Ann seemed more eager to actually eat a proper dinner than she has been lately. She started with a row of big seared shrimp with a peppery butter sauce over hoecakes--a substantial appetizer, I thought.
Mine was a little stainless-steel crock of oysters stewed in a creamy broth, again with a convincing admixture of Creole seasoning. The oysters were big and plump, and there was bread enough to dip into the rich bisque.
The entree for her was a couple of pieces of skin-on speckled trout, broiled until the skin was a little crisp, then set atop a stew of collard greens, tomatoes, and onions. This is her kind of dish; she's a big fan of collards, although she said she thought these were not cooked down enough. (Note to chefs: some vegetables are better cooked a long time than cooked a little.)
For me, a "brick chicken"--cooked under a brick pre-heated in the oven, although it didn't look like it. It was otherwise like a variation on chicken bonne femme, with a collection of potatoes, crawfish, and onions in a brown sauce that I think the menu described as an etouffee. Very good dish, I thought, especially the part around the crisp skin.
Mary Ann was, by this point, thinking of leaving the restaurant to make a pass or two around the site of the prom. It was in a familiar place: Generations Hall, where many dances attended by our kids have taken place. A few blocks away. I told her that she was wasting her time, that she wouldn't see anything. And if she did see something, she'd be seen in return, and that this would infuriate our daughter on her big night.
So she stayed, and I had dessert: a cheesecake served without a crust, in the same kind of black-iron pot that the oyster stew had come out in. I think I talked her out of her surveillance the project, although after we left in separate cars, she did drive in front of the hall, just in case.
La Cote Brasserie. Warehouse District: 700 Tchoupitoulas. 504-613-2350. French.
