Friday, December 10, 2010. Sign Here, There, And There. Meals Denied. This will be a busy weekend, and it began as soon as I was awake. I am working on a section of a bid that Sara Roahen and others are compiling to have UNESCO declare New Orleans a City of Gastronomy, and the deadline is near. Then Mary Ann, who went across the lake this morning called to tell me that traffic on the Causeway was backed up for miles. We knew this was coming. The Corps of Engineers is raising the lake levee, and this will mean blocking lanes getting off the southbound Causeway. I didn't hear it was happening today, though.
I skipped lunch entirely and routed my trip to the radio station through Slidell. Going that way is fifteen miles longer than the forty-five-mile Causeway route, but for some reason it doesn't take noticeably longer. Not usually, anyway. Today I ran into another traffic jam on the I-10 approaching downtown. I never saw what was holding things up, but it made me twenty minutes late for getting on the air. In twenty-two years I've only been seriously late five times. It's a mortal sin in broadcasting, as far as I'm concerned.
Still holding the record for lateness was a day in the early months of the show when D.H. Holmes announced it was closing its Canal Street store and putting everything on sale. The radio station was on the roof of the Maison Blanche Building at the time, a block away from Holmes. It seemed the entire city converged on Holmes that day, and I was over an hour late. I could have got there faster by walking from my home on S. Rendon at Palmyra.
One bright spot in today's maddening delay was a call from Ralph Brennan. He wants to buy forty autographed copies of Hungry Town to give to the managers of his restaurant. Well, that's flattering. While we were on the phone, Ralph told me that he has white truffles at Bacco, that Bacco's last day in the French Quarter will be January 4, and that there's still not name for the restaurant he will open in February in the former New City Grill on Metairie Road.
After the show, I hightailed it to Metairie, there to autograph copies of Hungry Town and my cookbook at Borders Books. The people were nice as always, and a number of customers came over to shoot the breeze at length. But the store wasn't very busy, and they only had three copies of the cookbook in stock. Why does this keep happening? Fortunately, Hungry Town is outselling the cookbook by a substantial margin these days. We sold about thirty.
Now it's nine o'clock. All the restaurants I would like to have dined in were closed. Andrea's was open, but if I went there I'd eat in the bar, listen to Philip Melancon's music, maybe sing a number or two, have a drink with Chef Andrea, and be there till eleven or later. I am too tired for this. And I am driving with an expired brake tag. That's the perfect excuse for the cops--who have radar for my presence whenever I commit any infraction, no matter how minor--to pull me over. So I just went home and gorged on Mary Ann's piles of near-garbage in the refrigerator.
Oh, the humanity!
