Saturday, May 1, 2010. A Hundred And Fifty Autographs. Vega Tapas Café. The Jesuit prom kept Mary Leigh out until around two in the morning last night. Is that all? In my day, we stayed out all night, and nobody thought much of it. When I was that age, I routinely stayed out till one or two in the morning for no particular reason. I don't even remember where I went. It certainly wasn't anything that would have been trouble. But here is one of the rare examples of a When I Was Your Age story in which the current generation is the better behaved.
No radio show--the Saints pre-empted me. At three, I was due at Barnes and Noble in Metairie for a book signing. En route, I realized that I didn't have a bottle of ink with me. Unless an embarrassingly small number of books were sold, my 36-year-old Parker Sonnet fountain pen would need to be refilled. This is a problem from the long ago for most people, but it's still part of my life. All five of the pens I use regularly are filled from a bottle. I don't own a ballpoint.
Finding ink in bottles is much harder than it once was. When I Was Your Age, I could walk into any drugstore and buy a bottle of Skrip ink. Now, you can't buy fountain pen ink even at a stationery store. Office Depot didn't have it when I checked there. I took a chance on a box of cartridges from a different pen maker and lucked out: they fit perfectly. But ten dollars for eight cartridges? A bottle of ink costs less, and gives me a hundred or more refills.
I signed books non-stop from three until five, and stayed another hour to sign backup stock for the store. I left behind about a hundred autographed books total, which seemed excessive to me. But the manager of the store said, "Oh, we'll go right through those. Your books sell very well." That's nice to hear.
Dinner at Vega Tapas Café. I haven't been there in some time. They were quite busy, but I did get an immediate table in the back of the main room, with enough light to read and take pictures easily. I began with a romaine salad with fried oysters. When it arrived, the round, long head of lettuce shifted and rolled, throwing two of the oysters off the plate. One landed on the floor, the other in my lap. The waiter apologized, but didn't replace the lost oysters. Hmm.
Next came a tapa: a small empanada filled with pork, napped with a zippy orange sauce sort of like an aioli. Delicious. I probably could have eaten two instead of one, but I'm glad I didn't. (I've loved dinners of many small courses since long before they became popular.)
The main course was emphatically not a tapa. It was a slab of opah, an unusual fish from Hawaii. It's also called the moonfish or the sunfish, because seen from the side it looks almost perfectly round. I've had it a few times before, mostly on the West Coast. Its texture is somewhere between salmon and tuna. I hear it makes good sushi. Here, it was seared and served atop a bed of corn. No extra points for creativity, but it was more than good enough, and I appreciate that Vega went to the trouble of bringing this rarely-seen fish into town.
I accompanied all that with a glass of Albarino. It was a filling dinner by the end of it, and I couldn't work up a desire for dessert.
I was home by nine. Mary Leigh was already in bed. She probably wouldn't tell me anything worthwhile about the prom, anyway. I attempted to watch Saturday Night Live, but it wasn't funny enough to keep me awake.
Vega Tapas Cafe. Old Metairie: 2051 Metairie Rd. 504-836-2007. Mediterranean.
