Sunday, August 23, 2009.
Layered Dips And Zetz Recollection.
Ceil Lanaux threw an afternoon party. Her two sons are about the same age as Jude, and the three boys were in the same Boy Scout unit for ten years. That friendship continues even though Scouting is over. Alex Lanaux flew to Los Angeles to spend a week with Jude a few weeks ago. Jude took him around on all his film shoots. We wondered whether Alex, who has grown into a strikingly handsome young man, would come back. Indeed, a few people on the shoots asked him if he were an actor or a model. He has the looks, but not the interest.
Good food arrayed itself around Ceil's newly-renovated kitchen. One of the guests brought a layered, cold dip made of a blend of cream cheese and goat cheese on top, a layer of pesto below that, and a concoction of sun-dried tomatoes below that. Everybody wanted the recipe, which came from Southern Living. (I found it here.)
Lots of wine was open, next to a stack of plastic cups. In the cupboard above were real wine glasses that looked hand-painted. I took one down, poured the wine into it, and found Ceil. "I hope our friendship is secure enough that you won't mind my using this obviously expensive wine glass," I said. "I'll be careful." She looked at me with astonishment, and said that the glasses were a buck apiece at the dollar store.
I fell into a conversation with Bob Zetzmann, whose family owned a major local soft drink bottling company for fifty-five years. Its major product was 7-Up, whose logo was emblazoned on a large, familiar water tower in the Ninth Ward. I told him of a trivia question involving his pop that I've used on my radio show for years. Nobody has ever answered it. I wondered if he would. What was the nickname of the Zetz line of flavored soft drinks? He didn't know what I was talking about. Aha! They were called "Zetz Rocket Beverages," because the returnable bottles were shaped like spaceships. Their sides were impressed with stars and comets and stuff. "Oh, is that what you meant?" he said. I guess I asked the question in a confusing way, but I'd had two glasses of wine by then.
Zetzmann and I spent another fifteen minutes or so talking about local soft-drink trivia. I learned the Zetzmanns started out with Dr Pepper and Royal Crown Cola before going with 7-Up, which was the big product in its time. (It was and is a great cocktail mixer.) My knowledge came from my having sold the drinks and racked the empty bottles during my teens, when I worked at the Time Saver for nine years. Amazing how much insignifica I remember from those days.
