Tuesday, January 6, 2009.
Twelfth Night Dinner With Godparents.
Jude is beside himself with a need to get back to Los Angeles and his busy life. (And, of course, his hot new car.) He was due to fly back this Thursday, but now he's trying to figure out a way to leave in the next ten minutes. He is bored out of his skull here at the Cool Water Ranch. Only his involvement as a go-between with me and Marc Juneau as we rebuild the web site keeps him from drooling.
And he had a social obligation (which is about how he sees it) tonight. Every Christmas season, we get together with Oliver and Carolyn Kluna for dinner at Andrea's. The Klunas are Jude's godparents, but this tradition of having a Yuletide dinner with them goes back long before I was even married. Oliver, who owned a small chain of bedding stores, was one of the clients of an advertising agency where I worked for about six months in 1974. After I left that gig, I wrote and designed his weekly newspaper ads (I had a typesetting business at the time) for some fifteen years. We became close enough friends that Oliver was my best man when Mary Ann and I married.
Our original tradition was indulgence at the grandiose Christmas-season feasts at the Sazerac in the Fairmont Hotel. Those were the precursors of the Reveillon dinners, but much grander. I forget how long we've had our annual Yule dinners at Andrea's, but it's been at least a decade. So here we were again.
The kids collected their Christmas presents, Oliver and Carolyn gasped at how much both had grown, kidded me about the mystery of their good looks given those of their father, and other delightful banter.
The Klunas themselves are looking good. Neither of them ever changes. Oliver has long since sold his business, and lately has retired, playing a lot of golf and taking more cruises than even we do. (They just returned from three weeks in the Far East.) He's a smart guy who worked obsessively for a long time, well earning everything he now has.
We began dinner by asking Chef Andrea to make a Caesar salad at the table. He did, and it was pretty good, but overloaded with dressing and too salty. I guess it's not something he does often. The fish that most of the others had for entrees were better--fish is always good at Andrea's. Mary Leigh was one of the odd men out with her order of rigatoni with four cheeses for an entree. 
I was the other. I swallowed Andrea's suggestion of cioppino during his radio commercial with me earlier in the evening. It was good, but preposterously overloaded: a whole lobster, big slabs of fish, a dozen each of mussels and clams, crabmeat, shrimp. When I had eaten all I could, the plate still looked full. It would have been twice as good it he'd served half as much. But this is what the mainstream customer wants: lots of food. Successful restaurateurs have known it for years. So have the more discriminating customers.
Jude and I drove home together. We talked a bit about the web site, and about the possibility of his getting a bigger apartment with two bedrooms so he can get a roommate to split the rent with. After those two subjects were exhausted, we didn't have much to say. His life is going so well that I have very little to offer beyond encouragement and congratulations. As nice as those are, they get boring after awhile. Actually, in recent times he's given me more advice about my career than I have his.
For example, he questions one of my plans for the new year. I am determined to write a novel (I have it outlined in my mind already) in which various standard American songs come up now and then. I want to record a CD of these songs, with the idea of including the CD with the book. Jude doesn't believe this gimmick will work at al. I don't figure it will cause bookstore doors to become unhinged, either. But that doesn't make it any less worth doing.
Sometimes I think I'm once again caught in the corner I recall from my early years on my own. Then, too, I'd done everything I ever dreamed of doing much sooner than I thought I would. It's happened again, and I don't know what to do next. Other than, of course, to soldier on with my absurd workload so I can pay the bills. But what fun is that?
Andrea's. Metairie: 3100 19th Street. 504-834-8583. Italian.
