Wednesday, August 7, 2013.
Dancing Around The Buffet. Two Birthdays, 60 Years Apart.
"Who is going to keep this music alive after all these people have gone?" Mary Ann asked. That's a question that comes up everywhere Big Band music continues to be played. Which, since a big drop in the 1950s, seems to be continuously.
We are at the Jefferson Orleans reception hall in Metairie tonight, by request of Jay Zainey. Not the federal judge who attended Jesuit the same time I did, but his father, who leads the most active Big Band in the area. He and his eight sidemen pull out their trumpets, t-bones, saxes and licorice sticks every Wednesday night at the J.O., and play the many hits of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Artie Shaw, and Glenn Miller for hours. They do this in back of a big dance floor with more traffic than I've seen at any wedding reception I attended lately.
These dancers didn't have to learn the steps. They have known them since they were teenagers, in the 1930s and 1940s. For them, dancing is like swimming: you never forget how to do it once you pick it up.
Look at these people as they make their way from their tables along the perimeter to the buffet supper and back, and the first thing you notice is unsure steps. Then a wan smile reflecting their concentration as they move along. Maybe even a feebleness.
But you don't see any of that when they're dancing to Jay Zainey's tunes. They move with sprightliness and exactitude. This is dancing.
"This may be the only regularly-scheduled ballroom Big Band left in America," Jay told me when he called in to my radio show a couple of weeks ago. It wasn't for the first time. He's tried to lure me out to his ballroom for years. I love the music--no problem there. But his ballroom night is my Eat Club night.
But not this week. And this week was another reason to go. Jay is celebrating his ninetieth birthday. He said he'd have a few more pieces in his band, and that a lot of people would show up. And that was true. They took up all the parking spaces and ate up the whole buffet before we could get there after the radio show.
In what was certainly one of the all-time high points of American popular culture, the Big Bands took over the radio every evening back then. I have a recording of the entire day's broadcasts from the CBS station in Washington D.C. on September 21, 1939. It is exemplary. Beginning at around nine, the Columbia Broadcasting System moved its broadcast from ballroom to ballroom all over the country, a half-hour in each place, until one in the morning. All the big bands, from the greats to the unheard-ofs. All sounding terrific, with a boy singer and a girl singer, the music of the likes of Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers, all introduced by what sounded like the same dumb radio announcer, with lines like: "And now Jerry Livingston and his orchestra ask the musical question, 'Boo-Hoo?'"
In my capacity as the Dean of New Orleans Radio Announcers (I get that distinction purely by remaining alive and employed), I was going to ask Jay whether I could be his dumb announcer. But so many people wanted to wish him a happy ninetieth that I couldn't grab him long enough to explain my shtick.
So my wife's question was answered. It seems that enough people are coming up the back end of the Greatest Generation to keep this music going. Michael Buble--much loved by people my kids' age--performs with a big band and much Bing Band era material. So there.
We couldn't stay until the end of the party. Mary Ann heard a rumor that if she were to crash a birthday party tonight at Pardo's--one of her favorite restaurants--we might not get questioned at the door or thrown out. The birthday was that of Penny Rodas, the wife of Pardo's owner Osman Rodas. His name makes him sound middle-aged and foreign, but he is neither. This was a swinging party with a lot of food and interesting people. I didn't know many of them other than Osman, but one of the advantages of my small celebrity is that a lot of people know me. I was never alone.
One person I recognized was Dan Davis, the Wine Guy at Commander's Palace. He had organized at least some of the wines, and they were good enough for us to talk about them.
Quite a spread of food was out for the taking. Chef Marvin Tweedy thought I might not find what I wanted, though, so he grilled and cut up a thick USDA Prime sirloin strip (my favorite cut of beef, he apparently knew) and sent it out with a garlic butter sauce. I was then very happy that I missed the pork roast and peas at Jay Zainey's big do. (I'm not criticizing it. What could one expect for $12 a person, anyway?)
The overwhelming opinion shared by the dozen or so people I spoke with at length was that Pardo's is the kind of restaurant the North Shore has lacked since the beginning of time. And that it could hold its own with the best gourmet bistros in the city. It may even be the equal of some of the big guns.
Ate too much. Drank almost too much. Didn't dance enough, but I never did. When I asked Mary Ann to dance at our own wedding reception, she said, "Not here. Not now."
No, she didn't.
Pardo's. Covington: 69305 Hwy 21. 985-893-3603.
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