Wednesday, June 5, 2013.
Eat Club At Impastato's.
Most radio and television personalities of my generation and before started their careers as disk jockeys, usually because spinning records and talking trash appealed to them when they were in their teens. That's certainly my story. Playing records on the radio goes back to the 1920s, but usually just to fill time between live shows.
It wasn't until the 1950s that a few disk jockeys discovered an interesting phenomenon, and did something with it. Tiger Flowers--a well-known New Orleans television sportscaster in the medium's early days--told me that it used to drive him nuts during his disk jockey years that people would call the radio station to ask for the same few songs, over and over again. We just played that! he'd tell them
"Well, can you play it again?" they'd reply. No, he'd tell them. Why would anyone prefer hearing songs they already heard that day?
Then a few stations began playing the same few popular records all the time. It became known as Top Forty. And as the most successful radio format of its day. Little stations could blow big stations out of the water by repetitious programming.
The food connection was displayed tonight in our dinner at Impastato's. We've had fifteen or twenty Eat Club events there over the years. With few exceptions, the menus were interchangeable. Dinners with different dishes caused fewer people to sign up, and made others complain.
And thus it was tonight, with seventy-something people in the room, and everybody raving about the food. Shrimp au gratin. Sauteed crab claws. Shrimp scampi. The red-and-white pasta combination, the best pasta dish served by anybody in New Orleans. Pecan-smoked filet mignon. Redfish with artichokes and mushrooms. Veal with crabmeat and shrimp. A few people were listening to me on the radio and knew to ask for soft-shell crabs, which are still in shorter supply than usual and more expensive.
Interesting bunch of folks. Half were regulars, ordering the same things they always do. Others were newcomers. I sat with three women for one course, during which one of them started psychoanalyzing me. "I think you're really an introvert," she said. Just spell my name right, I said.
I also sat for awhile with a group of semi-restaurant people. One of the women there used to run the front door at Clancy's. That must have been difficult, I said. Almost the entire clientele there are regulars, and many of those are VIP's, to boot.
An unusually large number of people wound up in the bar for after-dinner drinks. They insisted I get up there and sing. I started with "(I Left My Heart In) San Francisco," a song that sends a shiver down my spine. I hit all the high notes dead on, for a change. That's what Impastato's regular singer Roy Picou told me, anyway.
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