Wednesday, March 3. The Last Father-Daughter Luncheon. To Slidell For Overachievement At Nathan's. My senior year in high school was saturated with anxious, peculiarly pleasurable emotions. They had been building since the first time I heard Stark Whiteman's 1960s song Graduation Day--and that was when I was still in grammar school. Graduating from high school is life's first major final act. Something big is ending, and what will follow it is excitingly uncertain. It comes at a time when the significance of everything that happens to you is amplified.
My daughter Mary Leigh is a senior. There will be no seniors in our family (except in the other sense) after her. And I'm feeling those last-time-around emotions again. Today is our final father-daughter luncheon at her school. Although I went to all of them, she's only been a student there three years. That makes me a parvenu. Many of the other dads have attended this event thirteen previous times, if their daughters started at McGehee in pre-kindergarten. (We can't call that "pre-K" in New Orleans anymore.) Year before last, there was a guy who'd had daughters at McGehee for twenty-five consecutive years. That's a lot of fried chicken. (And tuition.)
Mary Leigh was waiting for me at the school's iconic gate. As we moved toward the tables on the lawn, we passed a vendor of McGehee school ties, with The Gate on a red background. I bought one, of course, and wondered why I haven't had the opportunity until now. I will wear it today, and at her graduation. And now and then, when I want to remind her of her alma mater. I'll hang it next to my Jesuit tie.
We sat with three of ML's closest friends and their dads. Dads of McGehee girls have a good icebreaker topic: the expense of sending our daughters to this school, and how it's been worth every hundred-dollar bill of it and many more. How lucky our daughters are goes unsaid. We all know it, and we also know that the girls will roll their eyes if they hear that for the 54,585th time.
Fried chicken at picnic temperature, green salad, square of chocolate cake with gooey frosting. Same every year. Not bad, not worth saying another word about. This meeting is not about eating anyway.
The crowd moved to the steps of the grand old main building. Three choruses, adding up to some sixty girls of all ages, sang the same three songs about how they love their daddies that they did last year and the year before. (It's a tradition.) One of them is a barbershop tune I used to sing (with slightly different lyrics) when I was in that chorus. The harmonies were sweet and lovely, and so were the girls. Or should I say women? I looked again, but my eyesight got a little blurry all of a sudden.
The songs over, the headmistress announced that the girls had to get back to class, thanked the dads for being dads, and cordially shooed us out. Mary Leigh, who knows which rules can be safely fudged, said we had plenty of time to go upstairs to look at her pottery sculptures. One is a large vase, its neck flaring off at a rakish, alarming angle. Striking. So was an even larger piece, still not completely dry. Its shape is different, but shows evidence of having been conceived by the same mind. A decidedly feminine mind. The piece could be called "Essence Of Womanhood." It looks pregnant. Mary Leigh says that everyone tells her that, but that it wasn't what she was thinking. Maybe not consciously, I thought--but didn't say. Her big challenge: the school's kiln isn't deep enough to fire this piece. She doesn't want to cut it down, so other options are being explored.
It was one o'clock, and she really had to go now. I drove back across the lake to finish my morning work. The radio program today is in Slidell, which is inconvenient. But I couldn't imagine missing what I'm sure will be the last organized Father-Daughter anything Mary Leigh and I will share. I have many to recall, going back to when she was a very little girl sitting on my lap.
I was a little late getting to Nathan's in Slidell, whose distance from home I always misjudge one way or the other. I felt bad about the Eat Club dinner tonight. It drew only twenty-five people, about fifteen fewer than I like and thirty fewer than chef-owner Ross Eirich was hoping for. He asked whether I thought lowering the price would enhance the numbers, but it's too late for that, especially in Slidell.
Part of the problem is that the second half of my radio show was not audible in Slidell during the time we were promoting this dinner. And that I didn't have a menu to promote until less than two weeks before. Despite that, I think I could have put more asses in chairs (that's what many restaurateurs jokingly call their customers) if I'd known what a spectacular sextet of wines would be poured. Nor did it come up that Chef Ross was planning on surprising us with two extra courses--a nice little crawfish pie with the pass-around appetizers, and a crabmeat cheesecake between the salad and the entree. I've got to write an advisory to tell restaurateurs how to get the most out of these dinners.
I was too busy meeting the diners at the beginning to get any of the passed appetizers except for a single oyster en brochette. But that always happens. And the sparkling wine was nice--Kenwood, which I didn't even know made such a thing. At the table, the crawfish cakes were delicious, the hearts of palm and avocado salad was nice, and the crabmeat cheesecake was tasty but so rich it was hard to finish even a small slice of it. The Pinot Grigio from Estancia was pleasant with all of that.
Two entrees to choose from. I almost never pass up any pompano dish unless a) I had it the day before or 2) it's pompano en papillote in the glop style. So there was a fillet of pompano before me, with grilled asparagus and a gratin of potatoes. The chef said the fish he received that day was disappointingly small, but I thought it was about right for a six-course dinner. And the fish and its light citrus butter was just the way I like it. The wine as the first Sonoma Cutrer Chardonnay I've had in a long time, workmanlike and big.
The fish did, however, look wimpy when compared with the osso buco. It had the classic caveman-style aspect, the meat nicely browned all over and falling off the bone, with a fine brown sauce. Chef Ross leaves these in the oven twelve hours. I know other chefs who make this every bit as well who say it takes them about an hour and a half. This is a paradox I must investigate at home.
We had a nice wine with that: Coppola Claret, a basic Cabernet-Merlot blend from young vines in Francis Coppola's marvelous former Inglenook vineyards. (Or elsewhere. I couldn't tell from the label.)
Dessert: blueberry cheesecake, with the blueberry component a hint rather than the grossly oversweet goo that usually comes with that gilding. A very light, sweet Moscato from Nivole came with it. I think I heard more favorable comments about that wine than all the other put together.
In attendance were two former kings of the Eat Club. Sonny and Nel Lauga used to show up every week until the hurricane relocated them to Mississippi. And Thomas Reed also had an automatic reservation every week for years, until he started traveling a lot for his work. They were seated at the same four-top table. Which reminds me. I must include in that Eat Club instruction sheet that tables for four or fewer don't work for us. You can have three couples that don't know one another at a table, but not two. It's not quite comfortable.
Nathan's. Slidell: 36440 Old Bayou Liberty Rd 985-643-0443. Creole. Seafood.
