Opulence Ever Opulence
Yours Truly in a Swamp
by
Leonard Earl Johnson
***
Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans
April 2005
". . . the empire of an American Caesar; it's the empire of faux Caesar salad." ~ David Brooks comparing America to sensual New Orleans, New York Times, March 12, 2005.
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Outside Brennan's, 417 Rue Royal, two long black limousines waited with open doors and uncorked Champagne. A liveried driver stood near by. Inside each limo, little wooden boxes held napkins and trinkets. On the port, a leather bench seat stretched from front to back door. Starboard, an ice bucket held more Champagne and beside it crystal flutes were fastened by the stem to polished oak racks.Two handsomely dressed New Yorkers passing on the sidewalk stopped and said they thought we looked like we might be "somebody."
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So it would have, had not L. A. Norma interrupted with, "We might, were we not undeniably us." She laughed, snorted and coughed through a fog of Camel Cigarette smoke. An ash fell in her Champagne flute almost as our host replaced it. The New Yorkers looked even more convinced we were "somebody" and whispered to a small crowd gathering behind them.
Lifting crystal and stepping in and out of a stretch limo can make anyone look rather like "somebody," I suppose. We had just left Bonnie Warren's annual Saint Patrick's Day Luncheon at Brennan's for scribes and other Blarney spreaders.
What had we eaten at Brennan's, the New Yorkers asked.
"The most redolent grillades and grits, turtle soup from Heaven, and wine from God's own vineyard," we declared. Given the day, we should have had corned beef and cabbage, but none did. None, that is, but boom-boom-girl, Margarita Bergen, Faubourg Marigny's bonne vivante realtor, party-going columnist for Les Amis de Marigny, and traveler home from the Sea.
"It was marvelous," Margarita said of her corned beef. She beamed at the New Yorkers. The man looked at the woman by his side and blushed. Local legend holds that Bergen once attended twenty-seven parties, soirées, auctions or events in a single weekend. Adjusting her green hat and lavishing "darlings" at the end of each sentence, she giggled, "It was a three-day weekend, darlings."
Not to be upstaged, Norma asked our tourist admirers if they had heard about JFK's assassination theorist at The Pearly Gates. She crushed her Camel on the curb and said, "At The Pearly Gates, as most everyone knows, Saint Peter asks the newly deceased if they would like any Earthly questions answered before entering Paradise.
" 'My chance,' says the assassination theorist, and he screams, 'Who shot John F. Kennedy?'
"Saint Peter says calmly, 'Why, Lee Harvey Oswald.'
"Slapping his forehead the theorist says, 'My God, this goes higher than I thought!' "
The New Yorkers laughed out loud, thanked us and trotted off down the street with their newly-formed flock of fellow travelers.
At our table inside Brennan's, documentary film-maker Peggy Scott Laborde said she had not seen David Brooks' column. Someone said they would send it. Someone else said it was in The Times-Picayune. Former T-P gossip columnist Betty Guillaud, credited with coining, "The City that Care Forgot," pushed back her mink and worked the room greeting new, old and forgotten faces. Here is some gossip; Guillaud is again living Uptown. Near the Episcopal Cathedral. (Should God be worried?) Someone told the story of David Duke marching one year in a French Quarter Easter parade. Guillaud wagged her finger and said, "No David Duke." We laughed, but no one reached for their eraser. L. A. Norma smirked, "Not by name anyway."
Lazone Randolph, lifetime Brennan's employee and former Sous Chef, has been appointed Executive Chef, Warren announced to the scribes. Randolph stepped forward to opulent applause, and Irish Coffee served with a dollop of green-and-white whipped cream. "To steady the writer-cramped hand," Norma told an Internet columnist licking her glass.
Libat-ed and limo-ed, we pulled away from Brennan's and purred up The River to the home of warehouse magnate and finely-fitted Irishman, Kevin Kelly. Kelly is owner of Houmas House and Plantation. Mint Juleps revived us from our posh journey, and the platonic cookery of Chef Jeremy Langrois of Latil's Landing Restaurant refreshed us. Everything was exquisite from soup to nuts. Lamb marinated in CC's Coffee was our main course. The soups were two, a sweet tangy squash, and the best leek-and-potato ever tasted. Marda Burton, co-author of GALATOIRE'S, BIOGRAPHY of a BISTRO (with Faubourg Marigny resident, Kenneth Holditch), proclaimed her short-crust sheathed salad greens the best salad known.
Photographer and food writer Kevin R. Roberts turned the conversation to the issue of tipping -- something not expected this day from our motley gathering, of course. He is against it. Everywhere. Preferring instead, "a buck added to the bill here and there," and paid as salary to the noble servers of the culinary trade. Ill-timed drumming, perhaps, in the face of the many youthful and attentive servers moving enough silver about our table to satisfy General "Spoons" Butler himself. "Lucky he didn't get a frog in his crème brulé ," L. A. Norma said from the back of our limousine, drifting into the arms of Morpheus as we floated to New Orleans, The City that care -- if not tipping -- forgot.
Back in the French Quarter, we raked together four dollars and forty-five cents to tip our driver, and took the last bottle of Champagne. Thank God the New Yorkers were not there to see it!