NO RUBBER CHICKEN DINNER

Grandpère and I went to a no-rubber-chicken dinner the other night. Our neighbors invited us to attend the annual banquet of a local business group, and GP accepted the invitation for both of us, although I had already told him that I didn't want to go to those dinners any longer. The food is usually bad, and the speakers are often boring. However, that night I was pleasantly surprised. The menu did not include rubber chicken, but crab cakes that were quite tasty. The MC moved the business part of the meeting right along, and the ex-president and president spoke only briefly.

Jay Dardenne, the Louisiana Secretary of State, the after-dinner speaker, was quite good. He talked about the uniqueness of the history of Louisiana and listed the 10 books about the state that we should all read, if we have not already read them. Interspersed in the listing of the books, he played snatches of typical Louisiana music, jazz, Cajun music, zydeco, Jimmy Davis, Lead Belly, Hank Williams, Doug Kershaw, etc., which entertained more than a simple listing and description of books. Dardenne does a mean imitation of Huey Long, including the shouting and the wild flailing of the arms which were part his speechmaking.

Here's the list of the nine of the ten that I could remember.

Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest Gaines

The Last Hayride - John Maginnis

Bayou Farewell - Mike Tidwell

Rising Tide - John M. Barry

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

Huey Long - T. Harry Williams

The Tin Roof Blowdown - James Lee Burke

The Earl of Louisiana - A. J. Liebling

After I wrote the words above, I thought, "There's no story here, nothing that anyone would be interested in reading," and I quit writing. But it turns out there is a bit of a story.

Now for the digression. Last August, during the clean-up after Hurricane Gustav, one of the tree men backed his truck into the street light in front of our house and knocked it down. The fallen light pole lay in the front yard for three weeks, despite our calls to have it picked up, since the grass needed cutting. Finally a couple of trucks from the city came and removed the pole.

Now we liked our street light in front of the house. On moonless nights, it's quite dark, and our driveway is difficult to see to turn in. We waited a couple of months, but no one came to replace the light, so we called the city public works department, whose employees assured us that our light would be replaced "as soon as possible". Then, after several more calls, with no results, we called the mayor's office. We never got the mayor on the phone, because he was always "at a meeting", "on the phone", or "out of the office". I told Grandpère that we should simply storm his office unannounced, but he did not agree.

One day, when I made one our periodic calls, the person I talked to told me that the city decided that they would try to get FEMA to pay for replacing the lights (ours was not the only one damaged by the storm). I almost screamed into the phone, "FEMA! You do realize that if you wait for FEMA, we will never get our light. It could be never, not in my lifetime, a long time away, any of those, but NOT SOON." The woman chuckled. So there we were.

We made a few more of what we thought were useless calls to the mayor, asking if they had heard back from FEMA and were told , "Not yet". No surprise there. Finally, one day I called the public works department again and was told that the city had decided that they would go ahead and buy the lights. Yay!

Back to the dinner. I saw the elusive mayor sitting at one of the tables, and I determined that I would make a beeline for him when the dinner was over. I told GP, and he said, "Don't do that." I told him, "Are you kidding? We've been trying to talk to him for weeks, no months, and he's right there, and you don't want me to bother him. I don't think so."

As soon as folks started getting up from their tables, I was on my way. I cornered him and asked him nicely when we were going to get our street light back. He came up with a list of reasons why it was taking so long, one being that the company that made the poles had a backlog since Gustav and was filling the orders slowly. That made sense, but I wondered just when the city had got around to placing the orders. I told him that we were thinking of putting up a pole ourselves, a creosoted black telephone pole with a light on it. I said that the neighbors probably wouldn't like it, but that we could not find our driveway in the dark.

The very next afternoon, the city trucks showed up with our light pole. Nothing like a close encounter to bring action. But wait! GP called the following day to thank the mayor for the quick action. His assistant told GP that one, only one, light pole had come in, and yep, we got it. Now we have a shiny new street light, but we don't yet have illumination, because Entergy, our power company, must come to connect the power to the pole. The men who put up the pole told us that the city would contact Entergy about powering up the pole. Our next phone project is to call Entergy to light a fire under them to connect our light to their power source.

In the middle of writing the post, I took a time-out to watch nearly the whole of "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing", a movie from the 1950s with William Holden and Jennifer Jones. William Holden had very cute legs. I fact, he was very cute from top to bottom. I had a major crush on him through my high school years. Jennifer Jones was gorgeous in the movie, with her semi-Chinese clothes and lovely face and figure. They just don't make romantic movies like that any more. Even GP was swept away, and he's not the romantic type. Plus, the beautiful song played throughout the movie, and there was the wonderful scenery in Hong Kong. Truly all around satisfying, a feast for the eyes and ears.


A bit risqué for the 1950s, don't you think?