A slight contretemps at Galatoire's, where I was hoping to get seated at my favorite table upstairs, but it turned out they had closed it, or so the maitre d' said, for a private party. We sat in the hideous downstairs (supposedly preferable, but I hate it) and
were waited on by a newbie who was very pretty (a woman waiting tables at Galatoire's???) and actually quite efficient. She got a good tip. We had, let's see, crabmeat Sardou - a bed of spinach topped with artichoke hearts topped with good white crabmeat topped
with hollandaise; oysters Rockefeller, the usual thing but light on the herbsaint flavor, so I had a glass of Pernod with; shrimp remoulade, the usual; crabmeat ravigote, the usual. We had a bottle of Simi Chard 97, nice with the crabmeat dishes. Any wine, I
think, would be killed by remoulade sauce, and if I were to match a wine with the oysters Rockefeller, I'd have matched it with the Matanzas Creek Sauvignon Blanc; the Pernod did its job, though. We just needed more people at table! For dessert, the others had
coffee and Bourbon bread pudding, a classic. As I'd eaten the bulk of the food, I passed. And then it was out into the ... rain ?! so we skeedaddled back in. Ordered drinks and toyed with them for a half hour; I'd ordered Remy VSOP and what I got was something
weird, but we weren't charged too much, and we needed a dry place to sit for a while. Eventually went upstairs to show the others, who'd never been. My waiter was there, and he expounded on how if he'd known it was we who had wanted to sit upstairs, he would have
made room for us. An embarrassment of hand-kissing, and we bade him a fond adieu. In the evening we went to see a gut-wrenching but funny play called How I Learned to Drive, put on by students at LSU.
In Baton Rouge: We visited the State House, which I'd promised to do because my committee chairman is the grandson of the architect of the thing. Art deco silliness 20 stories high, dominating the Baton Rouge riverbank. Impressive in its way, I guess, with high,
exceedingly ornately decorated ceilings (I was told made out of sugar cane tailings) in the entrance hall and the senate chamber. Didn't see the other chamber, as the house was in session that day. Ran my fingers along the bullet scars in the marble at the
elevator where Huey Long was killed. Took another elevator to the 16th floor observation deck and its panoramic view; unfortunately, there isn't much to see in central Louisiana.