30th Aug 2004
Jello Salad
Last night, I was invited to a delightful dinner party at Megan McArdle’s house in the esteemed company of political bloggers including Tim Blair, Mickey Kaus (albeit fleetingly), Matt Welch, Roger Simon, Julian Sanchez, Andrew Hofer, Walter Olson, Amy Langfield and others whose names I missed or forgot. (I picked up some good gossip about behind-the-scenes convention prep, most of which I’ll leave it to those covering the beat to blog, but I can’t resist passing on that apparently Fox News and Al Jazeera’s broadcast booths were set up side by side. Don’t say no Republicans have a sense of humor. Also, like the Democratic convention: no wifi!)
The theme of the party was Republicanism, given the convention for which several of the bloggers were in town. In keeping with the theme, Megan (who bills herself as a “libertarian,” which as someone at the party noted is what Republicans call themselves when they’re embarrassed to admit they’re Republicans) did all the cooking and waited on the mostly male assemblage hand and foot — barefoot, at that — and clad in a ’50s-housewife-style blouse and skirt and lace apron, the table decorated with two lilac blooms and a small American flag, and so on. The meal, along the same lines, consisted of glazed chicken, homemade dinner rolls, potato salad, homemade peach pies and, the pièce de résistance, jello salad.
Beautifully prepared and presented and absolutely delicious, it was all meant to be ironic and Republican. But the joke was on Megan: the food took me vividly back to my youth, as it was exactly like what I grew up with my Minnesota-born mother cooking, who is slightly to the left of Michael Moore.
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