A Good Lord Birthday Food Blog

Last night, I had dinner with D, one of my oldest friends, and my oldest son, Henry. I've known D now for thirty years, and no one currently makes me laugh harder. You will never see a photo of D either, because that's how he rolls, and since I love him to death -- well -- I'm banking he'll always be with me in some form or another anyway, so who needs a photo? In any case, he's got the body of a god and the face of an intellectual which is just about perfect (even if he does put on his trousers backwards sometimes) and I hope he's reading this. We went to a new restaurant in West Hollywood called Connie and Ted's that we could only get a reservation for at 5:15 (perfect when you're beginning the next half century and might need to segue into the early bird special time earlier rather than later). We ate an assortment of raw oysters first.

Good lord, they were icy cold, salty and perfect.

 Next, came a trio of chowda samplers: Manhattan, Boston and Rhode Island. Good lord, each was better than the next. The Boston tasted like it had a stick of the finest butter on the planet melted into it, and the Rhode Island made me remember when I was twenty years old (thirty years ago!) and spent the summer in Newport with ten of my college girlfriends. We ate a lot of chowdah that summer, hung out on the docks with America's Cup sailors, fell into and out of love -- but I digress.

That's what good food does, I think.

My main course was Mediterranean mussels and clams with little bricks of buttery, spicy toast.

Good lord, it was hearty:

Henry ordered fried clams. He said that they were perfect.

Good lord, they were:

I had a slice of peach pie for dessert, blew out a candle after making a wish, and laughed uproariously because D kept teasing me about my encroaching age-related daffiness. The sentence I need a birthday candle plate, pronto!, yelled in my old waiter voice will become part of D's and my stored collection of mutual mockery until the day we drop dead with no pain whatsoever.

Good lord, I hope my wish comes true:

We drove home in a seafood haze, blasting Eva Cassidy singing Lennon's Imagine (and you must listen to that if you want to feel like the troubles of the world have disappeared and what is left is warm and hysterically funny and fifty years are ahead of you, the same, light, wistful, filled up) as the golden light of Los Angeles softened into the sultry air.

Good lord, I'm blessed.
















Thank you, D.


P.S. I'm still shopping around for tattoo artists, so nothing to show you, yet!