Almost since the very beginning of this now arguably venerable Web log, many of my loyal readers have e-mailed to chastise me for what they suppose is my unjustifiably patrician taste in Washington DC restaurants. Their objections abound with some excellent recommendations for restaurants, bistros, cafes, diners, eateries and even pushcarts here inside the Beltway that, I will readily admit, offer world class value for the discerning diner’s money. Let me confess, then, that I do indeed visit, and what’s more, thoroughly enjoy, the cuisine on offer at some of those places. The simple fact is, I just haven’t had anything significant to report from those venues. Well, this post will change that – let me tell you about today’s lobster lunch with my dear sister Rose, held at Legal Seafood on K Street.
There is, quite frankly, no better place, on a cost-benefit basis, to experience the succulent bounty of the world’s oceans, rivers and lakes than Legal Seafood. The firm started out with a simple premise – seafood should come from sustainable fisheries, clean waters, and ethical suppliers. Having resolved to provide the public with this commodity during an era – shortly after World War II – when such a thing was by no means common, the restaurant got started in Boston, Massachusetts. Then, some time around the early 1970’s the proprietors adopted the industrial business philosophy of one William Edwards Deming, an American genius to whom nobody in America would listen. Why was this? Well, back then, Dr. Deming espoused a revolutionary theory of statistical process quality control, during an industrial epoch when America was rewarding the concept of planned obsolescence, espoused by one Alfred P. Sloan. Mr. Sloan was, for a considerable time, the chairman of a company called General Motors. Maybe you’ve heard of it. In addition to envisioning the construction of vehicles that were intentionally designed to start falling apart as soon as their GM factory warranties expired, Mr. Sloan was the fellow who said “the business of America is business.” Deep stuff, no? Oh, and by the way, there’s a school of management at MIT named after Mr. Sloan. Yes, America, as that memorable poster by R. Crumb, depicting a nude gentleman engaging in rampant cephalo-anal impaction was so memorably captioned, The Problem is Obvious. Don’t believe me? Take a look around.
Did I mention that the Japanese consider Dr. Deming to be a Shinto god, venerating his departed soul the way good Catholics like me exalt our martyred saints? And well they should – after adopting his ideas, they created the Japanese automobile industry of the 1980’s. As a matter of fact, even today, millions of bright Japanese schoolchildren grow up dreaming of winning the Deming Prize, one of the most prestigious awards offered by contemporary Japanese society. Funny thing about that – the vast majority of Americans have never even heard of him. Go figure. Oh yeah – didn’t Jesus once remark “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country?”
All the more reason, I suppose, that a place like Legal Seafood should give all of us hope for the future in these bleak times. Because, back when allegedly brilliant minds like Alfred P. Sloan were trumpeting the myriad bogus virtues of planned obsolescence and American cars were being manufactured with doors made from cardboard and no seat belts, the managers at Legal not only had the common sense to see that Dr. Deming was right, but the courage to employ his theories right here in America. And to this day, their awesome seafood totally rocks, and, what’s more, the Washington DC metro area is blessed with no less than five Legal Seafood restaurants – one downtown on K Street, three in the Virginia suburbs and one just off Route 270 in Maryland. So – no complaints from me when my dear sister Rose suggested Legal Seafood for lunch today.
Rose is approximately five foot eight inches tall and weighs about 115 pounds. She’s not skinny and she’s not fat. She’s what you’d call normal looking, except that she’s got a knockout bod. I know I should be careful talking about my sister like that, but honestly, I’m just being factual. The reason I’m mentioning it at all is that this woman can completely consume a steamed three pound Maine lobster and not gain an ounce. Why? I’d guess that bearing and raising a huge brood of Catholic offspring while pursuing a career as a public school teacher burns enough calories that, should an occasion arise where she’s sitting at a table in Legal Seafood and her kid brother Tom is paying, she might as well go for it. And frankly, I think she’s earned the privilege, too – it’s not like she gets a whole lot of lunch hours away from the school cafeteria; today, her entire class of third graders is off on a field trip and she had an eleven o’clock appointment on M Street with her obstetrician. Such are the logistical confluences required for my poor, dear sister Rose to have an occasional lunch in a real restaurant. So, IMHO, she’s got a right to splurge if she wants to. And come to think of it, as astute readers of the Web log may remember, Rose is pregnant again, and technically eating for two anyway.
One good turn deserves another, I say, and therefore I ordered a three pound Maine lobster for myself – stuffed and broiled. Okay, unlike Rose, I suspect I might risk gaining some weight eating that, but I can always skip lunch tomorrow, and if you haven’t had the stuffed, broiled lobster at Legal Seafood, by all means try it some time if you can. Should calories be an issue, order a chicken lobster. Anyway, if people in Maine run out of money for their mortgage payments next month, don’t blame us, because Rose and I were down here in the Nation’s Capital today doing our part, make no mistake about it.
I learned a long time ago not to initiate a conversation with Rose when she’s eating a lobster. It’s necessary to wait until she has cracked open the claws and removed all the meat, then cut out the tail and sliced it into bite-size chunks. At that point, she starts dipping morsels of lobster into the melted butter. This signals that her undivided concentration on the crustacean at hand is no longer required and that discourse is therefore allowed. Nevertheless, I waited, as I usually do, for her to have the first word.
“Tom,” she said, “I need to talk to you about Hank.”
“What now?” I responded, fearing at worst, the worst, and at best, the ridiculous.
Rose paused, thinking carefully as she soaked a fork full of lobster in drawn butter. “Did you watch the CPAC speeches?”
“No,” I informed her, “I didn’t. But I have watched some of the highlights, like that rant Rush Limbaugh foisted on the public – about how he loves people, the Constitution, life, liberty, freedom, the pursuit of happiness and wrapping himself in the American flag.”
Rose nodded sadly. “It was pretty maudlin,” she offered.
“And vapid, too,” I added. “I guess things have been pretty rough lately for Republicans like you and Hank. The Democratic sweep in the elections, that immediate loss of empowerment and influence you all had taken for granted for so long, and these increasingly lunatic reactions to the Obama administration’s attempts to straighten out this God-awful economic mess. Not to mention…”
“Look, Tom,” Rose snapped. “I know you and Cerise voted for Obama and I know what you think of Republican economic policies, too. So don’t gloat. I don’t need that at the moment if you don’t mind, all right?”
“Okay, okay,” I mollified, “I didn’t mean to rub it in.”
“But you did say something that hit the mark,” she noted.
“Which was?” I asked, as I cracked open the small claw on my own lobster.
“What you said about Republicans displaying ‘increasingly lunatic reactions’ to the circumstances – particularly the conservatives. It seems to me, the more conservative they are, the more insane they’re getting.”
“There could be something to that hypothesis,” I agreed. “And I know that Hank’s always been a holier-than-thou conservative Republican. Is he… I mean, he’s still…”
“Sane?” Rose looked up from her plate, where she had been contemplating her lobster’s mustard. She’s very fond of that green stuff, and always orders her lobsters steamed so they will arrive at table with it intact and of full measure. But she’s also very cautious when she’s expecting, taking nothing but water or tea with her meals, for example. I could see her expression change as she shifted from weighing the pros and cons of consuming lobster mustard during pregnancy to consideration of her husband’s current mental state. “That’s what I’m worried about, Tom.”
That statement called for a long pull off my beer schooner. “You think Hank’s… losing it?”
Rose shook her head sadly, consumed a large bite of lobster mustard, washed it down with her iced tea, then looked up. “I don’t know, Tom. You tell me. There was this kid who gave a speech to CPAC…”
“Jonathan Krohn,” I interjected. “I’ve seen his speech – it’s all over the Internet, just like Limbaugh’s.”
“That speech,” Rose confided as she demurely wiped her lips with a linen table napkin, “seems to have – I don’t know – been the last straw. It appears to have… pushed Hank over the brink, I guess. Now he’s started raving all the time – about how Obama’s wrecking the country, about how America’s turning socialist, about how Congress is going to tax and spend us to perdition, about how the Democrats want to take everybody’s guns away, about how Bill Bennett was right all along about everything, about how principle itself is the key to conservatism, about how the people abandoned the Republicans because they realized that the Party wasn’t conservative enough anymore, about how conservatism is the creamy, delicious filling to the crispy shell of the Republican Party…”
“Creamy filling?” I interrupted.
Rose scowled down at the tablecloth. “It’s something that nasty little brat said. Hank latched onto it like it was the opening line of the Gettysburg Address.”
“The Party of Lincoln as a giant cannoli,” I mused, suddenly wondering if I might have room for dessert after finishing my lobster. “Interesting metaphor. Maybe the kid’s blood sugar was getting low, and he just blurted it, not quite completely thinking out what he was trying to say or how it would sound.”
“Nothing that kid says is thought out,” Rose griped. “It’s either obviously rehearsed propaganda sound-bites or completely fatuous nonsense.”
“The CPAC delegates,” I pointed out, “seemed to approve of him, however.”
“CPAC delegates thrive on obviously rehearsed propaganda sound-bites and completely fatuous nonsense!” Rose insisted. “Those things are their life blood! Which is fine by me – they’re just a bunch of politicians, wonks and hacks; and that crap is what they do all day; I understand that, they have to make a living just like everybody else. But constantly spouting it all over the house isn’t doing my husband or my family any good. You should see him, Tom – waving his arms around and yelling ‘A child shall lead them,’ ‘Out of the mouths of babes comes Truth,’ ‘He’s like Mozart, writing symphonies when he was a kid,’ and ‘Joe the Plumber met him and says if he didn’t know better, he’d think he was talking to a thirty year old.’ Sure, I bet Joe the Plumber said that – he’s got a mental age of about thirteen himself! And of course, since this is a kid we’re talking about, any criticisms anyone makes are met with comments like ‘How dare you talk about a fourteen year old boy like that?’ or ‘How can you possibly attribute such cynicism to a child?’ or ‘He’s young! Look at how much he knows already! But is that enough? No, you’re expecting him to know everything!” And Hank goes on and on about that little snot’s Four Principles like they came down from the Sermon on the Mount – ‘Respect for the Constitution’ this, ‘Respect for Life’ that, ‘Less Government’ this, ‘Personal Responsibility’ that – I mean really, Tom, if living an honest conservative life were actually that simple, none of us would need to be any smarter or know any more than a seventh grader!”
“Gee,” I observed, “haven’t the conservative Republicans based everything they’ve done for the last sixty years on the assumption that voters are, in fact, no more intelligent or educated than seventh graders?”
Rose shot me her best Annoyed Teacher look. “That’s not funny, Tom.”
“Oh boy,” I griped, “everybody’s a critic, aren’t they?”
“Tom,” she chided, “this is no time for levity! Hank’s running around repeating that tiny twerp’s ridiculously flawed, half-witted syllogism…”
“You mean,” I inquired, “the one that goes ‘If you don’t have principle, you don’t have policy; and if you don’t have policy, you don’t have an ideology?’”
“Yeah,” Rose grimaced, “that’s it.
“Which is sort of like saying,” I posited, “’You can’t have a language without an alphabet; if you don’t have an alphabet, then you can’t produce words; and if you can’t produce words, then speech can’t exist.’”
“Exactly,” Rose sniffed, “the kind of reasoning you’d expect from a brainwashed child. But that doesn’t phase Hank for a minute! After he’s done repeating that idiocy about principles, policy and ideology for the umpteenth time, he starts raving ‘The people first, the people’s rights, based upon principled views, that’s the key to effective conservatism!’”
“I can see how hearing that over and over could get to be a real pain,” I told Rose. “But isn’t that what marriage is for – better or worse, tolerating it when your spouse does irritating stuff, like running around quoting a fourteen year old kid as if he actually knows what he’s talking about instead of just spouting a load of William Bennett’s dated, warmed-over horse hockey?”
“It’s worse than that,” Rose sullenly declared. “Hank took that speech off the Internet and saved it on a disk he puts in the HDTV. Now, every night, before they can watch their shows, he makes the children watch that stupid punk’s speech. ‘It’s only two minutes long,’ he says, ‘and it could be the most important two minutes of your day.’”
“And what,” I implored, “do the kids think of that?”
Rose heaved one of those deep sighs which only mothers can carry off without sounding melodramatic. “They think their father is a crazy [expletive] and they’re begging me to do something about it. Of course,” she continued somberly, “I haven’t told the kids about the home schooling yet.”
I dropped my fork. “Home schooling?”
“Hank says anyone can see that the reason this kid is such hot stuff is because he was home schooled. So now, Hank wants to start home schooling our children so they can all turn out like that creepy, weasly little Jonathan Krohn. And guess,” she dared me, “just guess who’s supposed to quit their job, stay in the house all day and do the home schooling?”
Finishing the last of my lobster stuffing, I took another swig of draft beer and ventured the obvious. “You?”
Rose nodded, as she sadly chewed a bite of lobster tail.
“Who else? I’m the one with the Virginia school teacher’s certificate, aren’t I?”
No point in ignoring the elephant in the parlor, it seemed to me. “Has Hank considered how you two, his brother and his brother’s wife could possibly manage to lose your income and still pay the mortgage on that house you’re all living in?”
“Hank says there are some things more important than money,” Rose muttered in a clearly disgruntled tone. “And what’s more, he says he’s figured out that we can save a lot of money on clothes and other expenses if we don’t send the kids to school.”
I shook my head in utter disbelief. “Has he thought about the consequences of keeping all those children cooped up in that house all the time? I’m no expert on child psychology, but it seems to me that it’s so crowded in that house since Hank’s brother’s family moved in, your kids and their kids must actually like going to school.”
“Yes,” Rose nodded, “and some of them have told me exactly that – maybe their schools are crowded, but nothing like their home is at the moment.”
“So,” I surmised, “one needn’t be Jean Piaget to figure out that if Hank keeps all those kids packed in that house for home school Monday through Friday and there’s no money available for them to run around and have a seriously huge blowout every weekend, some of them are going to develop serious imbalances in their cognitive development.”
Rose’s eyebrows raised up sharply. “Meaning?”
“You’re going to end up with a house full of juvenile delinquents,” I explained. “So call Hank, right now, and tell him that, and what’s more, tell him that since this home school thing is his big idea, he’s the one who will have to deal with the authorities when the kids get in trouble. And make it stick, Rose – give him a good old Ben Franklin close – run down a list of whom he will have to deal with. I’m talking cops, truant officers, family protective services, social workers, shrinks, probation officers, victim’s rights representatives, juvenile court judges, prosecutors, and victim’s attorneys, Rose, and see if you can think of a few more like that before you call him!”
Rose pondered my strategy for a long moment, first eating lobster, then stopping to pull a pen and pad from her purse and make some notes. “Okay,” she said at last, “that sounds pretty good, Tom.”
With that, Rose reached for her cell phone, but she never got to make that call, because just then, her cell phone rang. Picking it up and examining the screen to see who it was, she did a double take, then looked over to me. “It’s Hank!”
“Well, then,” I prompted, “answer it.”
She did. “Hello, Hank? Fine, I stopped by after seeing the doctor to have lunch with Tom. He’s fine, too, Hank, what do you want, dear? You did? You have? To tell you the truth dear, I think that’s great, and I’m relieved, really. Why would I be disappointed? I told you I thought it was a stupid idea, didn’t I? Well, okay, then, there you have it. All right. Yes. I love you, too.”
As Rose put her cell phone away, a broad smile spread across her face. “Hank says he’s giving up on home schooling the kids.”
“That’s certainly a relief,” I remarked. “What happened?”
“He ran the numbers and realized that if I quit my job, he won’t be able to afford golf, liquor, beer, steaks or Redskins tickets.”
“Now there,” I dramatically proclaimed as I gesticulated grandly with a massive lobster claw, “are some conservative Republican principles even I can agree with!”