All Kinds of Feasts

I've had people look at me pityingly when I said our family always went out to eat on Thanksgiving.

It was sensible, really. There were only three of us. We got invited to Papà's house for Christmas and sometimes for Easter and New Year's. We'd go to Papà's house afterwards anyway, for coffee and dessert, but for Thanksgiving dinner we were on our own.

I don't recall any type of a small turkey in those days. They came 20 pounds and up, too big a load for Mom's little Glenwood stove. Plus--and Mom wasn't shy about saying this--she really didn't like turkey all that much! Like me she preferred the dark meat and all you really got in one of those big turkeys was a big breast and not much else.

(Mom's nadir as a cook happened the year I caught chickenpox over Thanksgiving--I was delighted; it got me out of catechism class for three weeks and I didn't have to run home afterwards and miss ten minutes of Timmy and Lassie. Today we'd probably call Boston Market or cook some turkey pieces. Neither existed in 1967. Mom managed to find a smallish turkey--and we might have had the bigger Roper stove by then--and cook it. It was dry as that proverbial bone, even drumsticks.)

So after the parades were over, we'd hop into the car and drive out to Warwick to a place called Venetian Gardens. We never made reservations; the owner was a paisan of my Dad's. This was a big treat; we didn't eat out a lot, even at fast food places, except maybe in the summer when we were coming home from the beach or something, so different from my adult life when we eat out every Friday and Saturday. Nice restaurants were for holidays like Thanksgiving, Easter, Mother's and Father's Day. And Venetian Gardens was pretty nice, even if in a shiny collar type way as I got older.

It had been a supper club once, still did pretty good business on weekends, and for a long time the stage and the piano was still in the big main dining room. They had a foyer with a hat check girl, and there was even a elegant cigarette girl. We were dressed to the nines, like most people who went out back then: Dad in his best suit, his white shirt and dark tie, and his cufflinks, Mom in her best dress, with a hat and beaded purse and gloves of course, me in one of those cute little girly dresses with the skirt that stuck out with liberal help from an itchy net slip, black leotards and black patent leather shoes. The waiters were all in suits.

And if you were lucky, very lucky and arrived at the right time, there might be someone at the piano softly playing instrumental music like "Born Free" or one of the other hits of the day. (Later they had Musak-type stuff over the sound system and it just wasn't the same.)

Even though Mom hated turkey, we all had the turkey dinner. Dad said a blessing occasionally, and then we ate. I wasn't allowed to squirm or talk loudly or leave my seat: this was a special treat and one I had to earn. If I misbehaved, we all would go home and not go out for the rest of the day.

Later we'd join the aunts and the uncles and the cousins around the big table in Papà's cellar, but for now it was just us, "The Three Musketeers," all safe and warm and happy and together again another year.