Lady Who Lunched

I rarely, if ever, take a lunch. Well, take a lunch like go out, sit down, and have a cloth napkin draped across my lap. There are exceptions. Last week, three days in a row I went out to restaurants with the VP of my division and candidates interviewing to be my boss. That, I'm afraid, just doesn't count. It was work.

Today though, my college roommate was in town to see her daughter (now in college herself at St. Mary's). Theresa looked exactly the same - better maybe. She was always a stunning beauty with Mediterranean blue eyes, blond hair, and a pearly white smile. You might even imagine a little bell sound (TINK!), with a flash of light, every time she smiled. Theresa is/was stunning to look at, and to make things worse (for those of us who wear green well), she's nice. I mean, you really want to dislike someone like that - think that they can't be pretty and nice, right? But she was, is, always will be...nice. I mean, really, truly nice - genuinely--nice. So then you just have to acknowledge that there are beautiful people in the world who blow you away with their beauty inside and out. But enough of the mushy stuff - here's the good part.

We meet at Neiman Marcus' Rotunda restaurant, which is just lovely. The building originally belonged to the old City of Paris department store which transitioned to Neiman Marcus. But in the transition, they managed to keep a piece of the original architecture and build around it creating a unique ambiance.

What made this lunch particularly fun, aside from catching up with each other, was that during the hour, models (super tall/super thin-clothes hangers actually) paraded around the rotunda in various outfits. If there were a show, "what you won't wear", well, that would have been it. It wasn't that anything wasn't beautiful, but the moving clothes hangers simply weren't the same as the ladies lunching (or the men for that matter). With the exception of my friend, who would have looked amazing in the slinky black floor length gown, most of the women were middle-aged and "soft" (I'm being nice--like Theresa--she's rubbing off on me). Those women wouldn't have looked so--"nice" (still trying to be polite). But the "show" was fun - it wasn't quite Project Runway, but it was an extremely civilized way to enjoy my time away from work, catch up with a dear old friend and eat some rather delicious food.