white house dinner

The Guy had his company party on Saturday.

He went to my company party a week before, which was a Friday that happened to land on the day of a freak storm that battered California and took out power up and down the coast. I had originally RSVPed, but had then decided not to go, only to change my mind about an hour before the party.

"And you're coming," I told him, adding considerately, "Unless you don't want to."

As any guy who has ever been in a successful relationship with a woman will tell you, this is code for, 'I want you to come to be my support blanket, and if you do not come I will be understanding, but punish you anyway.'

"Sure," he said. "I'll be right there."

Say what you will about the Guy, he can read the writing on the wall.

The unfortunate result of my last minute decision change was that we were both wearing Silicon Valley chic at a party that had some very nice clothes on display. Jeans and sneakers are all very well in the office out here in geekland, but there is a time and a place for everything. Sadly, as usual, self-consciousness lasted for about two minutes, after which my nebula-sized ego forgot all about it. It did not hurt that, also as usual, everybody was sweet and did not comment on my excessively commonplace fashion sense. In case I haven't mentioned it recently, I really do work with some of the best people in the business.

The Guy's party was a different matter altogether. It's pretty unusual that we have a chance (or a reason) to dress up in our daily lives; his company's event was a White House State Dinner, featuring Walter Scheib, who was the chef at the White House during most of the Clinton administration and for four years following.

"The food will be good," he says morosely, the day of the actual event. He didn't actually say But... but a wife learns to read between the lines.

Saturday was, for several reasons, fairly stressful. There were appointments and deliverables, and assorted other problems. On top of a week in which raging insomnia and sleep apnea played a fairly significant part, the need to dress up and socialize with people one works with during the week itself seemed unnecessarily egregious. To dress up and socialize with people you don't even know but your husband works with during the week was especially brutal. Of course, I owed the Guy: turnabout is fair play, and he made a respectable showing at my company party, after all. We both collapsed in mid-afternoon, and woke up bleary-eyed and delirious from a nap about an hour before the actual event.

"Do you want to go?" he asked.

"Nnrgh," I said.

"Is that a no?"

I mustered what was left of my higher brain functions to consider the matter. "Mmfn," I said, which, translated literally, meant, 'I'll go if you go.'

We crawled out of bed. The Guy put on a tie. I put on a dress and heels. I even put on lipstick.

As is the way of these things, we actually had a great time. The Guy's prediction that the food would be good was dead on -- not really a surprise when the chef in charge headed the White House kitchen for 11 years. What was more surprising was that he proved to be quite a raconteur, full of hilarious and endearing and amusing stories about working intimately with two presidents and their First Ladies. In between courses, he explained what we were about to eat, and told us a little back story involving the recipes themselves. He was an engaging speaker, and a practiced one, and managed to be entertaining without ever being cruel towards the people involved.

"When you work for the White House, you check your politics at the door," he said.

I'm not a foodie, especially of late. My new diabetic diet (or it could be my medication, who knows) has made me a bit hostile towards food in general, which means I can't really enjoy it as much as I used to. The stories made the meal for me. Even when I can't remember what we ate, I'll still remember the tale of Jenna Bush and the tequila meat sauce, and Mrs. Clinton and the leg of lamb.

"It's funny how people always ask me what the difference was between the two presidents," he said at one point. "They seem to think that there's red state food and blue state food."

We laughed, because we're from California, and -- well, we do.

Scheib was brought on board because Hilary Clinton wanted to change the way that the White House did food. The previous chef did French food. What Mrs. Clinton wanted was to make the White House kitchens representative of America: eclectic, with all the influences of the hundreds of cultures that have made America home; organic and fresh, with all the food that is home-grown and available in the United States.

The First Ladies were always on one kind of diet or another, he said; they were careful about what they ate, and the nutritional quality of the food. The Presidents would've been perfectly happy if they'd just opened up a TGI Friday's in the basement. Somebody asked, was it ever difficult reconciling what the Presidents wanted with what the First Ladies wanted?

The rule of the House, said Scheib, is to make the First Lady happy. If the First Lady's happy, everybody's happy. Even if the Presidents would rather not be.

At the beginning of the Bush presidency, Scheib said, the President came to him and said, "Cookie," -- he called the chef 'cookie,' for whatever reason. I presume it's a Texas thing. -- "Cookie, let me tell you what I don't like. I don't like green food. I don't like salads. I don't like soup. And I don't like wet fish." Wet fish apparently meant any fish that wasn't grilled or fried.

A little while after that, they had one of their first state dinners. Mrs. Bush came to Scheib to work out the menu, and as part of that menu, she requested a green soup with a topping of light salad, with a piece of poached fish on top. Scheib listened to the order with some anxiety. "I don't wish to cause any trouble, ma'am," he said humbly, "but the President said--"

At this point, the First Lady fixed him with a Look. "I don't remember asking to know what the President wanted," she said. And that was that.

Keep the First Lady happy, that's the rule. The state dinner went ahead with the menu as she requested it.

We were none of us acquainted with real state dinners, so Scheib explained the mechanics of how these things work. The tables are ranked by order of importance. There is tier 1, which is the heads of state; then tier 2, which contains the slightly lower-ranked attendees, then tier 3, and so on. Obviously tier 1 gets served first, and then tier 2, and so on, so forth, with servers moving in and out of the kitchen in waves so that everybody gets served quickly and (more or less) at once.

The President of the United States plainly rates a Tier 1 table, and so he was among the first served. He looked down at his plate, saw green soup, green salad, soup, and wet fish, asked, "Did this wash up on shore?" and pushed his plate away.

Now, it being one of his first state dinners, he apparently was not acquainted with the way that the etiquette works at these sorts of things. When the President pushes away his plate, that is the cue for the President's Butler to take his plate away. And when the President's Butler takes away the President's plate, that is the cue for all the other servers to take the other plates away. So now half the room has not been served yet, but the other half of the room is having their plates taken away, and there are suddenly two waves of people trying to leave with plates and trying to enter with plates, and an utter domestic disaster as pandemonium erupts.

The chef looked out his window at this tumult of colliding and whirling bodies. "Oh boy," he thought. "Somebody's in trouble." There was never any real question of who that somebody was going to be.

That night, the word came down that Mrs. Bush had set her husband straight on future state dinners. "I don't care if you don't like it, Bushie. Don't do that again. From now on, just pick up a fork and move it around on your plate."

Scheib has a new business, and a book out that I think I'll be buying (or at least borrowing from the library) at some point soon. It's always very easy to dislike a president for his politics, his decisions, and his personality on camera. It's a lot harder to differentiate between the private person and the politician, a line that gets blurred far too frequently in American politics today. It's good to get the reminder now and again that even the devil likes quesadillas, and that behind the print and the sound bites there's also a guy who'd really just love to have a hamburger, if only his wife were out of town....