Qu’ils mangent de la brioche

Jeff already has posted about our delightful brunch at David Greggory earlier today, after he performed his duty as a Christmas-Easter Catholic (I did my part by driving him to the Metro but, as pretty much a naturalistic pantheist/atheist I didn’t even bother going to my own liberal Unitarian-Universalist services today).

I enjoyed the brunch a great deal, though I must confess to feeling a little guilty at times about the extravagance (the brunch regularly features an entire roast pig). My food critic moment, spoken innocently and earnestly at the time–that “the bison is kind of dry, but the polenta is very good”–nonetheless postprandially leaves me feeling a little conspicuous in my consumption, especially after such a overindulgent trouser-tightening brunch of bison with horseradish and three kinds of mustard, roast pig, a whole salmon, three kinds of bacon and at least that many of sausage, mimosas, fine cheeses, crême brulée and much–way much–more. Marie Antoinette, c’est moi.

Brunch also provided us with a Wonkette moment, or what passes in Washington as a celebrity sighting. The attractive African-American couple seated next to us looked familiar, and their conversation with each other and with the group seated on their other side moved between discussions of famous Northwestern alumni, Stanford’s success at attracting a diverse student population, housing prices in such upscale DC neighborhoods as Kalorama, and what sounded like a mention in passing that they both had been part of the Clinton administration. My suspicion that the gentleman was Larry Irving, former assistant secretary of commerce under Clinton, and as such the former boss of one of my former bosses and the originator of the phrase “the digital divide,” turned out to be correct; and his beautiful wife, it appears, is a colleague of mine at the Department of State.