On Cooking For A Funeral

     Page One Hundred-Nine.
     I was just (last night) hired to cook food for a casual memorial luncheon in a few weeks. It's for the father of one of my hair clients, Sophia. Her entire family will be coming into town next month for a long-planned wedding. Dad died last December, was quite elderly and the family is spread out over the globe; so, they smartly decided to merge the two events and are having the memorial the day prior to the joyous nuptials.
     Sophia and I haven't yet talked - just played phone tag, so I don't yet know what her concept is. I could grill chicken for everybody or make a couple trays of hearty, stick-to-your-ribs food: Lasagne and Beef Stroganoff or something like that. Perhaps she'll want a few different heavy pasta salads. With this type of event, the choices are endless. And she said it'll only be about two dozen people, so the number isn't daunting at all. (After preparing a community Passover Seder for two hundred-sixty people last spring, I feel that I can cater Prince Harry's wedding. See page Fifty-Five of this blog for that story.)
     The coolest, hippest memorial or funeral I've ever attended was about five years ago. It was for a woman named Vi and she died of cancer at about age eighty or so. She'd been an acquaintance of mine for twenty-five years or so and she didn't have a care or enemy in the world. She wasn't a famous person in the traditional sense, but everybody knew who she was. After she died, her name popped up in a Cleveland Plain Dealer journalist's weekly column. In fact, the entire column was about her, her spirit and how just everybody knew her and loved her. The funeral service was attended by about seven or eight hundred people; this for somebody who, again, was not a public figure. Her mail carrier, the employees from the drugstore, the secretary whom she gave her monthly rent to... they were all there. All eight hundred of them. She was just that type of person.
     Vi loved potlucks. So, she decided that for her after-funeral party there should be a potluck for all. The family rented out a local party center and by golly if eight hundred people didn't show up with eight hundred pots of you name it. Mac 'n cheese, meatloaf, green bean casserole, salad, pizza, brownies, ambrosia, fried chicken, tuna noodle casserole, Entenmann's cake and spinach/strawberry salad... times eight hundred. (I forget what I brought.) It was too fun for words. There was a disc jockey and here were balloons on the tables. Everybody just knew that she was thrilled.
     In thirty-five years (?) when it's my time, I want the exact same thing.