The Dinner Party Pat Conroy Missed

If I were invited to a dinner party with my characters, I wouldn’t show up~Dr. Seuss

It’s not that there probably aren’t better pies out there—although I am sure there’s no better crust. It’s not even that the blueberries were Violet Beauregarde-plump and the color of a Moroccan night.  It was about the memories wafting off it.

You see, I have these friends….

Carol, the pie czar who whipped the cream into submission and hand patted the crust into the perfect vessel for delivering those blueberries; her sommelier husband, Gary, who takes care of each one of us by throwing in just the right amount of pithy reply that keeps us from filling with too much hot air; and Kathy, who delivered the stand-up and praise-the-little-baby-Jesus prayer to kick off the whole evening are scientifically proven to be the best dinner companions.

No, really.

In a “Food, Culture and Society” journal article called “When I’m doing a dinner party I don’t go for the Tesco cheeses,” the researchers go on for pages about social and cultural capital, middle class hierarchy and the displaying of social and emotional connections. They found a common theme for most dinner parties was about displaying cultural competence and generally dependent upon women for their success. 

Check. We’ve got that.

Scholars Warde and Martens talk about how food plays an important role in the maintenance of friendship. Hunt’s anthropological research on friendship and home entertaining also connects food to good feelings, social connectivity and significant impact upon individuals’ life chances.

Yep, yep. We’ve got that.

Carol, Kathy and I are at various stages in our careers as journalism professors and Gary is a database replicator genius who has built and sold a company so impressive, he would tell you about it, but he’d have to kill you afterwards.

We are all living the dream as we do every time we get together. We have enough in common and just enough differences to fuel conversation to last course after course of our “Big Chill meals.” Our dinner parties are the right combination of people, conversation, intimacy and, of course, food. On this night we began with a sweet potato soup that Carol threw together because she had found sweet potatoes in her pantry and had bought the sweetest onions, because she heard they rivaled Vidalias, but she didn’t believe it. The main course consisted of fresh Salmon we bought from Gay’s Fish Market just down the street. We also had squash, green beans and corn from Dempsey’s U-pick farm in Frogmore. The aforementioned and now legendary blueberry pie topped off the meal. (Tonight we will be having shrimp fajitas, homemade tortilla chips and guacamole with a homemade mixed berry sorbet as a finish.)

We are all pretty good cooks in our own right, but Carol J. Pardun is a genius. I half believe she and Gary have the beach house on Coastal South Carolina simply to prepare fresh seafood, fruits and vegetables to beguile their guests.

And we have been beguiled.

They entertain on their intimate screened-in porch that overlooks a lagoon where several wildlife inhabitants provide dinner music and the ocean breeze drifts in from the starboard side.

It all belongs in one of Pat Conroy’s ever surprising passages he writes about his beloved South.  So much so, that the enterprising young Pardun managed, by some strange twist of fate and rowing club membership, to get Pat Conroy’s email address.

In an email to Mr. Conroy, Carol made a humble, yet enticing offer for the author to join us for dinner one night this week as we are all Southerners, writers, cooks and fans and are having dinner one island over from his home on Fripp Island.

Seeing as how Carol is world famous in some circles herself and we all know of his culinary delight, we just knew he would join us….

He didn’t.

You see, we briefly tried to step outside our intimate dinner party and imagine ourselves as dinner companions to a different set; but scientifically speaking, we might have altered the universe in a way that tarnishes the ease of conversation and the down hominess of the meal—A butterfly effect that we just might not want to set on its alternate path, no matter how much we love Pat Conroy.

But Mr. Conroy would have been entertained. And he would have eaten well. We are convinced we would somehow make it into his next book. However, in the end none of us really wanted to miss even one magical moment of our evening meals in our own storybook narratives.

Or share our portion of the blueberry pie.