Last weekend was a big, fun, family-filled time for us...we had a birthday party for my great-aunt Rudy, who turned 100 on February 15, in Slidell. Several relatives (and friends) drove down from Oklahoma to go to the party and hang out with us in the French Quarter. I forget how much I love the French Quarter until I'm there, and then I just want to keep going back. Without further ado, here's the 100-year-old lady:

If she looks awesome, it's because she is. She made a short speech at the party, which she closed by saying, "I don't lean on anyone. You lean on me."  I love it that she got a personalized boa and parasol. I wanted to stand up right then and start a second line, and I think it might've happened, if this gal hadn't crashed the party:

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This gorgeous woman is my great-aunt Valentina Wilkinson Sanford Duckworth--or as we like to call her, Aunt Rudy.  She's 99 and a half, and has spent most of her life in New Orleans.  She's pictured here with her boyfriend Joe Minacapelli of Slidell.  My grandmother, Frances, was Rudy's youngest sister; they had another sister, Florence, who passed away a number of years ago. Rudy is the oldest and the last surviving, and she recently moved back to the New Orleans area after a long stint in Cleveland, Oklahoma, where she moved to open a needlework business with Frances.

The needlework business was sort of a "retirement project" for the sisters, and they did well with it for about 10 years, but I don't mean to imply that once Rudy left New Orleans for a small town in Oklahoma, her life somehow quieted down. In fact, once she joined up with Frances, Rudy started to travel the world. My grandmother had taught foreign languages in high school, and had become the kind of French teacher who took a group of seniors to Europe each summer. She'd caught an insatiable travel bug, and when the needlework store started taking off, she and Rudy booked passage to Europe, Scandinavia, the U.S.S.R. (it still was, then), China, Australia, Israel, and places in between, with the dual itineraries of heavy-duty sightseeing and textile purchasing.  But let me not forget eating--they loved to try the local specialties, no matter how unusual. So when Rudy talks about restaurants, she's speaking with a wealth of experience, from cooking during the Depression to 13-course meals in Moscow--but you can tell that her favorite memories are from times she had in the grand restaurants of New Orleans.

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