Waving Wheat

In Oklahoma, even the wheat is friendly. It waves and it smells sweet, just like Mr. Hammerstein said it did. So, what better way to commemorate the nexus between food and love (of power? of change? of radically re-nomenclatured policy?) on this 20 January weekend than at the Oklahoma State Society Inaugural Ball.


On Sunday night, my OSU friend and I gussied ourselves up and enjoyed one of the finest (and freest) balls I've ever attended, at the National Museum of the American Indian, a Smithsonian museum on the National Mall. It's a beautiful museum... fountains and sculpture surround the rugged, white clay-colored building on the outside, and the inside opens up to a cavernous atrium. We skipped the exhibits, though, because the food was too good.

I'm a big fan of keeping to one's culinary roots, and the museum didn't disappoint: sweet grits with whole corn kernels; a cold salad with crunchy green beans, sweet potato, and sunflower seeds; barbecued pork; roast beef with mashed potatoes; a shot of a wintery, squashy soup; crab dip; cornbread with jalapeno peppers; and black eyed pea salad were all expertly presented on two buffet tables. My grin should attest to my delight with the spread (and free champagne):


We thought about mingling, but what was the point? I didn't have some high-profile aide position I could brag about (while taking delight in the fact that all I did was give ill-informed Capitol tours to petulant constituents) and I was too interested in the buffet offerings to risk approaching some intriguing be-suited man when I'd probably be intercepted on my path over by some aide who gives ill-informed Capitol tours. So we broke away from the dinner buffet table and hovered around the dessert table:

Sorry for my vanity (with more photos of me than food), but my friend was good enough to bring her camera, so the photos were more traditional than fetish food close-ups. However, for a distant food shot, see below. The plants were our lighthouses, providing us direction and shelter from our hunger. And that's a jazz band.


A plateful of overly sugarly trifle and cheesecake-on-a-stick later, we posed for photos with Oklahoma Governor Brady Henry, who told us to stop by sometime. We said ok. After seeing the governor, there wasn't much else to look forward to, so we rode the elevators. I think I was so excited to have a Cape Cod with clear cranberry juice, I couldn't help but pretend I was a Broadway star. No one can ever say I won't publicly humiliate myself here to recount a food detail.


9:15 struck, the music stopped, and the food was swept to the kitchen before I could figure out how to get something to-go (it's not the size of one's purse, but the intensity of one's desire to risk public approbation to score leftovers that counts). We spent half the walk back to the metro complaining about how horrible our shoes were until we saw this irresistible photo opportunity, fodder for giggle all the way back to L'Enfant Plaza.