Federalist Society Dinner

Last night Tom and I had the opportunity to go to the Federalist Society's Annual Dinner. The night started out pretty rough...we were running late, basically locked Ellie out of the house, hit traffic, the works. Fortunately, it got much better once we arrived. We completely missed the cocktail hour, but we found our table with time to spare before the food arrived. And let me tell you, the food was glorious. Appetizer was a Maryland crab cake that was to die for. Mmmm so much crab stuffed in that little cake. I almost cried when they took away a plate at an empty place setting at the other side of the table that hadn't even been touched. Salad had goat cheese and a champagne vinaigrette (didn't taste like champagne at all, but it was really yummy, even to someone like me who isn't a huge vinaigrette fan). Dinner was beef tenderloin and a jumbo shrimp with rice, and they served the rice inside a little pumpkin - so cute and clever! Of course, I kept wondering if they were able to get a good post-Halloween price ;-)

After dinner, the main event was an interview with Justice Scalia - he was hysterical!!! The reporter interviewing him kept trying to get him to say that their views on religion/politics/morality/whatever influenced the justices' decisions. At one point, she asked what the significance was of having no Protestants on the court (they are currently all either Jewish or Catholic), and Scalia retorted that the significance was "that there aren't any Protestants." Unfortunately, we had to pop out a little early - we wanted to get home to Ellie and didn't want to get stuck in the rush with 1500 people leaving at the same time. Of course, we hit construction traffic and it still took us over an hour to get back, but it would have been much worse if we had stayed.

Random side fact - I once dog-sat for Justice Alito. I was working at Fur-Get Me Not in the office and we had a call come in from the Alitos...I immediately jumped all over it. The gig was basically  hanging out with their dog, Zeus, for an evening while everyone was out. We went for a nice, long walk, then watched TV together. He was a big sweetie :)