Ah, the things that my wife and I find when we pick up litter on our daily walk in the Foothills of Tucson. On April 24, we picked up a discarded banquet order on the side of Kolb Rd. It was from the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, which is near our house.
The order was for a reception hosted by the University of Arizona Athletics Department from 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM on Wednesday, April 22.
Apparently, there is no place to hold a reception on campus; nor are there any dining facilities on campus. Also, the Marriott Hotel across the street from the campus is not hoity-toity enough. The same for nearby downtown Tucson, where hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent via a tax scheme to ostensibly transform it into a cat’s meow for dining, drinking, meeting, working and living.
The Arizona Wildcats evidently don’t see downtown as the cat’s meow, which is why they held the reception 15 miles from downtown.
The banquet order was for 200 people at a cost of $82 per person, for a total cost of $16,400. There was an additional charge of $450 to set up three bars. Pretentious wines and cocktails could be bought by guests for $13 a glass. Imported beer and domestic beer were $7.50 and $7.00 per bottle, respectively, and a bottle of water was $5.75.
Here’s the menu, with spelling and capitalization the same as the original:
Main Courses
Grilled Halibut
Grilled Flat-Iron Steak
Sides
Grilled Corn: Herbaceous and garlicky
Mashed Red Potatoes with Aged Cheese on the Side
Watermelon & Feta Kabobs
Grilled romaine salad with all the fixins
Grilled Seasonal Vegetables
Desserts
Grilled Pineapple/Peaches served with vanilla bean ice cream
Banana pudding
Pound cake with fruit
An appetizer wasn’t listed, but the banquet probably began with a land acknowledgement, in keeping with university tradition.
Maybe the university acknowledged that the resort is owned by a company headquartered in Manhattan, where, legend has it, the Dutch bought the island from Native Americans for a measly $24 in trinkets. And maybe it further acknowledged that privileged palefaces are continuing to rip off Native Americans, as evidenced by the Pascua Yaqui Tribe paying $60 million to put the name of their casino on Wildcats stadium for 20 years.
In any event, if the banquet had something to do with the mission of a land grant university, I’m not smart enough to understand what that might be. Nor do I understand what it had to do with social justice, which is an obsession of many if not most faculty, staff and students.
I do know what “herbaceous” means, however, but only because I looked it up.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
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