RANDY FERTEL - The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak

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Adult Event

Start: 02/07/2012 7:00 pm

RANDY FERTEL
will speak & sign,
The Gorilla Man
and the Empress of Steak:
A New Orleans Family Memoir.

We'll have complimentary beer on hand at this event, courtesy of
Saint Arnold Brewing Company. Join us!

The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is the story of two larger-than-life characters and the son whom their lives helped to shape. Ruth Fertel was a petite, smart, tough-as-nails blonde with a weakness for rogues, who founded the Ruth's Chris Steak House empire almost by accident. Rodney Fertel was a gold-plated, one-of-a-kind personality, a railbird-heir to wealth from a pawnshop of dubious repute just around the corner from where the teenage Louis Armstrong and his trumpet were discovered. When Fertel ran for mayor of New Orleans on a single campaign promise--buying a pair of gorillas for the zoo-- he garnered a paltry 308 votes. Then he purchased the gorillas anyway!

This is a New Orleans story, featuring the distinctive characters, color, food, and history of that city--before Hurricane Katrina and after. But it also is the universal story of family and the full magnitude of outsize follies leavened with equal measures of humor, rage, and rue.

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Randy Fertel is a writer and president of both the Fertel Foundation and the Ruth U. Fertel Foundation. He has taught English at Harvard, Tulane, LeMoyne College, the University of New Orleans, and the New School for Social Research.

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