"Look at those balconies", said Priscilla Fogarty, short, shrill, and solid. Priscilla, brilliantly and unnaturally redheaded, was encased in a polished silver linen suit that looked as unwrinkled and shiny as medieval armour. Her name and corporate logo stood emblazoned on a twenty-four-carat gold shield that decoratively protected the severe up-slope of her left breast pocket. I had noticed over the weeks of our association that Priscilla's heavily-constrained body - like her manually-applied features - never changed shape or flexed, whether she was sprinting up stairs to point out a skylight or standing on tiptoes to disable a burglar alarm. There was no doubt that the woman's garments, above and below, were every bit as formidable as Priscilla herself.

I was eating my second raw dozen, balancing a paper plate full of food while standing on the slippery banks of the Amite River, a man dedicated to the consumption of honoree bivalves at the Oyster Festival in Amite, Louisiana.

Then suddenly I heard my name called out loudly somewhere behind me. I turned to see an oil-covered, snaggletoothed, long-haired biker in full leathers racing toward me with his penis in his hand.

The crowd parted instantly, jumping back and yelling as if a rabid dog had been dropped into their midst. Fathers put their hands over the eyes of children. Mothers stood agape and transfixed. A gaggle of teenaged girls tracked the movement of the tumescent organ across the fairgrounds with a synchronised formation of half-a-dozen pointed index fingers and a moist cloud of snickers and giggles. I ignored the gasp from my own female companion. She also had reacted quickly and now cowered behind me holding onto my shirt as if she was afraid of falling into the yawning gateway of the erotic maelstrom that had suddenly opened in the middle of a family-oriented food fair. My opinion of her diminished. I would have actually thought her better prepared for such an eventuality. I know I was.

During my simultaneous house restoration and television-series production, I had been too busy to deal with the stove, what with alternating surprise bouts of plumbing and sound re-edits, and also the fits of depression that punctuated both processes. It was hard to cook, or at least cook interestingly, while living in a continuing, seemingly endless night-time purgatory of brutal, unending manual labor on the house, with only the prospect of waking to spend the daylight hours being artificially nice to people, acting the studio cheerleader as a producer must, coddling culinary divas - this was a cooking show. The work and stress loomed ahead day after day, a gruelling production schedule that stretched well into the next year.

He'd phoned twice the week before, and I'd returned the call to his hotel voice mail on both occasions, but we hadn't connected. So when the 350-pound biker widely known across the deep south as "Grizzly" called me again last Thursday, I was as prepared as could be for another of his semi-annual communications.

He was back home in Baton Rouge.

"Shit fire, Jimbo, I called and called, where the hell were you?" he yelled without preface as I picked up the phone in my office.

"Out of town, Griz, but I got your messages and left a couple for you explaining where I was."