I must have slept through the 80’s and 90’s, because I never heard the one about Chris Dodd, Ted Kennedy, and the “waitress sandwich.” I learned about this for the first time today, reading a great (so what else is new) column by the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass about Roland Burris. Buried in the usual Kass wit and sarcasm was this nugget:
One thing for certain, [Burris] won’t act like a couple of other senators who are beloved by the news media, two senators who made the famous cocktail waitress sandwich years ago.
According to news reports, those two liberal Democratic lions and champions of women’s rights, Sen. Ted Kennedy, the noted midnight swimmer from Massachusetts, and his buddy Christopher Dodd of Connecticut were out one night drinking at La Brasserie, a Capitol Hill restaurant.
Dodd had so much to drink he slumped in a chair. Kennedy decided to liven things up. So he threw a waitress on top of Dodd. Then Kennedy jumped on the astonished woman.”She was said to have run screaming from the room,” according to a lengthy 1991 profile on Dodd in the Hartford Courant.
Burris may be a hack, but he’ll never make a waitress panini.
Could this be true, and I missed it? So I did a web search, and yes, I missed it. A 2005 post at Sons of the Republic gathers up news reports, while a 1998 article at NY Magazine notes that the dynamic duo “participated in the famous ‘waitress sandwich’ at La Brasserie in 1985, while their dates were in the bathroom.”
And what’s worse, I missed other blog posts from last year when Dodd toyed with running for President, which rehashed Dodd’s antics. Perhaps I was too focused on Dodd’s mortgage deals to pick up on the references to Dodd’s waitress sandwich.
Just goes to show, just when you think you’ve heard it all …. Did you hear the one about the “Senator from Aetna” who gets red in the face complaining about greedy Republicans while lining his pocket with special mortgage deals while he’s covering up misconduct by his campaign contributors at Fannie Mae all the while serving on the Senate financial services committee, and now is in charge of reforming financial regulation?
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