Niki, a Great Host

Despite Mario Batali's creed, "in my perfect world everyone has an industrial slicer for Proscuitto and spends their days making Lasagne", I have to say, it aint easy. I made two yesterday. Today is my mom's birthday and I volunteered to make an early dinner for her at my house. I'm terrified.
Every night before I am about to "entertain" I have repeated nightmares where I am struck terribly ill before the guests arrive and they have nothing to eat or drink. I'm in my room throwing up with a headache and they are milling about confused and upset.
In spite of that, I did wake up this morning. The lasagnes are made. I also made some potato/green garlic /onion soup, the last two ingedients coming from my mom's garden, and I just have to clean the house, do all the dishes, and I'll be ready for twelve people to come in and make a complete mess.
So why entertain at all? Why do people do it? Some people are natural at it.

My old friend Niki Hale from Newburyport was a natural cook and host. She's a Greek woman who married a much older scion of the Hale family (one ancestor was Nathan Hale, "I regret I have but one life to give to my country") then she found herself a widow with two kids living in an inherited old historical relic of a house at the dead end of a road near the Merrimac river. Chipping green shutters. Creeky wood floors. Cloth bound books a century old lining every room. Coal stoves in all the bedrooms.
She rented a room to my girlfriend at the time, I was doing a degree at Harvard Extension in Cambridge, and the thing that got me through a week of lonely studying in Lamont library was the food-conversation-people filled weekends at Niki's house.
She'd pick me up at the train station, her frizzy gray hair flying, in her red rabbit convertible. Driving way too fast. Goofy smile with brown, crooked and missing teeth, brown because she smoked like a chimney. We'd go directly to the supermarket where's she'd get either a whole salmon, or a leg of lamb, maybe a bag a mussels. Though she was tiny , she moved through the aisles like a talk, talking, laughing and for some reason calling me "Jose".
We'd get back to the cold creeky house, warm our hands by the kitchen's coal stove which was black and about the size of a rhinoceros. Then we'd cook.
She'd put the fish in the oven. She taught me how to make real mayonnaise, whisking olive oil into egg yolk, and then she'd cut up a whole head of dill, add that in with lots of lemon juice and that would go with the salmon, still the best way to eat it I've ever had. She'd be on her second Jim Beam on ice (she always bought the gallon size) we'd put everything on the table.
Maybe she'd off to pick up her twenty year old boyfriend, or her daughter back from Columbia. But when we sat down, she'd talk. Talk about Greece, her father who was an archeologist, fleeing from the Nazi's, or Art. She could run down the whole history of art, especially the modern stuff, as her late husband, Robert Hale, was the first curator of Modern Art at the Met. By the time coffee was brewed in the chrome stove top pot, she might repeat the story of how, when she and Robert lived in the Hamptons, a neighbor who was low on cash, begged and pleaded and finally sold them a paintning for 65 bucks.
It was Jackson Pollack.
Sitting down with Niki, no matter if there were two or twenty people around, it always felt like a party. She'd say whatever the hell was on her mind, she'd shoot down someone if they were bullshitting; she was herself. At midnight, When she finally wobbled up to bed to read some thick novel for an hour, and fall asleep with the light on and her reading glasses perched on her nose, it was deathly quiet around the kitchen table.
I miss her.
It's rare to meet someone that fills a room with life. What a great gift to have.
That is what is truly "entertaining". Not just a bunch of good food spread out on a table, but that feeling of anticipation about being around people that are sure to surprise you.