This is a blurry picture, however I have a clear memory of a sweet, kind and wonderful person. I was in my first year at the Jolly G, the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, as a junior apprentice. I met Joanna who was a senior apprentice then and she was one of the nicest people I had met in that first year. She gave me my first cowboy hat--a Stetson--and it still hangs in my office today; a bit old but a great memory. So, every time I look at the hat I think of Joanna, and then the Greenbrier. 

It was so wonderful to see her after some thirty years. She was a chef, owned her own restaurant, and is now happily remarried. I have been blessed to have met some pretty cool friends. I had to laugh tonight; she reminded me of how I taught her how to eat the shrimp tails with the shell on, and said that was where the taste was. I do like to eat the tails, especially crispy ones, ha ha.

~AW