“I see faces here that I have seen here since back in the ’70s,” said Nathan’s owner Carol Joynt as she opened Nathan’s final “Q&A Cafe,” undoubtedly noticing several faces in the crowd who have starring roles in her guest’s newest book, “Mortal Friends.”
Many of Georgetown’s ladies who lunch filled the restaurant on one of its final days to hear author Jane Stanton Hitchcock talk about her murder mystery of thinly veiled characters living in the Washington enclave.
Joynt was hard-pressed to uncover who was who in the book, suggesting that the book’s character Carmen Appleton is event planner Carolyn Peachey (note the clever fruit reference), Gay Harding is former Washington Post owner Kay Graham, and the Myers power couple is Vernon and Ann Jordan.
Originally a New Yorker who never pictured herself coming to Washington (fun fact: The book’s leading lady’s name is Reven Lynch — “Never” backwards), Hitchcock clearly caught on with the workings of the District quickly, calling it “high school with wrinkles” where women wearing pastel suits are “weapons of mass destruction.”
Those pastel-wearing women, many of whom we spotted earlier at the lunch, again showed up at Hitchcock’s book party, appropriately in one of the book’s major meeting places, Café Milano.
