Elbows off, smiles on

Miss Manners crashes dinner: It's a new Kardashian world, but old standardsstill matter

Engel and Kennedy talk table manners.
From left, Lena Engel, Shavonnah Roberts and Melissa Seuffert of EmergingLeaders.
Mary Lee Kennedy has been teaching good manners for the past 20 years.
From left, Norma Collum, Phillip Collum, Laura Englert, Greg Englert and SarahGrimm.
Strip House's chocolate cake with chocolate whipped cream with vanilla sauce. Incupcake form.

Manners do not discriminate. Rich, poor, Kardashian - anyone can be charmer. It's part of why Latin men can be so attractive (despite often hidden macho agendas) and how the Chinese choose business partners.

For Mary Lee Kennedy, 62, manners are about kindness.

At the Strip House Wednesday night, 34 business professionals received a manners manicure by Kennedy, in a red-lipstick room. During her lesson, Kennedy recalled her teen years in Louisiana, where she wasn't allowed to leave home without her gloves.

In her seminars on etiquette, she likes to mix old with the new.

Kennedy led the Emerging Leaders, a group dedicated to grooming young professionals and developments downtown, through their dinner with a relaxed basic training in etiquette.

Hannah Thieodeux, 24, a senior broadcast major at the University of Houston, was there on invitation by the Emerging Leaders president Shavonnah Roberts.

"I'm glad she didn't make it stuffy," Thieodeux said. "So many of these manners seminars are like that."

Thieodeux says most of the information regurgitated things she's heard before at other events like these, but that it served as a good refresher.

"I picked up on things that I'd even use on a date," Thieodeux said.

Here's a list of basic dinner table no-nos:

- Chewing with your mouth open or talking with food in your mouth

- Slurping, smacking, blowing your nose or making any other unpleasant noises

- Holding a utensil like a shovel

- Picking your teeth at the table — or, even worse, flossing

- Failing to place your napkin on your lap or not using it all

- Taking a sip of a drink while still chewing food (unless you're choking)

- Cutting up all your food at once

- Slouching over your place setting or leaning on your elbows while eating

- Executing the "boardinghouse reach" rather than asking someone to pass you something that's far away

- Leaving the table without saying, "excuse me"

Not-so-basic rules:

- Never let your back recline against your chair during dinner (a difficult habit to break)

- Ladies do not cross their legs, only their ankles (an even harder habit to break)

- Never ask a new acquaintance about their schooling (not everyone goes to college)

- You CAN wear white after Labor Day (still seems dangerous)

- Black attire at weddings is fine (never white)

- Look people in the eye while toasting (isn't that flirtatious?)

- Don't make your eating habits an announcement (looking at you vegetarians)

- Never talk about sex, politics or religion

After trying these rules out on the dinner table, my party found themselves conversing on carnivale in St. Lucia, skin-scalding pools in Las Vegas and traffic in Chicago. Strip House served a Caesar salad with hearts of Romaine and paprika croutons, filet mignon with black truffle creamed spinach and crisp goose fat potatoes and the chocolate cake with chocolate whipped cream and vanilla sauce.

Psst ... Strip House's filet mignon is very soft — like biting into a nightgown (which isn't very polite).

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Thanks, Queen Bey

Pop icon Beyoncé donates $100,000 to University of Houston Law School

Photo by Erza Shaw Getty Images

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Pop megastar Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has donated $100,000 to the University of Houston Law Center Criminal Justice Clinic through her BeyGOOD Foundation. The gift will allow the clinic to hire fill-time faculty to head it, benefiting the students who study there.

“I am delighted that the BeyGOOD Foundation has made this very generous gift to the UH Law Center,” said Leonard Baynes, dean of the UH Law Center. “Not only will this funding help establish a full-time criminal justice clinic that provides pro bono legal services in our community, but it will also supercharge our already excellent criminal law and justice programming.”

The clinic is one of nine at UHLC. It helps students learn to navigate the criminal justice system, especially on behalf of clients that are underserved by skilled attorneys. People of color are affected disproportionately by a lack of good, ethical representation.

Beyoncé, the most decorated artist in Grammy history and easily the biggest musical star native to Houston, has a long history of advocating for criminal justice reform. She was a staunch supporter of the police reform following the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, asking law enforcement to “stop killing us” in a web post. In 2020, she penned an open letter to the Kentucky attorney general asking for justice in the death of Breonna Taylor.

Through her BeyGOOD Foundation, established in 2013, Beyoncé has focused mostly on expanding the prospects of Black-owned business and offering education opportunities to students. Forwarding the cause of legal representation in Texas while also helping out marginalized communities compliments her other philanthropic work.

“At UH Law, we envision a legal profession where ‘everyone has the opportunity to prosper,’ as BeyGOOD envisions, and we will achieve this vision by providing access to strong and effective legal representation in criminal proceedings,” Baynes said. “And together, through this gift, the BeyGOOD Foundation and UHLC will shepherd the next generation of criminal justice attorneys in the city of Houston, the state of Texas and the nation.”