By Jan Landon
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

They found their spot smack-dab in the middle of the Blue Sky Restaurant.

They call it the Chicks Table or the Chicklets Table, and they call themselves Ladies of the Round Table.

The table used to be off to the side in the Tallgrass Creek dining room. But these ladies would have none of it; now they sit in the center of the room. In the evenings it is home to a group of eight laughing, chatting, grinning single women who look forward to having dinner together.

“This is the liveliest table,” Joan Smith says.

“We have a lot of fun,” Deloris Read says. “This is a happy place.”

“I have all my friends here,” Grace Lilgendahl says.

A special guest
Tonight a man has joined them—unusual, but not unheard of.   The women laugh and say they kidnapped Donald Culver, who seems quite delighted with his surroundings. He says that this table indeed comes with a reputation for being a little noisy.

The center table is usually one of the first to fill up, and as the evening continues residents come in to fill the empty chairs at other tables. Without question, dinnertime at the Blue Sky Restaurant is the day’s biggest social event at Tallgrass Creek. 

There is no shortage of  conversation anywhere. A quiet hum fills the  restaurant— conversations about the success of a granddaughter’s basketball team or the weather or a movie or book or TV show or the day’s events or plans for the weekend or a memory from someplace they had gone or of someone they knew.

Residents wave across the room to friends who have found seats at other tables. By the end of the evening, more than 80 meals will have been served.

Best time of day
“This is our favorite time of the day,” says Granville “Bo” Bohannan, who sits at a table with Bob Altland, Myra Strickert, and his wife Katie.

“It’s very social,” Altland says about dinner at Tallgrass Creek. “It’s a good  time. You get to meet people.”