How’d you like to attend a dinner where some of our area’s best cooks will be preparing some of their special dishes?

You and nine friends or family members can enjoy the Teche Area’s most exclusive dining experience, if you submit the successful bid for The Cajun Sugar Co-op/Daily Iberian Cajun-Creole Cookbook Cookoff to benefit the United Way.

We’ve got a big ad with all the details, running in the paper featuring an alligator wearing a chef’s hat stirring a cooking pot.

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The dinner will be held at the Veteran’s Memorial Building in City Park on July 23. The person submitting the top bid and nine friends or family members will be lavished with personal service from members of the local United Way board. You’ll enjoy an amazing variety of foods, with as many as 40 different samples of dishes that are finalists for honors in our upcoming cookbook.

Previous years’ diners and guests have raved about the experience, and the food. It could be a memorable night for you.

Bids are being taken today through 5 p.m. July 9. Call The Daily Iberian at 365-6773 and enter extension “0” to give our receptionist your bid.

All of the money from the successful bid will benefit the local United Way and the good works it does in our community.

And you’ll benefit by having one of the times of your life.

Check your checkbook balance. Get together with friends and pool your money. But be sure to call in a bid for this one-of-a-kind dining experience, and at the same time help our local United Way.

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Are we really so narrow in our thinking that we’d outlaw the use of a foreign language in a graduation speech, when the graduate uses just a few words of another language to say something to his or her immigrant parents?

That’s being considered in Terrebonne Parish schools where officials are considering a policy that would require all commencement speeches to be in English only.

The proposal comes after two cousins, Hue and Cindy Vo, were co-valedictorians at an area high school.

Cindy gave a speech, most all in English, but according to an Associated Press report, including a sentence in Vietnamese dedicated to her parents.

She explained to her classmates and the rest of those attending that the line roughly translated as a command to always be your own person.

That’s apparently got school officials studying graduation ceremonies and considering rules for the same, including that speeches be in English.

I can remember speeches where students offered quotes from Latin or in French, and people thought that a good thing, demonstrating broad knowledge from the speaker.

Let’s hope rules about commencement addresses will allow graduates to continue to be their own person, as this graduate’s Vietnamese saying urged.

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Everybody’s feeling the pinch of higher gas prices and the associated impact on so many other aspects of our economy.

One I’d not considered was addressed in an AP story that told how legal brothels in Nevada were reporting a drop in business as the high gas prices had cut down on visits from customers.

I can think of a number of puns that would apply. Guess it’s safest I just note how every business is feeling the pinch from high gas prices.

WILL CHAPMAN is publisher of The Daily Iberian.