This is why Hailee Raffensperger wore a No. 77 jersey even before she served the two dozen kids from Ripley-Union-Lewis-Huntington headed to their prom this past weekend.
“He was walking up to his table and asked me if the kids were going to the prom,” Raffensperger recalls, taking a minute in the wake of the Thursday lunch rush at J. Alexander’s. “I said, “Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Give me all their checks. Just bring them over, but don’t say anything.”
In the end, of course, the kids figured out. It was Saturday afternoon, after all, and there was barely anybody in the Rookwood hot spot on Cincinnati’s eastern edge.