Deli Owner Served Up Laughter

January 1998: The Corti Sisters Italian Deli holds a grand opening lasagna-and-prime rib banquet for 50. The festivities are capped by a priest who invokes the blessing of “Santa Polenta” for prosperity and good luck.

March 25, 2000: The Corti Sisters Italian Deli serves its last meal.

Chris Corti, one of the two sisters who founded the little place on Ventura’s Thompson Boulevard, was killed in a car wreck the night before.

Friends and family are cleaning out the store, numbly hauling cases of plum tomatoes, cannellini beans, and olive oil to charities.

As the dispirited group silently clears the shelves, someone has the good sense to yell out: “Oh for God’s sake, this is a restaurant, right?”

Soon, bowls are brimming with pasta and sausage, and the stories flow.

There were plenty of them.

Corti started the deli with her sister, Jodeen Frank.

The two, both put up for adoption at birth, didn’t meet until 1984, when Jodeen tracked Chris down in Sacramento at her family’s famed Italian grocery.

“We did the LAX-screaming-crying-hugging-each-other thing,” Chris said a couple of years ago.

Over the years, they grew closer, finally moving in together and opening the deli.

“We always talked about being two blue-haired old ladies in wheelchairs whipping around together,” Chris said.

That’s not how it worked out, though.

Jodeen sold her share of the deli to Chris about six months ago.

“There was a strain, trying to work and live together,” said Jodeen, a nurse who does insurance physicals for a living. “Now, after having this connection for so long, it’s a strange feeling--it’s like I’m back to where I was: an only child again . . .. “

Even with Jodeen’s departure, Chris had big plans for the long-struggling deli.

She pictured a red-checked tablecloth kind of place, a nighttime gathering spot for neighborhood people and cops and ambulance crews and the occasional couple gazing moon-eyed at each other over tumblers of Chianti and platters of manicotti.

This week, she was to be fingerprinted and complete the last bits of paperwork before picking up her liquor license.

She and her 28-year-old daughter, Jennifer Vargas, were going to take their three employees to the beach for a picnic and a high-level strategy session: Who will work nights when we open for dinner? What kind of candles should we get? What about the menu?

But on Friday night, Chris had dinner with some friends at a Chinese restaurant.

As she left, her car was broadsided by a 20-year-old driver at a stoplight on Victoria Avenue. A police investigation is to be completed within a couple of weeks.

“I had to find out: Was she laughing at dinner?” her daughter said. “Was she having a good time? And it meant so much to me to find out that she was.”

Of course, she laughed all the time.

Maybe that’s one reason teenagers were so drawn to her.

One of her employees was a high school kid with her eyes on an acting career.

“I’ll save a place for you at the Oscars,” she liked to tell Chris.

“And I’ll be there,” Chris would say--needlessly, considering her enthusiastic attendance at the girl’s high school plays.

When her daughter was younger, Chris was her neighborhood’s all-purpose, all-occasion mom--the kind of woman who gladly hosted slumber parties for 25.

“Her frontyard was our baseball diamond, her living room was our arcade, her kitchen was our personal restaurant,” said Crisan Casillas, a lifelong friend who grew up nearby. “There were something like 13 kids on the block, but her door was always open, and she never told you to go away.”

On Friday night, emergency crews cut Chris out of her car and rushed her to Ventura County Medical Center.

An emergency-room physician there had eaten at the deli just hours earlier.

“My God,” she said. “It’s Chris.”

A memorial observance will be held in early April.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.