It's a spring evening. You are with your family on a highway somewhere in Indiana. Your choices are: Iron Skillet. Skyline Chili. McDonalds. LaRosa's Pizza. Dairy Queen. Arbys. I'm forgetting something, oh, yes, Waffle House. You choose LaRosa's Pizza, the nearest semblance to ethnic food. Your son is hungry. Despite the redundancy, you order the cheese bread sticks with cheese and a medium pizza. The sticks arrive white, doughy, soft with sliced Provolone melted on top and on the side the sweet tomato and sugar sauce and that bright yellow "butter" sauce you should know better than to eat.
Everyone in the restaurant seems to be happy that it's Friday night and they are out for pizza near the highway. There's mild excitement in the air about a game or the weekend or what happened in school. For once, you aren't thinking about the Democratic Primary (which you voted in, but believe now may have been a waste of your time since, ultimately, the choice of candidates may not be in your hands, but the hands of the new uber-beings, the Superdelegates), what others think of your parenting style or getting paid work or anything that causes stress. You are dipping doughy bread into fake butter. You have put aside your relentless standards, for once. You are just being like everybody else.
Your son is happy to be with you in a restaurant. Happy to have bread to dip in sauces. Soon he is kissing you, slathering fake butter on your face. Against your better judgment, you dip another bread stick into the "butter" sauce. It tastes like move popcorn. It's OK. You are looking forward to the pizza with the too-sweet sauce on crust that bears resemblance to cardboard. Your standards are indeed slipping. There isn't a wood-fired oven for miles around. That's OK too.
Then your thoughts fall back into their usual groove to whir on the track of your brain, like an anxious Thomas train. You briefly think about the relationship between pizza and politics. Your husband likes to read you Peggy Noonan's Saturday column in the Wall Street Journal. She and the rest of the media are obsessed with the nuances and what has become painful minutia of the upcoming election. Every week, you and your husband read her and others, and on Sundays you watch Meet The Press (after This Week with George Stephanopoulos) but it's only in this moment sitting in LaRosa's off the highway in Indiana, think you understand it better than they. You can literally taste it. Whoever can bottle and promise to preserve the optimistic "TGIF" energy in the room, the smile of the young waitress named Amber, the relief in the face of the heavyset woman in sweats as she picks up carry-out, the feeling that you are OK with pizza in any form, will win. Pizza will carry the day. Mediocre pizza. With sugar sauce and fake butter. It's a winning combination.
5 comments:
Better a mediocre pizza than a mediocre hamburger! ;-)
Well, true. But tell me, which is worse, mediocre pizza vs. mediocre Chinese?
Oooh, no contest. Mediocre Chinese wins, hands down!
Hmmmm ... It would appear that pizza does attain a certain level of immunity where mediocrity is concerned.
You are so right, mediocre Chinese is horrid. Exhibit A: Sweet & sour chicken made with corn syrup and deep fried. There are bad pizzas, but generally they can be excused. Inevitably there is some redeeming quality to pizza. You can't deep fry it for instance.
Oh no, you can deep fry pizza. Have you ever had Italian fried bread (on a summer morning before Taste Of Chicago begins, with a cup of hot coffee by the lake)? That beats everything. Hands down.
Post a Comment