Pizza Mind

Back in the Dark Ages, when I first moved to New York (okay, five years ago), there was this little pizza place a few blocks from my apartment, where the same guy was always there, all day every day, and he'd make you a fantastic pie with fresh ingredients and a hand-tossed crust, and you could take your friends there on your way back from Coney Island and wow them.

You know the pizza place I'm talking about if you care at all about pizza. Slice accepts it as a foregone conclusion that you already know all about DiFara, and about Dom DeMarco, its grizzled Italian Energizer bunny of an owner. You also know that when you go there, you can be assured that the service is going to suck, the tables are going to be dirty, and you must be patient. All this is understood, and most people know that the pizza is worth a bit of an extra wait.

But no pizza is worth what happened to us on Saturday. DiFara in the middle of the summer is a hellhole, and even that I knew going in. What I wasn't prepared for was for the oven to be spewing noxious smoke all over the restaurant, causing the air to be unbreatheable in addition to hot and stuffy. My friends all waited inside with me for the first half-hour or so, but eventually had to go outside for the second half-hour-plus. I think, by the time I got the pie, Dom's son thought I was crying about my pizza order. (I nearly was. And if that got it into my hands any sooner, then I'm okay with that.) For most of Saturday night and Sunday, I had a pretty nasty cough.

I remember the hot. I remember the stuffy. I even remember the pack of ...oh, I hate the word, so I won't say it, but it starts with an h and we have a lot of them in Brooklyn... thinking they are now part of the cognoscenti because they called Mr. DeMarco by his first name when they placed their order, and the pack of Midwood/Ditmas locals who are pissed that the pack of ...h-words have taken over their local pizza joint and who may actually be even more annoying than the h-words with their patronizing list of DiFara survival tips. (I'm not sure who I'd want to slap more - the next person who leans over the counter and says "hey, Dom, we need some more parmesan" or the next person who rolls their eyes at people in line and tells them "this is nothing. You don't know what waiting at DiFara is. Let me tell you about this one time...") But I didn't remember the smoke. And the smoke, my friends, was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The pizza? Delicious, of course. But many things are delicious. I am content to enjoy every other delicious thing in the world for the next five years or so, until every publication in the world moves on to the next great pizzeria, and then I might chance going back. I'm pretty sure it will get worse before it gets better.

In which your heroine is a nice person

I saw that a couple of people found my site today because I mentioned both bicycles and "Good Day New York." I think they were looking for this. Which is both hilarious and true. I've never been happier to own a Kryptonite lock that cost me twice as much as my bike did.

Ephemeral Stuff

While I dream up things to write about, I thought I'd throw you a few random links:

• Interactive Art Installation Kills People


• The Onion's funniest article in ages: "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence"


• Ken Jennings suggests ways to improve Jeopardy!


• People are sick of The DaVinci Code! Not me. It is just too much fun to hate.

Also, I am constantly terrified by the tiny animations that keep getting slipped into the online version of For Better or For Worse. I keep forgetting they've added the little blinks and such, and I start thinking the characters are coming to life to kill me.

(Greatest Hits) Oh Yeah!

(ed. note: Occasionally, to keep this blog fresh, I've decided that every so often, I'm going to repost things I've written ages ago and possibly reposted elsewhere, maybe re-tooling them a bit to stay current. This is just so you'll have something constructive to do while I don't have time to generate new and entertaining things. Besides, you know what they say - if you haven't read it yet, it's new to you.)

The other night, at the supermarket, I had a nigh-Proustian flashback while standing in the check-out line. I spotted a metal rack haphazardly jammed with little paper envelopes in bold reds and purples, and it cried out to me. Kool-Aid. Immediately, I was compelled to step out of line and dig through the rack in search of my favorite flavors. It's summertime, after all. It might be raining, but July is still definitely a Kool-Aid month. I spent every summer of my childhood up to high school drinking more Kool-Aid than was probably advisable or healthy. We sucked it down like water, every summer all summer.

There were a few summers in there where we saved the points and traded them in for plastic cups shaped like the Kool-Aid Man, or entered contests to try to win t-shirts or other assorted Kool-Aid-Man swag (which we never actually won). Oh yeah! Sure, my mom only made it with half the requisite amount of sugar, but I imagine one need only look to Kool-Aid, and the unflouridated Montana tap water, to understand why 90% of my top teeth and 60% of my bottom teeth are filled.

These days, technological advances have enabled me to substitute Splenda instead of sugar, which may not help my teeth, but it will at least help my waistline. To my credit, I still follow my mom's lead and make it with half a cup of sugar instead of a full cup, and it tastes just fine. Almost too sweet, in fact, leading me to wonder if maybe the sugar in her Kool-Aid isn't halved but thirded, or something like that. Once I made a pitcher of Kool-Aid and accidentally totally forgot the sugar. I don't recommend that.

Lately, I've had some trouble locating a few key flavors, particularly Tropical Punch (it's always been my favorite), but to my great relief there's usually Cherry in there among the bizarre, trendy new flavors. They did the trendy flavors when I was a kid, too (remember Purplesaurus Rex? Or Great Bluedini?), but I've always been a traditional kind of girl. Cherry, Raspberry, Tropical Punch. Not so much with the scary Kiwi-Peach-Guava-whatever. And Kool-Aid Lemonade is some nasty shit. If you want lemonade, I can't advocate any other method than fresh, or, in a pinch, the frozen cans that require 4 1/3 cans of water to one can of lemonade.

(Aside: when I was 16, I dyed my hair pink with Raspberry Kool-Aid. It lasted for about three days and smelled great. I tried this again recently. The pink streak stayed in my hair for over six months, until I finally cut it out entirely.)

Anyway, Kool-Aid is a notable substance in my world because Kool-Aid is exactly as good as I remember it. So few things are, you see. Most Disney movies come off as plodding and trite to me these days. Micky Dolenz (complete with ginormous white-boy Afro) is somehow not as cute to me as he was when I was 8. (I switched to Mike sometime during my teens.) Debbie Gibson, once the height of musical excellence for me, makes my teeth hurt. Pizza Hut pizza is just a big flavorless doughy mass to me anymore. Those plastic barrettes with animals on them damage my hair when I try to wear them now. And when I go to the pool nowadays I just swim laps, and that's fun enough, but I don't even remember what kinds of things my stepsiblings and I did at the pool that seemed to make the summer afternoons fly by. Was there really a point where I could amuse myself for three hours playing Marco Polo?

Some of this stuff is the kind of stuff that might not have been that good to begin with, and was only good when experienced as a child. Other stuff is probably not as good anymore because my tastes have expanded and matured and I've (possibly) become more sophisticated. But many things make me wonder if the defect is not in the experience itself, but in me. Maybe I've lost my capacity to enjoy certain things in the process of abandoning other childish conceits, and maybe it's not a good thing. So it's a relief to know that I can still derive the same simple enjoyment from a few of the things that I loved as a kid. And that's where the Kool-Aid comes in.

So what are yours? What's still as good now as it was when you were a kid? What's a disappointment?

(By the way, the best paean to summer nostalgia that I've ever read is Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. I need to drag that out and give it a re-read.)

There's No Intelligent Life Down Here

Long posts are in the works, most notably bashing Sex and the City sycophants, rhapsodizing about Cuban sammiches, and once again sticking up for my imaginary literary boyfriend Chuck Klosterman, but for now, I merely have this to offer you. I am awash in nerdy glee, as a fan of both Monty Python and any incarnation of Star Trek. The "pram-a-lot" line is the best part.

That's right, I said it. I love Star Trek. There are few things I love more. The only thing that has stopped me from going to a convention - in costume, even - thus far has been lack of opportunity. This is all changing in November. My sewing machine is fired up and ready for action. And you'd better frickin' believe I'm paying $60 for a photo with Shatner.

Pow! Wham! Zot!

It's no big secret that comic books are not exactly my favorite genre of literature. Sure, the Spider-Man movies didn't suck, I rather enjoyed The Sandman graphic novels, and I do think The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was one of the best novels of the last ten years, but by and large, I don't get excited about sequential art, its universes, its characters, or anything that comes out of the comic book universe. Certainly not the way a good number of my friends do.

But when I found out that one of the mainstays of my childhood was getting the graphic-novelization treatment, I had to check it out. From fourth grade through seventh grade, I lived, breathed, ate, and slept Baby-Sitters' Club. I'm sure if you were born between roughly 1978 and 1985, you did too.

All told, I probably read at least the first 50, and all of the Super Specials. New books used to come out at a rate of one per month, and while I was waiting patiently for the next one to be released, I would re-read my favorites. I used to write out my own BSC-style middle-school-minidrama fiction in five-subject spiral notebooks, using four-color pens. I've never loved an author quite as obsessively as I loved Ann M. Martin (and it broke my heart, years later, to realize that all but one or two of these books were ghost-written...well, I was either heart-broken or painfully jealous of these mystery people who got paid to write Baby-Sitters' Club books, one of the two - I'd still write pre-fabbed YA fiction novels for a living if someone offered me the job - AND I'd be awesome at it - hear that, book packagers? Call me!).

So when I learned that Scholastic was re-releasing the novels as graphic novels, I was intrigued enough to track down a copy of the first installment, Kristy's Great Idea. It is, bar none, the cutest thing I've read in ages. Raina Telgemeier's artwork is whimsical and adorable, but she also does a fantastic job of conveying emotions and packing pages full of information into one scene.

A good fifteen years after I last read it, I remembered a frightening number of random, tiny little details that appeared in Kristy's Great Idea (now you know what resides in my head instead of a full list of the British monarchs - perhaps this is the precise bit of information that cost me $13,000 on Jeopardy!), and I have to say, the graphic novel is a painstakingly accurate adaptation of the original. It makes me wish I had cousins or nieces the right age, so I could pass this on to them.

As it stands right now, I was poised to pass it on to Sharon this evening, who is my age and not strictly in the Baby-Sitters' Club demographic either. But I was worried it would get rained on, and being that I don't yet love comics enough to have any of those special plastic baggies, I figured it was better off staying in my apartment.