Bonded

Saturday, May 19th, 2012 | daily | No Comments

“Am I in it?” Josh asked with obvious alarm when I told him I have a book coming out next March.  Of all the people I ran into tonight at the 100th Anniversary of the Alpha Sig House at UW, none made me more happy than the guys who were seniors when I started this journey as their cook.  ”This place was such a shithole,” I said about 2006 and it was refreshing to have them agree with that and tell the current, somewhat complacent, Brothers what it was like before I shook things up, back when you didn’t need to chew the food and how suddenly you were getting steak and lamb and all kinds of actual food you’d never, ever seen before.  These guys, frat boys when I started here, are now serious professionals concerned about what I might write about them.  But as we laughed hard and loud about those early days, I could see some of the freshmen looking over at us and wondering who those guys were and it struck me that there is something really special and irreplaceable about these guys who first took me in.

Drinking Age

Friday, May 18th, 2012 | daily | No Comments

Marty here didn’t look as happy as he should on his birthday, probably because of the brain cell-killing ritual of the 21 run that he’d been on the night before.  I missed this milestone “celebration” involving 21 shots of liquor because I was living in Canada at that age and had been legally overindulging more moderately for years.  I was thinking of Martel when I was at Costco buying wine and blue cheese and John T. Edge’s The Truck Food Cookbook, which I thought might have some good Frat Friday recipes.  ”Dead serious,” the under 30 teller snapped when I asked him if he was serious about checking my ID.  ”But I’m OLD!” I said as the elegantly greying couple behind me smiled.  I have two kids over the drinking age, and I was thinking about telling the vice squad teller this so that he could mull over the riddle of how I could be born after 1991 when I had my first kid in 1985, but something about his attitude told me he was as lacking in math skills as he was in a basic sense of humor.  And what really burned my ass wasn’t that I had to fork over my geriatric driver’s license to prove that it was safe to sell me 4 bottles of wine, but that when I did so, he didn’t say, “Oh my god, you look 28 years younger than that!.”