Linguini

The Expectant Look, that says, "Well, you know what I want."

"No, what do you want?"

"Do I have to explain everything?"

I opened the door, and after much paw shaking he went out on the balcony for a minute, then came back in.

"No, that wasn't it."


I drifted out of a dream into a memory of a high school trip to Toronto. For reasons never completely clear to me, the planned excursion to a play fell through, to my great disappointment.

Instead we were taken to a relatively upscale restaurant. Upscale to a bunch of poor to moderate income Catholic kids. An unplanned expense, and a large group. Probably half or more of the score of us had never been in such a place, and did not know the custom. I struggled with the menu, and the waitstaff were not interested in us enough to be helpful. Not surprisingly, my linguini with clam sauce (aside from the clam bit, I had no idea what I was going to get, and the lack of obvious clam confused me) arrived late, and cold. I ate it because I was hungry, I was paying for it (calculating the cost exactly from the menu price, the cheapest item) and couldn't imagine what else I could do, like walk out.

Peer pressure in it's purest form, groupthink among the inexperienced. We had no concept of restaurant tax, automatic tips for large parties, the indifference (or antipathy) of waiters to students en mass, ordering. Complaining about bad, cold food in that confusion would have been less than useless.

The obvious followed. The bill added up much higher than planned, none of us had sufficient extra cash, and the chaperones wound up paying the tax and tip, and threatening to get the money out of us all later. (Which never actually happened.) I remember thinking at the time, 'this was your idea, your kind of treat, and I actually want my money back you idiots.'

The next evening, a bunch of us wandered off by ourselves and got a very nice, cheap, meal at a hole-in-the-wall Italian place, downtown on Yonge* Street (hey, we were from Detroit, seemed perfectly lovely to us.)

(Warming up after.)




*Known at the time as a rough area, not too far off from say, The Mission in San Francisco. Not bad exactly, but not a place for a bunch of teens to go wandering. Unless they happen to be from a worse neighborhood.