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I have just returned from strip-mall soul food at Beans & Cornbread. I was inspired to dine thusly after seeing this latest example of The Horrible Racism That Is Tearing Our Country Apart.

My associate Lucy Blumpkin and I were both virgins to the B & C scene and almost didn’t go following a review from our co-worker Jared Jabozniak, who declared it “unclean”; the food  “decent but only because it’s hard to screw that shit up.” I have been to many bad soul food restaurants (and one truly excellent one by which all others are measured) so I disagree with the latter comment but the cleanliness thing worried me.

Visions of the Black History month menu haunted me, however, so we decided to take a chance. I prepared for the worst and when I saw three or four available tables, my heart sank. “Noon on a weekday?” I murmured to Lucy. “This can’t be good.” She ignored me as is her custom and we followed our waitress (“LaToi”) to a booth. It seemed pretty clean to me. I closely examined the table and wall for smeared boogers or greasy fingerprints and finding none, decided Jared is simply a neurotic fag and picked up the menu. LaToi returned to take our drink orders.

“Do you have club soda?” I asked her. They have a full bar in there so I was pretty sure the answer was yes.

“No,” she answered.

I frowned and turned the menu over. I noticed they offered a grape Kool-aid martini.

“Wait—club soda…that’s…we have that.”

“I’d like one, please,” I told her briskly, closing the menu as Lucy humbly requested plain water.

I really wanted fried chicken, grits, and greens. They offered all three but not together. I noticed they had a “smothered” fried chicken served with mashed potatoes and gravy and a picture formed in my mind of a thick blanket of white (shudder!) slop hiding a bumpy mound on a plate. I was going to have to make some inquiries.

LaToi returned with the drinks and also a basket of plain cornbread and mini sweet potato cornbread muffins. Both were still hot and instantly melted the butter Lucy scraped out of the tiny Land-o-Lakes tray. I have to say that they were both totally excellent and I found myself marveling at the miracle of cornmeal. That’s how good it was. It was akin to the simultaneously banal and complex epiphanies experienced most commonly by fans of blotter acid.

After a few minutes, we were ready to order. I took a deep breath and began the negotiations of tailoring their menu to accommodate my whim.

“‘Smothered,’” I said to LaToi, looking deeply into her moist brown eyes. “Does that mean covered with gravy?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Here’s the deal: I don’t want it smothered in gravy, and I also don’t want the mashed potatoes. I want grits. Can I get that?”

“Uhhhh…it’d be…like…three or four dollars to add the grits,” she said.

“Three or four dollars?” I said, feigning confusion and pointing to the words “$1 for substitutions,” on the menu.

“That’s for regular sides,” she said in a matter-of-fact way that told me that even though grits cost about five cents per serving, the irregularity of their “side” status meant they were going to cost more than a dollar.

“Since we have the grits already made,” she went on, “we can still substitute them, though.”

I pondered this briefly. Grits were an accompaniment to at least two other items on the laminated, permanent lunch menu; that is, not a daily special. So, presumably, they were just as “already made” as everything else that was permissible to substitute.

“So, what is it, how many pieces of chicken is it?” I asked her, putting the grits issue aside for the time being.

“You get…a leg and…a…a thigh,” she concluded.

“Can I get a breast?”

“We have wings,” she said obstinately.

“What about breasts?”

“Hmmm…we have wings, and…let’s see, wings and legs and thighs on the lunch menu.”

“So I can’t get a breast instead?”

“We could do two breasts maybe. This is the lunch menu,” she added unnecessarily.

“Okay, well, I can’t eat two. How about just one instead of the leg and thigh?” I emphasized the “and” quite heavily hoping to appeal to her sense of two as being more than one and therefore a sacrifice on my part.

“I don’t think we can do that.” She seemed to be reverting to her earlier rigid “grits” stance so I sighed in a put-upon way and looked back down at the menu.

“We have wings,” she repeated helpfully in case I missed the 10 places wings were offered. Wings with grits, wings with hoppin’ john, wings with shrimp, etc.

“Okay,” I capitulated. “Wings. I’ll get the wings with grits and greens. Thanks.” I shut the menu and looked at Lucy, who was staring raptly at me.

“It’s either the catfish or the shrimp,” she said, looking at LaToi. “Which do you think?”

“Well…I love catfish, you know what catfish is. The other one, I haven’t had it but I’ve seen it and it looks good. If you want somethin’ you know what it is, get the catfish. If you feel like having somethin’ new, get the shrimp.”

Lucy seemed grateful for this rationale and briskly ordered the shrimp with grits.

We discussed ESP and ghosts like all girls do when there are no men present and I examined the other patrons. Everyone was well-dressed. I counted three TVs. The one facing me was showing the Food Network. A lady with too many teeth made what looked like a tomato smoothie in a blender then poured it into a tall, rectangular glass.

Finally LaToi appeared with our food. It did not take an especially long time but I was starving so it felt like an hour. There were four enormous wings heaped on one side of the plate with two small side bowls tucked on the other. Lucy’s was a large bowl of grits topped with slightly blackened shrimp and half-inch cubes of what looked like carmelized ham, if ham can be carmelized. It looked pretty good. She ordered the fried corn side, which was not really fried-looking enough for me.

My greens had shreds of pork throughout and were faintly hot with chili.

The grits were outstanding. The wings, however, were bogue. This could be due to the fact that I don’t like wings. It must be, actually, because the pieces of batter I peeled off were really good. It, too, was faintly hot, and also salty, which is excellent because I love salt.

Lucy reported that hers was very good, and we gave positive reviews to both LaToi and a very dressed-up man I assume was either the owner or manager who stopped by to ask.  I did apologize to LaToi for not eating the wings when she took my plate and explained that I don’t really like wings. I know she was thinking, “Then why’d ya order them, ya crazy bitch?” but if she were to cast her mind back to the ordering segment of our visit she might realize she’d bullied me into it. I decided to not to mention this on the "comments" form she gave us with our bill.

Afterward, we stopped at DSW to exchange some shoes for Lucy’s husband and just outside the door I found this shopping list for someone's sleepover party.

WEEKENDS WITH ERNIE

Ernie’s is a party store in Oak Park. I don’t want to say much more about it, nor do I need to. Watch and marvel at the wonder of Ernie’s. PS Take cash—no credit cards or checks accepted.

PPS I guess I need to say more. Two complaints have flown in already. Well, first of all, you get to customize your sandwich, beginning with the bread. Nothing is toasted so get ready for a wet bread experience. I chose white bread because I am an American and Stavros of course had to order the ethnic option, an onion roll. From there you just tell Ernie what to put on it, or in my case, what not to put on it. There is a $3, a $4, and a $5 version. We went with the expensive choice because we wanted to see what Ernie was made of when he went balls-out. We also tried Better Made's "Wavy" chips which I was not surprised to find were WAY better than Ruffles. Anyway, the sandwiches were good and vinegary, mine was, anyway, because of all the pickles and shit. There was something other than pepper in that shaker, too, because I definitely tasted celery and maybe some seasoned salt. You can tell that is what Ernie considers his special spice. The $5 is a very large sandwich, the kind you can't quite figure out how to get in your mouth. Next time I will get a smaller one. Stavros went back today and got one and said it was much better. If you don't like being chattered to in the manner of Ernie, like my good friend Janis Beaglehole, you should not go there, because he is obviously on fire like this all the time.

FOOD COURT JESTERS

As the Most Blessedest Day of All Year approaches, it becomes necessary to enter stores, even malls. Or in our case, “Collections.” Yesterday Stavros and I—following a hearty breakfast of Ikea-brand frozen pancakes and my special homemade English muffin breakfast sandwiches—did both.

I believe I have mentioned this assortment of shops before. This is a mall so vast it is on both sides of the same street, as crazy as that sounds! LOL!

We never go over to the south side, though, because it is mostly made up of Neiman-Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. Stavros and I prefer stores like Club Monaco (pronounced Muh-NAH-ko) and Urban Outfitters. If a store doesn’t deafen us with ear-splitting decibels of shitty music, we ain’t going in.

After an hour or so of riding escalators and elevators and dodging ugly teenagers and those people who just suddenly stop walking for no reason when in malls, I was nearly faint from hunger.

“I need soup. Let’s go to the food court,” I told my love.

“Okay,” he replied.

(We were kind of tired by then so the repartee wasn’t as snappy as usual.)

Because the escalators are only placed nearby stores no one wants to go to (the all-candy-apple emporium; the thousand-dollar pen store; the chairs for schizophrenics outlet; etc), we had to take the elevator up to the food court. Normally one wouldn’t view riding an elevator as a negative, but at the Collection, the two elevators are impossibly slow and there are always a couple of hundred meatheads clogging up the entrances and it’s hard to get on one in under a half hour or so. Luck was on our side and one of them was opening just as we approached. There was a lady in a wheelchair accompanied by her husband, a toddler, and a sleeping infant in a stroller. Why can’t they take the stairs? I thought bitterly, as they rolled in, hogging most of the elevator. We forced our way in as a tall girl with a luxurious mane of chestnut hair stood in indecision just outside the doors.

“Come on in!” I said generously, “There’s plenty of room!” Gesturing to the vastness of the elevator, I accidently backhanded the lady in the wheelchair.

“Excuse me,” she mumbled.

“How rude,” I whispered to Stavros, as the brunette finally made up her mind and stepped onto the elevator.

We rode in slow motion up to the second floor. The rear of the elevator is all glass and looks out onto the mall. Stavros and I turned and gazed out at all the holiday mayhem. The photo-with-Santa opportunity at the Collection consists of a much more elaborate setting than the one I visited as a child. Here, Santa lives in a castle. A two-story castle, overflowing with maidens inexplicably dressed in Ren-Faire garb. We peered down at Santa’s throne where a small boy huddled, weeping.

“WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” Stavros suddenly shouted out of the blue, startling the elevator’s other passengers and waking the sleeping baby, who began to wail at once.

“Stavros!” I said, frowning.

“I’m just kidding,” he said, looking exasperated, and the doors opened.

We stepped out and I realized at once that the food court was on the third floor.

“Oh, God,” I said, looking around for an escalator. “Come on.” I took Stavros’s hand and dragged him along, past the underpants for hookers store and the soap made from soybeans shop.

“Whoa,” I cried, once we stepped onto the moving stairs, arms windmilling.

“What’s wrong?” asked Stavros, gripping my wrist.

“I just lost my balance, those hanging things…” I waved in the direction of the giant Christmas puppets suspended from the ceiling, which is about a thousand feet high.

“What are those?” Stavros asked.

“They are…jesters,” I replied.

“Oh.”

Once at the food court, I looked around at the selection. There was a salad place (no), a “Sbarro” (no, I can’t even say that word), a Chinese place, a Zoup!, (no, no) a deli and a place called “Honey Tree” (maybe and no). I hesitantly approached the deli.

“I want soup, what’s the soup?” I asked.

No one responded since I hadn't really directed my question to anyone and then I saw the board: Chicken noodle, matzoh ball, or white bean chicken chili. Chicken noodle sounded safest, so I ordered that, plus a side of pickles. In a flash my order appeared. Everything seemed to be in order except for the old pickles, which I quickly exchanged for new.

We took a table overlooking the parking lot and grimly grey sky. I peeled back the lid of my soup and saw with disappointment that it was the Just broth! version of soup, the kind where they scoop noodles or rice or a matzoh ball in. After I added two salts and two peppers it had a vague flavor, but not very much so I picked up the package of Saltines they provided.

“What the…Stavros! Look at this!” I commanded.

Stavros reached over and took the Saltines from my hand and turned the package over.

“I can’t believe it,” he said.

“Yeah, what is that? Some kind of cost-cutting measure?”

ONE SALTINE. When would you ever want just one Saltine? What the hell sort of a gyp is that?

Well, I’ll tell you, it didn’t make the soup any better at all. To make matters worse, an event I was trying to put out of my mind forever surfaced as I was trying to swallow a large glob of noodles and I nearly threw up. I had to tell Stavros about it; I had to try to expunge the memory.

“When we were in the Apple store….” I began.

Our first stop had been to pick up an item I special ordered for the new phone Stavros gave me for my birthday. Inside the store had been an older lady with an oldish golden retriever who was with a man pulling a large suitcase. The suitcase was unzipped and open when we walked in and I noticed two ugly decorative pillows inside and a large plastic-wrapped item.

He closed the suitcase before I could fully inspect its contents, however, so I turned my attention to the dog, who I had assumed was a seeing-eye dog and unpettable. He wore a vest as those dogs do, but this one, instead of reading, “Don’t pet me!” or whatever they say, said “Pet me! I’m friendly!” so I reached down and gave him the petting of his life. Stavros joined in and we gave him a full-body rubdown for a few minutes until the lady and the suitcase man left the store.

“The dog we were petting…he had a booger or something on his face and it got on my hand,” I continued, retching slightly.

“What? A booger? How do you know? Was it a glob? Or mucus?”

My mind reeled as I relived the sight of the grayish glob glistening wetly on my knuckle. I’d tried to wipe it on my receipt but it dissolved into smaller chunks and just spread around further.

“Yes,” I answered. “It was…mucus.”

“Like this?” He poked at a noodle on the edge of my Styrofoam bowl.

“Don’t.”

“Like this?” He lifted the noodle by its edge and let it flop back down.

“I mean it. Don’t.” I pushed the tray away.

At this point I have to believe that Stavros wanted our relationship to cross the barfing-in-front-of-each-other line, but I had to put my foot down. I stood up and like the gentleman he is, he bussed my tray for me and dropped the jokes.

My stomach back on solid ground, we strode out of the food court and back into the teeming madness.

“Let’s go to SEE.”

“Ok,” I said, knowing full well that my beloved has 20/20 vision.

He tried on a variety of frames with the help of a heavily made-up “associate,” who wanted him to make an appointment for an exam.

“Well….” he hem-hawed, “I’ll come back this week. Do those frames have an item number I can write down?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ll just enter it into the system for you so when you come in we can find them.”

I could tell by Stavros’s body language (shoulders slumped, chin lowered in despair) that he’d wanted to try to find them online for less.

“Come along, my babboo,” I said, taking his arm, and we strolled out of the Collection and immediately became lost and could not find the car for a half hour.

GUEST POST--TOAST IS TOAST WITH ANDRE AND CINDY

Today's guest post is from local aesthete and man of arts and letters, Andre Prudhomme.

Thoughts of grand breakfasts swam through our heads as the night of December 1st drew to a close—I had taken a dear friend to Flint to pick up a quantity of good drywall, and neglecting dinner, found myself very hungry by the end of the night. Luckily I’d been able to furnish my insides with a thick morass of stout, but Cindy hadn’t the option to supplement solid food for good beer, so she took to pretzel rods, and we lumbered through the night. Needless to say, upon waking we found ourselves extremely famished.

“Breakfast. Where do you wanna go?”

“Well, it’s either Toast or Sam’s,” Cindy sighed.

We have our regular haunts, but rising after noon, those certain standbys were cut in half. So we found ourselves not thinking too hard, and with these two options.

“Let’s go to Sam's,” Cindy suggested, “You’re hungry, it’d be good.”

“Maybe... No, let’s go to Toast, the coffee...” Coffee is such an intimate part of the morning, and truthfully, the coffee at Sam's is not to standard. Toast became the victor.

As usual, when arriving at Toast, we found the back parking lot to be populated by cars belonging to aloof assholes; their haphazard idea of parking left little room for our little vehicle. Scuttling through the causeway I noticed a sign on the door of the adjacent restaurant giving hours, 4-9 PM, Friday and Saturday. I thought aloud, “My, that place must be fantastic!” Luckily the restaurant held only lunchgoers and not the usual hungover elites in for their weekly shovelful of “The Cure.”

It being a Wednesday we were able to seat ourselves and chose a table under a newly decorated wall, adorned with what must be the Christmas refuse of Anna’s Coffee Shop (God bless her).

We promptly ordered water and coffee and settled in with the menus, I determined to stray from the bacon and gouda omelet, my usual.

As quickly as we received our beverages Cindy commented, “This is going to be a while.”

Already she observed (what I later deduced) to be the waiter, and then a second man in the kitchen, operating the grill and dishwashing duties, taking on even the third task of bussing. The duo was operating the entire establishment.
Of course there was a table of demanding old ladies gumming up the works, so this meager staff (surely determined by some colleague’s “illness”) were already sinking into what seemed a maelstrom of gigantic proportions.

Our server was finally able to make it back for our order (and refill the coffee); Cindy deciding on oatmeal with a side of sausage and I choosing the Farmer’s Omelet, not a profound choice, but a great morning standby. Seeing as it had been nearly 24 hours since I’d eaten, I longed for the gluttonous portion.

As always Cindy was correct in her prediction—we talked of the week’s events, orated wild tales for our salt and pepper shakers (small bears in aprons), and waited for our order.

Finally the hustling server delivered a bowl of grey matter which Cindy immediately deemed “Soupy”; I with my lifelong abstinence of oatmeal couldn’t tell, but the porridge looked awfully drab and tasteless.

More revolting to me was the plateful of breakfast I received: the home fries appeared to be mutated raisins mixed with fried cheese and possibly pancake batter, accompanied by a pile of eggs and sausage lumps. A Farmer’s Omelet houses sausage, green peppers, onions, potatoes, and American cheese—this pile exhibited some vegetable pieces probably frozen around last Christmas (resurrected for this meal) with a portion of cheese lodged at the south end of the omelet, and uncertain trunks of sausage scattered about. As on the side, the potatoes exhibited a small, wrinkled appearance. However, in the omelet these tuberous pieces were at least edible, being soaked in the watery, half cooked egg like brine, which poorly housed this collage.

As soon as I saw that white runoff of the eggs I became appalled, pouring some obscenity across the table and cursing the very nook I had chosen for our repast. The gruel and sausages seemed to appease Cindy, though satisfaction certainly didn’t emanate from her side of the table. I struggled through, leaving a plate of withered potatoes astride a soupy remainder, and a sad side of dry rye on a small plate by the coffee. Yes, as lame as it is, even the toast was subpar.

R.I.P. "ANNA"

 ✝


The end of an era.

STANDOFF AT SHILLA

The first meal Stavros and I ever took together was at a Japanese/Korean joint by my old job in Troy called Shilla. I think Shilla used to be a place called Trini and Carmen’s, where my sister once barfed after too many margaritas when she was still practicing drinking. It’s got a tabletop barbecue scene on one side and a sushi bar on the other. I always eat on the sushi side because I prefer not to have acrid fumes blazing the hair and follicles from my face while I eat. I tricked Stavros into meeting me there on our first quasi-date by pretending that it was equidistant from our workplaces, when in fact it was approximately 1.2 miles from my job and 47 miles from his. With this foundation in place, Shilla is obviously a place we both hold dear.

We hadn’t been there in a while so we decided to go last Saturday evening following a trip to the nearby “Collection.”

NOTE: I would like to preface this story by admitting that neither of us was at our finest after staying up rather late the night before at a party.

At 5 pm, it was already pitch dark. The Shilla sign glowed feebly in the mist and as we approached the drive, I noted only two other cars in the lot. To make matters more sinister, my new phone (birthday present from Stavros) rang as I was setting the parking brake and its unfamiliar ring confused and startled me.  There was no name associated with the number, and the voice that barked out at me could have belonged to any one of my male friends.

“How was the party!” it demanded to know.

“Albert?” I tried.

“What?”

“Albert, is this Albert?” I was very puzzled because Albert had been at the party.

“It’s GREGOR!” he shouted in annoyance. I frowned at the phone.

“Oh, well, we are about to walk into a restaurant, can I call you later?”

“I guess,” sniffed Gregor, hanging up.

Stavros was already negotiating our seating with the Japanese hostess as I was replacing my phone in my bag and I saw with horror that she was trying to lead him into the Fume Room.

“UH—NO!” I shouted. They both turned around with stunned expressions.

“May we sit in here?” I gestured calmly to the sushi half of the restaurant.

The hostess nodded demurely and Stavros pivoted and followed without missing a beat.

Apart from the sushi chefs, we were the only people in the room. Those must have been their cars out front. What are they doing taking the choice parking places? I thought bitterly. We sat down and then I immediately got back up to go wash my hands. The music was quite loud in the ladies’ room and was the sort of soft rock normally found in chain discount stores.

There was also an AirWick© Plug-In™ Room Freshener in Apple Pie Spice™ scent that did not lend itself to the surroundings. The bathroom door (I decided to go since I was already in there) was also too close to the toilet and I felt very cramped in the stall. The motorized paper towel machine whirred eerily but nothing came out. I wiped my hands on my pants and went back to the table.

The waiter appeared at once and I ordered a glass of wine. Yes, I know I previously admitted to being hungover but what man among us can cast stones?

“What are you getting?” I demanded.

“The Bo-Bup Gog,” said Stavros, or something like this.

“Allright. I wonder if the udon is good here. Is the udon good here?” I said to the waiter impatiently.

He looked at me with an amused expression I took for insolence.

“Nevermind,” I said. “I’ll take the udon. Does that come with the sides? The little side dishes, the bowls of stuff? Or is that just with entrees? Can you get it with the udon? CAN YOU?!??!” I almost grabbed him by the collar.

“Yes, comes with sides,” he responded.

“Ok, that’s what I’ll have, only NO SHRIMP TEMPURA, got it? Vegetable. Can I get vegetable tempura instead?”

“Vegetable tempura, okay.”

“The Bul-Book Kon,” said Stavros, closing his menu and handing to the waiter.

I fooled around with my new phone for a few minutes and drank my wine.

“Remember when we came here that one time and you told me that story about your uncle, and the swords on the wall?” I asked my glassy-eyed mate.

“What? My uncle? What uncle?”

“Your uncle,” I said. “Something about a sword, there were swords on a wall somewhere.”

He looked baffled. The waited returned and set down six small bowls of pickled salads and gross fish cake slices. Also my udon, sans tempura anything. We started eating at once and the waiter left, then came back a moment later with Stavros’s Bul-Bik Gog, which turned out to be plain boiled beef slices with onions and one lettuce leaf.

My udon was sweet. There were bell pepper slices floating around and the broth was sick with their flavor. I added some kimchee and soy sauce and that helped somewhat.

“What about the tempura?” Stavros asked me.

“I don’t know, I’ll ask. Maybe he thought I didn’t want it at all?” I wondered aloud. “Excuse me!” I said to the waiter, who was lurking down at the end of the sushi bar and watching us.

“Um, I meant that HE will eat my shrimp tempura, not that I didn’t want it…” I lied, pointing at Stavros with my chopsticks. “We DO want that,” I added.
The waiter looked confused.

I looked at Stavros. I was confused, too. I couldn’t really remember what I’d tried to do about the tempura. Did I tell him I wanted the vegetable or that I wanted the shrimp and that I’d give it to Stavros? I read no answer in my beloved’s face.

“Uh…one moment,” the waiter said, and disappeared. Ten seconds later he was back.

“Vegetable is already cooking,” he said, “Cannot change. So sorry.”

“Oh. Okay. I guess I’ll just take the vegetable, then,” I said, looking at Stavros for any further clues. Finding none, I mumbled to the waiter’s back, “Do you think we can have some more kimchee?”

He returned with more kimchee and fled without a word. We ate in silence and kept waiting for the tempura. I didn’t want to ask again. I must have misunderstood something.

A waitress stopped at our table. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

I paused. I could bring up the tempura with her, a new person. I looked at Stavros, who had long since finished his beef and onions, and said, “Do you think we could have another bowl of kimchee?”

ROMEO PEACH FESTIVAL

I have been so busy for the past several weeks that I almost forgot to post about one of the most exciting events of the summer. I have a few moments now so allow me to share with you the tale of THE ROMEO PEACH FESTIVAL.

My dear friend Angelina Langoustine, who grew up in Romeo, graciously invited me and Stavros to join her at the festival and stay overnight at her parents’ house. She had invited me the previous year, too, but I declined, largely because Romeo seemed unknown and distant. But I have discovered that nearly anything can be endured with Stavros by my side, and in fact many otherwise horrible experiences are made fun by his presence alone, so I figured what the hell?

So one lovely Friday evening, we loaded up the car with provisions and headed north. The plan was to have a dinner party with a handful of other folks then hit the festival. So we brought a salad and some wine and Angelina was providing a big pasta dinner, and the other folks were bringing appetizers.

Romeo wasn’t nearly as far as I thought but the trip included one roundabout so it seemed like we had traveled a great and harrowing distance, which is all I ask for in a getaway. Exiting the freeway deposited us in the center of a very charming little town. There were people crowding every street corner and parents dragging children by the hands down sidewalks and old people eating hot dogs and teenagers shoving each other and tipsy-looking twenty-somethings everywhere you looked. We turned right at the main intersection, which was appropriately located at Main St and something else street, and drove slowly, looking left and right for the Langoustine family house.

I should mention that Starvos and I have similar family backgrounds. Our families are both middle-class working folks from east Detroit. We live modestly. Our parents live modestly. And we are neighbors with Angelina Langoustine, so imagine our surprise when we located the address and pulled up into the driveway of a house that looked like this:

“This explains a lot,” I commented to Stavros, referring to Angelina's surplus of belongings and expensive tastes.

“No shit,” he murmured, mouth hanging open as he took in the property.

Because I wished to appear familiar with this casually wealthy scenario, I headed straight for the back door, where I was sure the kitchen was located.

“Hullo!” I called, in what I hoped was a vaguely British upper-class tone. “We’re here!”

Angelina was at the stove in the vast kitchen, wearing an apron and stirring a pan of browning meat. There were bottles of wine and plates and napkins and silverware out and I could tell she’d been working all afternoon. She turned to greet us, a big smile on her face.

We put the bags down and she took us on a tour of the house. I do not exaggerate when I say that the house I grew up in could fit in their living room. The ceilings were 16 feet high. The floors were inlaid wood in geometric patterns. Stained-glass window panels hung in doorways. Multiple sets of stairs led up, down, zig-zagging into basements and attics. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like growing up in such a house. Turns out I didn’t have to try very hard, because when Angelina led us to her old room, I noticed that both her and her sister’s room, where we were quartered, were virtual shrines to their teenaged selves.

We went back downstairs and people began arriving. Angelina’s anorexically-thin sister and her silent husband. Angelina’s friend the psychiatrist and her husband of 17 years. Mallory and Evan, a couple recently married. Alice and Mark, a boyfriend/girlfriend team who seemed to be experiencing some just-below-the-surface tension. It was a decent mix and everyone was in good spirits and we ate and drank wine and after peach pie and ice cream we walked the couple of blocks to the peach festival.

There was plenty to see on the street even though it was pretty dark. There was an overabundance of teenagers everywhere and they all looked identical. The girls wore way too much eyeliner and the shortest possible shorts with flip-flops. They were also uniformly bronze in a very unnatural way. The boys just looked like douches, the way teenaged boys everywhere look. We passed an old church that had been converted to a halfway house for the mentally impaired.

“Where are they halfway to?” asked Stavros to no one in particular.

Finally we reached the fairgrounds. To call the scene before us idyllic would be accurate, but there was something so alien about the cleanliness and wholesomeness of what we were seeing that Stavros and I both found it a little eerie. We were instantly separated from the rest of our group and began walking from attraction to attraction, trying to figure out how we’d spend our tickets.

First was the fun house, which really was fun. If you’ve never bumbled around a thirty-foot-long mirrored maze chasing a dozen drunks with corn-dog breath, you don’t know what you’re missing. We giggled and bumped our way out of there and headed over to the children’s roller-coaster. This is the sort of roller-coaster on which a new mother might feel secure placing her newborn; a smallish, low-altitude affair with minimal twists and turns. Nonetheless, Stavros and I screamed as if we were in a 747 plunging toward the Earth at a thousand miles an hour.

Next was the legendary Tilt-A-Whirl, a boring, jarring clunker of a ride that I suspect has only survived the festival circuit for so long because of its endearing name.

The best ride was the last one we rode before running out of tickets: Cliff Hanger. This is like that ride with the swings, only instead of swings, it’s got a board you lie on facedown and a bar that comes down to hold you on, so you’re sort of flying, or hang gliding, around in a circle. This was the pinnacle of our whole experience, this five-minute ride. Stavros was in the chair next to me to my right, and I was in the outside chair.

“STAVROS!” I yelled once we took off, and he looked over at me, laughing.

“WE’RE FLYING!” he yelled, and laughed some more.

Around and around we flew, swerving high and low over the faces of people on the ground waiting in line, seeing and hearing the whole fairground in a panorama of short-shorts and blinking lights and grinding gears and Taylor Swift and fallen flip-flops…finally the Cliff Hanger screeched to a stop and we staggered off. The carnies were all South African and mean. You said thanks to them and they looked at you like they wanted to rip your lungs out. We bowed courteously and scurried out the gate to find the rest of the gang in the beer tent.

Once inside the beer tent, I realized that we were in the midst of a giant all-year Romeo high school reunion. Thankfully everyone wanted to repair to a local saloon so we elbowed our way out and walked to a bar. It was during this segment of the evening that some of the couples in our group began to lose the ability to conceal their hostilities with one other, and Stavros and I decided to head back to the Langoustine house for the night.

We slept in Angelina’s sister’s room in twin beds we pushed together, and in the morning, went to a little diner for breakfast. The Romeo-ites were already out in full-blast festival mode so to cap off the trip, we took a quick stroll through the park hoping to catch the pie-eating contest. It was the first Saturday of the month, and so the tornado siren was going off. We had to shout to talk, and as we passed the petting zoo, I noticed all the animals were walking quickly around in a frenzied circle, heads bent low.

“They don’t like the siren!” I yelled to Stavros. “We gotta get out of here! This is freaking me out!”

Suddenly the eerily idyllic nature of the festival began to suggest only one thing to me and that one thing was David Lynch.

We hustled our asses back to the car and hugged Angelina goodbye and got the heck out of there.

It was probably the best night of the summer.

PS For those of you who think that the festival pictures above look a little seedy, it’s because they were actually taken at the Michigan State Fair, which is not in Romeo and is not at all idyllic, unless you grew up in Sarajevo.